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The Universal Squad #26SwitchbackPicture if you will, a rather large man with a blond flat top. He's wearing naught but a dirty white tank top, tattered blue jeans, worn hob-nailed boots, and a big black top hat. Oh, and a handlebar mustache. He's standing over a battered young man with long blond hair and cackling madly, watching a train rapidly approach from the distance. Any time now, it will run over our trussed up hero, trapped as he is atop the railroad tracks before it... (That should do for a 'cover', shouldn't it?) Notice: for those of you that are faint of heart, the following tale isn't exactly what one would call G-rated in nature. It may contain a plethora of bad language, excessive violence, sexual innuendo, and/or of course, things that would get this story burned, were it in a printed form, by the more fanatical elements of just about any religion on earth. In other words, if any/all of these things offend your sensibilities - you've been warned. (That should do for a 'disclaimer', shouldn't it?) *** Consciousness returned slowly at first. A hint of noise from a busy street nearby. The distinct sensation of cool air blowing over the portions of skin not covered by his costume. Costume? A question posed, his eyes slowly opened, quickly panning down to the rest of his body, eying the tatters of a black spandex body suit. Luckily, as far as he could tell, enough of his modesty was protected to, at the very least, make it back home. But where was he? And how did he get here? Extending his vision beyond the myopic scope of his own, ruined ensemble, the confused man looked around, taking in the view of several run-down, possibly burned out warehouses around him, or at least the top story or two of such. Moving a bit further down, he saw that he was laying in a ruined aluminum roof, body resting within a curiously anthropomorphic indentation in the surface. Perhaps his body made it. Shaking his head, he tried to stand. Wobbly at first, he eventually regained his balance, eyes at first fixed on his heavily worn, custom-made orange leather boots. Apparently they had seen about as rough a time as the rest of his costume, as had his similarly dyed leather gloves. There was no sign of his cape at all, and George assumed that it had been lost in whatever calamity had left him there, unconscious, on this mysterious building. Brushing himself off, he shrugged at his momentary lack of recall, and leapt into the air in the belief that altitude would give him a better perspective on his situation - or if lucky, would jar his memory. The flaw in this plan, of course, was that he did not actually fly into the air when he leapt off the roof. Not unless you count falling downward into the alley below in a ballistic arc as 'flight'. Striking the ground face first, George momentarily blacked out again. As he came to anew, George said a few four letter words, though he stopped abruptly as his eyes began to focus on a pair of feet approaching his face. Concentrating through his haze of acute pain and unfocused rage, he saw them resolve into a set of black leather boots, attached to a man in worn blue jeans and a white tank top. Recognition slowly tumbling into place, George took a few seconds to try and sort the situation out. When that failed, he simply looked at his teammate with an eyebrow raised. "Switchman?" The only reply George received was a haughty "Yeh." before getting a sharp boot to the head, causing him to black out a third time. As everything went dark, our hero could almost swear he heard sinister chuckling... *** Waking up for the third time in a row to considerable pain and discomfort, George peeled one eye open as soon as he was aware that he was, well, aware. As things came into focus, he could see a whole lot of unpleasantness before him. In addition to the man that kicked him unconscious - the man who was supposed to be one of his teammates - George saw the man that may very well be his arch nemesis, the one and only Roy Shijitzu: the Psi-Fox! "Hello, George." Struggling to stand, George found that he had been bound to a chair with a truly excessive amount of rope and duct tape. Before he could even work out how unpleasant it would be to remove all of that tape, George realized that the chair below him was not on solid ground - this because the whole 'room' shifted suddenly. Eyes rapidly darting around him, George took in enough details to deduce that he was in a cargo plane of some sort, and that it was airborne. "Yes, my intellectually challenged friend, we are indeed in the air, on a one way trip to... your Doom! I do believe a mad cackle is in order, don't you? Moo Hoo Haa haa." Before George could respond to this, Roy kicked him upside his head, causing him to helplessly fall to the floor of the aircraft. "You imbecile! You ignoramus! For all of your interference with my plans, all the problems you've caused me, this will completely redeem the frustration! "It's so simple, I don't know why I hadn't thought of it before. All I had to do was use my psionic powers to convince you that YOUR powers weren't working properly, and you were MINE! You're so