Zephyr 4.6 “A Tarantino Moment”
MY REVERIE EVAPORATES at the chirrup of the Zephyr phone. I snatch it quickly from my belt, but otherwise remain defeated in my rickety office chair.
“What is it?”
“Is that Zephyr? It’s Hallory O’Hagan from MMI.”
“Oh, Hallory, Christ, hello. Sorry. I was expecting someone else,” I lie.
“That’s cool. Where are you now?” she asks in her ever-effervescent voice.
“I’m, uh, actually outside some bad guys’ lair right as we speak.” I grin, pained, the expression unpleasant. “Talk about a Tarantino moment.”
Hallory titters. “I guess it seems like a silly time to want to discuss figurines with you.”
“Hey, I get fanboys wanting to talk about my figurine all the time.”
“Well it’s definitely time we revamped your line. It’s been, what, ten years?”
“Sure.” I shrug. “Those plastic fuckers last forever.”
“Okay,” Hallory replies with enough trepidation that even I can discern it. “Did you manage to talk about the line of dolls with the other Sentinels?”
“New Sentinels,” I correct her. I’m pretty sure I blew the rights to the old team name in a poker game, though it is equally possible it was Mastodon who walked out with the winner, taking with him the keys to Omeganaut’s Omegamobile (which he later crashed and sank in the bottom of the Bay) and the rights to Aquanaut’s first-born child. Boy was that a night.
“Look,” I tell the hot redhead on the other end of the phone, “it’s still a little premature to discuss this. We haven’t actually finalised the team.”
“Really? I thought we were booking media for the launch next Friday?”
“Well, yeah. . . .”
“I might have some interesting feedback for you, then,” Miss O’Hagan continues unperturbed. “Focus groups have thrown up a few names you might want to consider.”
“For my . . . team?”
“Well for the action figures, but yeah I guess they need to be on the team too so we can licence them, right?” she responds.
“Okay,” I shrug, uncomfortable yet intrigued. “Who?”
“Shade, for starters.”
“Shade’s, like, British. From London.”
“We’re getting some very good numbers for her at the moment, and beside you’ll need ethnic diversity, right?”
“So they tell me.”
“What about Paragon and Jocelyn?”
“Jesus,” I hiss. “I don’t think so.”
“Why not?” Hallory asks. “Have you even heard the figures they’re talking for wedding pictures?”
“Let’s keep going down the list.”
“Cusp? I don’t even know who that is.”
“I’m working on it. Next?”
“Okay. Red Monolith.”
“He’s, uh . . . he’s dead.”
“Okay well that’s not happening then. Do you think we could acquire a licence from his estate? Sort of a, ‘friend of the New Sentinels’ angle?”
“Jesus, lady, I don’t know,” I stagger a sigh. “I’m beginning to think you could get a licence to kill if one really existed.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” she says and I can practically hear her purring down the phone. She is so mine.
“Do you actually have any suggestions I can use?” I ask.
“Okay. Well how about Nocturne? If you can’t go with Shade, Nocturne’s another good coloured option.”
“I don’t think we call them ‘coloured’ any more,” I remark.
“I’ve got another idea, not sure what you’ll think about it.”
I scratch at my mask and realise I am still not wearing one. “Go on.”
“The groups were indicating boys from eight all the way through to thirty-five were pretty keen on a modular, kind of transforming robot sort of guy,” Hallory says and barely drops pace as she continues on with the spiel. “I’ve had production mock up a few costumes and the copy guys have suggested a few names: Contraption Man? Mr Roboto? Rocketman?”
“But I don’t know any . . . transforming robots . . . I don’t think.”
“I guess that’s the point,” Hallory says. “You could think of it like meeting your obligations to equally represent minorities on the team. Have you asked yourself, do you have the machine world covered?”
“Honey, I don’t think the machines have a lobby group we need to worry about, unless they’re armed. . . .” I think briefly at this juncture about Think Tank. “Next thing you’ll be making suggestions for a fucking superhero with Down’s Syndrome or something. It’s not happening, okay?”
“Zephyr, the numbers are really good.”
“I’m sure they are,” I say.
She waits a beat. “Even for a disabled person, we’re getting feedback that there’s a lot of angles as far as accessories go, there’s even a synergy between the robot guy.”
“There is no robot guy!”
“Only because you’re being so negative about it.”
“Christ, Hallory,” I say, sounding spent. “You know I love you and everything, but you have to listen to what you’re saying here. The two members of my team you’re most interested in don’t exist, and maybe they’re having an affair together? The robot guy and the girl with mechanical legs?”
“It’s not a bad idea.”
“I’m hanging up now. I’ll fax you the final roster when I get the licences signed off.”
A gravid silence hangs between us. I don’t know if I’m sympathetic just because I want to get into her pants, but I feel guilty about chewing Hallory out and there’s nothing but embarrassed, possibly sullen vibes emanating back down the phone line.
“I’d green light the Red Monolith toy, though,” I say reluctantly. “He would’ve liked that.”
