Centurion Nouveau

[neo_ozon]

Chapter 2: Sacrament Of The Belladonna (In D Minor)

After his shift ended, Dale left with the Batsuane’ twins and Gerald. The transportation of choice was a dull cobalt blue ‘79 Chevy Monza Spyder. The quartet cruised to the nearby beach, the surf cresting and receding with sea foam frothing the sand into a bubbly sludge. Yuley and Gerald ran into the water, splashing each other like blissful children. Dianne had changed into a rouge colored one piece with a floral sarong, giving her a sense of grace with a bit of playfulness thrown in. Like Miranda, she radiated a motherly warmth that made everyone in her presence feel cared for. The sky faded from sheer modicum of warm hues to greyish blue, dusk was soon upon them and the tide was like nature’s timepiece. The oceanic flood waters of man’s birth and bold excursions of war and self discovery seemingly vanished. A large black portal materialized, radiating rings of light that reflected the trillions of stars around them. The four walked through it, bewildered to the paradise of the imagination;freespace.

They were greeted by “the four”, the eldest of the Centurion Nouveau; Apollo Diethety, Night Wind, Ta'al Vulstrum, and Markaia Odellus, history’s storied and all but forgotten children. Night Wind was perhaps the youngest, as he was a participant of Custer’s Last Stand where he was a war shaman for the Lakota people. From within himself, he channeled the spirits of his fallen brothers making him a mighty warrior and an insurmountable force of nature. His hands and face were not his own anymore, as they were covered in the ghastly gristle of his enemies. It was a single, precise shot to the chest that ended his war path.

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Makaia Odellus came after, she was a beautiful spanish duchess who was betrothed to Henry the 8th. Her gentleness and sophistication shrouded her in the guise of an earthly madonna. Unfortunately, she was beheaded for not being able to bear her husband a son. Her swan like neck became incredibly sensitive to the supernatural once she joined the Centurion Nouveau and later the Shroud itself. Next was Ta'al Vulstrum, a Bulgarian celric on a religious pilgrimage of the self before he was slaughtered in the midst of a holy war that he unfortunately wandered into. His death was one parts scurvy and two parts blood loss as his right arm was severed clean off from the forearm downwards. During his resurrection, he was given a prosthetic made out of pure dreamstuff that could bend itself to his will and create a fearsome array of weaponry. He jokingly referred to it as “God’s Golden Arm” after a brand of mead from the Nordic highlands that he was fond of before his indoctrination into the house of god.

On the brows of the potential usurpers, an orifice opened, purely undetectable by most modern sciences. The orifice widened, stretching like a plasmatic glob of putty until it engulfed their entire being. The four dreamers in training stepped forward through the globulus gulf of dharmic enlightenment to become their truest selves, the Nouveau. Markia welcomed the quartet back into paradise as only a mother could, these precious few truly were worthy of the divine sainthood that had been so fervently emboldened with. This eve, her pupils would be subject to an incredibly auspicious event, a visit from the almighty Shroud herself.

Across the vast recesses of the human mind was a doorway to mind-numbing horrors beyond comprehension. The door was not easily found by those searching in the dark pools of flashing neurons, but rather those whom the door called to in a whisper of a siren song. Magma boiled and frothed enrapturing the place in sweltering, inescapable heat. Hell was not an appropriate description, for “what is hell?” afterall, but den of eternal suffering and anguish. The souls that dwelled here were not in mourning, but joyful in their hate for the world beyond the doorway. In a past life, they had names, jobs, homes, life partners, but such things no longer mattered. They were nightmares incarnate, the grim terrors of the crescent moon, the Acropolites; fallen champions of the dream world who had the desire to dream grander dreams of lustful power and sin. In the largest magma pool was a large ebony crystal that hummed like a choir of demonic angels, a fractured figment. Inscribed upon it were runes that bound it to it’s domain, much like the animate masters. But the runes served a dual purpose of dark enchantment, a mana pool.

Atop the highest marbled stalagmite was a throne and a hooded figure that eternally pondered, his boney fingers tapping the chiseled armrests with disdain. The Nouveau were growing stronger, too strong in fact. The ever tipping scales of power would no longer be in the Acropolites’ favor unless they found an ace in the sand; an X-Factor. For some time, they had been well aware of a young boy, Eli Spitzer, who had limitless potential. But the boy’s fire had yet to be sparked. If he was influenced by outside forces, perhaps they could forcibly trigger him “awake”. The hooded figure sipped the chalice of dark rouge colored wine and pondered…

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Standing at the very forefront of a definite end was Hopper Wilde, ace photog for the Wellspring Gazette. He watched helplessly as a rabid monstrosity, who was once a former friend, savagely destroyed storied buildings rich in both in history and nostalgia. He charged head first into action, stripping himself bare of his suit and waistcoat. Wilbur, the gazette gofer, needed a friendly face; why not his? “Wilbur, it’s Hopper,” he said, fakely panting as if exhausted, this was not a time for the people of Wellspring , Minnesota to know his secret; not yet anyway. “Please, I know you’re angry and probably confused, but you need to stop this. You’re not only endangering the lives of people you know, but you’re endangering yourself.”

