This weekend only Captain and team are coming to Naru2U convention in OTTAWA, CANADA!

Peoples of Ottawa, come obtain glorious books of captain and other items of interest!

I've had that dream again.


That strange place, so distant, yet so close to my heart. Buildings as tall as mountains.
Dead structures, watching with dead eyes. Empty, vast and endless honeycombs of stone and steel. Air filled with gray ashes, always fluttering from the cloudy sky.

The black vortex opens up in the sky, descending down to the city. The vortex spiral rips the city apart, bending the air itself, feasting on light, feasting on time.

There is a lonely figure standing in the street.
No matter how hard I try to make out his or her expression, I cannot. Is there no face there at all? Or perhaps there is a million human faces there, intertwined and flickering in unison, as bright as the light of ten thousand suns?
The being stares into the abyss of the vortex.
It takes another step towards it, into the horizon of nothingness, into a place where nothing can exist.
The stones of the roadway beneath its feet crumble and flutter in the air, colliding with each other.
Has it no fear of the black void? Perhaps it thinks that the void cannot affect it?
But, can it affect the void?

I suddenly realize that the being is searching for me, and that I am its servant.
The faceless one speaks.
It plans to drink the vortex dry.
It plans to find me.

...The faceless one will surely take me away from my home.

I awake, covered in sweat, my heart pounding, terror gripping my mind.
I have to see my Angel.
He always calms me down in time like this.

For me, mirrors never work right. The surface of reflection doesn't show me what is, but instead reveals a reality which runs in some kind of twisted parallel to ours.
Perhaps for me, the mirrors are so thin that they reveal the true manner of things?

All my life I've seen my black and white knight in reflective surfaces and mirrors.
As far back as I could remember it, the knight was there for me and I could admire his wonderful and strange armour of black and white patches, his face-shield made of materials foreign to our world, his gorgeous lenses of blue cobalt, as sparkly and blue as my own eyes.
This is nothing odd, my father had told me - he is your guardian angel, and he is always watching over us.
You should be proud to have an angel, in these dark times of despair.

If it wasn't for a hired painter, I would never know what my face actually looks like.
I caress the surface of the mirror, seeking solace.

Oh Angel, my Angel
Wherever you be
So calm so serene
Always watching over me.

My brother? My lover?
My heartstrings aflutter
So close, yet so far.
My knight, my guide, my star.

Could you, would you tell me please?
Would you put my mind at ease?
What will my tomorrow be
What fate awaits me?

PEOPLES OF LONDON,
CAPTAIN COMES ONCE AGAIN TO ZEE MOST PROPER PLACE IN ZEE WERLD.

LONDON MCM [link]
WANTS YOU TO COME AND JOIN CAPTAIN'S GLORIOUS PARADE OF DOOM!

PLEASE SEND ME A NOTE IF YOU'D LIKE TO MEET CAPTAIN IN LONDON AND HAVE FUN-TIMES!
POST-APOCALYPTIC COSTUMES WILL BE PROVIDED.

COME ONE, COME ALL, GET YOUR PANTS, TOP HATS AND MONOCLES SIGNED BY CAPTAIN AND TEAM!

COME FIND CAPTAIN AND CREATORS OF RA IN NY COMICON THIS WEEKEND!
GET YOUR BOOBIES, PANTS AND BABIES SIGNED!

BOOTH W6, IN ARTISTS ALLEY!

PRIZES AND HUGS WILL BE DISPENSED FOR ANYONE WHO DRESSES IN RA COSPLAYS AS WELL.




BOOKS THAT WILL BE SIGNED DERR IN PERSON:

WATT IS UR LEAST FAVORITE THING ABOUT POPULAR MUSIC CULTURE OF ZEE PRE-APOCALYPSE?

CAPTEIN NEEDS A NAME FOR CAPTAIN'S MUSICAL BANDS OF MISFITS.
SNIPPY CAN BE ON THE DRUMS.

GIVE ME YOUR BAND NAME IDEAS!

tHeRE's SoMeThiNg iN tHe MoSt DisTanT MeMoRy Of PaSt SoMeThiNg ThaT DoeS Not BeLong, SoMeThiNg ThaT I mUsT ShOw tO ChaRleS SniPpy.

