Snake-Boy Loves Sky Prince Chapter One: The Origin of Snake-Boy

Notes

Snake-Boy Loves Sky Prince is currently running in near-daily serialization in very, very small installments at the official website: sblsp.wordpress.com

I'll be providing a semi-monthly compilation of the serial installments into meatier chapters here at DeviantArt.

Please comment and share!

The Great Hunter

Here you will find everything that people know, and two things they don't know, about the Great Hunter.

The Great Hunter started out as a Rough Rider under Theodore Roosevelt. He's been an active Bledsoe City crimebuster since the late 1910s. He was the first. Maybe. He doesn't remember. Nobody does. Those were different times, murkier, less well-documented than ours.

He used to be called the Great White Hunter, but re-branded himself in the 1960s, under the advisement of George Plimpton, who is supposed to have coined the term "re-branding" during the very conversation that they had on this subject, while shooting half-heartedly at rooster pheasants in North Dakota.

New name notwithstanding, the Great Hunter still looks like a product of the gorier edge of the Gilded Age, which he certainly is, and will always certainly be, as long as he lives -- apparently forever. He still affects a luxuriant, chestnut-colored, well-waxed mustache, for example, wider than any other part of his head: "Strikes fear into the hearts," he says. "Pip, pip, tallyho." He wears jodhpurs, a pith helmet, a modern-day Kevlar jacket (seriously, wouldn't you?), a monocle. He wears no socks. His feet bleed into his flat-soled boots. "Ballet training," he says, "don't you know." He keeps his hands dirty, his face dirty, his brown eyes bright.

Sometimes he shoots criminals with arrows from his bow. Sometimes he shoots blow-darts from a blow-gun instead. Sometimes he shoots a thick handgun that he has to load by poking some gunpowder down the barrel with a little stick, then poking a bullet down the barrel after it.

That's everything people know about the Great Hunter.

His real name is Isabel Stewart. They don't know that. They don't know that he was born a woman, that he still carries ladyparts between his hard, hairy legs. Roosevelt knew, but he's the only one who ever did.

Lady Dogface

Quick! You are a young woman with the body of a world-class gymnast, and the head of a border collie. You were born this way. So: what do you do? What do you make of yourself? Do you sit in the corner and whine?

Well, yes. Of course you do. The things people say! The terrible rumors about your mother, the Beast Mistress! It's just not true. It's just not fair. You whine and you whine and you whine.

But after that, what? You pick yourself up, is what. You follow in your mother's footsteps. You defend her reputation, and yours. You go fight crime!

It helps, of course, that border collies are able to see all of history at once, anything that has ever happened, anywhere that they decide to point their eyeballs. Which is why their eyeballs -- and yours -- so often, frankly, roll. But it's a power, at least, even if it is the kind of power that you have to learn to not use, to consciously block, in order to take one single solid step on the present-day sidewalk, which is also an ocean, and a canyon, and a crowded wagon trail.

So what if your mother is embarrassed by you, refuses to let you go on patrol with her? So what if you've never managed to be in the near proximity of, much less fight, even one single crime? So what if the other kids in Crimebuster High School keep telling you to "Sit," and "Heel," and "Stay?" And you do?

Sky Lord

Sky Lord has beautiful green eyes, three of them (he hides the one on his forehead behind a headband). Sky Lord wears a red cape, a white all-over unitard with a cutout in front, to show off his hairless chest. Sky Lord can fly. Of course he can fly. He can lift a car over his head with his hands, too. Bullets bounce off his skin, etc. You know the drill. Sky Lord stands seven and a half feet tall.

"They are like the Nazis of your world," he will tell you, if you ask him why he came to our planet. "Except on our world, they won. They took over. They killed all of my people. My father put me on a spaceship he had built in secret. I was a baby. I was just a baby."

He pauses here. The pause matters, we believe. It's important for a being as powerful as himself to appear from time to time to be at a loss for words. Or at a loss for anything. Otherwise, if he's too perfect, if he comes off that way, people might become distrustful. He cannot serve them, cannot be their protector, without their complete, unflinching trust. Right? He doesn't want to be manipulative. It's just that he has to be. This is our theory. This is why he pauses.

"Long story short," he says. "There were two civilized species of humanoid on Engoni-Varian 3, my home planet -- my birth planet, I should say." Another pause, a glance around, a little smile, maybe a swallow, to show his appreciation for his adopted planetary home. "Two species, evolving for countless eons, side by side. And now, after the war, there is only one."

Watch the videos on the web. Whenever he talks about himself. He does it every time. Those exact words, those exact pauses.

