The Power Fantasy #6-8 (part one)

This review was commissioned by @toxinvictory.


Early in the summer of 1989, a magical radiation spike occurred in Europe. Detecting the threat, Jackie Magus - then at the height of his powers - used his eldritch devices to contain the emanation, and then called the indestructible Santa Valentina to enter the quarantine zone and determine the source. It turned out that this energy spike was the side-effect of an extradimensional being entering Earth's spacetime. This entity was very different from the angel called Santa Valentina with her natal flesh-homunculus. It didn't need to borrow a human body. It came with one of its own.

Upon being approached by Valentina, the newcomer explained its intentions.

And, well, that sounded like a pretty good idea to her.

Over a decade earlier, Ettiene Lux had asked Valentina why she doesn't conquer the world. She reacted to his question with shock and horror, and nearly felt the need to strike her first and best friend down just for asking it. Perhaps Lux simply hadn't chosen the best phrasing.

Granted, it also helped that the entity that soon came to be known as the Fairie Queen had a very different powerset than those of the human-bodied superpowers. Ones that lend themselves to conquest of a much less coercive nature than what Valentina, Jackie, or even Lux could do.

Conflict was also minimized by the Queen's decision to keep her pleasure-paradise relatively small, at least for now. The city of Manchester, where she first manifested, became her domain. Those that wished to join it were welcome to come and do so. Those already there who did not wish to participate...well, it's not clear if there were any such people. The Queen wasn't controlling people's minds; Valentina and Lux both had ways of sensing that sort of mental tampering, and as best they could tell the Queen really just made things that damned good for the people around her.

The Fairy Queen wasn't an angel. Of this, Valentina was quite sure. But her goals and powers certainly seemed heavenly, even if they didn't come from heaven. Jackie Magus, ostensibly the most knowledgeable man in the world about these realms of spirit, had absolutely no idea what the Queen was all about, and this disturbed him.

The old superpowers had no consensus about how and if they should react to Manchester's transformation.

Brother Heavy had the least knowledge about esoteric matters of their group, but he did have an ideological angle that naturally aligned him with the Fairy Queen's project. Santa Valentina, of course, was all for anything that increased human happiness (and more selfishly, as quite the hedonist herself when off the clock, the Queen's Manchester was exactly Valentina's jam).

Jackie Magus and Ettiene Lux, on the other hand, didn't trust any of this for one second.

Ettiene's logic was cold. Arguably monstrous. But then, he knew himself that purely abstract ethics were insufficient alone, which is why he needed the others' input before acting. And, of course, his ability to act in any case was restricted by the mutually assured destruction threat. The Fairy Queen clearly had powers comparable to those of the existing five superpowers, which meant that - however dangerous leaving her alone might have been - moving against her was more so.

Jackie Magus was sure there was a danger here. That this was too good to be true. That a being as alien as the Queen couldn't possibly avoid being dangerous to humans, with the power she had.

It probably seemed to the others that Jackie was really just angry at the Queen for not fitting into his much vaunted understanding of the realms beyond. That impression may have been correct. Or it may not have been. It doesn't really matter in retrospect.

Santa Valentina spent much of that summer in Manchester, partaking in every innocent pleasure from stimulating intellectual debate to mind-shattering drugs and sex, while trying to get to know the Fairy Queen. The Queen hinted about her true nature, sometimes, but she always spoke about herself in riddles. Valentina was never able to glean enough to get a real picture.

Then, after the "Second Summer of Love" had been going on for some months, the Queen asked Valentina if she thought that this was as good as it could get. Valentina, contentedly, said that she believed so. At that answer, the Fairy Queen - who had come to trust Valentina's opinions on such matters - fell into a screaming, sobbing rage.

Whatever lost paradise this "residue" of a being was trying to recreate, humans weren't suitable for it. The human ability to experience pleasure was insufficient. More than that, the physical laws that human biology evolved under were insufficient. Reality as mankind knows it could not be shaped into the form that the Fairy Queen desired. This crude facsimile she'd managed to create was only close enough to be frustrating, not satisfying.

