LOOK HARD ENOUGH INTO THE SETTING SUN

By Dale Glaser

Ibrahim al-Bazziz sat in a wire-frame chair with thinly padded cushions, while the woman on the other side of the desk manipulated the icons populating the flatscreen of a tablet computer sitting on her desk, just behind the small brass nameplate that read ‘Maria Escudero’. From his angle it was impossible for Ibrahim to make out much more than files opening and minimizing, but the woman was offering a running commentary. “These are mostly to do with various insurance options, in addition to the health insurance programs I just went over with you” Maria said, her words coming in a rapid syncopation that indicated a patter honed by almost constant repetition. “You’re automatically enrolled in a basic A.D. and D. insurance coverage, Accidental Death and Dismemberment? But you can buy supplemental coverage if you want, have it taken out of your paycheck with the rest of your deductions, and the rates are in this file here. There’s also short-term and long-term disability insurance, same deal, the rates are on the pages after the application form and there’s a little more about it in the ReadMe file.” She nodded once at the tablet and handed it across the desk to Ibrahim, who was trying to process everything that had been reviewed yet found he could only remember a few specifics: direct deposit sign-ups, employee assistance program guidelines, individual retirement account prospectuses …

Ibrahim glanced around the Hollow’s human resources office once again, if only to confirm what he had observed previously. The room held four desks total, one of which Ibrahim was sitting before and one of which was unoccupied. At the nearer of the other two, a man was working at a computer, tapping and sliding his fingertips on dual touchscreens with a quietly confident precision and economy. The man was bald, with a cranium enlarged beyond normal human parameters, while his eyes were narrow with gray irises so lightly pigmented they were nearly translucent. Otherwise, his physique was normal, albeit covered by the standard-issue A.R.M.O.R. uniform of bronze and white, almost identical to the one in which Ibrahim himself had been outfitted earlier that morning. The last desk apparently belonged to an inhuman creature which was quickly shuttling back and forth between the desk and the row of file cabinets against the office’s back wall, quickly and efficiently indexing folders. The creature did not wear a uniform, so Ibrahim could see that its entire body was covered in skin with both a texture and a mottled yellow-orange coloration that reminded him of some kind of tropical frog. In form, however, the creature resembled a cross between a spider and an octopus, with the rounded though strangely bi-lobed abdomen and smaller, distinct head of the former, and the large paired eyes and beak-like mouth of the latter, as well as eight long and slender tentacles rather than jointed legs. With weird, fluid grace, the creature was able to somehow support its weight on one tentacle, open a file cabinet drawer with another, widen the gap between two hanging folders with yet another, and with a fourth tentacle slide a new folder into its proper place.

Despite the vast disparities between the two human resources employees, Ibrahim could detect both their auras with minimal effort. The man with the enlarged cranium possessed a modicum of psychic ability and was constantly shedding tachyons, which combined with his appearance led Ibrahim to conclude that the man was an evolved human from Earth’s future, perhaps the year 4000 or even 5000 CE. The hybrid frog-spider-octopus possessed no inherent energies in its bio-aura, yet was overlaid with a dimensional signature that allowed Ibrahim to identify its place of origin as the Negative Zone. A little tricky, the Negative Zone’s characteristic effect on auras, but Dr. McCoy had tripped Ibrahim up with it once on a quiz, and he was unlikely to ever forget it.

He returned his attention to the woman conducting his in-processing, who was in the midst of explaining to him that “open enrollment period comes at the beginning of the year, but new employees have a thirty-day grace period to sign up for any benefits or programs from the date of hire, so go over everything and e-mail the completed forms back to me …” Maria Escudero was even more devoid of aura variations than the eight-legged creature currently feeding a piece of paper into a data scanner. She was a middle-aged woman, bordering on matronly, with medium-length black hair and bifocal glasses and a dark buff colored complexion, and to the extent that Ibrahim could verify, nothing more whatsoever.

“Are you wondering what my super power is?” she asked.

“Beg your pardon?” Ibrahim asked, startled back to attentiveness.

“I do have access to your existing personnel files, Mr. al-Bazzaz,” Maria said. “I’m aware of your mutant ability to visualize energy patterns and I’ve seen you concentrating on me as I’ve been going over your orientation packet.”

Ibrahim smiled tightly. “Force of habit, ma’am,” he admitted.

