The Stormcrow, A Superhero's Tale Options

[SubRosa]

Acadian: That was a nice interlude for January to flex her wings and take the moment to sharpen her abilities to adapt to the upcoming challenge of descending into the deep. I liked writing it because it gave another opportunity to show how magic works, and how individual's interact with it.

Jan's Elements are the classic five: Air, Earth, Fire, Water, and Spirit. Though that is not to say those are the official ones for the world. There are as many or few as each individual magician believes there are. It all depends on how you look at it.

I suppose if January was a Transformer she would turn into a Chevy Bolt, or maybe a Lightning GT.

That would have been an excellent opportunity for Calypso to have a sidekick . Or even a pet like Viuda's tarantula Toby. Sadly I never had the opportunity to get that deep into her development. Silverlight OTOH does have someone whom we will eventually meet - her contact in the Pentagon.


Renee: I made a playlist of sailing songs to listen to while I wrote the underwater scenes in this story, to help get me in the mood. Things like Downeaster Alexa, Orinoco Flow, The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, Sloop John B, that sort of thing. I am listening to it right now.

Silverlight's Mind Link is a pretty standard power for Telepaths. It is basically just a psychic radio that a team can all use to communicate with.

Autobots, Roll Out! is sort of the catch phrase for the Transformers. Their leader Optimus Prime says when they go into action.

Calypso needs to have a way to disguise her boat, otherwise anyone will be able to look up the name, flag of origin, serial numbers, etc... and find out her secret identity. Otherwise it would be the same as a super driving into action with the license plates visible on their car.











Calypso's Theme Music = Elton John - The Circle of Life

Hudson Canyon can be found on the Stormcrow Map

Continental Shelf/Slope Transition

Six-Gill Shark

Hagfish



Book 12.27 - Broken Arrow

While the ocean had seemed featureless from above, down here it was something different. On one hand, yes, the water disappeared into a blue haze in all directions. But that haze was not empty. She saw fish of various kinds suspended within this liquid world all around. She could not come close to identifying any of them. She just knew that there were big ones and small ones, fat ones and sleek ones. It was like a different planet from the one she lived upon.

Soon the soft blue all around faded to deep velvet, and they passed into a realm of eternal twilight. Here the normally bright rays of the sun were nothing but a pale glimmer overhead. The distance at which everything turned to an indistinguishable haze closed in sharply now, and narrowed the world to a small space around the heroes.

Yet if anything January noted there was more life around them than before, and in ever stranger shapes. There was a little squid that swam so that one big, bulbous yellow eye eternally pointed up, and another, far smaller black eye on the other side of its body faced ever down. There was a jellyfish that looked almost like a transparent traffic cone. There were fish of all sizes and shapes, and even more types of squid, and octopi, and others.

Twilight soon melted into total blackness. Well, it would have, were it not for Silverlight. The lunar stone of her staff Mene's headpiece gave off a continuous glow. Like the moon in a night sky, it was a literal light shining through the darkness. This created a zone of illumination around the heroes. After a moment Calypso waved one hand through the water around her, and a second glow of light sprang up around them. Beyond these twin beacons, the world simply vanished into inky darkness.

January stretched out into the astral with her senses, and immediately this seemingly empty void was filled with life. She did not bother to close her eyes, as she often did when astrally sensing. There was little her meat eyes could do to distract her magical senses here. Beyond her immediate group of allies, the marine world was lit by the warm glow of both magic and life. The latter came in all shapes and sizes. Some floated aimlessly in the water, others darted to and fro with seeming purpose.

Through it all January began to detect a faint rain of particles that slowly fell down alongside them. To her meat eyes it looked like snow. To her astral senses it was clearly something biological. In fact, it was a lot of something biological. But it was not alive. In the magical realm she could sense that it was tiny bits and pieces from many, many beings. It reminded January of some sort of detritus, like nail clippings, or flaked-off skin.

"Marine snow," Calypso's telepathically projected voice rang through her skull. "That is what it is called. It is tiny bits of organic material that falls down from the upper levels of the ocean. Scales, droppings, mucus, bits of flesh from dead fish, and so on. Everything above us eventually falls down here, and becomes one of the primary fuels for life in the deep."