He says that he gets his powers from the oxygen-rich atmosphere of our planet. Nobody buys this explanation. Especially the scientists. Have you ever seen him interact with scientists? It's hilarious. "Oxygen. Allows you to defy gravity?" they say. "Oxygen. Makes heat beams come out of your eyeballs, tornado-class gusts of wind come out of your lungs. Makes it possible for you hear a scream for help half a world away. Really? Oxygen?"

Sky Lord says, "Don't worry about it, okay? You know what? Just never mind." Sky Lord flies away.

Snake-Boy is Born

The eggs appeared overnight, clogging the streets and sidewalks, each of them as large as a very small car. The thickest clumps lay along the base of the Three Towers themselves, of course, every supervillain's favorite attack site. Anybody who saw those eggs, who noticed the way that they throbbed and wiggled, would have told you that nothing good was about to crack out of them.

Not that anybody panicked. Residents of Bledsoe City were used to these kinds of days. New Yorkers might be proud of their reputation for smack talk and tiny apartments. Los Angelenos may always be the first to tell you how superficial their lives are, how fragile the connections that bind them to their friends and so-called loved ones. The occasional supervillain siege was part of what made living in Bledsoe special. Everybody knew the drill: you stayed at home and waited it out, in the basement if you had one, in the bathtub if you didn't. It was no more and no less frightening than inclement weather.

So nobody witnessed Snake-Boy's birth. Nobody realized that he had come out different. His brood-brothers, the other snake-boys hatching all around him, didn't even notice. To be fair, he did look exactly like them: snake-faced, human-bodied, scaly all over, tan in the front, black in the back. His brothers had stepped bright-eyed out of their shells, though, the kind of powerful young henchpeople who always stand, who always lean back on their heels when they stand, who always face the sky slightly. Not Snake-Boy. He had tumbled out of his broken egg with a mewling cry, like a startled kitten. And there he remained.

He tried to say, "Hello?"

But his brothers didn't hear him. They had begun to sing, each of them using all five of his mouths (the face-mouth and the ones belonging to the four actual snakes twisting out of each snake-boy's shoulder-blades). "He is the SerpenTerrorist," they sang. "He is the rightful ruler of the Solar System. He is the rightful mayor of Bledsoe City. He is handsomer than God."

Then they bolted, as one, toward the Three Towers.

What is wrong with me? Snake-Boy wondered, as he staggered up onto his feet. Where did they learn that song? Who is the SerpenTerrorist, anyway? He stretched his half-awake shoulder-snakes into the sky behind him, like wings. Was this an interesting enough pose? He wanted to be like everybody else. He wanted to be ready to "bite for and fight for and die for" (as one part of their song went), "snake-strong, snake-proud, snake-sure." But he was none of those things. Maybe, though, if he just went along, stepped into the running stream, pretended to be what his brothers had been born being, he might somehow transform into one of them. He broke into a trot, hoping to catch up, but he was too slow, too clumsy and dumb. He fell down onto his tender knees.

His own shoulder-snakes twisted themselves around in front of his face. They hovered there, slippery against one another. He thought for a second that they might even bite him. They did not. They flicked their tiny forked tongues, though. They blinked their bright, empty eyes. They spoke into his brain: Loser. They laughed at him, snake-laughter, from the very bottom of their throats, which were their whole bodies.

"Okay," he said. "That does it."

It was fine for him to question himself, but he wasn't about to answer to his own appendages. He grabbed the shoulder-snakes just below their jaws, two to a hand, shoved them behind him, held them there, until he felt them slacken, become a part of himself again.

He got up. He took one step, to test his feet. He took another. He took a third step. And so on. And then he ran, beautifully and well, toward the growing, glistening, rumbling clump of his brothers at the base of the Three Towers, as if he had always known how to run, as if he had always known why he was here.

Once they made it to the Three Towers Plaza, even Snake-Boy's brothers, who had busted out of their eggs with such purposeful confidence only moments before, seemed confused. They made an anxious perimeter around the property, singing their little anthem with less and less conviction as every second passed. None of them tried to go inside the Plaza. None of them tried to do anything. It frustrated Snake-Boy. What was the plan after all? He had gotten himself all worked up over nothing. It did not occur to him that he might himself step up and lead the way. He just stood there, with the rest of them, waiting. They stared at the empty sky.

Then the Crimebusters flew out of the top of the Towers and started killing them.

Blue Spark made the first strafing run. Snake-Boy did not know the name Blue Spark at the time. He didn't know anything about the Crimebusters. All he knew was that some guy in a silver and blue body-suit and a pointy metal hat had flown overhead, shooting blasts of energy from his hands, carving two stripes of immediate, uncompromising death to the left and the right. The smell of bubbling brother-flesh filled Snake-Boy's mouth, fuzzy in his throat, coppery on his tongue.

