Stars, far as the eye can see, the backdrop to the infinite blackness of the universe. And for a time a catatonic Joseph floats amongst them. The last thing he remembers as consciousness returns are his eardrums rupturing, noxious smoke filling his lungs and burning his eyes. He had died, the blade to the chest saw to that. He raises his hand, looking at it, opening and closing it, it feels so real, so… corporeal. No one can describe what it's like being a spirit but one can only assume that it doesn’t feel like being in a flesh and bone body.
He rationalizes what is going on, just absolute death. Joseph starts thinking and contemplating what it means to actually be dead and he reflects on his life, the things he has done, hasn’t done and will never do. A heavy feeling swells in his chest and sinks to the pit of his stomach. Sadness swirls into anger and frustration then hatred towards Brian, the man who took his life from him. Everyone often wishes their kin a peaceful passing but Joseph now knows why vengeful spirits exist because he is filled with bitterness and vengeance in his mind. A bright light begins to shine before him, growing brighter by the second.
The light envelops Joseph and what he sees… something no mortal eyes should lay their eyes upon. Tendrils, eyes, teeth, all mixing twirling and conjoining together, an amorphous form. Joseph cannot make sense of what he is looking at but most importantly, he is not going mad, his sanity is fully intact.
A singular eye is fixed upon Joseph and he hears a singular voice booming in his mind, a voice whose words he cannot make out or understand but it sets his dead nerves on fire… with life.
”NO!!!”
Joseph awakens from a nightmare, or what he thinks to be a nightmare. What he just saw and re-experienced was his meeting with his patron Outer God, a meeting he was forced to have against his will. He moves to get out of bed and the moment his feet touch the ground his head pounds with the pain of memories and information. Phrases flash by in his mind, “Ignorant humans”, “Misunderstanding”, “Sleeping”, “Dreaming”, “Awakening”. These words gnaw at his mind as he collapses to his knees, holding his head in both hands trying to silence them.
He screams until his body is trembling and until he is drooling. It is straining and painful but it works, it calms his mind giving him a moment of respite as he looks around his dark apartment. He moves on his knees to his nightstand, fumbling around to find his phone, blinding himself as he unlocks it to see the time. It's four AM, he tosses the phone back on the nightstand and sits down against his bed on the floor, feeling panicked as the previous night's events unfold before his mind again.
The noxious smell returns and he waves his hands at invisible smoke, trying to waft away a nonexistent scent. He squeezes his eyes shut over and over so hard that they start to water, he confuses the discharge with blood and doubles his panic. His ears are muffled from his own screaming earlier and he falls to the ground, curling up into a ball, sweating profusely, wishing for it all to stop, wishing for peace.
He begins coughing, dry heaving until his vision goes dark and calmness envelopes him. He stands to his feet, slowly, he feels as if a font of power boils beneath his skin. He makes his way to the bathroom and turns on the light, scaring himself as he sees himself in full Avatar garb. He may not know its name now but it is known as a Madness Mantle. The mantle feeds on sanity and it appeared to feast upon Joseph’s and in turn it calmed him down. He doesn’t understand this either, he is a newborn to this power but while he has a moment of clarity he uses it to think about this power. He feels strong, and briefly wonders if he has become some sort of super human.
He thinks about going outside but living in an indoor apartment complex makes that difficult as people would ask questions. There is the window but can he even fly? Is he durable or is he just a mutated freak who is just as fragile as any other human. These are things he has to think about as he lives in an indoor apartment tower. Living about three quarters of the way up a fall from that height is sure to kill any human. But he remembers the Tendrils and how they held him up in that blaze last night… All this madness happened last night…
The window slides open letting in the sounds of the city and the cool summer night air. He looks down to the alley between his building and the one across, not a light to spare in that abyssal chasm.
”I want… To go down.. Take me down…”
His cape remains at rest, unmoving, nothing more than cloth, well more like some sort of organic matter in the form of a cape but still unreactive. He climbs out of the window, against his better judgment but that tends to happen when someone's sanity is literally slipping from them. As it stands he is afraid to go to sleep, scared to be isolated in the silence of his own one bedroom apartment in fear that the memories of last night return. Joseph has always enjoyed life but right now, life is painful and so he leaps.
