Origin, Chapter One

The Four Heroes and the Next Four stared aghast as one, staggered by the scene that had presented itself to them. A straightforward mission to retrieve the severed head of one of Dimension Borg’s robots from six old enemies had spiralled irretrievably out of control, upon the sudden appearance of a horde of warlike and strangely familiar rock-men apparently under the command of a girl identical to Phoenix Neetkins, who called herself Phoenix Prime. Now, as an inferno continued to blaze throughout the ravaged warehouse interior, as the robot’s domed head looked silently on from its pillar of technical apparatus in the centre of the floor, and as the stony soldiers poised for the advance, Phoenix Prime issued her order from her vantage point far above the others’ heads.

“I go to do that which is my life’s work – to purge all impostors who usurp my name. Legions, keep The Four Heroes occupied while I am about it!”

Folding her wings of flame in over herself, the slender girl began to discorporate into a form of pure fire. She broke apart into a dozen burning bolts, which flew to each corner of the warehouse and were gone. On this signal the rock-men charged, their pounding feet on the metal deck-plates raising up a thunder that shook the beleaguered building to its very foundations.

Bret met the vanguard with his fist, shattering the foremost foe to pebbles though not without effort. Across the spacious room his seven allies were making similar discoveries about their opponents’ toughness and brute strength, pitting all their powers against their resilient hides and facing up to a gruelling battle. Meanwhile, the six supervillains were taking advantage of the confusion to do what they did best, and obey their cowardly natures while they still could.

“Typical Four Heroes, a guy can’t even try and conquer the world without their unique brand of weirdness getting in the way!” Solenoid growled, summoning up his magnetic powers to drag the head on its column across the room to him. Cables were yanked from their sockets and clattered to the floor but emergency battery power kicked in, keeping the Dimension Borg robot’s functions running and its artificial intelligence suppressed. Solenoid caught the hunk of machinery in his waiting hands and hefted it under his arm.

“The waiting list…The Four Heroes are too busy to take your call right now…we are being held in a queue!” shrieked blue-haired Hydrus. “Oh, the ignominy of being forced to listen to their superheroic answering-machine message!”

“The ignominy you speak of has given us our chance to escape, fool!” Maelstrom retorted. “Now come, unless you would rather take your chances here!”

The three men, with their cronies Icer, Flesh-Ripper and Sword-Slicer hot on their heels, beat a hasty retreat from the warehouse interior carrying the precious robot head with them. Bret saw them go as he fought on against the untiring rocky masses.

“Darn it, we can’t let these goons distract us!” our hero cried. “We need a way through them, and now!”

The Chancellor had already pulled a compact rocket from a pouch on his dark grey uniform, and was fitting it into the barrel of his gun. “Coolant supply,” he said simply, taking aim at a tangle of pipes in the far corner of the room.

“Reading your mind, Chancellor,” said Dylan, as the rocket took flight. An explosion blew the pipes apart broadside, whereupon they began to vent great clouds of white sub-zero cryogenic gas, and Dylan turned his metal-manipulating powers upon them at once to wrench them away from their iron brackets and point their gaping jagged maws directly at the battlefield. The raging fires immediately were quenched, and the enemy soldiers, whose rocky bodies had undergone heat-expansion in the blaze, all at once contracted under the sudden assault of extreme cold with more speed than they could handle. In an ear-splitting din of splintering, shattering cracks, the ranks became a rockslide that rained down upon the ground. All that was left of them was a great pile of unmoving stone hands, legs, heads and great irregular chunks of bodies.

“What the devil were those fellows?” D’Carthage asked, gazing at the devastation.

Dylan used his powers to reseal the coolant pipes. “The One Below,” he said quietly. “I remember now. Guys, The One Below used rock-men like them as his minions!”

“You mean that big underground monster we met ages ago, before we went to 2596 even?” Neetra exclaimed. “The one who captured Phoenix on the day we found her, because he wanted to use her in his plans?”

“And now we have another girl who claims to be Phoenix, working in league with The One Below’s soldiers,” Joe mused. “There are strange connections here that I am at a loss to fully understand.”

“We have another problem too,” Gala resumed briskly, sheathing her cutlass of shining white light. “Our enemies are fleeing, with the head. Half of us had better go after them, while the rest take care of this Phoenix Prime. A division along the same lines as this morning, then?”