“So would you like to know what it is?” Maria repeated. Ibrahim shrugged and nodded in a single, combined gesture. “My secret power,” she said in a low voice, leaning forward conspiratorially, “is that I am very … good … at my job.”

Ibrahim blinked in moderate surprise at the deftness with which Maria had subverted his expectations. The phone on Maria’s desk rang and she answered it. “Escudero … Yes, we were just finishing… I’ll send him over.” She hung up the phone and pushed up her bifocals slightly as she rubbed the corners of her eyes with her fingertips. “That was Prithita in Director Little Sky’s office. He has an assignment for you, but would like you to stop by the teleporter room to escort a group of guests to his office before you pick up the assignment.”

“Escort them from the teleporters directly to the director’s office?” Ibrahim asked. “Not to quarantine?”

“They’re guests who have visited before, q-exempt,” Maria explained.

“Oh … so then why do they need an escort?”

“Strictly speaking, they don’t need one,” Maria conceded. “I suppose it’s just a courtesy that Diretcor Little Sky is graciously choosing to extend. Don’t forget to return those electronic forms to me as soon as you’re able.”

Ibrahim took Maria’s point in dismissing him, rose from his chair with his new tablet computer tucked under his arm, and made his way out of the office. He crossed via catwalk over the Park, where a small group had gathered near one of the arboretum’s artificial streams. One figure stood facing four others, arranged in an ad-hoc rectangle, and the individual was leading the others through a slow sequence of poses and movements which Ibrahim assumed must be some variant of tai chi. The instructor was a crystalline being, most of its facets a milky white but a scattered few appearing to reflect lights in pastel pink, blue and yellow. Three of the tai chi students – a man with a long gray ponytail, a dusky woman with large tropical flowers pinned in her hair, and a green-skinned, squat-featured humanoid whose body from the waist down had either been encased in or replaced by trapezoid-shaped machinery which allowed it to hover above the grass – wore versions of A.R.M.O.R. uniforms, while the fourth student, a tall and broad creature covered head to toe in amber quills, wore nothing at all. Ibrahim watched the group progress through several training forms as he walked above them, noting the way that the exercise caused their various auras to ebb and flow almost in unison, until he reached the far side of the Park and approached the teleporter room’s entrance.

In the center of the teleporter room stood six costumed women, one of whom was engaged in conversation with a male uniformed A.R.M.O.R. technician while the rest talked amongst themselves. Some of the female visitors to the Hollow were recognizable to Ibrahim, others less so. The six-foot-seven statuesque figure with jade skin, emerald-highlighted black hair and a halo of telltale gamma radiation could only be the She-Hulk, and while Ibrahim did not recognize by name the woman standing beside her, nearly a foot shorter and dressed in an assymetrical magenta outfit with metallic accents, a pale blue complexion and water-filled breathing helmet clearly identified the She-Hulk’s companion as Atlantean. Two of the women, while being physically formed in entirely human proportions, seemed completely otherworldly: one looked to be composed of slowly swirling pale blue and white vapors that maintained the form of a teenaged girl; the other was completely encased in lustrous golden skin from her toes to two upswept points above her shining white eyes, while behind those peaks a mane of living fire flourished, accompanied in Ibrahim’s perceptions with a near-blinding corona of pink-tinged cosmic power. The final two members of the group, by contrast, appeared the most human. A strawberry-blonde in a form-fitting costume of saffron and cobalt with catlike attributes elicited a vague recollection from Ibrahim, while the striking woman with snow-white hair dressed in a short robe and leggings alternating in shades of pink and lavender made Ibrahim feel as if he should know her immediately, a sense accentuated by the rapidly shifting mystical energies that clung to her. The white-haired woman was the one conversing with the technician; Ibrahim assumed she must be the leader of the group and approached her directly.

“Here to pick up the Defendras?” the technician asked Ibrahim, already turning back toward his station. “Enjoy your visit, ladies.”

“Thank you so much, Agent Zhang,” the woman smiled, before turning her violet eyes on Ibrahim. She held out a delicate hand and said “We’ve not yet had the pleasure. Clea.”

Ibrahim shook Clea’s hand. “Ibrahim al-Bazzaz.”

Clea gestured at the rest of her team. “My associates are Nova, Hellcat, Cloud, Andromeda, and She-Hulk. I believe Director Little Sky is expecting us?”