Next came The Great Hunter, standing astride the Beast Mistress' winged back, shooting arrows that were wide-headed, that were smoky with poison, flick, flick, flick, into the faces and eyeballs and backs and throats of the assembled horde, but still, somehow, narrowly missing Snake-Boy himself.

Sky Lord flew straight up from the top of the tower -- so high that he looked like a star, the only one in the sky -- then dropped, slamming himself, his fist and his knee, onto the ground in the center of the Plaza, knocking Snake-Boy and his brothers off their feet from the shock-wave.

Now from the ground floor of the northwesterly Tower, home of Crimebuster High, flooded the next-generation heroes, the trainees and the sidekicks, under-powered but feisty, eager to prove themselves. A girl with the face of a dog led the charge. She bit Snake-Boy on the arm. Twice. She was good, and she was fast. And by the time he had decided to try to bite her back, she was gone, tangled up in the shoulder-snakes of another snake-boy just past him. A vast, giggling cloud of nearly-microscopic Japanese schoolgirls swarmed through the scene on butterfly wings. They carried tiny knives in their tiny hands. They got in his mouth; they got in his nose. They got in his eyes. He stumbled forwards, eyes shut, mouth full of wings and itty-bitty short-skirted polyester uniforms.

"Fiend!" said somebody.

Snake-Boy said, "Blah?" He stopped, and spat, and opened his eyes.

In front of him -- startlingly, touchably close -- stood a young man, a boy, really: blond-haired, green-eyed, clunky-kneed and awkward of elbow, but muscular. He was wearing a headband, a white cape, and a red unitard with a hole cut in the front to show off his hairless chest. He looked ridiculous.

"Uh, Sky Prince?" said the girl with the face of a dog, who was having a little bit of trouble subduing the snake-brother with whom she had picked a fight: "a little help here?"

Sky Prince waved his hand at her without looking, "Sorry. Busy."

He snapped his head back around to Snake-Boy, narrowed his eyes. He took off his headband, behind which a third eye had been hidden. He narrowed that one, too. Snake-Boy felt a weird, piercing tingle all over his face from the gaze of that third eye. It was not unpleasant.

Sky Prince said, this time in a whisper: "Oh. Wait. I see. You're different, aren't you?" Then he looked down, with a strange and sudden lack of intensity in his three eyes, as if they had all gone blind at once. He coughed up a bunch of blood, at least two mouthfuls, much of it onto Snake-Boy's face and chest. "Eww. Sorry about that," he said.

He fell, face-last, onto the ground at Snake-Boy's feet.

The Blue Spark

The Blue Spark is actually a collective of four other-dimensional microgods, who require a human host in order to manifest themselves physically. The host dies after twenty-four hours, his or her brief adventures as the Blue Spark a final blaze of glory available to any terminally ill patient, death row inmate, or suicidal thrill-seeker willing to stop by Crimebuster HQ and sign the necessary papers. The waiting list stretches out for decades.

The microgods who comprise the Blue Spark Collective are as follows:

• Elvod, a microgod of Justice.
• Elvap, a microgod of Vengeance.
• Elvum, a microgod of Truth.
• Elvis, a microgod of White Lies.

The Blue Spark is married to the Beast Mistress. When host-less, the microgods reside within the four large stones set in her tiara.

This One Is Mine

Maybe it was because the swarm of tiny, knife-wielding Japanese schoolgirls on butterfly wings had reduced visibility to zero for a little while there. Maybe it was because the third eye inspection that Sky Prince had just performed on him -- that piercing, tingle-inducing gaze -- had left him feeling flustered and excited and, weirdly, naked (weird because he had not felt the need for, nor even the absence of, clothing before that moment). Or maybe it was something else. Whatever the reason, Snake-Boy had sort of forgotten that they were surrounded by thousands of his own rioting, hyper-violent snake-brothers. He had sort of forgotten that a deadly attack by the Crimebusters was exploding all around him. Maybe it was already love that had muffled the rest of the world. He didn't know the concept, though, and could not be expected to account for such a thing, or even recognize it.

Either way, the instant that Sky Prince's face hit the ground, the world -- its noisiness and smelliness, the screaming, the dying, the shaking earth, the bright red flickering morning sky -- slammed back into existence around them. Snake-Boy took a breath. It came hot on his tongue and into his lungs. He took a step backwards. His head rang. His eyes watered. He wanted, maybe, to cry, except that that was another concept he did not yet have available to him. A couple of his brothers pushed past him to try to get to the fallen Sky Prince. And then a couple more.