January turned that over in her head. It was bits of dead fish and marine mammals that were falling down around her. But then again, it was not like fish had cemeteries. When something in the ocean died it was naturally going to end up one place: the bottom.

So far her water breathing spell was holding up fine. She was now thankful that she was not straining oxygen from the water with gills like a regular fish did. Then she would be breathing in all that second-hand fish snot. Instead the element of Air itself filled her lungs and bloodstream with life-giving oxygen.

Still, she was reminded of an old quote by Joseph Campbell. "Life lives on life. This is the sense of the symbol of the Ouroboros, the serpent biting its tail. Everything that lives lives on the death of something else."

Or as Elton John might say, it was the circle of life.

"What is that?" Mercury's voice came through the mental link loud and clear, with an unmistakable note of trepidation.

January snapped her awareness around, even as Calypso slowed their descent to a halt. That gave them all a chance to see what the Philadelphian meant. It was a gigantic fish, well over twenty feet long. It could only be a shark, given its distinctive shape. But it was odd. Its dorsal fin was practically non-existent, and pushed far back along its body. Its pectoral fins were likewise smaller than normal, and its head possessed a blunt shape.

It came near enough that January could see its face with her meat eyes now. She was immediately struck by its gaze. All of the sharks January had ever seen in pictures had black eyes. Like a doll's eyes some might say. But these looked all-too human, with slightly iridescent pupils that were set within a wider white sclera. It was like a person looked back at her, rather than an animal.

"Hexanchus griseus!" Calypso exclaimed. "A sixgill shark. We are lucky indeed, to meet this fellow. They are very rare. I wish we had more time. I would love to swim with him and film him. I have not seen one this far north in the Atlantic before."

"Yeah but is it going to try to eat us?" Mercury said what January was thinking. She had seen the movie Jaws. She knew that it was fiction, and that not all sharks acted like the one in that movie. Actually that no sharks acted like the one in that movie, given that it ate ships. But that cold, rational portion of her mind was fighting with the reptilian part that was screaming at her to start punching.

"Nah, trust me bro, we taste like old jock straps to sharks." Ranger assured the other man. "I've swum with them plenty of times. They don't want none of this..."

"Speak for yourself!" Mercury laughed. "I assure you, I am highly desired! Just usually not by fish..."

"It is probably just curious because of the light," Calypso noted. "As long as it does not think we are competition for food, we are fine. Besides, it will not be able to keep up with us."

With that, Calypso whirled her staff around, and the team once more swept down into the depths. As the aquanaut had said, they left the shark far, far behind them as they continued ever to the bottom. At least January imagined that was where they were headed. She had no real way to orient herself in the utter darkness. They could have been going up, and she would not have known it.

As she had expected, the pressure began to mount as they descended. It started as a gentle touch all around her. Then it slowly turned into a tighter and tighter squeeze. But the spell Calypso had taught her adjusted as they went deeper, and countered it all the while. January could feel the water pressing in, and felt the magic pressing back. That kept her mostly in equilibrium, mostly. But the reality of the crushing weight of the water above her was ever present in her mind.

The same was true of the cold. January was keenly aware of the chill that seeped into her bones from the water around her. But whether it was due to the spell Calypso had taught her, or her own natural invulnerabilities, it did not really bother January either. Rather it merely felt like a crisp spring morning.

This might have seemed like a simple sight-seeing trip so far. But there was no mistaking the fact that this was the most dangerous journey January had ever taken. In some ways it was even more deadly than the Abyss itself. That world—as alien and inimical to life as it had been—had not tried to crush her into a fine mist and choke the life from her lungs.

Then something did come into view. It was the bottom. January could sense it beneath them through the astral. In a way it reminded her of a grassy hillside. But in this case it was not plant life that she sensed embedded within and overlaying the crust of the earth below. Rather it was a plethora of that marine detritus that snowed down from above. Along with it were numerous small animals, such as sea cucumbers, urchins, lobsters, crabs, and the like.

From this blanket of life and organic matter, she was able to make out that they stood upon the edge of an underwater ridge or escarpment. Behind them the land was relatively flat. But before them it sloped down sharply to some lower depth, as of yet unplumbed and unseen. January hoped there were no shoggoths down there. Now she regretted reading all those Lovecraft stories when she was younger...