“Right this way,” Ibrahim agreed, exiting the teleporter room with Clea at his side and the rest of the Defendras close behind. Traversing the walkways and corridors of the Hollow, Ibrahim allowed his developing sense of the layout of the A.R.M.O.R. facility to guide his steps while he exchanged pleasantries and small talk with Clea, focusing a surprising amount on her brilliant purple-sparkling eyes. He caught snippets of conversation from the rest of the group: She-Hulk and Hellcat discussed the possibility of setting up a friendly basketball game against the Crusaders; Nova and Andromeda bantered about their relative effectiveness in a recent combat against Bloodwraith, with Nova antagonizing her teammate at every opportunity. But for the most part, Ibrahim hung enraptured on Clea’s every word, yet simultaneously had extreme difficulty concetrating. He was only jarred back to himself somewhat when he realized that another step would cause him to collide with Prithita’s desk in the reception area outside the Director’s personal office.

“Thank you, Ibrahim, it’s been a pleasure,” Clea indicated, taking her leave as Prithita waved the Defendras into Director Little Sky’s office with the tip of her serpentine tail. Ibrahim watched the six women disappear through the doorway one by one, then turned toward the snake-woman as the door swung shut behind Cloud.

“Oh, good,” Prithita was saying, “HR gave you your tablet. I’m going to synchronize your virtual dossier with Director Little Sky’s. There’s a briefing that he was going to give to the Raido away team, but with the Defendras dropping in …” Prithita trailed off as she devoted her attention to her own computer, calling up the electronic dossier and initiating the synchronization process with Ibrahim’s handheld device.

“Uh, thanks,” Ibrahim managed, feeling as unbalanced as if he had nodded off while studying and then woken up just before tumbling out of a chair. He steadied himself staring at the animated progress icon on the screen of his tablet, and when it signaled completion asked Prithita, “Do I need to go get the team, or …?”

“No, no,” Prithita undulated her head back and forth. “The briefing was already scheduled, it’s in room seventeen, the upper Phoenix corridor, and the Raido team will meet you there in a few minutes.”

“All right,” Ibrahim acknowledged. He turned to leave and was halfway out of the reception area when he heard a voice calling out, “Hey, wait up a sec, kid!” Ibrahim looked back over his shoulder and saw an A.R.M.O.R. technician emerging from the doorway of a closet-sized space across from the director’s office. The man flipped a casual wave to Prithita on his way past her and joined Ibrahim in the corridor outside.

“Joshua Speer,” the man named himself.

“Ibrahim al-Bazzaz. Can I … help you?” Ibrahim asked.

“Thought maybe I could help you,” the man countered as the two walked side by side. He had a thin, angular face and wore wire-rimmed glasses, and his dirty blond hair was cut in a flattop, all of which combined to make his age impossible to pinpoint; Speer could have been a seasoned twenty-something or a boyish forty-something, with no indications of inherent powers or extraspatial origin. “Got a question for you, though. Which one would you do first?”

“Which … what?” Ibrahim asked.

“Which of the Defendras?” Speer asked with a sly, knowing smile. “I mean, feel free to elaborate on what the decision-making process entails, whether you’d get the least do-able one out of the way first and save the best for last, or whether you’d be all up on the hottest one first, or whatever else. But hypothetically, you can have your way with all of them one at a time, which one first?”

Ibrahim could feel the prickle of his skin flushing uncontrollably as he mentally flailed for a way to answer. Every reasonable response to the question required him to flatly deny that those kind of thoughts had entered his mind, but the truth was that Speer had somehow verbalized Ibrahim’s thought process almost to the letter. The entire time he had been accompanying Clea and the other Defendras to Director Little Sky’s office, Ibrahim had been fantasizing wildly, about how strong the She-Hulk’s thighs must be, about flying unconstrained in Cloud’s embrace or skinny-dipping in Andromeda’s, about how Nova’s gleaming body would feel if he could run his hands uninhibited up and down her curves, about what kind of scratches Hellcat might leave on his back if she did the same, and again and again wondering what exactly a nude Clea might look like by candlelight, to the point where it felt less like curiosity and more like an all-consuming need to know. All of those carnal musings had felt blissfully natural at the time, but now the way they had superceded reality seemed so excessive that he could hardly believe the force with which they had gripped him. He was attracted to women and as prone to idle speculation as any male, but never before had he turned any woman he had just met into a fervent lust object so completely. Not only was he grappling with that phenomenon, but additionally with the fact that a co-worker had bluntly called him on it. Ibrahim stared at the corridor floor and wished for his own head to explode.