"Uh. No," said Snake-Boy. It didn't seem fair, attacking a kid who had already hit the ground, who was already seriously wounded. He waved his hands at them. "Stop? Please?" A few more snake-brothers came running. He stood over Sky Prince, waving arms and shoulder-snakes. "Go away!" he screamed. "Leave us alone!"

The unthinkable but undeniable fact that one of their own was blocking the way, standing between them and an easy kill, confused the snake-brothers just enough to make them stop.

"This one is mine!" Snake-Boy screamed.

That seemed to make some kind of sense to the snake-brothers, who turned and scurried away, in search of easier pickings.

Behind Snake-Boy, the dog-girl, sitting on a pile of snake-brothers she herself had handily acquitted, clapped. "You confounded them. Very impressive!" Then she looked down at Sky Prince. She looked back up at Snake-Boy. "He'll be just fine, you know."

"You think so?" said Snake-Boy, poking at Sky Prince gingerly with his foot-claw.

The girl walked over, stuck her hand out, "Lady Dogface, pleased to meet you."

He placed his hand into hers, but didn't shake: concept unavailable, etc. "I don't think I have a name."

"We'll call you Snake-Boy, for now." She took advantage of her grip on his hand to turn it over, pull his arm toward her. "I got you pretty good. Pretty bad, I mean" she said, with a smile and a wince. "Sorry."

"Don't worry about it. It's nothing," said Snake-Boy.

Sky Prince, beneath them, flopped around a bit, made a mumbling moan.

Lady Dogface finally extracted her hand, flapped it toward the city streets behind Snake-Boy. "You better stay out of the field of battle, or somebody might really hurt you," said Lady Dogface. "Go hang out in the city. Do tourist stuff or something. You can't stay here. I mean, you look just like one of them," she added, angling her head at the pile of snake-brothers she had just been sitting on.

"I am one of them," he said.

"No." She put a hand on his shoulder. "I don't think so. Now git." She saw that he was looking down at Sky Prince. "Ugh. Don't worry about him. His dad will come along at some point. This happens all the time."

"Not," said Sky Prince, slowly, painfully, "true."

"Whatevs," said Lady Dogface. "You're just not cut out for the crimebusting life, I don't care who your dad is." She turned and started walking back toward the base of the southerly Tower, where another battalion of his brothers was attempting a final stand. Over her shoulder, quickly, breathlessly: "Give him mouth-to-mouth or something, if you want to be helpful. I don't know. Something." Then she laughed, and waved. "Nice meeting you! Bye!"

"Wait!" said Snake-Boy. He stood there.

Sky Prince coughed. Blood squirted out of his nose. He spoke a few words to himself, and giggled, and sighed. Blood bubbled out of his mouth.

Snake-Boy shouted, in Lady Dogface's direction, "What is mouth-to-mouth?"

Defectives

"She's right, you know," said Sky Prince, lifting himself up on one elbow. He dabbed his mouth with the sleeve of his other arm. "You need to get out of here. My dad will kill you."

Snake-Boy sat on the ground beside Sky Prince. "I'm not leaving you here. You're too weak. One of my brothers could come along. Or ten of them."

"What do you care?"

Snake-Boy shrugged. He continued sitting. The concept of sarcasm was unfamiliar to him. The concept of ungratefulness was unfamiliar to him. The concept of arrogance was unfamiliar to him. He was, however, quite familiar with the beauty of Sky Prince's eyes, which he had been staring into since the first time he saw them.

Sky Prince looked away. "You're creeping me out."

Snake-Boy said, "What does that mean?"

"Don't stare at me like that." He said it gently, though, quietly. Weirdly.

They watched the junior heroes mop up the remaining snake-brothers on the other side of the Plaza as the sun came up. Toward the end, there were only a couple of snake-brothers left, and the twenty or so young trainees seemed to be playing with them, drawing it out, just for the sake of the torment.

"They're new. First time most of them have had an opportunity to crimebust," said Sky Prince.

"Was this your first time, too?"

Sky Prince sneered. "Don't be silly. I'm the son of Sky Lord. I'm special. I get to go out and crimebust all the time."

"I'm special, too. You said so. The dog-girl did, too."

"I said you were different, not special." Sky Prince fell back off of his elbow, onto his back. "What you really are is defective. It happens with SerpenTerrorist's technology every so often. You know, he sends an attack wave of you guys every couple of months, and there's always one or two who don't pick up on the programming. Who aren't evil henchmen. Who have minds of their own. Souls or whatever. Like you."

"What do you do with them?"

"I already told you. We kill them." Sky Prince coughed. He put his hand up to his mouth. He looked at his hand: no blood. "There's an execution chamber in the southerly tower. Nobody's supposed to know about it. We interrogate them, get any information SerpenTerrorist may have let slip into their brains, then we throw them into the ovens, just like all their brothers."