"We are at the edge of the continental shelf," Calypso explained. "It is the relatively shallow water that rings the continents. During the last Ice Age much of this would have been above sea level. Before us is the continental slope. It angles down to the true depths below."

The ridge went off as far as she could sense to her left. But when she looked to her right, January saw that the continual slope and shelf alike were rent open by a wide, jagged slash. It was like some giant had split it open with a massive, celestial axe. It was so wide that January could not sense the far wall of this deep crevasse. She could only sense the void it created in the slope around her. It was like they hung at the edge of the Grand Canyon.

"Welcome to Hudson Canyon," Calypso declared. She moved her staff about, and the team of heroes swept off to the side. For a moment they hung suspended over the black waters of the canyon. The then they plunged straight down into the ravine. "This is a deep notch cut by the flow of the Hudson River. We are near the lower end, meaning here it is over half a mile wide."

"It feels like a different planet down here." Hwarang gave voice to what January felt. She wondered if Janos Heisen had felt the same when he had descended into the atmosphere of Jupiter.

"Which way Silverlight," Calypso turned to their eldest sister present, who still clutched the old parachute to her breast.

"That way," Silverlight pointed one marble hand out, toward the deeper water beyond the open maw of the canyon. "Somewhere down there."

"Are we close?" Mercury wondered as they swept down the canyon walls, and plunged deeper into the abyss.

"I cannot tell," Silverlight shook her head. "It's confusing now... It wants to pull me in more than one direction."

"So you mean you aren't sure which way to go?" The exasperation was clear in Ranger's psychic voice. "Has that ever happened before?"

"I don't know," Silverlight said. "I've never done this before."

"You've never done this before!" Now it was Hwarang's turn to voice consternation. "You could be leading us on a wild goose chase down here!"

"She will lead us to the wreckage," January declared with certitude. "I know it. Just give her some time."

"It could be that the plane has broken up into multiple pieces," Calypso considered. "This often happens with ships. I sometimes find parts of them miles away from the main wreckage, and even that can often be broken in two or three separate sections."

"So Keep 19 might be spread all over the bottom here," Mercury managed to whistle in January's head. "Oy vey! This makes things... more interesting."

"We will have to go one at a time, until we rule them all out," Calypso insisted. "Just pick one bearing and follow it Silverlight. We shall see what we find, when we find it."

With that they continued on, until they finally hit the very bottom at the base of the canyon. It felt strange to feel land under her feet. Or at least underwater land, such as it was. Given that there was an entire ocean on top of her, January had the feeling that the world was somehow upside down. The land was supposed to be at the top of the water, not the bottom of it!

If not for the bits of marine snow suspended all around, January would have thought that she was standing in the desert. There was no plant life here at all. Instead it was a long sheet of what looked like dirt, mixed with tiny stones and a layer of silt. The muddy surface was not featureless however. It was an endless plain of tiny hills and pockmarks, ridges and troughs. It reminded January of the surface of the moon. Though unlike that heavenly body however, most of these features were only a few inches in height or depth either way down here.

They now trudged along the bottom, and their feet kicked up small clouds of silt in their wake. They came upon a cluster of long and slender life forms, and January could not help but to lower her astral senses for a moment and look at them with purely meat eyes. They were hagfish! She could not contain her delight at seeing the serpentine creatures, with their spiky-crowned heads. They writhed and swum about, and seemed to be picking away at the carcass of some long-dead sea animal.

"Look at them!" January exclaimed. "Aren't they beautiful?"

"They look kind of gross..." Ranger murmured.

"Yeah, what's so exciting about eels?" Mercury wondered.

"Those are hagfish, not eels," Calypso pointed out.

"My original armor was made from their snot!" January declared. "Gadget still uses it too, as the base layer for his powered armor."

She wanted to reach out to try to pet one. But even now the others were following Silverlight ever onward.

"Ewww!" Ranger's disgust was clear in his mental voice.

"That's just... nasty..." Mercury added.

"No, that is brilliant!" Calypso insisted. "Hagfish eject a cloud of mucus as a defense mechanism. It is filled with extremely strong and flexible fibers. I have read that the US Navy was experimenting with using it to coat the hulls of their ships in order to reduce drag."

"It is really, really good at fire defense too. It saved my life in the Flying Dutchman fire." January turned away from the hagfish, and hurried to catch up to the others. "It's handy for stopping bullets too."