Chương 79: Interlude G

2103: 12: 31: 23: 55: 06 New York's cold embrace had felt less like coming home and more like walking into a prison. Without Alfons there to talk to, and with his foul-mouthed, pesky, yet adorable little junior Acute Puncture, Jeanie, caught and jailed – by his own sister no less – there was little here that felt like home to Michael.

Add to that the blame and burdens Ritual Master would no doubt throw on him out of an inability to accept that it was the Jannacht – not Michael, not Alfons, but the Jannacht and thus Ritual Master himself – that had gotten outplayed in Charm, and there was even less reason to celebrate the homecoming. At least Jeanie wouldn't be here to suffer with him.

Knowing her – and more importantly, knowing the justice system – she'd be put on probation, relocated to another city, and then released when she became of age, free to do whatever she wanted, be it returning to the Jannacht, become a hero, a vigilante, or rogue, or retiring from the masked scene for good. Michael hoped it would be anything but the first.

Better yet, Michael hoped she would realize that this stupid game wasn't worth playing, especially for one so young, and especially especially for an organization like the Jannacht. And the masquerade was a game, Michael knew. Sam might've agreed in the moment, but he'd seen she didn't fully comprehend – or at least accept – what he was saying.

It wasn't a game in the sense of cops and robbers or some other playful thing some especially minor villains, heroes and rogues would reduce it to, but much closer to something highly, highly competitive. Heroes, villains, rogues; all masked were part of the sport called the masquerade. And much like highly competitive sports, people got killed. Not just the athletes, but the fans too. Emotions ran high in sports games, especially among those with a, let's say, separatist-type mindset.

That inborne tribalism often came to the front when most competitive sports – games, one and all, no matter how some people differentiated between the two – revolved around an us-versus-them dynamic. So when one team wins and another loses, or when two longstanding rivals faced each other on the field, violence abounded. It had done so in Greece, in Rome – both East and West – in America, and everywhere else.

But the people who outright joined such a game, 'fans' or otherwise, shouldn't bitch and moan about people on their side dying. They chose to be a part of it. Every hero, villain, vigilante and rogue had the option to turn professional. And even if some of the villains and rogues got wealthy in the masquerade, the risk versus reward was far, far more in favor of professionals than anything else.

No, what really drove people to join the masquerade, and what was at the core of both its institutionalization and continued existence, was ego. It was pure bloodsport, a colosseum for people with power beyond the human and with the will to exercise it – or with the lack of will to resist its pull. Even the henchies felt it. They either joined for a taste of it, in worship of it, or simply to belong to something they deemed greater than themselves. Which was also all ego.

Michael himself, he'd long since figured out, was much the same. His desire for vengeance was, ultimately, all ego, and his later spite towards his Mom was all ego as well. The only time that it was neither ego nor power that had driven him was when he'd killed Juezito; then it was fear and self-preservation that had become his driving force. Which, in his opinion, was even worse; that was the realm of animals.

Add to that the rush that fighting could give, and the immense feeling of power, of authority and might that one could get as either a hero or a villain, and the masquerade was a honeytrap for those that simply couldn't fit into polite society. Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions. Michael knew this. He'd not always known it, but he'd been a quick learner, and he wasn't so blind as to not recognize himself in a mirror.

Even before Alfons had come along, he had some understanding that the masquerade was not what the public believed it was. Then, he studied the Unification and – since there couldn't have been a Treaty without it – the masquerade as well, and finally understood what it was all about. Ever since the 1960s – if not earlier – there have been and always will be people with superpowers.

And since the dawn of humanity, there are always people – psychopaths, glory hounds, the mentally disturbed people and the hurt themselves – that wished to harm others for one reason or the other. Mix the two with the thousands upon thousands of years of excuses conjured to justify said desire for violence, and you have the explosion called the Dark Age. The solution? There were two components, both equally ancient. The first: domination.

Have an individual or a group of individuals so powerful beyond powerful that even the most self-serving asshole could not help but obey them. Malcator himself was the first, and the Triumphants the last, if no doubt not the final one. Still, this alone would not have been enough. A person could not be everywhere at once, and it would have only lasted until there came a bigger dog to steal the bone. And so, the second component: ritual.

Much like how new civilizations could rise from the cesspool of violence that any collapse brought with it, both Malcator and the original Triumphant Twelve set out to create new laws, new rules, new customs and constitutions to duct tape it all into something resembling a system. And just like that, the modern day's globe-spanning colosseum people called the masquerade came about. That was what Michael learned, and how he had understood his role in it ever since.

He'd accepted the blood-cost regardless and found a place within it, and had been climbing the ladder ever since. But, there was always a difference between knowing something and truly understanding it. And there was a difference between understanding it, and finally paying the price. He'd almost killed his older sister.

One half of the two figures that had inadvertently dominated the course his life had followed, and someone he had, if not outright deified, then at least beatified – or sanctified, or something equally as weighty – in his memories. Even if he'd never realized it so strongly as today, she'd been the reason he felt justified in what he did – no matter how twisted, or circular, or outright false that reasoning was. Such things rarely mattered to the human mind.

And now, the fulcrum that had lifted his world had returned to smack him in the face with his own stupidity. The clock struck twelve, and far in the distance, in New York City proper, Michael saw fireworks light up the sky. The towers of the city – rebuilt seven times over since the Dark Age – lit up in silhouette, providing him the latest variation of New York's ever-famous, ever-beautiful skyline.

If anyone of his colleagues in the Syndicate had known he'd arrived early in New York, they'd be wondering where he was. If they'd known he was out floating in the middle of nowhere above the sea, kilometers out from shore, they'd become suspicious. They'd be right to. As if the world was a curtain, space rippled in an area straight ahead, creasing before being pulled aside. Wildsurge, dressed in his red-and-green-light veined grey metal scale plate maker armor like a futuristic Viking, stepped out of the portal.

Crocketteer, dressed like a frontiersman complemented with his early 19 th century-looking power-called rifle, emerged right after him. Both floated on a near-transparent pane containing an energy that flowed like the waves. Michael had asked Wildsurge to come alone, but of course, the Guardian had brought the nuclear option with him. He'd have been a fool not to.

"So Darkstar, what do you want?" Wildsurge asked. Michael might disparage the masquerade with good reason, but he also loved it, and not just because of its addictive nature. It was a specific part he found he liked more than the power and ego, one that shone through beyond the cynical and that, if perhaps not strictly necessary for its continued existence, was likely a large part of the reason why people accepted it. That part was the theatre of it all.

Michael lifted his arms slowly, the heroes tensing and entering a fighting stance at the motion. Then, when it continued upward without conjuring up orbs besides the ones he used to float with, they relaxed, thinking he was raising his hands to signal peace, if not necessarily surrender. Then, when they moved to his head, they tensed for an entirely different reason: shock. Michael pulled off his cosmic cowl, revealing his face to the two heroes, and said, "I want to talk."