He coughed again. This time, blood squirted out of his mouth and nose.

He said, "I'm not supposed to know about that. I just do."

"You said we."

Sky Prince snorted. "I didn't mean me. I meant the adult Crimebusters. They'll be back from Mars any minute now and you'll see first-hand."

"What is Mars?"

"It's a planet. In outer space. Turns out you guys were a diversion. SerpenTerrorist's real target was the seat of Solar System government. On Mars. The adult Crimebusters figured it out within twenty seconds. That's why they let us out, to fight you guys. So they could go to Mars." Sky Prince laughed. "Your master sent you here to die for nothing. How does that make you feel? Hurt? Betrayed?"

Snake-Boy said, "These concepts are unfamiliar to me. And I don't have a master."

He was engrossed in the subtle intricacies of the cleft in Sky Prince's chin, the way it interacted with the freckles and the hairs there. He didn't say anything more for a long time.

Sky Prince was coughing without opening his mouth, now, trying to hold it all in.

"Should I give you mouth-to-mouth? Was the dog-girl right about that, too?"

"Her name is Lady Dogface," said Sky Prince. "She's my girlfriend. And, no. She was being a dork. She was making fun of you."

Snake-Boy looked sideways.

"I know, I know. Concept unfamiliar." Sky Prince reached out, placed his fingers gently on Snake-Boy's tight, earhole-to-earhole snaky smile. "I don't think you could give me mouth-to-mouth. I think your mouth doesn't work that way."

"What happened to you?" said Snake-Boy. "Did one of my brothers get you?"

"Hunh? This? Oh, no." He tried to sit up again. Gave up. "No, your kind could never hurt me. This is an internal problem."

Snake-Boy said, "Oh. Okay." Then, after a while, "What does that mean?"

"I'm a clone, okay? There was no way my mom, who is human, could possibly have given birth to me -- I'd have busted her wide open without meaning to. So dad took a little of her genetic material, a little of his own, and made me. Problem is, he didn't do a good job. My body wears out after a few days, especially when I'm stressed out. Like I kind of was today."

Snake-Boy said, "Because of the attack?"

"No. Something else." He shut his eyes for a second. He opened them, shut them again for two seconds. "Anyway, we have to dump my memories into a new body every time I wear one out. This one's just about had it."

Snake-Boy said, "So I can see."

"The only problem is if one of my bodies dies before we get a chance to dump my memories into it. Then everything since the last memory dump is lost. It's like that body never lived. I don't mind it so much, but it drives my friends crazy. Things we did together that I don't remember anymore."

Snake-Boy said, "So you're a defective, too."

"Yeah." He met Snake-Boy's eyes for the first time, smiled. "Yeah, I guess we're both defectives. But I'm still the son of Sky Lord, and you're not. So I'm defective but I'm also special."

Snake-Boy said, "And I'm just defective."

"Exactly." He put his head back down on the ground. "Nobody knows that stuff I just told you. But you'll be dead soon enough, so it doesn't matter." He opened his eyes. He pointed a finger at the sky. "Hey look. There he comes now."

Before Snake-Boy had a chance to look, Sky-Lord landed on the ground in front of them. Just like that. Back from Mars. He didn't say anything at first. He said, with no inflection, as a greeting, "Son." But he didn't look at Sky Prince. He looked at Snake-Boy. He said, with no inflection, "Fiend." He took off his headband. He opened his third eye. He narrowed it.

Snake-Boy screamed. Snake-Boy writhed on the ground and screamed, for a long time.

The Three Towers

The Three Towers stand in a circle, tilting slightly towards one another, like the legs of a tripod with the tops chopped off. They are the official headquarters of the Crimebusters organization, Bledsoe City's only governmentally-sanctioned group of super-powered individuals. The eccentric technology billionaire N. O. Botts financed their construction in the late nineties, and then promptly donated them to the Crimebusters, thanks in part (he claimed) to repeated requests ("nagging," he said) from his bodyguard, life partner, and corporate mascot, Nanoman.

Some members of the organization keep their private apartments in the middle floors of the northeasterly tower, which also houses the Crimebuster Museum (ground level) and Crimebuster Meeting Hall (penthouse).

Crimebuster High, a training facility for the next generation of heroes, occupies the northwesterly tower.

The southerly tower houses the prison and the execution chamber. Outside of the the Great Hunter who administers it, Nanoman who built it, Sky Lord whose idea it was, and, of course, those unfortunate villains who happen to be walking into its ovens at any given moment, nobody is supposed to know about the execution chamber.