“Cool,” Miss O’Hagan comes back. “I’ll courier you over some new concept art. Where should I, uh, do that?”
“No concept art,” I snap. “He wore red and black, with yellow panels under his arms. And a motorbike helmet, damn it.”
I snap the phone shut and jam it back into its purse hard. I am fuming with anger and yet mostly I’m just annoyed at myself. I consider annihilating the TV and instead exercise just a modicum of control, giving it enough spark to power it on. The widescreen resolves into a picture of British actors picketing the skyscraper where the Union Jacks have their base. Seeker’s vanishing fortress is certainly a better deal than a headquarters where even a bunch of freakin’ thespianoids can manage to find you. As the small crowds wave their placards, Protector himself appears – the third British super to bear that name – and tries to settle the crowd with an inaudible speech that soon turns to violence. It’s not a good look as he jets through the crowd bowling women and policemen over, bottles smashing the glass façade of the building lobby. I reflect on an image of his teammate Lionheart, last time he was in Atlantic City, with a beard of puke dribbling from his chin into some stripper’s lap.
I glare at the screen throughout a twelve-minute commercial break, promos for American Hero, Celebrity Heroes, Heroes: Where Are They Now, You Can Be A Hero, Heroes Unlimited, Arena Heroes, Down And Out In Atlantic City and London and a cooking show with some raven-haired British bint who eyes the camera insouciantly and looks like she’s licking up cum as she devours a mess of chocolate cake and cream on a child’s-sized spoon.
A newsbreak live from the NBN chopper shows some ridiculously buff dude with black hair and a gold cape fucking around the top of the Silver Tower, seemingly inspecting the array of antennae and digital receivers. NBN splices in some of the free-to-air feed Chancel himself provides, giving a fish-eye lensed view of the stranger up close, a furrow to his otherwise fine, completely unfamiliar features.
It’s enough for me. I’m angry and already dressed. I press my mask into place and stomp through to the wallspace and the open window and basically throw myself out and plunge into the glimmering dusk.
IT’S ONLY A couple of seconds across the city at the speed I’m travelling. Golden Boy hears me coming and turns as I use the concrete ledge as a brake and snarl, “Who the fuck are you?” as the news copter whirrs around for a new angle.|
The other guy has about half-a-foot on me, which isn’t anything unusual as I’ve explained before, I’m just ordinary height. He has shoulders like a bull, black hair in a sort of Imperial Roman cast, a gold circlet around his brows matched by the cape and little sandals. His arms and legs are bare, the rest of him in a clinging reddish blouse, thick belt and trunks.|
“A spiritu fornicationis, Domine, libera nos,” he chuckles. “This-a question, it is rhetorica, no?”
“What?”
The foreigner smiles and next thing I know there is immense pain in my chest as eye-beams lance through me. I lose all strength and drop from the air – not a good thing when we’re about forty floors from the ground – and it is only rebounding off the hard concrete ledge that jolts me back into awareness long enough to grab for a hand-hold. Meanwhile the dude in the cape gives a final once-over to the audio-visual apparatus on the outside of the tower, glances at me and then rockets heavenward.
I’m a ruin. I only just manage to roll onto the ledge and lay there for long seconds with the smell of my own cooked bacon filling the air, even with the competing cross-winds. The news helicopter turns around and a megaphoned voice booms my name a few times before I manage to sit up and, gasping, actually trying not to break into tears of embarrassed, pained frustration, I probe the wound to my chest in disbelief.
“Who the hell was that?”
The leather is scorched and peeling and basically destroyed. Likewise for the top-most layers of my skin and pectoral muscle. It hurts like a bastard and if it wasn’t for my own persistent physiognomy I’d be winging my way to the ER right now. All I know is I need to get somewhere private and strip down. Victim of my own adventures as I have been so many times these past years, I am a veteran at this routine and manage to get to my feet without much more than wincing. I remember once seeing a Canadian hero called Manowar do the same thing after a few of Cogito’s goons triple-teamed us with some of these industrial lasers he’d whipped into weapons. Poor bastard didn’t realise he’d been nearly cut in half by the beams and stood only to watch his intestines and liver pour onto the ground. I think somehow he lived, though he’s been institutionalised ever since. I guess you don’t adjust easy to seeing your insides in the dirt.
I give the chopper a little wave and a wan smile and shrug, oh well, for the cameras. I have to shake myself off a moment to ascertain that my powers haven’t deserted me completely and then I do the crouch thing and pretty much abscond from the whole disaster, avoiding the news loops for the next two days that show me getting my arse handed to me from pretty much every angle Amadeus Chancel could provide.
Everyone’s happy enough to lend their own little comments to my performance, but they don’t even think to ask who the hell was my opponent. The only time anyone even thinks to address the matter – and to add insult to injury, it’s Nightwind – the panellists just shrug their shoulders and move on to the next schmuck.
From my sickbed, with the wound healing nicely, I scrub Chancellor’s name from the ‘potentials’ list and work the phone, whittling down the final candidates via conference call as the big night comes ever closer.
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