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Stories from the Verse
A Dozen Verses
Chapter 156: Cooper 125
Table of Contents
Previous chapter: Kondor 309
He had moved yet again, Cooper realized. Sitting up, he tried to focus, pulling back the hood of the Mister Justice suit, and saw that he was in a huge chamber with three other men and three women. One of the men and one of the women was black; the black woman was unconscious. Enameled metal walls, some kind of lights in the ceiling, and the whole thing reminded him of a warehouse.
The black man addressed him. “Well, most of us know each other, but I don’t believe I’ve met you. I’m Joseph Wade Kondor. This is my companion, Ezekiel Smith. We call him Zeke.”
“Pleased to meet you, I’m sure.” Both of them were wearing desert military fatigues, but were the only ones so clad in the room. Relaxing a bit, he recognized that all of them were versers; that made things a bit easier--they weren’t going to wonder how he got here. A beat behind, he continued, “I’m Brian Cooper, or Barrelmaster. Joe Kondor, you say? I’ve heard of you.”
“Oh?”
“I worked with Derek and Vashti Brown a couple worlds back. We were superheroes in a city called Berkeley, Colorado.”
The one called Joseph Kondor nodded. The lanky blonde beside him extended a hand which he shook from the ground, and then he helped pull Brian to his feet. “Then you probably heard of me, too,” he said. “I’m Bob Slade--Lord Robert Elvis Slade, technically, but then all of us have titles and names we’ve accumulated through the worlds we’ve visited, and Bob is good enough among friends. This is my wife, the Lady Shella.”
She gave an abbreviated curtsey.
“I--I think I actually saw you, once, uh, Bob. It was the first world I had ever been to, and I had no idea what was happening, but someone who looked a lot like you--but without the leather armor and weapons and such--was sitting on some vehicle trying to do something with a wrench or something. Then before I could do anything, you were hit by some kind of artillery shell or something.”
“Wow, that’s going back a few decades. Before I met Shella even. Funny enough, that was also my first world; I was trying to strip parts off that thing in the hope that I could construct some kind of vehicle or shelter or something, I really don’t remember. It's been so long. So, you were there?”
“For a while. I found my way to a place they called Umak Tek, and was there for a while. Eventually one of those coral bushes got me when I was on a hike.” Barrelmaster winced a bit. It had not been as bad as being stoned, but it had not been immediate either. The searing flashes of light had taken a little time to finish him off.
“Well, then,” said the other woman, turning around to face him. He recognized her immediately. “You’ve probably also heard of me. I’m Lauren Hastings--as Bob says, with a lot of other names and titles, but Lauren will do.”
“I--I saw you, too, not that long ago. I landed on a tropical island, and followed that sense--Derek and Tommy called it the scriff sense--and I saw you, dressed very like you are now. You seemed to be trying to fire a magic arrow at a target, and suddenly it looked like you were swallowed up by the ground.”
She frowned and nodded. “I never did get that to work,” she said, “but from there I wound up visiting the outskirts of heaven, where Peter gave me a couple useful tools and sent me back to finish a very long battle against vampires in the future. So,” she said, looking around at the group, “what do we know so far?”
Cooper noted that even though she made no big deal of it, everyone paid very close and respectful attention to her. The answer-and-move-to-the-next-topic technique was a trick he had used many times as a teacher himself. She could command a room.
“The mystery is why we’re all here,” Slade says. “We’ve got seven of us, all combat seasoned--I’m assuming you are,” he said to Cooper, who nodded. “A couple wizards, psionicists, engineers and mechanics, a thief. I don’t know why the gods have put us all here together,” he concluded, “but it must be something big.”
There is a behind-the-writings look at the thoughts, influences, and ideas of this chapter, along with eleven other sequential chapters of this novel, in mark Joseph "young" web log entry #536: Character Confrontations. Given a moment, this link should take you directly to the section relevant to this chapter. It may contain spoilers of upcoming chapters.
As to the old stories that have long been here:
