ChasNicollette
Allons-y Means Let's Go.
- Joined
- Nov 1, 2007
- Posts
- 16,135
Emil. Secret Origin. "Forever Yours."
It has been said that Englishmen are not permitted the luxury of madness.
Emil Hamilton and his brother had this tenet drilled into them from a very young age by their powerful and imposing father.
To this day, Emil believed he had upheld that tenet.
Even though his dreams were haunted by the shards of something long dead, even though he was whispered-to sometimes by a ghostly feminine masculine androgyne voice that harkened from beyond Man's earliest race memory, he believed himself utterly sane.
Whether he had permitted himself the luxury of madness or not, only time would tell...
He stood watching the various viewscreens in his lab in Lex's subterranean Reeves Dam Complex.
His correspondence sat untouched on a table behind him, left by a messenger who had scurried in and scurried out before Emil could berate him for needlessly disturbing important work.
Emil reached up with metal fingers and touched a screen which displayed nothing but white expanses. Touched the screen almost... affectionately.
Fields of white stretched around them, as distant as the eye could see.
A place where none could live, and where no-one did.
A wasteland at the bottom of the world, abandoned to time and to the elements, ventured into only by the bravest and the most intent of explorers and scientists.
But even they had limits.
"I'm sorry, Doctor Hamilton," Joseph Brooks declared, stopping atop a ridge that Emil had just begun picking his way down, "the team's not going any further."
Emil stiffened, and whirled back around to regard Brooks, his team's foreman, assigned to him by The Ministry.
He frowned, and the frown around his goggles and the flecks of ice in his unshaven face was a frightening frown indeed. "I. Beg your pardon."
"As I said sir," Brooks replied, his Yorkshire accent managing not to crack under Emil's terrible regard, "we're not going further. Not today. There's a snowstorm moving in, and we're about to lose what satellite coverage we still have. The batteries in the radios are dying, and what emergency shelters we've brought don't seem sufficient to guarantee our surviving the storm."
Emil grunted. "Well. That's... disappointing. I had thought you made of sterner stuff."
"Stern I may be, sir," Brooks rebuffed, "but I'll not risk lives for you, not any more than I already have. Not on a-- 'vision quest.'"
Emil arched a snow-flecked eyebrow. And blew air out through his nostrils like steam. And turned. And kept walking down the slope.
His prosthetic hand twitched beneath the layers of weatherproof gear he wore.
"Please yourselves, then," he growled.
"There's something out here and if I have to find it alone, then so I will."
"And damn you all who tell me nay."
Brooks paused. And shook his head. And turned, and returned to the party, to help them reach McMurdo Station before the storm swallowed them.
The Ministry "forgot" things all the time. And when Emil's vaunted intellect got him killed, The Ministry would "forget" him, too. There would be angry letters from Downing Street about resources lost to The Crown, but ultimately, off-book research remained off-book even in death.
But Emil would not yet perish.
Another hour into his onward trek, alone into the frozen wastes, following the impetus of the compass-points etched in two years' straight of nightly dreaming, he thought he saw something. He thought he saw a glint of steel in the six-month Sun.
As clouds crawled across the sky and obliterated that Sun, Emil staggered into...
...he didn't know what.
Around him, peeking out of the ice, were hints of spires and structures, some gold, some silver. He found they were warm to the touch, and while they had qualities of metal, so also were there elements of stone. He could not identify it.
There, in the last hints of sunlight, he gazed at his reflection in the shimmering surface of something Ancient of Days. It mesmerised him. To see himself as part of this, to see himself as though painted upon the surface of these echoing, whistling, windswept structures, this was profoundly moving.
The structures of his mind shuddered to think of it.
...and then the storm struck, and he sought shelter in those impossible, primordial caverns.
Whilst huddled there against the dark of the clouds, he fell into a fitful sleep, and a terrible dream.
There was a voice. A ghost. Asexual and sensuous.
They told him of The Future.
A future in which Man was at the mercy of terrible forces because Man was unprepared. Because Man was powerless. Because Man was weak.
'Prepare,' They told him, ominous and prophetic, They told him, 'the Armies of Man.'