“No way!” was Neetra’s reply as she rounded on Gala, looking for a moment not unlike her mother at her most fearsome. “I’ve seen the Next Four’s way of doing things. This is family, which means you don’t come within a light-year of it! The Four Heroes will deal with Phoenix Prime – you just concentrate on getting that head!”

“You heard her,” The Chancellor said, with the slightest suggestion of a shrug. “They went that way. Let us proceed.”

The Next Four set off. “Phoenix Prime said she was after Phoenix, and she’s at the Military Control Centre with Amy right now,” Neetra went on to her team-mates. “That’s where we have to be. Let’s move!”

Amy was standing on the balcony of one of the laboratories on the upper floor of the Control Centre, looking quietly out at the lit-up windows and neon signs of Nottingham’s tower blocks that shone against the black sky. Phoenix stepped out to join her in the night air.

“Amy? Ze tests are complete, I ’ave all ze preliminary information I need,” said she. “It will be a few days before ze results are computed, but for now, we are done. Zere is nothing to stop us returning ’ome.”

“Thanks, Phoenix,” Amy said, and gave a sigh. “I guess I just needed a minute. Before he left Bret told me who they were going off to fight this evening, and, well, for it to be those six guys, on the very night you and I were doing this…I just can’t help thinking it’s a bad omen.”

Phoenix touched her gently on the arm. “Superstition. ’Ardly ze best way to support an hypothesis,” she told her with a smile. “Par example, I do not conclude zat you are bad luck, black cat though you are.”

Amy grinned back. “I know, Phoenix, I’m being silly,” she said. “But it was their boss who made me into what I am, whatever exactly that is – nobody completely understands the enchantments he used to do it. And what we’re trying to do here, something so…so human, when I was born an animal and I’m only walking around like this now because of magic…well, you can see why I’m scared it won’t work out.”

“We must keep our hope alive in ze face of our fears, Amy,” Phoenix said simply. “Is zat not a thing we ’ave learned, in all ze time we ’ave been friends?”

“You’ve also learned to call me Amy, instead of Miss Shore,” Amy observed. “I’m really glad about that, by the way!”

Phoenix laughed. “I did overuse ze formal address when I was first transformed,” she admitted. Amy put her arm around her, and together they went back into the warmth of the laboratory.

“You’re right, Phoenix, you and I have seen some things,” Amy went on. “Adventures, war, saving the world, those awful Hero Girl uniforms in the future…and we’ve both been through so many changes over that time, you even more than me. You know, Bret and I said we wanted nobody but you to help us with this, not even Dylan like usual, and we meant it. Of course, it’s kind of girls’ stuff anyway, for one thing. But more than that, Phoenix, you know what it’s like to face the big uncertain changes. We’ve both of us been there, and we’ve both spent a fair bit of time having to figure out just who and what we are. All through it, we’ve had each other. There’s no friend I could trust with something like this, apart from you.”

“Friendship like zat, ma cherie, is ze greatest of all ze wonders zat life in ze Four Heroes’ world ’as shown me,” Phoenix said. “It ’as given me, at long last, people I can call family, sisters, boyfriend…and even, Amy.”

Suddenly, a sound like a roaring fire began to fill the room. Phoenix and Amy whirled round to face the source of the disturbance, in time to see a dozen streaks of flame converge in the laboratory and flash into a humanoid form. Phoenix Prime, her blazing wings stretching from her shoulders, glared across at the two friends from a face identical to that of Phoenix. The girls could only stare back, dumbfounded beyond words by what they saw.

“How I’ve waited for this moment,” Phoenix Prime said to her doppelganger, a bloodthirsty smile beginning to steal across her lips. “Prepare to meet your doom, creature!”

The Four Heroes hurtled down the street in the direction of the Military Control Centre, streetlights flitting by them in a luminous blur. Dylan had taken the lead, running at full-pelt and saying little, though as the bulky shape of their destination loomed on the horizon ahead he declared grimly: “Nearly there now. We’ve got to stop her, no matter what it takes!”