CaN YoU  GuESs  WhaT iT iS?

WhAT ShAlL We dO WiTh cHaRLeS SnIPpY'S rEqUEST??

To WhIcH PlaCe AnD TiMe ShOuLd The BiOmAtRiX TaKe Him?
WhErE AnD WhEn WoUlD YoU Like To SeE?

The living scarf twisted around my neck, flowing back and forth.
My neurons tingled, misfiring.

Was it numbing the pain of being compressed into a hexagonal cocoon that pressed tighter and tighter?

No, it was showing me what it could see and feel, what my limited human vision could not.
The aggregate virus bore into my body, feasting on my cells, borrowing me to expand itself, yet it did not take over completely.
I was here, no I was out there, I was a hundred trillion cells and they were ALL suddenly under my control.
It seems that our relationship status has been upgraded from "master controller/slave drive" to an "unlicensed symbiosis".
The Biomatrix served as my new eyes, letting me peer through my own skin, bones, flesh and organs, through my fireproof jacket, through the web of intertwining lights that bound us in a stasis field, through the thick, crystalline walls of the Arbitrator's spacecraft.
My vision intensified, expanding in curves, the arm of the milky way amplified, the stars intensely vibrant, fiery and beautiful.
I saw the serenity of earth below and the aurora borealis dancing on the poles.
I could almost taste the earth's atmosphere and each layer was a different shade and color.
For a brief moment, lost in the ravishing sharpness of planetary iridescence below, I even forgot that my world was mostly a weary, barren wasteland.

The obsidian, spiked sphere that was the Arbitrator's vessel was gliding silently over the Earth's exosphere, twinkling ominously.

Why? Why could I see all of this?
Did the Biomatrix want to show me how desperate my... no our situation was?
How there was nothing that could be done?

Did it merely want to look at the end of a world, something that it had never seen before?
...For it had never failed to bring a civilization of organic beings to its knees, or to defend what was necessary and judge those that needed to be judged, until now.
Its failure was bitterly irritating, it was unacceptable, it was inexplicable.
Probability pointed that it was the fault of the un-scannable one. It didn't know who Zee Captain was. It had millions of guesses, but they were all nasty or simply insane.
Perhaps, I didn't even want to know these guesses for I ignored them because a lot of them were some sort of horrible versions/visions of me.
The Biomatrix refracted its unpleasant emotions onto me - they ranged somewhere from absolute distress to angry desperation.

I saw the dark matter drop disconnect from the Arbitrator's tetra-seed carrier.
The Biomatrix highlighted its path for me to track. Thanks a lot. Now I can see the exact moment my world implodes.
Now I can remember it forever, in perfect clarity.

The meteoric seed pierced Earth's atmosphere, and the thick cloud cover embraced it heartily.

It reached its destination and with a bang/a million echoing whispers, the shell of the seed containing the drop collapsed, bending everything into itself.

The point of terminus.
The end of all things.
The singularity was free.

The event horizon wave glittered like a thousand inverted rainbows, falling and rising, pulling in and pushing away.

I could see its hell-fire in a billion colors. Colors that I could not name. Colors that weren't even meant for me to see.
Waves of fire spread out across the atmosphere exploding into lightning storms, tornadoes of fire and rings of northern lights all across the planet.
This was brilliantly alarming and deadly.
The terminus point drew clouds into itself, forming the waves of a new storm that was unlike any other, that ran across the world.
It ripped apart the surface of the planet, wherever its flames touched. It evaporated mountains of ice and licked up the continental stone plates that were directly underneath it.
As the hole in space-time expanded its reach, everything was drawn into the collapsing void.
Nothing could escape it, except for the Arbitrator's ship which was designed exactly for harnessing the wave to propel itself across the universe.

I suddenly understood that the Arbitrator came here only because he destroyed another world, not unlike ours.
This was how it could instantly move from one place to another, faster than the speed of light.
This was the decompression that I felt, that temporarily killed me, when the Arbitrator arrived.
This was its mission. To punish those that did not please or side with the Union.
The stasis field would carry me directly to the Universe Compendium court, while the Arbitrator and its carrier would shift elsewhere, forward in space-time, wherever it was necessary, wherever a call from the Union would summon it to.