A Rooftop Confession

The Great Hunter had never considered his own vampirism to be of particular note, until just recently. It did not define him, the way that being a calvaryman, or a Methodist, or even a Crimebuster had defined him, now, for well over one hundred years. He wasn't "a vampire." It was just a condition, like diabetes. It was less than that, because he was obliged to attend his diabetes every several hours, and his vampirism only troubled him four or five times a decade, at most. He had a very minor case of it. There were times when he all but forgot about the cravings. There were other times, usually after he got an accidental taste of the stuff somewhere -- during a round of fisticuffs, or a visit to the dentist, for example -- when his thirst for blood threatened to overwhelm him. Each of these times lasted a little longer than the one previous. He imagined that if he lived too many more years, he might eventually let go. He could feel the pull of it, the slide into a comfortable kind of depravity, one lapse in judgment leading to, and justifying the next, and then the next and the next. Eventually, he would no longer care about anything except the demands of his own unholy gullet, just like every real vampire he'd ever met, fought, killed, and drunk the blood of, over the course of his crimebusting career. He never wanted to be like that. He had sworn to himself that he never would be.

Except that lately, he had been feasting on the blood of snake-boys. It was not his fault. They were delicious. They were also soulless, and plentiful, and annoying. They had been coming in waves now, every few months, for years and years. There were always a few survivors from every wave, whose only means of interaction with the world was to sing that dreadful SerpenTerrorist song they all sang. Loudly. Out of key. And asynchronously with one another. The other Crimebusters were always happy to look the other way while the Great Hunter tied up the loose ends. It was his job. They assumed, he supposed, that he was simply cooking them in the Execution Chamber ovens. And, eventually, he was. If you thought about it -- and he did think about it, a lot -- was drinking their blood first any great harm to them, given the situation they were already in?

But the harm, of course, was not to them: it was to himself. Each time he drank blood, even cold snake-boy blood, as sweet and refreshing as an American lager, he became a little less of a man, and a little more of a monster.

It ended tonight.

He stood on the rooftop of his famous house, the so-called Clockwork Brownstone, waiting for Sky Lord and the others to arrive. He had called this meeting to tell them everything, and to beg for their forgiveness. As long as it was a secret, known only to himself, his vampirism could potentially grow into a more serious problem than it had ever been to date. Quite clearly, it had already started to do so. If his friends knew about this little situation, though, they could help keep him in check. That had been the plan, anyway. He hadn't anticipated another snake-boy attack on the very morning of his coming out party, so to speak, but decided, ultimately, that it was a good sign. The ensuing flood of snake-boys into his care (assuming his friends allowed him to remain administrator of the Execution Chamber) would serve as a temptation for him to resist, and his resistance, in turn, would be proof of his new resolve to himself, and to his friends. He hoped.

"Pip pip," he said, to cheer himself up and calm himself down as he surveyed the sky. "Tally-ho."

He hadn't been this scared since he had stood at the bottom of San Juan hill, waiting for Col. Roosevelt to give the signal and start the charge. Back then, he had had nothing to lose but his life. Time -- he thought -- has a way of raising the stakes for everybody, and even moreso, it turns out, for immortals. The longer we have lived, the more we have to lose. Reputations. Bodies of work. Mechanical houses made of gold. The Great Hunter liked his life, the one he was living now, except for the one little thing. When you really considered it -- he thought now to himself -- his vampirism was not really even like a disease. It was more like a war wound, something he had picked up while protecting innocents from the ravages of far worse vampires than himself. Maybe he had called this meeting too rashly. Maybe he would be able to take control of himself without help. Maybe he shouldn't risk having his friends turn on him. They had thrown other former Crimebusters into the ovens in the past -- for heinous crimes, certainly -- but maybe they'd see his vampirism as a more serious kind of problem than he himself had managed to thus far. Anything was possible.

Sky Lord arrived with two young children draped over his shoulders, like a deer hunter with his kills: there was Sky Prince, the man's son, on the one shoulder. No surprise. Happens often enough. Poor lad. And on the other shoulder was a snake-boy, of all things. Sky Lord dropped them both onto the rooftop with a heavy thump, thump. They lay there, possibly (but not certainly) breathing.

"So yeah," said Sky Lord. "What's the big deal? You wanted to talk?"

"Shouldn't we wait for the others?" said The Great Hunter.

"Sure, okay," said Sky Lord.

Later, the Great Hunter would remember this moment, the way that Sky Lord had sat on the edge of the rooftop, dangling his feet over, pretending to wait, as if he had no idea that the others weren't coming. It would be one more thing -- a smaller thing in the scheme of things, certainly, but one more thing all the same -- that the Great Hunter would hold against him.