If he can’t fly he’ll fall and if he doesn’t survive he’ll die, simple as that, either way this either comes to an end or he gets the answers he wants. He thinks- no his instincts scream for him to reach out and grab the wall, one of the fire escapes that line the wall of the adjacent building. Then, in that moment of instinctual screaming his cap springs to life or rather, his tendrils spring to life, unveiling themselves from the guise of being a mere cape as the latch onto the wall and wrap around the bars of the fire escape.
His descent is stopped at the midway point between his apartment five floors up and the cold of the alley concrete four floors down. The tendrils stick to the wall with ease as if it is natural for them to adhere to surfaces. Joseph tries to understand this feeling, the feeling of this extra appendage on his back. He moves the tendrils that aren’t holding him up, it is surprisingly easy, like moving your arm. Next comes his ascent, the tendrils pulling up upwards until he is on the roof of his apartment building.
He relaxes himself and his extra appendage or appendages relax around his form as if they are hanging loosely in water. Gently waving, and undulating in the air, if someone were to see him this would look quite horrifying, like a giant land cephalopod with the body of a human at its core. He takes a deep breath and truly relaxes them and they return to their inert cape like form. For the next forty minutes he “activates” and “deactivates” his cape on command. It's as natural as breathing air now as if it was something he always knew how to do. His next step was traversal as he began using them to walk and run himself across various rooftops. Leaping with the tendrils, climbing up walls and even attempting a cheeky swing at one point like some sort of spider themed hero.
He smiles beneath the mask, for the first time in his life he feels alive and it's ironic that he had to die to achieve this bliss. He becomes bold and runs using his own legs and realizes that he himself can make impressive jumps on his own. The strength that surges through him is inhuman but he doesn’t know the limits of it. Thankfully Joseph has always been an upstanding citizen so his first thought was to help those in need. Lurking around in the twilight of the early morning hours before sunrise he learns that he does not have “Citizen in trouble” detection powers.
A distant scream rings out, the kind that can’t normally be heard while on the ground as it is muffled by the towering buildings of the city. The scream is projected upward into the air and it catches Joseph’s ear, his moment to shine is here!
”No! I told you sickos no already! Leave me alone!”
”Yeah, yeah, sadly you don’t have a choice. You got the exact sort of look the boss is looking for, you’ll make him happy and probably sell for a pretty penny or two when he’s done with you.”
Three men encroach upon a young woman in her early twenties, based on how they are talking about her like an object they must be human traffickers. Joseph quietly descends behind the three men, the woman can see him and her breath catches in her throat. A new fear grips her that makes her too terrified to even breathe.
”Leave the woman alone, now.”
The men turn around and look at Joseph, his tendrils are at rest in the form of his cape and he just appears to be any other hero out to do the right thing. The men look at him then each other and start laughing as they pull out a strange looking gun, glowing with energy. It’s fired and hits a barrier that hovers just over the skin of Joseph. Because it hit a solid surface the bullet explodes and blinds everyone briefly revealing Joseph to be not only unphased by the flash but still standing as if nothing had happened.
”Huh, so sci-fi weapons are the new 9mm for thugs now?”
”What the fuck?! This thing is supposed to stun Outliers!”
The ground breaks at Joseph's feet as he lunges forward and grabs the gunman by his throat. His two lackeys reach for a similar firearm only to be swatted away by his cape springing to life. Joseph grips the man’s throat, tightly almost as if he is testing the limits of his strength and how much he needs to hold back.
”You will leave these weapons here and let the girl go free, do you understand?”
The man nods, as best he can, the gun falls from his hand and clatters on the ground as he is then skipped across the ground by Joseph tossing him down the alley. The man gasps and stands up, holding his arm as his two accomplices reunite with him.
”We’ll be back for you, you stupid bitch! The boss always gets what he wants!”
”What?!”
