Echoes of Callisto's Death
This is a Fanfic set in
the Superman Unbound Shared Universe.
https://supermanunbound.angelfire.com/index.html
Copyrights no infringement or profit is intended
---------------------------------------------------------
Lois
& Clark the new adventures of Superman is copyright to Warner
Bros. and DC Comics.
Sailor Moon is copyright to DiC,
Toei, Kodansha, and Naoko Takeuchi.
Zatanna is
copyright to DC comics.
Robur is the creation of Jules
Verne and depending on where you live, will or will not be in the
public domain.
King Arthur is taken from the public
domain legend
Indiana Jones is copyright Lucasfilm Ltd
which inspired my Sir Jones "The last Knight of the round
table" an adventuring American archeologist who does not own a
whip and rather likes snakes.
------------------------------
NOTES
I couldn't find
any reference to Zatanna's grandmother's name, just her grand father
"Luigi Zatara".
I picked Milessa as the name of Luigi's
french wife in 1940.
The Catalyst for this Fanfic was Arthur's
Hansens suggestion "that maybe the Zatara clan speaking spells
backwards was due to a damaged Silver Millennium artifact".
Echoes of Callisto's Death
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Year 1940 Taken from "History of the Avalon Senshi" compressed abridged 2001 edition requested by princess Serenity.
An adventuring American archaeologist looking into legends of the King Arthur's round table and a pair of English Historians investigating rumours about the round table in Germany come together. Reluctantly the archaeologist and the English Historians agree to work together and eventually discover the Round Table being used as a teleportation device by the Lancelot League. They also discover the factories and stockpile of super weapons that were to be used in the invasion of England.
The two Historian are forced to reveal themselves as representatives of Avalon named Arthur and Althea, the returned King Arthur and Merlin's great grand daughter the current lady of the lake and Princess Titan. Princess Titan manages to destroy the underground factories and most of the stockpiled advanced German equipment, but is killed when the League's own Princess Callisto uses Merlin's Round Table to teleport in and surprise her, minutes later Princess Callisto unaware she is facing the legendary King Arthur makes a careless mistake and is be-headed with Excalibur.
King Arthur and the archaeologist manage to recover both Henshin rods and escape, but they lose the Callisto Henshin rod when King Arthur cannot disarm the fail-safe and it returns to the oldest Child of the last princess Callisto. They are also unable to destroy the King's round table or remove the black kryptonite devices embedded deep within and are forced to leave it in the hands of the Germans and Lancelot League operatives.
The American archaeologist now the Last Knight of the Round Table and the despondent King Arthur make there way back to England and then Avalon.
King Arthur and Avalon are unaware that the Callisto Henshin rod is now effectively lost to the Lancelot League. Lady Callisto's oldest son, Luigi was exiled to a minor post in France for disagreeing with his mother and the League council, when the Henshin rod appeared to him he spent a few minutes mourning his mother's death and then gathered his five year old son John and wife, escaping the Lancelot League in the confusion of the fall of France.
Luigi eventually makes his way to America where he changes his last name to Zatara and goes into hiding with his wife and son.
-------------------ECHOES----------------------
Callisto screamed as the sword
sheared effortless through the titanium bracer on her right arm and
continued down cutting the same arm off an inch from her shoulder,
jumping instinctively she landed over a hundred feet away immediately
losing her balance and rolling several times, moaning each time her
stump encountered the muddy ground.
Staggering to her
feet Callisto fought to stay conscious her vision going gray as her
power worked to stop the blood loss and numb the pain. Blinking
several times her sight finally cleared causing her to snarl, the
bulky swords man was already halfway to her making ten foot leaps.
Lady Callisto still grinding her teeth in pain had hoped the
rubble created during her fight with Lady Titan would be a hindrance,
pushing the pain out of her mind and cursing her own arrogance,
Callisto raised her remaining arm even as a thought circled in her
mind Who was this man? No sword wielded by a man should have
been able to hurt her, even the swords of power still used by the
older high level Avalon operatives had never done more than scratch
her.