...he had left that place with a singular purpose. Before he had left, he had placed explosives and buried The Ancient of Days beneath another layer of ice atop that left by the storm, sufficient, in his calculation, to keep The Ancient of Days hidden for another hundred years or until he decided to unearth it.
And then he had returned to civilization a Phoenix risen not from ashes but from snows, impossibly surviving the unforgiving elements to fulfill a message of change.
To fulfill the message of The Future.
He had found in his brother's chromosomal make-up one clue to the mystery of saving Mankind from its terrible fate. But all his testing had indicated that the gene his brother possessed was horribly horribly rare. What he needed was a way to give the gift of post-human ability to those without the metagene. All Mankind would be needed.
Serums were investigated and discarded, artefacts of legend (like The Orb of Ra and The Water of Warriors) were dismissed as simply fiction, and Emil exhausted himself exhausting the potential vectors for empowering humanity against the coming threat.
Until the day, decades later, working in the offices of S.T.A.R.Labs Metropolis, a courier brought him a sample of a Smallville meteor.
And he gazed upon this like Saint Paul himself, as though scales had fallen from his eyes.
At last he would be able to fulfill his calling.
Emil's eyes refocused, and he found himself gazing at a piece of green meteoroid sitting in the palm of his metal hand.
A study in emerald.
He pondered at it.
And he wondered, not for the first time, when it would be his turn. When he would be allowed to rise.
It had always seemed to him terribly unfair that the unwise tomfoolery of his brother should be rewarded with the natural gift of metagenetic ability, whereas Emil's own tireless devotion was repaid only with cryptic messages insisting patience.
But he would wait. If it took forever, he would wait.
There had been interesting results in tests on the green crystal, by far the most prevalent; it seemed that the application of a certain level of heat would catalyse the crystal into the black formation. And this formation had... unforeseen capabilities.
He curled his prosthetic fingers around the crystal, and then placed this softly, reverently, under leadened glass.
It occurred to him then that he might be hungry.
Running his tongue over his teeth, he sat quietly by the terminal by which he sent encrypted, redirected e-mails to Lionel Luthor, attempts to translate the extrasolar cryptography of The Alien Menace. These were equal parts obfuscation and genuine attempts to decode the messages; obfuscation would perhaps go unnoticed in this because it was, after all, largely conjectural work. But Emil could not permit Lionel to get ahead of Lex in these matters, because Lionel perhaps had been... compromised.
(The redirection of the e-mails would, if efficacious, prevent Lionel from determining the geographic site from which the e-mails were sent. So far as Lionel knew, Emil had appropriated facilities from a lab just outside Metropolis in the semi-rural suburb of Mont Curtiss, a place called "Cadmus Labs," and was presently nowhere nearer Smallville than that.)
Opening a container in which had been secreted an egg salad sandwich prepared by the resident chef of The Luthor Mansion, a gourmet delight between slices of white bread, Emil then uncapped a thermos of Peruvian Blonde coffee brewed for him by that selfsame kitchen staff. For dessert, he would enjoy a green D'Anjou pear, his favourite fruit.
Having prepared to take his repast, Emil turned and fished about in his mail, in case anything interesting had come down the--
He stopped. And stared.
At the cover of this week's Science Weekly.
"No," he hissed.
"No."
"No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No!"
His metal fist exploded down against the desk and the keyboard juddered and the monitor flickered and the coffee splattered and with a roar of frustration he scooped up the thermos and flung it fiercely across the room...
...it rebounded and rolled away and he stood there glaring to nowhere for a moment, seething.
Snatching the magazine back up he paged through it violently, tearing a few of the pages as he delved deeply. He ran organic fingers over the photography.
He made little sounds through his teeth, and sometimes those sounds were words.
"...no..."
"'My God...'"
"'...why have You forsaken me?'"
He clawed his hand atop his head and scowled, and muttered to himself.
"Makes no sense. Should have been buried for a century."
"Damned, damned climate shift. Receding ice caps."
"Should have foreseen this."
He adjusted his spectacles.
...his eyes unfocused, thinking of a project that he had kept both from Lex and from Lionel alike.
