Black Hole Sum

Faust. Pandora's Box. Nebula Gas. Kamen Riders. House Arak. Miu. 

The names, in huge block capitals, swirled around him as he stood in the middle of a vast horizon of black sand. It stretched to infinite on either side of him, seeming to merge with the starless void that hung above in lieu of a sky. A white fog swirled around his heels, amongst which the words danced and twisted like swallows. Each one silently shouted themselves at him, their size alone conveying wild and accusatory tones without sound or voice.

He looked up. Mars hung in the sky, and he only knew it was Mars because he recognized the continents upon it. But it was dead - not the vibrant red of its youth and prime, but dark and ashen grey. Not even a single glimmer of the once-proud towers, no light from the once-bustling cities. Somewhere in the distance, a disembodied voice was singing - an old Martian lullaby, he knew, to which the words had long been lost to him.

There as an awful glooping noise.

He looked down. 

The fog parted, and faces came up at him from out of the sand. Each one of them was screaming in hate and agony amidst a miasma of purple smoke that belched forth from between the bubbling sand grains. He didn't recognise a single one of them, disgust and fear bubbling in his chest as he watched them twist and merge with each other like a kaleidoscope in a John Carpenter film, flesh flowing like modelling clay.

YOUR FAULT! they screamed, voices mingling with each other. YOUR FAULT! MURDERER! YOU DID THIS! ALL YOUR FAULT!

"What the fuck?!" he asked, before he could stop himself.

A shadow loomed over him. He made the mistake of turning around.

"They're your children," hissed the impassive, emotionless, bat-shaped visor that hung in the air above him. "Are you proud of them yet?"

And then it was joined by more. The leering, snake-shaped helmet of Blood Stalk. The gilded, imperious eyes of Evol. Build's helm, cracked and broken and worn. Kamen Rider Clear, now covered in so much scratches and dirt that the name was ironic. Slavering, fang-filled mouths appeared on each one, sliding into reality in the same way that, in a badly-generated AI video, details morph and change without rhyme or reason.

The faces beneath him screamed and roar louder. Only snatches of individual words could be heard now - MURDERER! KILLER! - as they rose up around him. He felt as though he was on the stand and the jury had finally lost it's shit with him, screaming for him to be hung.

"I... I couldn't!" he cried, ice in his stomach. "I had no choice! I-"

But the helmets closed in, looming, twisting. Horrible, cackling, mocking laughter spilled from their maws. And at the same time as he cowered from them, he felt twisted appendages and digits clawing at his shins as the things writhing in the quicksand beneath assaulted his ears in the screaming denouncement that echoed off of the nothingness around him.

ALL YOUR FAULT! ALL YOUR FAULT! ALL YOUR FAULT!

--------

Evolto Naja opened his eyes and realised he didn't know where he was.

This was nothing new to him. He'd developed a habit of doing this ever since he'd arrived on Earth and began to mingle with the culture. Accidentally jettisoned from his home planet by Pandora's Box, which was a whole story in and of itself, his awakening in the middle of Manhattan with a screaming headache and a dry throat was the first in a storied history of waking up in odd places. Even when he'd been roped into working for Faust, he'd still had his fair share of amnesiac mornings, although in that case that was mostly to try and forget what he saw writhing in the tanks.

It was only now, as he opened his eyes and saw himself surrounded by a huge expanse of grassland, that he began to wonder if it was becoming a problem.

He didn't know what time it was exactly, but the morning sun was already hot on his skin. His body ached as though he'd been running a marathon. His head felt like a swarm of bees was trying to escape from inside his skull. And as he pushed himself upright, groaning from the effort, his stomach churned in protest at being forced into a vertical position. None of these are insurmountable problems if you are at home in your own bed, or even in somebody else's bed. They're quite another matter when you're inthe middle of an unidentifiable grassland in God knows what corner of the world.