Allowing her enemy to approach closer she
exaggerated her sway pretending to have trouble keeping her balance
as she waited several seconds finally launching an attack just as the
man started to leap a small crater, caught in mid air and unable to
dodge, her attack hit the bulky british professor mid chest and
carried him back thirty feet pinning him in the rubble, of a
collapsed wall.
Callisto only had an instant to see
him struggle to rise and start to ponder how the man survived, it
didn't make sense, even in her weakened state, a five hundred mile an
hour blast of super cooled ice crystals should have cut him in two.
A moment later machine gun fire from a shattered tank
broke her concentration and knocked her to the ground. The gun fire
wasn't really a direct threat, her senshi aura easily deflected the
large caliber bullets, but it was keeping her from targeting the man
with the sword. Ignoring the geysers of dirt as well as the impacts
of bullets on her head, shoulders and back she focused and silenced
that damnable American's machine gun. It was to much to hope her
attack had harmed the American, but it did slice off the barrel of
the machine gun and dig a couple of inches into the armour swivel
plate effectively jamming the mechanism.
Cursing
Robur's failure in 1905, she rolled over, her eyes widened as she saw
that the portly British professor wasn't, her attack had blasted away
an over sized suit revealing ancient Avalon plate armour. Jogged by
the emblem emblazoned across the armour's chest plate ancient
memories rose from her two rings, rings given her mother by Sir
Lancelot himself, allowing her to finally put a name to the man's
face.
"Arthur" saying the name even as she
mentally deleted the preceding king, now she understood reaching out
with her senses, Lady Callisto cursed as her suspicions proved true
she could feel Lady Triton's power linked to Arthur's armour and
through that Excalibur.
Scrambling to her feet Lady
Callisto, was frightened, normally even the legendary Excalibur could
barely scratch a Senshi, but boosted by the power of another Senshi
the blade's cutting aura had overcome her protection and that single
attack allowed in a moment of victorious arrogance had hurt her
badly.
Focusing as much power as she could Lady
Callisto launched an attack at Arthur, her heart skipping a beat when
his armour's avoidance protocols turned a direct hit into a glancing
blow gaining her only a few seconds respite.
Snarling
at the skill he displayed, she watched as he carefully used a
shuffling walk that kept both feet on the ground, it had slowed his
approach considerably, but it gave his avoidance protocols a better
than even chance at dodging any attack.
Lady Callisto
hesitated unsure what to do, here was one of her people's legendary
enemies alive, believed dead for over a thousand years, she wanted to
kill him badly, but his armour's link to a henshin rod and her
weakened condition made him more than a match.
Coming
to a decision Lady Callisto started to turn, planning to jump away
and use the converted round table to teleport home, she never got the
chance, not seeing the American pop up from a rubble pile and toss
two grenades.
Her son would later discover that her
last memories were of being tossed into the air by an explosion
followed by skidding across the ground and the glimpse of a shadow
connected with the flash of a descending sword.
------------
Chief Councilman Ralph
Nilgerson slammed his fist on the desk and glared at the man in the
monitor and said "I don't care how much rubble is sealing the
Teleportation center's entrances get those reinforcements out of the
mountain, Lady Callisto is facing a Avalon Senshi and an undetermined
number of Avalon operatives!" Switching video feeds abruptly
Ralph's features changed from anger to worry as he gazed through
another camera this one focused on the councils interrogation
chamber. Currently it held Doctors working on the girl that was a
fourteen year old version of his Lady Callisto.
Standing
up Ralph started pacing the length of the Council's executive command
center his eyes never quite leaving the display showing Princess
Callisto. He was worried Princess Callisto's sudden collapse had him
thinking something might have happened to Lady Callisto. Lady
Callisto ruthless use of her Henshin rod's memory function had
resulted in a younger twin that had a closer connection than any
natural twin ever had and it had given the two an uncanny ability to
sense the other.
Princess Callisto's collapse a few
minutes before had happened without warning and had the entire
council scared it hadn't taken long to determine that she wasn't
breathing and lacked a heart beat. It was almost Ironic, but the
closeness of the councils interrogation chambers and the associated
life support systems had probably saved her life, even so the young
girl had been dead for at least 45 seconds before they had gotten her
into life support.