Joseph leaps into the air and lands in front of them, spreading his tendrils out to block their path before quickly snatching the goons up with them.
”I told you to leave the woman alone! That doesn’t mean just for tonight! Not for the month! It means FOREVER!”
”You don’t get it hero! There are laws and people even you can’t cross! You must be fucking new around here! Jon Marceles ain’t to be fucked with! He’s good friends with the Howardson family, you know em? The people who own this fucking city?!”
Jon Marceles, a known crime lord but untouchable due to how he conducts himself. While not a super powered individual he is still terrifying due to the connections he has and with the name Howardson being dropped it makes it all the more apparent as to why. Joseph begins to lower them to the ground slowly, all three men snickering with superiority. But then they are suddenly pulled in close to Joseph.
”I can see your minds… So bright and full…”
Energy courses through the tendrils holding the men before they all start screaming in unison. Joseph watches as the light of their minds fades into darkness and that same light flows into him. The men are dropped onto the ground, limp and drooling messes. He has just drained every ounce of sanity from their minds, this too was done as naturally as breathing. He searched himself for a way to hurt them without killing them and he found it and for the first time since waking up in a cold sweat earlier, he feels better.
His inky black extra appendage slithers across the ground, collecting the three strange guns as he then looks at the woman, his glowing white eyes narrow as he fixes his vision on her properly.
”Go home, pack your things, and leave this city. You got lucky I arrived because we both know heroes don’t frequent this city too often. Go to Prism City, you’ll be safe there, I’m sure of it.”
The darkness of the morning begins to turn twilight and Joseph retreats into the receding darkness. Moments later he returns home, stashing the strange guns in a closet and a new problem now vexes him, how does he remove this suit? Suit… Could he even call it that? It feels more like a second or new skin. He closes his eyes and instead of relaxing his muscles he relaxes his mind and when he opens his eyes the suit is gone. That impressive strength he had is mostly gone but some still lingers, a sign that he is more than human now.
Due to what happened to his co-workers the hardware store is temporarily closed down, giving him a chance to sleep in. He lays down in bed after closing his curtains and sleeps like a baby. In his living room the Onyx Man sits on the couch, drinking some of Joseph's beer, not that he would even know or is aware of this entity's presence.
”Out playing hero, that's a rare trait for an Avatar to have. How long will you keep it up though? Stopping bank robbers and murderers. How long until you realize these things are beneath you? There are nightmares that humans can barely comprehend. Some right in this little city of yours.”
The Onyx Man opens up a newspaper and on the front of it is the headline story about a group of campers killed in brutal ways at a lake just outside Hexington City. The story details how this may be connected to a massacre that occurred a few years ago on a suburban street with the killer never being found. The Onyx Man chuckles until the chuckling becomes ethereal as if he is fading out of this reality…
When Joseph awakens he works on summoning and taking off his Madness Mantle. He finds it strange that since he incapacitated those men that he was able to sleep well and has been thinking so much clearer. He is unaware that he has satiated his Madness Mantle’s hunger for sanity and it is no longer feeding on him. What he finds even stranger is how this whole costume and power thing is coming to him so naturally, like the information was implanted in his brain on a primal level. Granted he had to push himself to the extreme to shake that information free by jumping out his window.
Night time comes and he decides to “patrol” the city. He wants to help, if people blessed by Panacea understood that they should use their powers for good then he’ll do the same. While stopping for a moment on a rooftop to take in the skyline of the city he spots a strange orange glow in the industrial district of the city, a fire. He hurries over to it and once close enough he hears screaming inside, a male voice.
”Stay away from us you masked fuck!”
Joseph kicks open the door and whatever else may have been barricading it. This catches the attention of the two men and three women running from a rather muscular male who slowly turns his head. He is wearing an Aztec Mask, despite all the flames the feathers on said mask are well and intact. He has a bloody machete in his hand, most likely used to cut down one of the members of this group of people he is chasing.
