Welcome to the world of Edison City, where the never-ending battle against the forces of evil includes everything from the Owl Bandit taking over the subway line downtown to the Antichrist trying to rewrite history aboard the HMS Titanic. Anything and everything is a possibility here, including flying sharks. Especially the sharks.
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And now, the adventure continues!
Previously on Meg, Mauve, and Malevolent, Samuel Superlative the Third is trying to adjust to heroic life in Edison City when he and his new friend Meg Atomic come under attack from Behemoth Bob! Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, a mauve wall has sealed off the tiny city-state of Muldavna from the rest of the world, with Mr. Superlative trapped inside…
“Not my fault.”
Mr Superlative first said the words, stammered them really, when he staggered up from the remains of the flower shop to find everything around him frozen in a pale mauve light. Nobody moved. The people on the sidewalk, drivers on the street, even the birds in the sky: all hung suspended, staring with open mouths and wide eyes. He tried saying something, anything, but no one replied.
“Oh, good,” the wizard had said, with a bitter laugh, “we’ve broken time. Hooray us.”
“We?” he’d said, turning angrily on him. His voice echoed in the silent city. “I didn’t mean for this to happen; I didn’t do anything, it wasn’t my fault! It was you and your, your magic!” He said the word like a swear.
“Oh, no,” Vencentus the Mighty said, “I was working a proper spell, which involves considerations of timing, the proper pronunciation of each word involved, accents and stresses, and most importantly, no interruptions! It takes a lot of effort to harness magical energy and direct it into the proper channels, but no, you just jump in there and hurl it about like a cannonball in a china shop; what did you think would happen?”
Mr. Superlative swore, this time with something much more pungent than “magic”, and launched himself up into the sky with such force that the sidewalk should’ve cracked. It didn’t. “Hm,” the wizard said.
When the cape didn’t return, Vencentus decided he’d best go looking for the man; after all, there certainly wasn’t anyone else around worth talking to. He found him at one of Muldava’s seediest establishments. Mr. Superlative had kicked in the door, liberated every bottle in the place he could find and drunk them all, and was now staggering towards the pool table in the back room. He tried to make a shot but misjudged his strength and sent the ball through the table, the floor, and the basement, and into the water lines below,where it lodged firmly in a chunk of concrete.
The wizard looked from the wreck of the pool table and the gaping hole below it to Mr. Superlative, who appeared to be leaning on the cue to prevent his falling over. “I see you’ve forgotten you can fly,” he said acidly.
“I can?” Mr. Superlative said, several decibels too loudly. “Oh good! I’ll fly us outa here! Lessgo!” He tossed the cue aside where it shattered into splinters against the wall, then grabbed hold of the wizard’s arm and launched away, soaring straight up through the roof of the bar and out, right on up until he bounced with a glassy thud off the slightly darker mauve wall that barred his way to the outside world.
“Hey!” he said. “‘Was’ that? Which one ‘a you put that there?” He swore again and hit it, hard. It didn’t break. He kept hitting it, and hitting it, harder and harder until his blows were landing at near sonic-barrier speed, and then he loosed all the red wrath of his laser vision on it. Finally, when he’d exhausted even that, when even he in his unsteady rage had to admit that he just could not get through, he fell back slowly to the ground, shaking in fear and shock and a tangle of other emotions he couldn’t make out, and it was only just then that he realized he wasn’t holding the wizard anymore.
“Yes,” said a faint voice, “Congratulations on another brilliant idea. Some of us get to project our consciousness for just a moment after we die, some lingering magical pull on our souls or some such thing, I never understood that. Anyway, I’m off to my eternal reward, at least I hope it’s a reward. Guess we’ll see. Probably could’ve helped out more down here, you know,” the ghost shrugged bitterly. “Might’ve been able to work some more magic, get you out maybe. Not now, though.”
He began to fade. “No,” Mr. Superlative said, “No! You can’t! It’s not-”
“Your fault?” Vencentus, ex-wizard, now ex-living, said. “Oh, please. Isn’t it?” With that final retort he faded away, leaving Mr. Superlative alone.
He tried battering his way out again. It didn’t work. Neither did more laser blasts, or explosives, of which Muldavna had a surprising amount for a small city-state that mostly had catered to tourists. He even tried digging, only to find that the wall extended underground and beat back his efforts. He found a small helipad near the edge of the city, where its leadership resided, picked up a helicopter, and threw that at the wall. The helicopter exploded. The wall didn’t even flinch.
Finally Mr. Superlative had to admit he couldn’t get out, which meant he had to wait on someone outside breaking in. That was rough. He had never before encountered a problem he couldn’t hit, break up, fly over, or burn out one way or another. Even if all else failed, he could always rely on backup, one of the other Edison City heroes, to pitch in until he could regain the upper hand.
Now here he was, no backup, nowhere to go, no use for his powers. He wandered back by the bar again. Unconsciously echoing Samuel the Third, he found himself asking “What do I do? What the hell do I do?”
He roared the question into the frozen city outside. Only his own echoes replied.