“Easy, Dylan, Phoenix Prime’s not going to harm Phoenix while we’re around,” said Neetra, drawing up alongside him. “But let’s not do anything rash! We need to get to the bottom of this, and find out exactly who and what she is – because there might be something, at least, in the things she’s saying.”

“Yeah, Dylan, I hate to be the one to point this out, I know how you feel about Phoenix and all,” Bret went on, “but we found out a long time ago there’s a whole load of other versions of her out there, and… ”

“I know, Bret, our Phoenix is a clone, we’ve always known that!” Dylan interrupted, not breaking his stride. “She’s one of hundreds of clones made by her parents’ Anti-Matter Transporter, not long after she was born. That process stopped their aging process and left them all superpowered fiery babies. Phoenix is just one of those clones, only her anti-matter mutation happens to have been cured!”

“Then surely you can see that Phoenix Prime, who is identical to Phoenix and whose powers resemble those she used to possess, may be another clone who has likewise managed to undo some of those ill-effects?” Joe put in. “Equally, it is possible she is some kind of offshoot of Phoenix, as Ice-Bird was. In either event, Phoenix Prime would be correct in asserting she holds an equal claim to Phoenix’s identity, however much her methods for enforcing that identity must be checked!”

“He’s right, Dylan,” said Neetra. “Try to look at this scientifically, like you usually do! It’s the only way you’ll keep a level head through all this.”

“I’m not scientific about everything, Neetra,” was Dylan’s reply. “I know all about Phoenix’s history, about the experiment and the clones and all the things Phoenix went through to become who she is now. But I also know that that girl, that Phoenix, the one who wears glasses and speaks French and brings me coffee, is the girl I’m in love with. If Phoenix Prime’s planning to hurt her…”

Dylan clenched both fists as he ran.

“…then she’s going to get me at my most unscientific!”

A very different group was racing through night-time Nottingham in the opposite direction, bearing the Dimension Borg robot’s head with them in their flight to elude the Next Four, five of them running with Flesh-Ripper bounding along on all fours at their heels. Finally the supervillains’ route of escape led them to break cover from the back-alleys and cross a wide street, deserted but for parked cars and lined with antique weapon shops. The streetlamps gleamed back coldly from swords, helmets and throwing-stars in every window-display as the six miscreants passed.

“Is he still onto us?” gasped Icer, running for all he was worth.

“I can’t see…we may have thrown him off,” Maelstrom returned, glancing back over his shoulder. “I believe…no! There he is!”

A bolt of broiling orange-red fire scaled above the black rooftops and cut a path across the night-time sky, its course bold, unfaltering and determined. The villains drew to a halt.

“We cannot flee. We needs must, then, make our stand here!” Sword-Slicer declaimed, in tones that indicated he’d been eagerly awaiting this part. The long-haired blond man in gleaming sliver armour drew his weapon, which cast a swirling otherworldly light across the scene. “Me buckos, let us pledge victory or the honour of blood-soaked death and dismemberment!”

“Preferably the former,” Solenoid muttered, parking the robot head and its column behind him on the street. “Best plan, though, as there’s clearly no outrunning that flying bucket of bolts. Well, we trashed The Four Heroes on our first time out so let’s see if we can’t do the same for their new buddies too!”

“Beginners’ luck…some authorities, following Dr. Johnson, assert it is the last refuge of the oft-defeated super-scoundrel!” Hydrus warbled.

Far above, Steam spied the group of six as he rode his flames through the heavens. Clocked ’em in the antique weapons quarter, Gala, High Street up towards Palais, he reported psychically. Looks like they’ve had enough running!

Good, came back Gala’s telepathic reply. We’ll finish this swiftly. Rendezvous in three seconds at our location.

Steam cancelled his flames and began to drop from the sky, descending towards the row of cars on the edge of the street. The six supervillains poised for battle, readying their powers, as the mechanical man approached the ground. He was on the brink of touching down alone when from out of the shadows burst Gala, The Chancellor and D’Carthage, their mighty leap clearing the roofs of the cars and bringing them side-by-side with their comrade. Gala unsheathed her cutlass as she vaulted, lighting the arena with an arc of brilliant white, whereupon the Next Four landed facing the foes together. Then their feet left the pavement again, as The Four Heroes’ mysterious new friends and long-established old enemies plunged into deadly combat.

END OF CHAPTER ONE