Something to tide him over whilst impatiently waiting for his turn to receive power.
"I must accelerate my timetable."
It has been said that Englishmen are not permitted the luxury of madness.
Emil Hamilton and his brother had this tenet drilled into them from a very young age by their powerful and imposing father.
To this day, Emil believed he had upheld that tenet.
Even though his dreams were haunted by the shards of something long dead, even though he was whispered-to sometimes by a ghostly feminine masculine androgyne voice that harkened from beyond Man's earliest race memory, he believed himself utterly sane.
Whether he had permitted himself the luxury of madness or not, only time would tell...
He stood watching the various viewscreens in his lab in Lex's subterranean Reeves Dam Complex.
His correspondence sat untouched on a table behind him, left by a messenger who had scurried in and scurried out before Emil could berate him for needlessly disturbing important work.
Emil reached up with metal fingers and touched a screen which displayed nothing but white expanses. Touched the screen almost... affectionately.
Decades Ago.
Fields of white stretched around them, as distant as the eye could see.
A place where none could live, and where no-one did.
A wasteland at the bottom of the world, abandoned to time and to the elements, ventured into only by the bravest and the most intent of explorers and scientists.
But even they had limits.
"I'm sorry, Doctor Hamilton," Joseph Brooks declared, stopping atop a ridge that Emil had just begun picking his way down, "the team's not going any further."
Emil stiffened, and whirled back around to regard Brooks, his team's foreman, assigned to him by The Ministry.
He frowned, and the frown around his goggles and the flecks of ice in his unshaven face was a frightening frown indeed. "I. Beg your pardon."
"As I said sir," Brooks replied, his Yorkshire accent managing not to crack under Emil's terrible regard, "we're not going further. Not today. There's a snowstorm moving in, and we're about to lose what satellite coverage we still have. The batteries in the radios are dying, and what emergency shelters we've brought don't seem sufficient to guarantee our surviving the storm."
Emil grunted. "Well. That's... disappointing. I had thought you made of sterner stuff."
"Stern I may be, sir," Brooks rebuffed, "but I'll not risk lives for you, not any more than I already have. Not on a-- 'vision quest.'"
Emil arched a snow-flecked eyebrow. And blew air out through his nostrils like steam. And turned. And kept walking down the slope.
His prosthetic hand twitched beneath the layers of weatherproof gear he wore.
"Please yourselves, then," he growled.
"There's something out here and if I have to find it alone, then so I will."
"And damn you all who tell me nay."
Brooks paused. And shook his head. And turned, and returned to the party, to help them reach McMurdo Station before the storm swallowed them.
The Ministry "forgot" things all the time. And when Emil's vaunted intellect got him killed, The Ministry would "forget" him, too. There would be angry letters from Downing Street about resources lost to The Crown, but ultimately, off-book research remained off-book even in death.
But Emil would not yet perish.
Another hour into his onward trek, alone into the frozen wastes, following the impetus of the compass-points etched in two years' straight of nightly dreaming, he thought he saw something. He thought he saw a glint of steel in the six-month Sun.
As clouds crawled across the sky and obliterated that Sun, Emil staggered into...
...he didn't know what.
Around him, peeking out of the ice, were hints of spires and structures, some gold, some silver. He found they were warm to the touch, and while they had qualities of metal, so also were there elements of stone. He could not identify it.
There, in the last hints of sunlight, he gazed at his reflection in the shimmering surface of something Ancient of Days. It mesmerised him. To see himself as part of this, to see himself as though painted upon the surface of these echoing, whistling, windswept structures, this was profoundly moving.
The structures of his mind shuddered to think of it.
...and then the storm struck, and he sought shelter in those impossible, primordial caverns.
Whilst huddled there against the dark of the clouds, he fell into a fitful sleep, and a terrible dream.
There was a voice. A ghost. Asexual and sensuous.
They told him of The Future.
A future in which Man was at the mercy of terrible forces because Man was unprepared. Because Man was powerless. Because Man was weak.
'Prepare,' They told him, ominous and prophetic, They told him, 'the Armies of Man.'