gullible and so weak that your body believed what my mind was telling it, and thus, you so easily fell into my clutches. I didn't even need to sway your former ally, the Switchman, to my cause, but he'll be much more happy working for me than for you. "And much more... useful, shall we say." Realizing that Roy was talking about him, Switchman attempted to add something to the conversation. "Hur hur hur." Glancing at the pain-addled traitor, George shrugged, after a fashion. Well, at least, as much as he could in his current, bound state. "I assume you've found some means of neutralizing the agony that poor sucker feels constantly, which is good I suppose, but that doesn't mean I'm going to go easy on the two of you when I beat your little trick, Roy. "What I don't get is, how did you find me in the first place? The last thing I can remember, you and your gang of freaks had disrupted some sort of teleport-y magic Schroedinger was up to. I was in the Pacific somewhere and then... on some rooftop somewhere. I -" After a second boot to the head, George became somewhat dizzy, and stopped talking altogether. Which, unfortunately for him, gave Roy a bit more time to rant at him. "What, you don't recall that my minions have access to powerful, tricky sorcerous knowledge as well? Bah, as an enemy you simply don't measure up. Neanderthal. You're not worth the special doom I had planned for you... I'm going to kill you here and now!" Grappling George, Roy throttled him about the neck, squeezing and squeezing in a homicidal fury for over five minutes, until our poor hero stopped twitching at long last. "Humph. Super Hero, indeed." Spitting on the corpse as he stood up, Roy then kicked the body for good measure. "Meh. No miraculous resurrections for you this time, fool. Switchman! Open the cargo door!" Lumbering to the rear of the plane, Roy's newest stooge pulled a lever, causing the door in question to open up. As the thin, chill air rushed into the plane, Roy drug George's body to the very edge, looking down at the small, tropical island below. "You see!", he said to the corpse. "If the impact doesn't liquefy every last cell of your body, the volcano will incinerate it beyond redemption! Good bye, George Andersen." With that, Roy kicked George's body one last time, causing it to tumble from the plane like a lifeless rag doll. Watching it intently as it fell, Roy peered in on George's lifeless mind with his telepathic powers, waiting to see if he miraculously 'woke up' before striking the lava below. Shortly after the body faded from sight, Roy made a face, a very unpleasant face, as if Switchman had eaten far too many beans. "Hm. Land the plane. For a moment, I thought... well, we'd better make sure, shouldn't we?" Slowly deducing that Roy couldn't be talking to anyone else, any longer, Switchman shrugged. "Yuh." *** Landing a large plane on a mostly deserted tropical island can be somewhat tricky if you don't actually expect to, so it was some time before Roy and the Switchman made their way as close to the slowly erupting volcano as was safe. Wincing at the heat, Roy waved his cohort forward. "You're the one that can absorb and redirect energy, fool, get up there and look for any sign of his body. If you find it, pitch it in the volcano. If not, at least we'll know for sure." "Yuh." As the powerful freak of Science lumbered off, Roy shrugged, wishing the powerful drugs he'd acquired to dull his thug's pain wouldn't make him quite so stupid; the conversation on the way home was going to be simply abysmal until he could get back into proper cellular coverage. Of course, that wasn't his real concern. Roy's true worry was that, somehow, George had indeed managed to avoid the fate he'd planned for him. Killing someone once was usually enough. Twice? That's when it gets personal. As the boss began to feel the slightest bits of doubt and worry take hold, Switchman climbed up the side of the slowly oozing volcano, his body absorbing the ambient, deadly heat and transforming it into, for the lack of something more useful, light, which he simply cast away in the form of an impressive glow. Kicking boulders as he went, Switchman circled the lower perimeter of the volcano before wandering up in a spiral towards the top. Looking at the lava as it slowly oozed through a crack in the volcano and ran down the side, Switchman shrugged a healthy, mentally vacant shrug. He'd covered a square mile or two but wasn't seeing any sign of the body. Any body. Growing bored, he dipped his hand into the lava, absorbing its intense, fiery heat and discharging the energy as quasi-laser beams with his other hand, tearing up the rock near him with each blast, yelling "Pew Pew Pew!" all the while. At least, until the lava suddenly exploded violently, the raw, concussive force of the blast throwing him back a good twenty feet. As he slid to a stop, Switchman looked back at the volcano incredulously, eyes wide as what looked like a burning hulk stepped forth from the molten earth. Squinting at it as it resolved itself into a more humanoid, familiar shape, Switchman frowned angrily. "No. No way. You're dead. I saw him kill you!" The anthropomorphic mass of fiery