He blinked several times, trying to clear the fuzz from his vision and get a better look at his surroundings. But no matter how much he tried, it refused to be anything other than rolling grassland dotted with rocks and strange bushes he didn't know the name of. So he brought his secret weapon into play - a forked tongue flickering out from between his teeth before snapping back inside, and his jaw clenched as he pressed it up to the roof of his mouth.

Dusty. Dry. Primarily cheap beer, barbecue smoke, sweat and motor oil, all fighting for space. Hints of gum tree and eucalyptus. And a strong aftertaste of...

He turned his head, and saw a kangaroo grazing nearby.

Australia.

He gave a groan. Of all the places to wake up. Not that he wouldn't have minded going to Australia in any other circumstances, but... What even happened last night? How did he end up here?! Granted, that was a question he asked himself most mornings, but on this occasion it felt... more urgent. Like it was actually a conundrum this time, and not a comical happenstance. And he didn't know why that was, unless it had something to do with how he got here at all.

A nearby rock caught his eye. As if by instinct, he pushed himself to his feet and wobbled over to it. The action made every one of his senses howl, all of them refusing to come to work and demanding that he go back to the comforting blackness of sleep. He ignored them and sat himself down, adjusting and grimacing until he couldn't feel any sharp edges digging into his thighs. His brow furrowed as he tried to extricate some form of memory from the black soup that had swallowed up the previous night. 

Well... he'd been drunk. Obviously. But there was more to it than that, or else he wouldn't have this nagging doubt in the pit of his stomach, the lingering worry that he might have actually fucked up somehow. All he could dredge up, though, was the idea that he'd gotten in trouble - for what, he didn't know. Had he been drunk when he'd done it? That sounded like him.

His ears picked up the sound of the kangaroo bounding across the grass in his direction.

He vaguely remembered being... angry. Like, actually angry. And that was significant, because he spent so much time in a fog of weed, booze and dangerous experiments that it was rare for him to get angry. At worst, he got whiny, like a little kid. The last time he'd been angry, it had been when Gentoku - that warmongering bastard - had infected one of the Lupinrangers under his care with Nebula Gas, despite knowing she wasn't compatible with it. It had been the most genuinely angry he'd ever been.

But he remembered being blindly angry. He remembered shouting. Somebody had said something back, he didn't know what, but it had only made him angrier. And then... he was here. Because he'd gotten angry, and most likely had come here just to spite whoever or whatever it was that had made him angry.

Not that it made much difference. Because, in truth, Evolto Naja hadn't been very happy for a while. A long while. And it wasn't anything specific that had started it off. Nothing Dawn or a Ravensky or even any other Kobber had done. It hadn't even really started when Shouma, his cousin, had turned up. That hadn't helped though - not that he hated the kid, he was just a handful. Like a big, stupid dog on a sugar high. Except dogs didn't usually try to become heroes in spite of their simplistic, black-and-white view of the world around him.

The kangaroo had pulled up alongside him. He could see that it was glancing at him as it ambled forwards, sniffing in search of the tastiest  morsels.

No, Evolto'd been in a bad mood even before then. And as he sat there on the rock, the hot Australian sun beating down on him, the Martian was starting to put a name to the sense of worry and discontent in his stomach. It was...

And then he remembered the nightmare that he'd had, just before he woke up. The dead black sand. The dead grey Mars. The faces, screaming, accusing, condemning. The laughing masks of those he had, indirectly, created-

"Lovely mornin', cobber!

Evolto shook his head, and it was all gone. He turned his head to see only the kangaroo standing there.

He was less surprised than he should have been. And when he looked back on this moment later on, that would also trouble him. Because the fact that the kangaroo had spoken and had the pleasant and cheery lilt of a preschool teacher in her voice, should have at least made him do a double-take, if not shriek in horror. But he didn't do either of those things. Instead, he chose to glance back at the talking marsupial with the distracted look of somebody who was recovering from a night they didn't remember.

And maybe that wasn't the right reaction, he would later come to think. Maybe being desensitised to the strangeness of the universe was actually a bad thing.

"Is it?" he asked, still unsure as to wherever to take the word "cobber" as an insult or not.