The monster who was once Wilbur Jones swatted Hopper Wilde away as if he were a petty insect. At near mach speed, Hopper collided with a building, rupturing the structure like a bulldozer. If not for his gravity powered bands that gave him his strength, he would have been a goner. Darting into the bathroom of the conveniently vacant building, Hopper stripped down further. Moments later, a stark blue blur darted out and struck the monster. It was Blue Hope, the humanoid being from another time. As a boy, he was on a interstellar cruise with his parents visiting then modern day Earth from the year five billion, until the ship collided with a black hole. Young Hopper managed to escape, but the rest of the crew and it’s passenger were not so fortunate. Hopper spent the next three and a half years stranded on the moon, fending for himself, struggling to survive on plentiful foreign fruits and wild animals. With a salvaged periscope viewed the world below like ants through a magnifying glass. The more he saw, the more he grew to appreciate how much they were like him.

On the eve of his sixteenth birthday, Hopper was greeted by a familiar face, his Great Uncle Jacobe. After not hearing back from the Interstellar cruise ship for some time, a search party was sent out, and Jacobe was the first to Volunteer. As much as he appreciate the gesture, Hopper felt a strange urge to stay and guard his newfound friends on earth. Jacobe was not pleased, but understood. “These were found in the wreckage,” Jacobe said, pulling out a large wrapped box, “I have a feeling this was intended as gift from your parents.” In the box were two gleaming gold bands inscribed with powerful runes and glyphs from Hopper’s culture. “Go to them Hopper,” Jacobe whispered in parting, “make our people proud.”

But to some folks, that was all hearsay, few believed such an outlandish tale. None more so than Alec Rasputin, local trillionare with a knack for drawing attention to himself in the most unscrupulous ways possible. Every crime in the past five years could be drawn back to Alec in some form or another. Luckily the townsfolk, the police especially, were easily overcome with amnesia at the sight of a large wad of greenbacks. Alec had been experimenting with a radical new formula that, if all went well, would enable him to usurp Blue Hope as a the city’s champion. With his keen brain honed by years of scientific understudy, nothing was too far out of his reach, except for one; Trina Tisdale, award winning reporter for the Wellspring Gazette. Unlike the other easily malleable women who waited with baited breath for a sliver of a chance at his courtship, Trina was seemingly impervious to his charm, as slimey and uncouth as it may have seemed….

The tattered and heavily dog eared copy of an 80 page giant reprint of various Blue Hope serials was Eli Spitzer’s pride and joy. It was one of the few home comforts that he was allotted when his parents checked him into a mental asylum for his own benefit. Eli had known from a very early age that he was a dangerous hazard to himself and everyone around him, but he didn’t quite know why. He had been there for three months and after numerous counseling sessions, he still had not even the faintest inkling of a grasp of what was wrong with him. He opened his door, grabbed his walkman, his fanny pack filled with cassette tapes encompassing a variety of genres from Italo-Disco to Alternative Rock and went for a stroll through the bleach white corridors. He asked the woman at the help desk if it would be alright if he got some fresh air at the visitation grotto and she didn’t see why not. Eli had been the spitting example of good behavior and the woman at the help desk was one of the many staff members who began to question if there was really anything inherently wrong with the boy at all.

Outside Eli encountered a particular counsellor who offered to buy him a can of soda that was rendered lukewarm by the faulty refrigeration of the dispensing machine. Eli liked the woman named Georgia enough to accept such a sundry and when she returned, the two talked of whatever topics came to mind; politics, love, religion, their minds were like open books. Even though Georgia may have been old enough to be Eli’s mother, she didn’t feel like it, she was far too progressive in scope. “I wanted to give you something, I know it isn’t exactly staff policy, but I saw it at a boutique shop in the mall and thought you might like it.” It was a navy blue t-shirt with a graphic. On the front, were three red stars encompassing Yggdrasil, the norse tree of life. The symbol had much meaning to Eli as it was emblazoned on Blue Hope’s french style military coat. Eli was speechless. The happiness inside him was gushing to the point of overflowing and that’s when “it” happened. An orifice opened dilated his unready mind into a torrent of new ideas and even newer possibilities from within. His fragile grip on reality, like all other things, shattered before him. Eli fainted, but before he collapsed, he noticed someone who wasn’t there before, someone blue with an unearthly aura about them

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The Lady Shroud, in all her celestial beauty, descended from the heavenly plane of the mind to her perch at the echelon of pure cognitive thought. “Brothers,” she softly mummered in a gentle, motherly “coo” of a whisper, “and sisters, I am honored to be in your presence this evening and oh how I wish for it to be on happier terms. But nay, the deeds of the dark the curdle men’s souls in the blackest embers of villainy seek to rupture our grasp on the coil of freespace. They will not honor you as fellow warriors, they are above such charliton acts of goodwill. They will be tens upon tens as unmerciful as they were with Brother Wind-Spur, for that was just a sliver of their indomitable wrath. Hate and pain only makes them stronger, more vivid, more real. The fire in their bellies is a raging inferno that could forge a blade to tear the heavens asunder, giving them free reign to annihilate the human race and the worlds beyond. I weep for you and your future burdens, but know that you will be made stronger through your battles with the enemy and that I will always be with you.” The cult, the four, and the Nouveau all bowed before the mother, savouring her words that were still fresh as ripe fruit in their minds.