Pausing directly in front of the
display as one of the doctors moved and gave the camera an
un-obstructed view of the young woman, Ralph frowned the lesions that
had spontaneously appeared on Princess Callisto's neck bothered him
and only the absence of the Callisto henshin rod reassured him that
his Lady Callisto was not dead.
He watched as one of
the large medics assisting the doctors made hand signs, the discrete
signs were geared for telling the condition of a person undergoing
heavy interrogation and designed to give the council members
overseeing the subject an idea of how hard they could push. In this
case they indicated that the patient was off life support and still
unconscious, but appeared to be recovering, brain activity was
increasing from a coma like state.
His worry slightly
mollified Ralph allowed contingency plans to settle back into his
subconscious for the moment his power base appeared to be secure, all
he required was at least one of the Callisto's to survived the
younger or the older, it didn't really matter.
--------
Milessa stood frozen trying
to blink or look away as she fearfully watched an object hover before
Luigi, she was terrified, an unearthly gray white flare had washed
out the headlines of her Paris paper sending her to her feet, only to
be caught by the light of a cold gray fire floating at eye level to
her seated husband.
Milessa's surprise had changed to
fear when two gentle pops heralded the appearance of a pair of rings,
coming from nowhere and going into orbit around the hovering crystal
rod. The rod's inner fire reached out to envelop the circling rings
even as she suddenly realized it was also holding her frozen in it's
cold grip.
Milessa would always be unsure, but minutes
or seconds later a heart tearing sob from her husband and a single
whispered word broke her trance allowing her to blink and turn eyes
toward him, his paper forgotten a hand slowly reaching into the gray
flames covering the flaring rod.
Focusing on Luigi's
face only added confusion to Milessa's frozen fear, in the ten years
of their marriage she had always been able to read her husband like
an open book and now all she could see was a determination laced with
a deep grief as his hand rose into the cold gray fire pouring from
the rod. She couldn't understand, couldn't he feel the deathly cold
bite of those unearthly flames?
"No",
Milessa desperately whispered straining trying to move against an
unseen force that encased her like sand, he was going to touch the
fire, why wasn't he scared? Why was he so sad? Milessa watched
helplessly as the rings broke orbit and floated to her husband's hand
each settling on a finger leaving his wedding band to separate them,
moments later his hand closed on the fiery rod.
Milessa
staggered forward toward her husband as the unseen sand seemed to
erode away in an unfelt wind, reaching she tried to grab his arm only
to gasp and scramble backwards away from the burning cold flames now
washing over Luigi's form and spilling across the floor driving her
into a corner and trapping her there whimpering behind a overturned
table.
---------
Luigi had been surprised and
very suspicious, at the sight of his mother's henshin rod, he had
hoped to never to hold that rod and when Lady Callisto and the League
council had exiled him to the German embassy in France twenty years
ago he had thought that legacy had been denied any future daughter or
grand daughter.
Slowly raising a hand toward the rod
Luigi let out an involuntary sob followed by "mother" as he
felt a resonance form with the henshin rod, he knew it and it knew
him, there was no question it was Lady Callisto's rod of power,
through it he again felt an echo from that distant moon and no power
on Earth could counterfeit that.
Luigi allowed the
link to form and with a single thought he guided the orbiting rings
to his fingers, never really feeling or noticing them settle as he
focused on the Callisto henshin rod now firmly held in the same hand.
Putting his grief aside Luigi frowned, this shouldn't
be, fourteen years ago one of the few friends he still had in the
League had visited and informed him that the council had finally
developed a cloning method. His friend had also mentioned that his
mother had just given birth to a new heir an "aunt" to him
and a younger twin sister to herself.
He had even met
his younger "aunt", his mother had shown up for his wedding
and she had been in tow, his heart had went out to the four year old
even as he felt a chill enter his soul, what had happened to the
League, how had they sunk so low?
Everyone had thought
the little girl had been so cute the way she dressed just like her
mother, but it went much deeper and only Luigi had the insight to
recognized the signs of a child far to young forced into using a
Silver Millennium artifact's memories. The little girls mannerisms
and movement weren't the normal actions of a child trying to act like
her mother.