“Hey, look, stop,” Speer said, coming to a halt himself and placing a hand on Ibrahim’s shoulder. “Sorry. I’m not trying to embarrass you to death. You’ve got nothing to be ashamed of anyway, and I don’t just mean in the middle school health class confusing-feelings-are-natural sense, either.”

“How do you mean then?” Ibrahim asked without looking up.

“Did you know Clea was the Sorceress Supreme of her dimension?” Speer asked. “And once, after she defeated a demon called Laurox the Lecherous he took a parting shot at her, cursed her with a twisted type of allure enchantment?”

“No,” Ibrahim admitted.

“Well she is, and she did, and he did,” Speer continued. “Clea eventually figured out how it worked well enough to get rid of it, but the thing is, she didn’t do that. She just modified it, so instead of driving men insane with desire it just turns up their interest level, just enough to be distracting. Then she put together her all-girls team and used the same magic on them. I’d say it’s amazing how many times it’s saved the Defendras’ lives and let them save their universe, but using sex to mess with guys’ heads? Not really that amazing.”

Ibrahim finally met Speer’s eyes. “So I was under a spell?”

“More or less, and a pretty harmless one all in all,” Speer confirmed. “And it’s the kind of thing that loses some of its impact over time, so if you ever run into the Defendras again it won’t be so intense. Still, if it were up to me, that’s something I probably would’ve warned you about before you met Clea for the first time. I’m guessing the Director didn’t do that.”

“No,” Ibrahim admitted, rubbing his soul patch thoughtfully.

“Right,” Speer said, setting off down the corridor again. As Ibrahim fell in step beside him, Speer looked back over his shoulder and then added, “The Director, he’s … he’s like that. Very need-to-know on most things. Also very interested in knowing as much as he can about the people who work for him. So maybe he figures he should know if you’re liable to have any … lapses of judgment when dealing with the ladies.”

“Are you saying he set me up?” Ibrahim asked. “That the Director sent me to meet the Defendras to see if I would … what, if I would feel one of them up, or something? Because I didn’t. I wouldn’t.”

“You don’t have to convince me,” Speer shrugged. “But as far as the Director goes, I guess you could call it a set-up, yeah. But it’s not as simple as that either. He didn’t want to see which way you would go between two options, right and wrong. He wants to figure out everything that makes you tick.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Ibrahim asked.

“Just seems fair to me,” Speer offered. “You’re new and you’re young. Just by the fact that the Director brought you on I also know you’re pretty smart, and you probably would have figured out that the Director’s always watching and profiling eventually, but I can save you some time.”

“And how do I know that this whole conversation isn’t just another set up? That you’re not going to report back to Director Little Sky how I reacted to the idea of him monitoring me?”

Speer smiled. “I guess you can’t really know that. Tell you what, though, me and some other guys are getting together in the garden cafe this evening, low key happy hour kind of thing. You’re welcome to join us. Get to know some people, see what your gut tells you about me.”

“That could be another set up, too.”

“Yup. Sure could. Up to you.” With that, Speer headed toward the opposite corridor. Ibrahim watched him walk away, then continued toward the briefing room, finally turning his attention to the electronic dossier on his tablet. It included the profiles for each member of the Raido away team, which Ibrahim was obligated to give no more than a cursory glance, just enough to ascertain that the team had eight members: two women, four men, an artificial construct and a Super Ape. Primarily Ibrahim focused on the parameters of the mission at hand, and had just reached the end of the summary when he arrived at room seventeen.

The room was large enough to accommodate a long, arc-shaped table where the members of Raido were already seated, as well as a lectern facing the table and a meter-high conical device set in the floor at the center of the arc. With flashbacks to giving oral presentations at Xavier’s in the back of his mind, Ibrahim walked toward the lectern. Before he reached it, a harsh, skeptical voice asked, “Director Little Sky cannot even be bothered to charge us with the task himself? What fool’s errand must this be?”

Ibrahim’s eyes went to the agent who had spoken, a bare-chested, tan, lithely muscular man whose light brown hair fell to his shoulders. “The Director is meeting with the Sorceress Supreme,” Ibrahim answered as neutrally as he could, believing that the man staring haughtily back at him was the Polemachian warrior he had noted on the team roster. A non-native dimensional contrast surrounded the man like a heat shimmer.