The planet grew lighter, loosing mass.
Nothing could withstand the brutal pull of the void. Nothing that the Biomatrix knew could stop it.
Why? Why would the Arbitrator do something so abhorrent?
Did it have something to do with "AI defense network" that the Arbitrator mentioned?
"Correct", the Biomatrix whispered, its voices were those my own cells.
"It was well hidden from us by the high concentration of radioactive dust in the atmosphere.
We have never lost an avatar before. This should have served as a warning sign.
Having dominion over the organic but not over the inorganic, we have discovered the truth far too late, and only by rewinding you.
In a desperate gamble to survive, your civilization has foolishly birthed a cognitive Grid who's only purpose is to feed on the neural waves of thinking beings and as such it must be halted here, before its mechanized pestilence consumes other worlds.
Your world reeks of the Grid. It has spread deep underground and high overhead as far as the troposphere. The Grid plans to do something highly unpleasant to the entire planet if it has not done so already.
It must be wiped clean from the universe. Your planet is badly infected and the Arbitrator has the necessary cure, it matters not whether the patient dies as long as others can be saved."

The negative sphere grew quickly, it already devoured a patch bigger than the country of England.
Everything went into slow-motion.

Was that your tampering with my perception again, or the fact that the event horizon stops time itself?
You know what, it doesn't matter. I don't care. This is all too horrible. This moment, that lasts forever.
This simple fact, that I will be the only human being left alive in the universe and that my planet must be erased for reasons not entirely clear to me.

The mug began to vibrate and in this vibration I started to hear a song of metal, a song that was in the exact tune with the inescapable death that was being brought forth by the all consuming, growing sphere of the void.

I wanted to be elsewhere.
I didn't want to see these final seconds of my world, stretched out to all eternity.
I didn't want to be here. Please let me go. Please wake me up somewhere else.
Construct for me a memory from my past that's so real that it lasts a lifetime.
Take me back, away from all of this.
I know you can, even in the confines of the stasis field, even if you are not allowed to kill me now.
You can do it.
Do it!
...Pretty please?

"Blasted mug!"
I looked at it hatefully.
"This is all your fault!"

I attempted to throw the mug at the Arbitrator, to smash it, to let go of it.
Nothing of the sort was possible.

I flailed left and right. The mug did not budge. I could not let it go, no matter how hard I tried. It was as if it were glued to me with a strange static-like substance. It rolled between my fingers and from one hand to the other, but it was as if I were made of iron and the mug were a powerful rare-earth magnetic bearing coated with oil.
Why can't I let go of the mug?!
Did the Arbitrator's reconstruction of my organs have anything to do with this?

Upon giving up to prying the mug out of my hands, I turned to the Arbitrator and spoke.
I made my case calmly and clearly, pressuring various facts that my DNA couldn't possibly be on the mug and that I looked nothing like Captain and that it might as well scan my memories for evidence or something of that sort.

"EVIDENCE IS PRESENT! OUR SCAN REVEALED YOUR SECONDARY FACE INSIDE YOUR SPINAL-BASED COMPARTMENT!" The arbitrator boomed, the interior of wherever the hell we were in, shifted when it spoke.
It was as if I were inside an enormous lung composed of soft, mobile crystals.
I had no clue what it was talking about.
Oh...
My backpack. It was still on me. Right.
I pulled the strap down and unzipped it slowly.
Perhaps there was something in there that could help my case?

No.
No.
No. NO. NO!
Captain's perpetually smiling face stared at me, mischievously taunting me, as I held it in my hand.
This simply didn't make sense. Why were captain's mask and scarf inside my bag?
There were supposed to be supplies in here, cans, bullets, medical adhesive strips and other useful items.
Why?! What?! Where did they go?

Was I Captain?
My mind cracked, spilling out memories, an array of imagery rising from the depths of my nightmarish past, rewinding the tape of my life backwards with an imaginary cranking sound.

Did I imagine Captain being there, on the ice?
How could that thin ice possibly take Captain's weight? Was the water so thin that it seemed like Captain's boots didn't sink in it at all?
...that it seemed like walking on water?