"Somewhere in the world, it is!" The kangaroo did not seem to be bothered by his attitude, and instead dipped her head down to nibble at the short, coarse grass beneath. There was a moment of silence - inasmuch as the silence of the wild, with the deep rush of wind and rustling of grass always present in the ear, could be described as such.

Evolto wasn't sure what possessed him to say what he said next. Maybe he just needed to break the silence. Maybe everything that had been weighing on his mind like a blockage in a water pipe had finally reached maximum pressure and needed to be let out. Or perhaps he was hallucinating the entire thing due to crumbs of edibles still in his guts. But he said it, regardless.

"...do you think I'm beyond redemption?"

The kangaroo lifter her head from the grass and, still chewing, fixed him with the half-lidded stare that is the default expression of all kangaroos. Without much effort, it gave the impression of unimpressed boredom, that she was waiting for him to do something exciting and he wasn't currently living up to the hype. Evolto stared back, feeling deep down that he shouldn't take that kind of insult from something that kept her babies in a horrible skin bag on her stomach.

"I dunno," she said, at last. "D'you think you are?"

Evolto's eyes narrowed. "If I had any idea, I wouldn't be asking you."

"Fair dinkum, mate," said the kangaroo in that same upbeat manner. "But it's an odd question to be askin' me, right? I mean, I don't even know anythin' about you!"

Evolto blew out between his lips and leaned back slightly. Oh, boy. Might as well keep it brief - no kangaroo, talking or otherwise, would be able to comprehend his life story in detail.

"Well," he said, "I come from a noble family on a distant planet. In another dimension, too. I'm a genius and was very good at manipulating space gas. We used it to do things that shouldn't even be possible, but we did it anyway because reality is more of a suggestion to us than a hard rule."

"Uh-huh," interjected the kangaroo.

"There was a civil war, and my family took part in it. I stopped it, but that meant my entire race got trapped in a space-time pocket and I got thrown to that dimension's version of this planet. Then I ended up getting involved with a paramilitary terrorist organisation that wanted to exterminate all superhumans and instigate a global dictatorship." Evolto winced as those words came out of his mouth.

"Wow," said the kangaroo. He bristled to hear that one - it sounded vaguely condescending.

"I... turned a lot of people into monsters. I also might have killed a few people. Some of them were heroes who protected that world. We staged an invasion of another dimension - this one. Turns out, all the heroes we killed on our world were still alive here. But I stopped them from killing the big bad evil guy right off the bat. He'd taken the device that I used to stop the war and was holding it hostage to ensure I gave him what he wanted."

"Crickey." Okay, that was unnecessary, in Evolto's opinion. You're Australian, we get it, lady.

"But then he made somebody I cared about very sick, and that's when I'd had enough. He was going insane. I left him and joined up with the heroes, and I helped them win in the end, but... it was a very close thing. I ended up making a lot of people mad, and most of them... still don't trust me. Especially that Dawn Cosineau." Evolto snorted. "She can go fuck herself. Judgemental bitch."

There was an even longer, far more protracted silence. In the distance, a kookaburra let out its signature chattering cry and then abruptly fell silent.

"Well," said the kangaroo, at last, "sounds like you've had a pretty wild life, mate."

"Yep." Evolto smiled mirthlessly. "I'm a real wild card, me. Never know what I'm gonna do next."

"Proper larrikin." The kangaroo turned her head and nibbled at something vaguely bushy. "And what 'ave ya done to make up for it?"

The question was like a hammer blow to the skull. Evolto's expression betrayed nothing, but his mind screamed in panic as it reeled, knocked off balance by the words and their implication.

Because he'd never been asked that question. As far as he could remember, not a single person had directly asked him, to his face, what he'd done as penance for his acts under Faust. Not even the Kobbers. Oh, sure, Dawn held it against him, but she'd treated him more like a nuisance than anything, so it obviously wasn't that huge on her priority list. And there hadn't even been a grieving mother in a shawl, or a vengeance-seeking youth with a huge sword and stupid hair, to confront him about it, either of which was the usual cliché in such situations.