Luigi bit his lower lip his "aunt's"
link to the Callisto Henshin rod had been nearly as strong as his
mothers, if she was still alive the Henshin rod should have found
her. His worry and fear deepening for his family especially his son
John, Luigi came to his feet as he realized what it meant for his
son, they needed to start running now as soon as the Lancelot League
realized he had the Henshin Rod they would come for it and his son.
After a couple of fear blinded steps first in one
direction and then in another he stopped and frowned, he needed to
know where to run, he was going to have to hide from both the League
and Avalon, but he needed to know what had happened how could both
have died? Had Avalon finally discovered Mystery and launched a
surprise Senshi led invasion of his hidden homeland?
Taking a deep breath and seating himself on the floor in a
meditation stance he started concentrating, he was about to try
something that would have been an automatic execution during the
Silver Millennium. Men even a Senshi's first born son could
only form a low level link with a henshin rod, the Silver Millennium
had been quite chauvinistic, they weren't allowed to access the
memories and only the worst situations imaginable would allow a man
to even hold a Henshin rod and form a meager link to it's power.
Luigi focused choosing his thoughts carefully as he used his
masculine limited access to the Henshin rod to order it to cross link
with his badly damaged Judge's teaching bracelet. Both were artifacts
given only to women and as such both should have contained the same
protective circuits to prevent full access by a man's mind or aura.
The protective circuits were supposed to be a
fail-safe design, removing or damaging the security circuits should
also destroy the esper link circuit and the associated memories
stored in the synthetic diamond and ruby. But somehow nearly seventy
years ago an ignorant Jeweler unaware of the bracelets true origin or
power had reshaped it into a center piece for an ornate necklace and
unknowingly succeeded in doing what experts for twenty thousand years
had said was impossible.
Focusing not on the Henshin
rod in his hand, but on the bracelet hanging as a amulet around his
neck Luigi gathered his thoughts to use the damaged artifact. Making
the bracelet work required very high levels of concentration, in the
nearly two hundred years of experience before his exile he had never
seen an artifact that had required more effort to use.
Settling deeper into a trance Luigi isolated out his link to the
bracelet normally he no longer needed this much preparation to reach
the required concentration levels, but now there was no room for
error, illegally tapping the power and memories of a Henshin rod,
wasn't something to try with a divided attention.
Putting
his grief for his mother completely from his mind and pushing his
worry for his family deep into his subconscious Luigi carefully
crafted the mental image/pattern he wanted to send. Like most
League teenagers Luigi had been taught the trick of voicing a rough
approximation of his mental command, the words held no actual meaning
for a Silver Millennium artifact, but they did serve to increase an
inexperienced person's esper threshold. Like most, Luigi had out
grown words within six months of being given his first artifact.
He had tried using the voicing technique with the Judges
bracelet, but it hadn't been quite enough to get reliable results,
eventually he had hit on speaking backwards and that had worked after
a fashion, it had been nearly twelve years and he still had to
vocalize his commands backwards to use the bracelet.
Taking a deep breath he spoke slowly saying ".SRUOH XIS TSAP
EHT YROMEM S'OTSILLAC YDAL WOHS"
Slumping
slightly in exhaustion and relief, as a three dimensional image
formed before him, it had worked and better yet the security hadn't
fried him or in this case explosively crystallize the water in his
body. Settling into a more relaxed position Luigi almost smiled at
the Irony, the League council had stripped him of his personal Silver
Millennium artifacts and then had thought to torture him with an
incredible waste of a precious splinter by giving him an artifact
they thought doubly useless to him.
Luigi cringed as
he heard a gasp and a whimper from behind him, turning and looking
over his shoulder he saw Milessa's fearful eyes peeking over an up
ended table.
Silently berating himself for forgetting
that his wife had also been in the room, he raised a hand and
motioned to her as he forced a sad smile and then saying "Honey
I can explain, this is a family legacy my mother has." Pausing
for a couple of heart beats Luigi regained control and continued "Has
died and beyond expectation that legacy has come to me."