Joseph doesn’t say anything, he has no catchphrase, he doesn’t even have a code name. But these aren’t why his voice is still. It's because something about this masked man feels uncanny, unnatural… Everything in his body is screaming at him to not simply subdue him but to kill him with his full might. The Avatar of Azathoth stares down against his first true challenge and test as a supernatural being.
”Next issue! The Occultist vs Defaced!”
He rationalizes what is going on, just absolute death. Joseph starts thinking and contemplating what it means to actually be dead and he reflects on his life, the things he has done, hasn’t done and will never do. A heavy feeling swells in his chest and sinks to the pit of his stomach. Sadness swirls into anger and frustration then hatred towards Brian, the man who took his life from him. Everyone often wishes their kin a peaceful passing but Joseph now knows why vengeful spirits exist because he is filled with bitterness and vengeance in his mind. A bright light begins to shine before him, growing brighter by the second.
The light envelops Joseph and what he sees… something no mortal eyes should lay their eyes upon. Tendrils, eyes, teeth, all mixing twirling and conjoining together, an amorphous form. Joseph cannot make sense of what he is looking at but most importantly, he is not going mad, his sanity is fully intact.
A singular eye is fixed upon Joseph and he hears a singular voice booming in his mind, a voice whose words he cannot make out or understand but it sets his dead nerves on fire… with life.
”NO!!!”
Joseph awakens from a nightmare, or what he thinks to be a nightmare. What he just saw and re-experienced was his meeting with his patron Outer God, a meeting he was forced to have against his will. He moves to get out of bed and the moment his feet touch the ground his head pounds with the pain of memories and information. Phrases flash by in his mind, “Ignorant humans”, “Misunderstanding”, “Sleeping”, “Dreaming”, “Awakening”. These words gnaw at his mind as he collapses to his knees, holding his head in both hands trying to silence them.
He screams until his body is trembling and until he is drooling. It is straining and painful but it works, it calms his mind giving him a moment of respite as he looks around his dark apartment. He moves on his knees to his nightstand, fumbling around to find his phone, blinding himself as he unlocks it to see the time. It's four AM, he tosses the phone back on the nightstand and sits down against his bed on the floor, feeling panicked as the previous night's events unfold before his mind again.
The noxious smell returns and he waves his hands at invisible smoke, trying to waft away a nonexistent scent. He squeezes his eyes shut over and over so hard that they start to water, he confuses the discharge with blood and doubles his panic. His ears are muffled from his own screaming earlier and he falls to the ground, curling up into a ball, sweating profusely, wishing for it all to stop, wishing for peace.
He begins coughing, dry heaving until his vision goes dark and calmness envelopes him. He stands to his feet, slowly, he feels as if a font of power boils beneath his skin. He makes his way to the bathroom and turns on the light, scaring himself as he sees himself in full Avatar garb. He may not know its name now but it is known as a Madness Mantle. The mantle feeds on sanity and it appeared to feast upon Joseph’s and in turn it calmed him down. He doesn’t understand this either, he is a newborn to this power but while he has a moment of clarity he uses it to think about this power. He feels strong, and briefly wonders if he has become some sort of super human.
He thinks about going outside but living in an indoor apartment complex makes that difficult as people would ask questions. There is the window but can he even fly? Is he durable or is he just a mutated freak who is just as fragile as any other human. These are things he has to think about as he lives in an indoor apartment tower. Living about three quarters of the way up a fall from that height is sure to kill any human. But he remembers the Tendrils and how they held him up in that blaze last night… All this madness happened last night…
The window slides open letting in the sounds of the city and the cool summer night air. He looks down to the alley between his building and the one across, not a light to spare in that abyssal chasm.
”I want… To go down.. Take me down…”
His cape remains at rest, unmoving, nothing more than cloth, well more like some sort of organic matter in the form of a cape but still unreactive. He climbs out of the window, against his better judgment but that tends to happen when someone's sanity is literally slipping from them. As it stands he is afraid to go to sleep, scared to be isolated in the silence of his own one bedroom apartment in fear that the memories of last night return. Joseph has always enjoyed life but right now, life is painful and so he leaps.