When I lost my favorite rifle, did I... pretend that captain was there next to me?
How could someone only a few inches taller then me be completely unaffected by the thermonuclear explosion of the Alien vessel that flung a cloud of debris and my body across the street?

Was I simply talking to myself when that phone booth rang? Did it even ring?

Oh god. Oh no.

Did mutants ever pay attention to Captain? Did the hideous "Photoshop" worm ever try to eat my mad commander?
I tried to recall such an instance and I could not.
It mostly ignored Captain... and so did all the other beasts of the wasteland. They usually went right after me, I had a smell and I was incredibly delicious to all sorts of deadly things.

Did I imagine Captain standing over me all those times when I woke?

Did I commandeer Pilot, all while dressed up as Captain?
Did Pilot even exist? Did Engie? No, they must exist. I can't question everyone's existence now.

The little straws of unexplained things that always happened to Captain chipped away at my sanity and snowballed into a hideous, confusing pile.

- - -

When I was lost in the dead zone, crawling in the ashes amidst the irradiated rubble of Eureka, knowing that I no longer had a home, knowing that my squad, my science team and my tourists were done for, knowing that there was not a living soul left anywhere for thousands of miles, knowing that I was about to die myself from exhaustion and lack of food, did I simply find a mask and imagine myself as Captain to give myself something to cling to? Someone to tell me what to do, no matter how utterly ridiculous, to distract me from the horrible hopeless existence of knowing that everyone I knew was dead and it was all my fault?
A friend, someone to talk to, someone that wouldn't ever give a crap about what I did in the past?

I tried to recollect that day. The day I met Captain...

The day I finally lost all hope. My dead zone crawler had run out of gas and I'd been walking for countless hours in circles trying to find anything useful, anything left intact, afraid to fall asleep, afraid to miss a sound, a voice.
The city was dead, the Zone had won, just like Dr Gromov feared.
What was it that Gromov offered humanity?
Immortality in the machine, your mind preserved forever on the servers, incapable of feeling sadness or pain, only if you absolutely supported the Good Directorate and bought their products, surrendering all your thoughts to them.
Death and suffering in the hellish, frozen wasteland if you don't...

I was too late, I missed the war, or the conflict, or the last stand, whatever it was.
Did the 1% finally initiate their promised plan of blowing up ANNET's towers one by one?
Did I start the war by wishing for a better humanity, or by continuously sabotaging ANNET's servers in my hateful spite for their nonacceptance of my person, for all of those bastards calling us soulless?
I did passionately hate that term, but had I finally snapped and sabotaged ANNET's core before I left to the Zone for the last time?

I tripped on the massive tracks that a humongous war-machine must have made. The tracks rammed across several office buildings, toppling them in the process. More tanks like this one were frozen solid, glittering far off in the distance, their electronics wiped out by the electromagnetic blasts of the nukes.
This was it, I realized. I had nobody left. There was no strength left in me to get up. The gray snow, intermixed with ashes fluttering from the sky, had begun to cover me. The bitter cold was eating me alive. I was dying from exhaustion and I knew it, giving up.
I squinted, my eyes closing.
A tall, capped figure appeared in the snowy mist.
I blinked. It did not vanish, but it made no sound of footsteps as it marched towards me.
The figure reached out towards me, offering me a hand, loudly proclaiming, "Bonjour, monseigneur, zee weather is rather lovely this spring, don't you find? Why, you look rather shabby! Do you fancy a taste of bourbon? No? How about an exquisite job opportunity with partial dental benefits and potential chances of advancement in zee ranks?"

Did I imagine that strange moment in time of meeting Captain? The unexpected angel of mercy that found me when I needed it most?

I tried to grasp at the totally insane string of logic that lead me nowhere.

The world stopped making sense, ever since they'd installed those cursed ANNET broadcasting towers to copyright, to take control of, the last vestige of humanity - our thoughts.
The towers laid shattered and inert now, but my perception must have remained slightly warped even when I was no longer in broadcasting range.