His mind continued to scream as it sought a handhold on the jagged rocks of memory to stop itself falling into an ocean of shit.

"...I helped them fight a bunch of villains," he tried, lamely. "And I got an organisation back home that's trying to undo the damage. Fighting old remnants of the bad guys, rebuilding, offering aid..."

He trailed off as he realised the kangaroo was staring intently at him. The unimpressed expression suddenly seemed more cutting than it had been.

"...I don't think that's gonna cut it, mate," she said, shortly.

Evolto bristled, anger rising in his chest. "The fuck do you mean?!"

"Look," said the kangaroo, "far be it from me to rock up to a bloke and tell 'im where to get off. But you ain't doing much good getting full off your head and joyridin' around the multiverse like a bored swaggie. Sounds to me like you're just ignoring all the crook stuff and hopin' it'll fix itself. And you know stuff like that doesn't heal that easy."

"And what if I can't heal it?" retorted the Martian? "What if, instead, I get condemned and judged by the people I pissed off? Or even by people I didn't even do anything to, just because the fact that I'm alive is offensive to them?"

"Now, that's a trickier problem," said the kangaroo, scratching herself. "You've got me there. But I reckon that what you're doing's worse, if not just as crook. You're acting like you didn't even do anything wrong, or that what you did back then doesn't bother you. And that doesn't look good from the outside, especially when your hands are as mucky as you say they are."

"So what?!" Evolto shocked himself with how quickly his voice rose. "Why should I care about what other people think of me at this point?! They can sit there and judge me all they want, but they haven't a goddamn clue what it was like! I'm not a cartoon villain over here! It's not that cut-and-dried!"

"Never said it was, mate!" said the kangaroo in the same infuriatingly level and upbeat manner. "Seems a bit odd, though, that you ask me about redemption, then go on about how you don't care about what others think. You need a word with yourself or something? Because last I checked, caring about what others think is a big part of redemption. Or d'you think you can go on lyin' about that?"

That was too much. Evolto stood up so quickly that something in the  nearby grass scurried away. His forked tongue flickered and his fangs stood out against his gums.

"Listen, you lean and tasty alternative to beef," he hissed, "I was in a fucked-up situation and I had to do fucked-up stuff to survive! Of course it bothers me! Why do you think I switched sides?! But I'm not gonna fucking sit on my ass and weep about how dark and troubled my past was! I've got a life to live, and I'm not going to live it by moping about it! And I'm certainly not going to spend the rest of it handing out apology cards to people who don't even want to hear it!"

The kangaroo stared at him, unfazed by his outburst, for an uncomfortably long time. Then she shrugged - an impressive feat when your shoulders are as broad as a kangaroo's.

"No need to split the dummy at me, mate," she said. "Go ahead and keep doing what you're doing, if that's what makes you happy. All I'm sayin' is, you can't run from your past. You ever watch The Lion King sober? And you can't find peace if you're not prepared to do right by the blokes and sheilas you've hurt. Runnin' away might seem easier, but it ain't helping anyone, least of all yourself."

The fact that she was so calm about it was only half of what was annoying the Martian. The other half was the sneaking suspicion was that she was correct. And he didn't fancy that idea for two very good reasons. Firstly, he'd be damned if a talking kangaroo, of all things, was going to talk anything resembling sense into him. And secondly, because if she was, then it meant he would actually have to do something about it, which... 

The image of the screaming faces came back to him.

...no. Just no.

"Whatever," he snarled. "You're not even really talking. You're just the crumbs of edibles in my stomach from two nights ago. I don't have to think about this ever again, if I don't want."

And he got up off the rock and, not even particularly knowing or caring which way he was going, set off across the Australian bush. The kangaroo watched him leave, ears twitching.

"Seems a decent bloke," she said to herself.

Then she went back to eating. So she didn't notice the drone swooping overhead, following Evolto as he stubbornly marched off in a direction that, unbeknownst to him, would lead him right to where he didn't want to be.

 Evolto Naja will continue to bother the Kobbers
in 2025