“No doubt he called for her consultation on the matter of the Undying Ones’ demonic assault on the Hollow,” another man opined. He wore the full A.R.M.O.R. uniform, but he too sported shoulder-length hair, including braids dangling from either temple. He also wore a full, well-groomed beard, which like the hair of his head had once been jet black but was now salted and peppered with age. He matched the description of Micah Synn from the roster profiles, Ibrahim noted, a powerful physique lacking any exotic energy signatures. “We should be patient with Little Sky under the circumstances,” Synn suggested.

“Yeah, come on, Firat, be a team player. For once,” a third team member appealed to the Polemachian, his voice only slightly sarcastic. The man filled out his A.R.M.O.R. uniform like a veteran offensive lineman, but his heavy-set face was friendly, augmented by its ruddy complexion rising all the way to his receding ginger hairline. “Don’t take your lord-and-liege complex out on whatsisname here … sorry, kid, what is your name?”

“Ibrahim al-Bazzaz,” he supplied.

The man smiled broadly. “Don Remming,” he introduced himself. The jagged electric blue outline of his aura indicated to Ibrahim that the man had undergone some form of artificial power augmentation in his lifetime.

Sitting next to Remming was a younger petite Asian woman in the standard uniform. Her black hair was cut in an angular bob and highlighted with glints of cherry-red. Gesturing at the lectern, she said, “Ibrahim, there’s a docking station for your tablet if you want to hook it up so you can start the briefing. Sorry we’re all on edge, we’ll try to take it easy on you from here on out.”

“Thanks,” Ibrahim nodded, mentally identifying the woman as Abigail Dunton, the Raido team’s psychic. He slotted his tablet into the connection port on the lectern, and the conical device a few feet away hummed to life, generating a holographic image in mid-air of a sepia-toned planet Earth.

“You might not have hooked the tablet up tight enough,” an electronically amplified voice offered. “Colors are a bit off.”

The observation seemed to have come from a robot, its metallic shell fashioned abstractly after ceremonial samurai armor in blue, red, silver and gold, but Ibrahim recalled that the only completely robotic on the team was the Dragon Man android, its ovoid, tyrian-scaled head looming mutely at the far end of the table, wrapped in a bizarre combination of technological and magical energy signatures. The gleaming automaton which had spoken was more accurately a powersuit codenamed Raydeen and controlled by Richard Carson; Ibrahim had not had time to read the full background, but had gathered that at one point Raydeen stood as tall as a city building and its pilot was the size of a normal human, but an accident had reduced Carson to miniscule size and his robotic craft to proportionally human dimensions. Whatever shrinking energies had acted on Raydeen and Carson now left only the faintest bubble-imprints on Ibrahim’s perceptions.

“Actually,” Ibrahim explained, “the colors are accurate. This is Earth Z-1.1.5.8.”

A murmur went around the table as the implication took hold; in the A.R.M.O.R. classification system for alternate worlds, the Z-prefix indicated a completely depopulated world. “How did it happen?” asked the other female Raido agent, a woman named Jillian Woods, tall, fair-skinned, with long, raven tresses. Her aura was almost an opaque shroud, a connection with the Darkforce Dimension which was profound and primal, something beyond the mere ability to access the black energies of that plane.

“That’s not a hundred percent clear,” Ibrahim admitted. “A routine drone probe brought back some fragmentary information based on data-scanning of satellites, which all points to a level eight mystical extinction event at a minimum.”

“One or more gods laying waste to the entire world,” Synn paraphrased. Beside him, an albino Siamang gibbon, Stanislav according to the Super Ape’s profile, shifted restlessly in its seat, roiling the animal’s aura of metabolized cosmic radiation.

“Something powerful enough to literally scorch the Earth at any rate,” Ibrahim confirmed. “The image looks so brownish because of the massive dust-storms, because every continent except Antarctica is desert, and because the oceans are becoming lifeless mud.”

“Becoming,” Remming repeated. “So this just happened recently?”

“That’s right,” Ibrahim indicated. “Director Little Sky wants your team to retrieve something from this world before anyone else in the multiverse has the chance to stumble across it.”

“And what might this prize be?” Firat inquired.

Ibrahim tapped the screen of his tablet and the holographic image of the desolate Earth was replaced by a schematics wireframe, a diagram of interconnected cylinders and oblate spheres. “You’ve heard of bunker buster warheads?” Ibrahim asked. “You could call this a temple buster. It’s a bomb for destroying the sanctuaries of gods.”

TO BE CONTINUED …