But that would be later.

For now, he said, "Would you like some, ah, tea? I've got tea. I could make coffee, as well." Even after all these years, he was not accustomed to one-on-one socialization with the most powerful known being in the universe. He figured that a trip to the kitchen might keep him out of Sky Lord's company until somebody else, some leavening influence, like Beast Mistress, maybe, could arrive. She had a nice patter. She kept things light.

"Oh no," said Sky Lord. "I'm good." He casually hovered away from the edge of the building, like a swimmer pushing off the side of a swimming pool. "As a matter of fact, though, while we're alone, there's some stuff I wanted to discuss," he said.

Oh goodie, thought the Great Hunter.

The last time that Sky Lord had had "something to discuss" with him, he had ended up taking on the responsibility of running the supervillain prison and Execution Chamber. Which, ultimately, had led him to his current predicament. Though Sky Lord was not any kind of official authority figure, he had taken it upon himself to decide who, in the world of Bledsoe crimebusting, did what.. It was like he was arranging the lot of them on a playing field or a chess board, one that only he, himself, was able, apparently, to see.

"Do tell," said the Great Hunter. "I love our little chit-chats."

Sky Lord put his arms above his head, bent them at the elbow to the left. He turned a slow cartwheel in that direction. He bent his arms to the right. He turned a slow cartwheel to the right. This was the kind of thing he did. He never quite seemed to be paying attention, when he was at his most intensely manipulative. He stopped himself, upside down, hovering face to face in front of the Great Hunter.

He burped.

"Sorry," he said.

He righted himself, but stayed in the air, hovering over the edge of the building.

"I was going to talk to you about this snake-boy over here."

The Great Hunter walked over to where the two boys lay unconscious on his rooftop. "Yes. I was curious as to why you brought one with you."

Sky Lord hovered behind him, floating on his back.

"How's your son?" said the Great Hunter.

"Oh. He'll be fine. I'll pop him into a new body, good as new, when we get home. Anyway, this Snake-Boy." Sky Lord landed beside The Great Hunter. "He saved my son's life -- for some reason. Wasted effort, because the body had pretty much had it, but all the same. I looked into his soul. I saw it all. He stood up to the other snake-boys and protected my son while he was down."

Sky Lord looked deeply into the Great Hunter's eyes, attempting to use his super-sincerity power, the Great Hunter imagined. Or would that be his super-insincerity power?

"He's not like all the other snake-boys."

The Great Hunter crossed his arms, rubbed his mustache with thumb and forefinger. "Hm. Yes. Well. SerpenTerrorist has sent us defectives before ..." He was stalling for time, to see where Sky Lord was going with this conversational line. It had always been Sky Lord, in the past, who insisted on executing the defective, non-evil snake-boys, on the grounds that they were likely sleeper agents, or, at the very least, inhuman and soulless and therefore, inevitably, someday, dangerous, regardless of their apparent lack of specific SerpenTerrorist-related programming.

"No. This is different," said Sky Lord. "I mean, more different than the others have been. He's not just not-evil. He's actively good." He floated up high into the air again, as he often did when he got excited. He wiggled his toes. He cracked his knuckles. "I looked into his soul, don't you see?" He paused. He smiled. He opened his arms wide, as if he were about to embrace his long-lost best friend. He turned a back-flip. "That means he has one. Right?"

When The Great Hunter didn't respond, Sky Lord dropped himself back down onto the roof, landing on his buttocks and hands, gently. He shrugged. He looked at a fingernail on his left hand. "Also, it looks like his cellular structure is holding up better than most of the SerpenTerrorist's clones do, even after several hours of life, so ..."

"Oh, I see now. That makes sense." The Great Hunter started to walk to the door that led downstairs. "You want to figure out why, and then maybe apply that answer to your son's clones. I get it. Good. I'll find a place for him in the prison." A hidden agenda that actually made sense struck him as a relief.

Sky Lord super-speedily blocked his way.

"Actually, I was thinking maybe he could be your sidekick," he said. "I wasn't lying about the other stuff. He really is kind of heroic. I really was kind of impressed."

There was some other game afoot, then. Damn.

"I've got a big heart," replied Sky Lord. "I'm a softie. People don't know. Besides --" and here his eyes (the visible two) tightened. "It'll be good practice for you, to keep from drinking his blood, if you're really planning to swear off the sauce."

Sky Lord held up a finger. "Oh, come on. I can hear a feather touch a cotton ball in a pillow-fight half a world away. I can see through walls. I can read souls. I can smell your breath. I can taste your guilt. I can hear you screaming about it every time you walk into a room, even though you don't know you are screaming. There's really nothing you can hide from me. Like, ever. Silly old bear."