If he can’t fly he’ll fall and if he doesn’t survive he’ll die, simple as that, either way this either comes to an end or he gets the answers he wants. He thinks- no his instincts scream for him to reach out and grab the wall, one of the fire escapes that line the wall of the adjacent building. Then, in that moment of instinctual screaming his cap springs to life or rather, his tendrils spring to life, unveiling themselves from the guise of being a mere cape as the latch onto the wall and wrap around the bars of the fire escape.
His descent is stopped at the midway point between his apartment five floors up and the cold of the alley concrete four floors down. The tendrils stick to the wall with ease as if it is natural for them to adhere to surfaces. Joseph tries to understand this feeling, the feeling of this extra appendage on his back. He moves the tendrils that aren’t holding him up, it is surprisingly easy, like moving your arm. Next comes his ascent, the tendrils pulling up upwards until he is on the roof of his apartment building.
He relaxes himself and his extra appendage or appendages relax around his form as if they are hanging loosely in water. Gently waving, and undulating in the air, if someone were to see him this would look quite horrifying, like a giant land cephalopod with the body of a human at its core. He takes a deep breath and truly relaxes them and they return to their inert cape like form. For the next forty minutes he “activates” and “deactivates” his cape on command. It's as natural as breathing air now as if it was something he always knew how to do. His next step was traversal as he began using them to walk and run himself across various rooftops. Leaping with the tendrils, climbing up walls and even attempting a cheeky swing at one point like some sort of spider themed hero.
He smiles beneath the mask, for the first time in his life he feels alive and it's ironic that he had to die to achieve this bliss. He becomes bold and runs using his own legs and realizes that he himself can make impressive jumps on his own. The strength that surges through him is inhuman but he doesn’t know the limits of it. Thankfully Joseph has always been an upstanding citizen so his first thought was to help those in need. Lurking around in the twilight of the early morning hours before sunrise he learns that he does not have “Citizen in trouble” detection powers.
A distant scream rings out, the kind that can’t normally be heard while on the ground as it is muffled by the towering buildings of the city. The scream is projected upward into the air and it catches Joseph’s ear, his moment to shine is here!
”No! I told you sickos no already! Leave me alone!”
”Yeah, yeah, sadly you don’t have a choice. You got the exact sort of look the boss is looking for, you’ll make him happy and probably sell for a pretty penny or two when he’s done with you.”
Three men encroach upon a young woman in her early twenties, based on how they are talking about her like an object they must be human traffickers. Joseph quietly descends behind the three men, the woman can see him and her breath catches in her throat. A new fear grips her that makes her too terrified to even breathe.
”Leave the woman alone, now.”
The men turn around and look at Joseph, his tendrils are at rest in the form of his cape and he just appears to be any other hero out to do the right thing. The men look at him then each other and start laughing as they pull out a strange looking gun, glowing with energy. It’s fired and hits a barrier that hovers just over the skin of Joseph. Because it hit a solid surface the bullet explodes and blinds everyone briefly revealing Joseph to be not only unphased by the flash but still standing as if nothing had happened.
”Huh, so sci-fi weapons are the new 9mm for thugs now?”
”What the fuck?! This thing is supposed to stun Outliers!”
The ground breaks at Joseph's feet as he lunges forward and grabs the gunman by his throat. His two lackeys reach for a similar firearm only to be swatted away by his cape springing to life. Joseph grips the man’s throat, tightly almost as if he is testing the limits of his strength and how much he needs to hold back.
”You will leave these weapons here and let the girl go free, do you understand?”
The man nods, as best he can, the gun falls from his hand and clatters on the ground as he is then skipped across the ground by Joseph tossing him down the alley. The man gasps and stands up, holding his arm as his two accomplices reunite with him.
”We’ll be back for you, you stupid bitch! The boss always gets what he wants!”
”What?!”
Joseph leaps into the air and lands in front of them, spreading his tendrils out to block their path before quickly snatching the goons up with them.
”I told you to leave the woman alone! That doesn’t mean just for tonight! Not for the month! It means FOREVER!”