********
...he had left that place with a singular purpose. Before he had left, he had placed explosives and buried The Ancient of Days beneath another layer of ice atop that left by the storm, sufficient, in his calculation, to keep The Ancient of Days hidden for another hundred years or until he decided to unearth it.
And then he had returned to civilization a Phoenix risen not from ashes but from snows, impossibly surviving the unforgiving elements to fulfill a message of change.
To fulfill the message of The Future.
He had found in his brother's chromosomal make-up one clue to the mystery of saving Mankind from its terrible fate. But all his testing had indicated that the gene his brother possessed was horribly horribly rare. What he needed was a way to give the gift of post-human ability to those without the metagene. All Mankind would be needed.
Serums were investigated and discarded, artefacts of legend (like The Orb of Ra and The Water of Warriors) were dismissed as simply fiction, and Emil exhausted himself exhausting the potential vectors for empowering humanity against the coming threat.
Until the day, decades later, working in the offices of S.T.A.R.Labs Metropolis, a courier brought him a sample of a Smallville meteor.
And he gazed upon this like Saint Paul himself, as though scales had fallen from his eyes.
At last he would be able to fulfill his calling.
********
Emil's eyes refocused, and he found himself gazing at a piece of green meteoroid sitting in the palm of his metal hand.
A study in emerald.
He pondered at it.
And he wondered, not for the first time, when it would be his turn. When he would be allowed to rise.
It had always seemed to him terribly unfair that the unwise tomfoolery of his brother should be rewarded with the natural gift of metagenetic ability, whereas Emil's own tireless devotion was repaid only with cryptic messages insisting patience.
But he would wait. If it took forever, he would wait.
There had been interesting results in tests on the green crystal, by far the most prevalent; it seemed that the application of a certain level of heat would catalyse the crystal into the black formation. And this formation had... unforeseen capabilities.
He curled his prosthetic fingers around the crystal, and then placed this softly, reverently, under leadened glass.
It occurred to him then that he might be hungry.
Running his tongue over his teeth, he sat quietly by the terminal by which he sent encrypted, redirected e-mails to Lionel Luthor, attempts to translate the extrasolar cryptography of The Alien Menace. These were equal parts obfuscation and genuine attempts to decode the messages; obfuscation would perhaps go unnoticed in this because it was, after all, largely conjectural work. But Emil could not permit Lionel to get ahead of Lex in these matters, because Lionel perhaps had been... compromised.
(The redirection of the e-mails would, if efficacious, prevent Lionel from determining the geographic site from which the e-mails were sent. So far as Lionel knew, Emil had appropriated facilities from a lab just outside Metropolis in the semi-rural suburb of Mont Curtiss, a place called "Cadmus Labs," and was presently nowhere nearer Smallville than that.)
Opening a container in which had been secreted an egg salad sandwich prepared by the resident chef of The Luthor Mansion, a gourmet delight between slices of white bread, Emil then uncapped a thermos of Peruvian Blonde coffee brewed for him by that selfsame kitchen staff. For dessert, he would enjoy a green D'Anjou pear, his favourite fruit.
Having prepared to take his repast, Emil turned and fished about in his mail, in case anything interesting had come down the--
He stopped. And stared.
At the cover of this week's Science Weekly.
"No," he hissed.
"No."
"No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No!"
His metal fist exploded down against the desk and the keyboard juddered and the monitor flickered and the coffee splattered and with a roar of frustration he scooped up the thermos and flung it fiercely across the room...
...it rebounded and rolled away and he stood there glaring to nowhere for a moment, seething.
Snatching the magazine back up he paged through it violently, tearing a few of the pages as he delved deeply. He ran organic fingers over the photography.
He made little sounds through his teeth, and sometimes those sounds were words.
"...no..."
"'My God...'"
"'...why have You forsaken me?'"
He clawed his hand atop his head and scowled, and muttered to himself.
"Makes no sense. Should have been buried for a century."
"Damned, damned climate shift. Receding ice caps."
"Should have foreseen this."
He adjusted his spectacles.
...his eyes unfocused, thinking of a project that he had kept both from Lex and from Lionel alike.
Something to tide him over whilst impatiently waiting for his turn to receive power.
"I must accelerate my timetable."
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