So, in the space of thirty seconds, the Queen gave up on trying to turn the world into her esoteric paradise, and started doing something else.

His reasoning might have been motivated, but Jackie Magus' conclusion was right. The motives of such an alien god should have never been trusted.

...

There had only been five human-based superpowers in the world, until that summer. Santa Valentina, the first, whose spirit had entered the world and taken hold of a developing human embryo in the wake of the first nuclear bomb tests in the 1940's. Brother Heavy, one of the "atomics" who started appearing in her wake, whose powers had started small and grown over time before finally coming to a rest at godlike levels. Ettiene Lux, another atomic, whose powers had likewise started small, but unlike most atomics' never stopped growing no matter how much time passed. Jackie Magus, the occultist, who claimed to understand where superpowers actually come from and to have - uniquely - taken them for himself by conscious act. And Deconstructa, another atomic, albeit one whose power seemed to have a mind of its own.

The Second Summer of Love would see the birth of a sixth, born of desperation to end the Fairy Queen's rampage.

...

A decade prior to the Queen's arrival, a teenaged student at a Catholic school in upstate New York gave a class presentation about eternal damnation and how it reflects on the nature of the divine.

Her peers and instructors were impressed by her sharp mind and reasoned arguments. And incensed by her delivery.

She, uh. Didn't end up going very far at the seminary. But that was okay. It wasn't her fault that she knew better than them. Their rejection of her only served to prove to Eliza that the church wasn't worth the application of her superior mind. She kept her Christian faith, though. For all that she had a very high opinion of herself, Eliza also had genuinely-held religious faith of a kind that only a very few professed believers actually share.

Not long afterward, a young adult Eliza found herself joining another mystical organization, with ethical sensibilities closer to her own. Eliza's ego and irreverence continued to undermine her career within it, but not as badly as they had in the church. And here, ironically, it was (at least in part) the existence of that genuine Christian faith of hers that ruffled feathers this time.

When the Pyramid was just in the process of growing from a small local sect to a larger organization, Eliza was passed over for a promotion in favor of her husband, Devin. She and Devin both suspected that Jackie Magus' judgement had been skewed by his emotions here. He wasn't super fond of Devin, and he'd been doing a poor job of hiding his infatuation with brilliant new student-of-the-occult Eliza. It seemed like he was trying to do the right thing, counteracting his biases when it comes to managing the Pyramid, but it also seemed like he was overshooting it, as Dev and Eliza both knew that the latter was both a better magician and less likely to abuse her power. She confronted Jackie about it, in private. He denied it, and instead gave a reason that infuriated her even more: it didn't bother him that she was a Christian, but - according to him - the sheer genuineness of her faith was likely to cloud her judgement when it came to esoteric matters.

She knew exactly how to hit him back to make it hurt.

Eliza also broke off (either divorced, or else simply estranged, it's not clear) with her husband. As she told Devin, if he's willing to accept the promotion to...groan..."fucking arsehole" over her, then that means he thinks Jackie is right to not trust her. And in that case, it means that Devin doesn't trust her either. And in that case, he must not really love her either, because you can't love someone who you don't trust.

...

Eliza is very good at being wrong even when she's technically right.

...

She clung to her victim complex throughout the following years, but also retained her position as a lower-middle level member of the Pyramid as it grew into an international organization and elevated Jackie Magus to superpower status. Then, in 1989, an ethics classroom thought-experiment appeared in Manchester and started destroying the planet.

The Pyramid worked with the other superpowers to fight back as best they could. Jackie Magus had a plan, but it was a rough plan.

The Fairie Queen was trying to open a portal to the realm that Jackie claimed roughly corresponds to human religious notions of "hell" and let Earth (and possibly the rest of our universe) fall into it, where it would be destroyed past, present, and future. The only way to close this reality-wound was to have a team of magi casting spells from both sides (the hellside team would be temporarily protected by Jackie's most powerful spells), and they could only even do that if something else neutralized the Fairy Queen. Santa Valentina had been subdued early in the battle, though, and nobody else was able to meaningfully hurt the Queen.