----------
Luigi continued to speak
softly as his wife hesitantly made her way to his side saying "I've
activated the Callisto henshin rod." Hesitating yet again he
frowned trying to find a way to explain just what a henshin rod was
and what it was showing. After a moment he continued "Think of
the rod as my mothers magic wand and I've asked it to show me the
past." Cringing at having to use the word magic he took a breath
and blurted out "It's going to show mother's last six hours. I
need to know what could kill a Senshi."
After
Milessa had settled clumsily at his side, he hugged her and whispered
"I'm sorry Milessa for not telling you of my true back ground.
This isn't really magic." Stopping at the look of complete
disbelief on his wife's face, he finally said after several seconds
of thought "It isn't magic at least not your def..."
"Is that a unicorn!" turning from his wife he looked at
the holographic display generated by his bracelet and saw his
mother's hands in her private stable giving sugar cubes to the horses
and mice to the pair of Griffins and a unicorn also stabled there.
Idly he thought "This isn't going to be easy."
-----------
Milessa listened to a
distant clock strike one AM as she carefully positioned her husband's
head on a cushion taken from a chair, about an hour ago Luigi had
broken down crying and a few minutes after that he had drifted into
an exhausted sleep tucking a rug around her husband she left the
room. Now he needed to sleep, seeing his mother be-headed from her
own point of view didn't need to be fresh in his mind, getting out of
the German embassy to France during war was going to take skill and a
lot of it.
Trembling slightly Milessa left the study
and made her way toward their son's room. She felt sick, reality had
taken on the feathery feel of a nightmare. A nightmare she suspected
the world would not soon wake from, her confidence in France's
defenses had been shaken by what she had seen and she was never going
to forget the sad laugh her husband had given and the retort of "One
wall does not a fortress make." when she had mentioned the
Maginot line.
Pausing at her son's room she quickly
checked on him, thinking on what she had learned and seen in the past
seven hours, Unicorns, Griffins, an under water city, a battle
between two Sorceress one who used wind and water and her own mother
in law that fought with ice and a freezing fire and then there was
her executioner a man Luigi swore was King Arthur a man not seen by
the League in well over a thousand years.
-----------
Arthur Pendragon groaned
softly as he put the young American down quickly placing a hand on
the man's back steadying him as he staggered, in the soft glow
generated by Arthur's armour.
As sore as he was inside the
armour he didn't envy the young man that had rode in his arms in
their desperate escape. Arthur had been forced to drive his armour to
it's limit only the heavily shielded trickle of energy from Lady
Triton allowing it to sustain a bone jarring cross country speed of
ten to fifteen miles an hour for the last six hours. Settling on a
small boulder he watched as the young American staggered around the
cave slowly working the life back into his limbs. Turning his
attention inward Arthur frowned as he worked on sending information,
reassurance and questions over the power link to Lady Triton. The
link wasn't suited for that especially in stealth mode, it was
relatively easy to hide a low level power transmission as wide band
white noise, but adding in a coherent signal, even a scrambled one
ran the risk of creating a pattern noticeable to many Silver
Millennium artifacts.
Arthur had started to use a
wider bandwidth link, but Lady Triton had quickly overrode that, he
hadn't had much time to describe what they had found under and around
Neuschwanstien Castle and sending thought images were out of the
question, but the terse verbal description mostly stolen from his
American companion or the lost Lady Titan had only added to the
turmoil in the Avalon council.
Lady Titan's death
hadn't just been a shock to her oldest daughter, the woman's grand
son was in a stage production and hundreds of Avalon's citizens had
been present when the Titan Henshin rod had appeared and upstaged it.
One thing you could say about the Silver Millennium rulers was that
they liked to give a good show.
"It's going to be
worse than I thought isn't it." broke from his internal thoughts
and the slow dialogue with Lady Triton, Arthur looked up at his
American companion and after several seconds of confusion realized
what the most recent and probably last Knight of the round table was
speaking of and said "Yes. Sir Jones what we discovered and
those that died mean that this war is going to be far worse than
anyone thought."
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
howard melton