The Great Hunter felt empty and angry and cold. Never mind that he had planned to confess. This was a violation.

"It's not a big deal," said Sky Lord, putting his arm around the stricken hero. "As long as you keep your, ah, activities quiet, and limit yourself to villains and henchpeople ... I'll never stand in the way of that. I fully approve, as a matter of fact. But I need to know you know the difference. I need to know you can control yourself." He flicked his eyes over to the Snake-Boy. "I need you to show me."

"The others. They're not coming, are they?"

"I asked them not to, yes." Asked, of course, meaning told.

"Why?"

"I couldn't let you ruin your life over this silly little vampire thing you've got going on. As long as you don't talk to them about it, nobody cares. Even the ones who know -- yes, okay, I'm not the only one, whatever, get over it -- don't really, you know, care to know. You talk to them about it, you blow everything. Then they have to respond. Don't make them respond. Okay? Don't rub it in their noses. So to speak."

"Who else knows?" said the Great Hunter. For some reason, this part of it seemed more important than any of the rest.

"You've got a nice life," said Sky Lord, floating away, on his shoulder, with one arm crooked in the air like a kid in the ocean trying to scare his younger siblings by imitating a shark.

"Yes. I was thinking the same thing, just before you arrived," said the Great Hunter, deflating. "I do have a nice life."

"You'll do it then! Great!" said Sky Lord, slapping the Great Hunter on the back, sending him sprawling across the rooftop. He landed beside the prone bodies of the boys. "The snake-boy will make you an excellent sidekick, just you wait." Sky Lord strode over, picked up the carcass of his son, slung it over his shoulder. He took Sky Prince's face in his hand, squeezed the cheeks together so that the mouth seemed to move. "Say goodnight son!"

And then he laughed and laughed and laughed.

Then, just like that, Sky Lord was gone.

The Great Hunter walked, with more dignity than he had any right to muster, to the edge of the rooftop. He screwed his monocle into his left eye-socket. He watched Sky Lord fly away in the bright blue afternoon sky. He felt like nothing. Sky Lord had placed him under a complete, mercilessly casual, control. It was the casualness of it, really, that burned the most. "Who else knows?" he said, knowing that Sky Lord could hear him, no matter where he happened to have gone to on the planet. Knowing that Sky Lord would not answer. "How did they find out? Did you tell them? Why? Why are you doing this to me?"

Just like Sky Lord to miss the joke, thought The Great Hunter, who had known George and Gracie personally. You're supposed to say, 'Say goodnight, son," and then your son would say -- or you'd mime your son's mouth saying, anyway, 'Goodnight son.' Idiot.

Hours later, he was still staring. A calmness had come over him, though. He didn't know yet what he was going to do, but he knew one thing. It was all that he knew anymore. It was all that he cared to know. He knew that Sky Lord was too powerful to be allowed to continue living. He knew that he was going to have to take him down. Maybe that was two things.

He walked over to the snake-boy, still flat on his belly where Sky Lord had dumped him.

"Did you hear any of that?" He started to kick the thing, but then thought better of it. "I know you're awake. Answer me." He squatted down, gently slapped the snake-boy's face.

Snake-Boy opened his eyes. "He is the SerpenTerrorist," he sang. "He is the rightful ruler of the Solar System. He is the rightful mayor of Bledsoe City. He is handsomer than God."

Nanoman in "The Fight of His Life"

One night on his way to the movies, Nanoman was attacked by his worst enemies, the Nancyboy Brigade. He defeated them. When he got to the movie theater, though, his life partner, N. O. Botts, was nowhere to be found.

Nanoman called him.

"Sorry I was late. The Nancyboys attacked. I defeated them."

"Late? For what?"

Nanoman couldn't believe what he was hearing. "You forgot our movie date!" he said. "Again!"

"Baby, I'm sorry. It's just that I'm so busy here in the lab."

Nanoman, tearing up: "I'm beginning to think those reporters and bloggers are right! The ones who say we've never been seen in the same room together!"

A long pause.

"Nanoman. You can't be seriously trying to imply that you are my secret identity, that we are the same person. Surely you know better. Being, after all, yourself, and not me."

This threw off Nanoman, who was, like most Crimebusters, not particularly bright, and therefore easy to throw off. "No. Um. I just meant that we're never in the same room together." He slammed the phone down, which was difficult to do, since the "phone" was nothing but software running inside his own circuitry. But he managed to slam it all the same. That's how angry he was.

Notes

Near-daily serialization in very, very small installments at the official website: sblsp.wordpress.com

I'll be providing a semi-monthly compilation of the serial installments into meatier chapters here at DeviantArt.

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