Eliza wasn't ready to let someone else sacrifice themselves to save the world while she was left dirtside with the other grunts. And she saw all the civilians fruitlessly praying for Santa Valentina to come save them, not realizing that she was unable to hear them. And, just like that time back in parochial school, Eliza knew the right answer to this question that everyone else needed to bow down and respect her for having.

She'd gotten her husband (who she'd been repeatedly on-again-off-again with since their initial falling out) to part with some Pyramid upper-echelon secrets that he wasn't supposed to tell anyone. And, right now, Hell was much easier to contact from Earth than it had ever been previously.

Hell was a living being as well as a place. As a timeless entity of pure destruction, it craved the ability to experience things beyond its own reach. So, she allowed it into her soul to see and feel through her. Which also meant allowing her soul into it. In an instant, Eliza Hellbound became at least as powerful as Santa Valentina. She attacked the Fairy Queen and forced her into her own hell-portal before the Pyramid's spells closed it on her, destroying the entity utterly. The battle destroyed all of Europe, but it was won.

However, the cost was more than just the continental collateral damage. In order to send his elites to hell and keep them alive in there long enough for spellcasting purposes, Jackie Magus had to expend the life force of all of the Pyramid's grunts. All of them. And then the elites that he sent down there died too when the portal closed. As for Eliza...when she eventually dies, her soul will be fused with the essence of Hell. She will not be annihilated as most who touch Hell are annihilated. She will remain in there, in a timeless moment of loneliness and dissolution, forever into the past and future. The only human being who has ever truly suffered damnation.

At least, that was what Jackie said. Jackie was quite adamant that, in utilitarian logic, saving the Earth wasn't worth it if it meant even a single person would be eternally damned. Ettiene Lux engaged him in an ethical debate on the subject. It ended when Jackie got frustrated and kneed him in the crotch.

To this day, Eliza Hellbound keeps a great temple, a monument to those lost, in the ruined region that used to be Europe. She prays for the dead, and for herself, day in and day out. She remains adamant, just as she was back in high school, that an omnipotent and omnibenevolent God exists, and that such an entity would not allow anyone to be damned for eternity if they were truly penitent. So, she prays for forgiveness for all her acts of pride and heresy, day after day, month after month, year after year, and she's confident that if she does so enough He will in fact save her soul.

...

The four superpowered veterans of the Second Summer of Love crisis lived with their new trauma as best they could. Valentina, remorseful at having trusted the Fairy Queen despite her wise friend's warning, simply became even further removed from the mortal world than she'd been since the end of the Nixon Administration, haunted by the possibility that maybe her optimism and naivette - and thus the will of Heaven itself - were wrong. Brother Heavy became bitter and morose. Jackie Magus, tormented by both all the men and women he'd sacrificed and the inevitable fate of his former underling (and possible crush) Eliza, started doing lots and lots of cocaine and having bad ideas. Ettiene Lux, alone, carried on the same way he always had. He had perfect control over his own emotions, after all, and it turned out that he'd been right about the Queen all along, so there was no need to revise his system of ethics.

...

Meanwhile, quietly, there was another disruption taking place behind the scenes.

A few years before the Second Summer of Love, while coming to the aid of a precognitive atomic who was having seizure-related issues, Ray "Brother Heavy" Harris was told a prophecy.

It was then that he finalized his plans for the floating singularity-fortress. It would indeed serve as a refuge for persecuted atomics, and a last bastion of the mid-century free love hippy subculture that Brother Heavy had been struggling to keep alive. But those weren't the concerns that spurred him into action and finally got him to actually build the thing rather than just thinking about building it.

The seventh superpower, Kid Ignition, has been slowly growing in power in much the same way his father once did. He was kept a secret throughout the Second Summer of Love crisis, and through the rise of Eliza Hellbound. Until now.


Next time, we return to the present.