energy laughed, a seething, crackling laugh that gave no hint of humanity, or mercy. "Yes, yes. So you people keep saying. Didn't anyone realize that, maybe since I keep dying and keep coming back, maybe I'm not actually dead? Or maybe, just maybe... I'm immortal!" Enjoying the distressed look on his former teammate's face, George decided to worsen his demoralization. "Why don't we see how immortal you are, traitor? "Moo hoo haa haa, as your new friend would say." Currently having no mass, existing merely as a ball of superheated fire thanks his body being annihilated by the lava, George simply willed himself towards his foe, who began waving his hands at him in fear. "No no no, you're a ghost, get away! I'll absorb you completely - kill you again. Kill you again! Again!!" Panicking, Switchman dove at George, attempting to metabolize all of the strangely not-dead hero. Not fighting him at all, George let the Switchman take in all of his strange, fiery energy, simply standing by within as his foe calmed down, and began to prepare for his own, final revenge on Mr. Shijitzu. Sure enough, Switchman calmed down after a few minutes of hyperventilating, and ran back down to the boss. Rambling his tale of fiery ghosts and his apparent victory over the thing, Roy shrugged. "Are you sure you're not overmedicating?" George chose this moment to liberate himself from Switchman's body, lashing out with a searing explosion that proved to be too much for the energy absorbing experiment gone wrong. Hovering over the collapsed body of Switchman, George's fiery form leered at Roy Shijitzu, who immediately launched an impressive psionic assault at him. Unfortunately for Roy, George's current, energy form seemed a lot harder to 'connect' with psionically. "Is that all you got?" Flinging a fireball at the psi, George laughed as the villain helplessly dove for cover behind a nearby tree. Swelling in size as the rogue psi hid, George began to cackle a fiery, hissing laugh. "Yes, cower. Cower! I'm coming for you, Psi-Fox... and I'm going to EAT YOU." Slowly drifting towards his opponent, George laughed inwardly as the psi fled towards his airplane as fast as his more-than-human feet could carry him. "Oh yes, I'm not done with you yet..." Once Roy had disappeared into the tropical forest around him, George looked down at the unconscious Switchman, and began to take stock in the situation, mind slowly wrapping itself around his current reality. No body whatsoever... that made things somewhat difficult. On the other hand, it proved he wasn't crazy, and that he was, in fact, somewhat immune to permanent death. He was pretty sure, but his whole time in the 'afterlife' COULD have been a really bad acid trip. Or something. Concentrating on being 'normal' again, George felt his form contract this time, and soon enough it coalesced into a fleshy, matter-filled human body. Yet another new one, by his reckoning, but he had the feeling that he may as well get used to the idea of 'replacing' it every now and then, both due to his dangerous lifestyle and the fact that it seemed to be happening more often than he'd like. Flexing momentarily, he then tried to reverse the process. Feeling an incredible heat and lightness grow within the very core of his being, George detonated in a blinding burst of fire, resuming the flaming form he'd apparently adopted upon his rebirth in the volcano. Smiling inwardly, he decided he liked the new ability that came with his latest resurrection, and flew off towards Roy's plane in a hurry. Making his way there before the arch-villain, George simply flew through it, blowing it up real good. Continuing on in his general path of 'away', George could swear he heard cursing behind him as he rocketed off. Though he at first considered going after the psi and seeing just how deathproof the jerk was, he quickly thought better of it, realizing that if the menace could find HIM so easily after the Squad's defeat so recently, it serves to reason that he may have found the others, too. And maybe, just maybe, had sent some of his goons after them, too... *** Having seen where Firebomb got to after the staggering, ultimate defeat of the Universal Squad and their subsequent scattering to the four corners of the universe, we now turn our eye to the Circuit Board (as he's next in line, you know). Blasted into the far, far reaches of the future, our hero would like to simply steal a few samples of things from the era he finds himself stranded in, but all those no-goodnick future people just aren't playing ball...! (That should do for a 'preview', shouldn't it?) Of course, while you're at it, don't forget to check out Hate Ball #1 in order to see what became of 8-Ball once the Calamity Conspiracy had their way with our heroes. That's right, the team's favorite fanboy failure of a hero finally strikes out in his own four issue limited series, coming to you from the fine folks at Tales from Variant Earth 13 'Comics'. So go check it out – it's ready, willing and able to be read as we speak! (That should do for a bonus 'preview', shouldn't it?) ***
The Universal Squad #26: Switchback Extra Goodies:
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