The unexplained anomalies we'd discovered in the Dead Zone on the surface of the frozen, receding ocean were clearly not meant to be understood by human minds.
They were something from another world, a place that no longer belonged to us, something that the war had unleashed, or perhaps something that came from other worlds like the Arbitrator, or perhaps something made accidentally when the Directorate began to lose control of their reality-bending projects?
We wanted absolute power over our universe and in our careless reach. In our quest... we broke the world.
We wanted to find or to create God and so we did. It even spoke to me, whatever it was that they called it?... "Anomaly 441", "God of the Wishing well", "Satan's Arse", "The black star"... It promised me that all my dreams would come true.
That was the first thing that spoke to me that I chose to ignore... and yet I still continued in my persistence to ignore things that talked, things that should not be talking... like the damned ceramic heart mug that clung to my hand.

The "Anomaly of God" broke my team, drove them mad with its absolute power, turned them against each other like the "gold rush" of a long forgotten era of Earth's history, and so I must have killed them all, and it must have driven me to that ultimate moment... to becoming something other than myself... to being Captain?
...to leading other hopelessly lost souls across the wasteland on an endless series of epically pointless quests.


- - -

I was at a loss. Lost in my thoughts. Lost in my past. Who was I?

"No!
My name is Charles Snippy!
MY NAME IS CHARLES SNIPPY!" I chanted to myself, focusing.

The Arbitrator monstrosity stared at me, judging me, evaluating my frantic movements, as I shakily tried to stuff Captain's mask back into my backpack. I must have have thrust the mask back too quick, it flung the scarf outwards and now it oddly wrapped around my neck.
This was not making my case of not being Captain any better.

The scarf!? It moved on its own! It was alive!
I recoiled in terror, pulling at it.

Flesh made of metal, metal made of flesh.

The thing Captain dubbed "CANCER".
It was the unspeakable horror of my nightmares that pierced my body and invaded my spine.
It was real. It was here, with me. It followed me! How did I not realize what the Captain's scarf was?
It was cold, paralyzingly cold like instant frostbite.
Its glowing, red flesh flowed in my fingers and felt oddly enough like a pantyhose filled with sharp and heavy sewing needles.
Wherever it touched, I felt numbness spreading, my nerve endings surrendering their warmth and control.
Flowers and fleshy twines intertwined, twisted and formed themselves into an animal-like skull.
The face of terror looked at me and uttered in a reverberating hiss:
"Claim... diplomatic... immunity!"

The room changed again, the Arbitrator spread its limbs, resounding:
"YOUR ORDINANCE LICENSE HAS BEEN SUSPENDED FOR...
TEMPORAL MALPRACTICE AND AVATAR MISCONDUCT!"

I had no idea what it was shouting on about.
Was it talking to the fleshy scarf?

"THE RUNAWAY AVATAR AND THE INSUBORDINATE
AI PLANETARY DEFENSE NETWORK WILL BE DEALT WITH."

Again, confusing.

"WE HAVE MADE THE DECISION TO DISMANTLE
THIS PLANETARY BODY!"

Now... that didn't sound nice at all.

"A DARK MATTER DROP HAS BEEN RELEASED INTO THE ORBITAL EXOSPHERE!
ONCE THE SINGULARITY DETONATION CONSUMES THE PLANET...
WE WILL RIDE THE EVENT HORIZON TO UNIVERSE COMPENDIUM!"

It was going to open a black hole in Earth's atmosphere!?
My poor dead, radioactive world, so this was to be its end... and only I knew of why it happened.

Lines of light akin to comet tails shot out from the Arbitrator's black, sparkly limbs.
They intersected and converged around me, forming a strange, pulsating, hexagonal web.
The cocoon of intersecting beams pushed my arms and legs together, towards my body.

"EXCUSE THIS TEMPORARY CONCENTRATION OF YOUR PERSON...
THE DETONATION OF YOUR WORLD MIGHT CAUSE YOU MINOR DISCOMFORT.
PLEASE MIND YOUR APPENDAGES AND POSSESSIONS!"
The spidery space-monster rumbled at me. I was its delicious butterfly.

The Arbitrator had made up its mind.
There was no use convincing it of anything else now.
Where was it taking me? Did it plan to lobotomize me in some sort of space-court?
The Earth was doomed. I was doomed.
Here and now according to all evidence, I was... Zee Captain.

What would Zee Captain do?