”You don’t get it hero! There are laws and people even you can’t cross! You must be fucking new around here! Jon Marceles ain’t to be fucked with! He’s good friends with the Howardson family, you know em? The people who own this fucking city?!”
Jon Marceles, a known crime lord but untouchable due to how he conducts himself. While not a super powered individual he is still terrifying due to the connections he has and with the name Howardson being dropped it makes it all the more apparent as to why. Joseph begins to lower them to the ground slowly, all three men snickering with superiority. But then they are suddenly pulled in close to Joseph.
”I can see your minds… So bright and full…”
Energy courses through the tendrils holding the men before they all start screaming in unison. Joseph watches as the light of their minds fades into darkness and that same light flows into him. The men are dropped onto the ground, limp and drooling messes. He has just drained every ounce of sanity from their minds, this too was done as naturally as breathing. He searched himself for a way to hurt them without killing them and he found it and for the first time since waking up in a cold sweat earlier, he feels better.
His inky black extra appendage slithers across the ground, collecting the three strange guns as he then looks at the woman, his glowing white eyes narrow as he fixes his vision on her properly.
”Go home, pack your things, and leave this city. You got lucky I arrived because we both know heroes don’t frequent this city too often. Go to Prism City, you’ll be safe there, I’m sure of it.”
The darkness of the morning begins to turn twilight and Joseph retreats into the receding darkness. Moments later he returns home, stashing the strange guns in a closet and a new problem now vexes him, how does he remove this suit? Suit… Could he even call it that? It feels more like a second or new skin. He closes his eyes and instead of relaxing his muscles he relaxes his mind and when he opens his eyes the suit is gone. That impressive strength he had is mostly gone but some still lingers, a sign that he is more than human now.
Due to what happened to his co-workers the hardware store is temporarily closed down, giving him a chance to sleep in. He lays down in bed after closing his curtains and sleeps like a baby. In his living room the Onyx Man sits on the couch, drinking some of Joseph's beer, not that he would even know or is aware of this entity's presence.
”Out playing hero, that's a rare trait for an Avatar to have. How long will you keep it up though? Stopping bank robbers and murderers. How long until you realize these things are beneath you? There are nightmares that humans can barely comprehend. Some right in this little city of yours.”
The Onyx Man opens up a newspaper and on the front of it is the headline story about a group of campers killed in brutal ways at a lake just outside Hexington City. The story details how this may be connected to a massacre that occurred a few years ago on a suburban street with the killer never being found. The Onyx Man chuckles until the chuckling becomes ethereal as if he is fading out of this reality…
When Joseph awakens he works on summoning and taking off his Madness Mantle. He finds it strange that since he incapacitated those men that he was able to sleep well and has been thinking so much clearer. He is unaware that he has satiated his Madness Mantle’s hunger for sanity and it is no longer feeding on him. What he finds even stranger is how this whole costume and power thing is coming to him so naturally, like the information was implanted in his brain on a primal level. Granted he had to push himself to the extreme to shake that information free by jumping out his window.
Night time comes and he decides to “patrol” the city. He wants to help, if people blessed by Panacea understood that they should use their powers for good then he’ll do the same. While stopping for a moment on a rooftop to take in the skyline of the city he spots a strange orange glow in the industrial district of the city, a fire. He hurries over to it and once close enough he hears screaming inside, a male voice.
”Stay away from us you masked fuck!”
Joseph kicks open the door and whatever else may have been barricading it. This catches the attention of the two men and three women running from a rather muscular male who slowly turns his head. He is wearing an Aztec Mask, despite all the flames the feathers on said mask are well and intact. He has a bloody machete in his hand, most likely used to cut down one of the members of this group of people he is chasing.
Joseph doesn’t say anything, he has no catchphrase, he doesn’t even have a code name. But these aren’t why his voice is still. It's because something about this masked man feels uncanny, unnatural… Everything in his body is screaming at him to not simply subdue him but to kill him with his full might. The Avatar of Azathoth stares down against his first true challenge and test as a supernatural being.
”Next issue! The Occultist vs Defaced!”