Amalgamite
From Justice Force
Amalgamite
Sitting here in Paragon, drinking my beer or trying to if it doesn’t start flying again, has gotten me to thinking how everything all led up to this point in my life.
Still hard to believe, it’s been twenty four years ago that the facility blew up. Eight years after that happened, in 1986, I came into my own set of circumstances that have seemed to have changed my future forever.
I was a child prodigy, a genius by all accounts, but I didn’t have any idea about what was to occur ahead of me.
Growing up in Milwaukee wasn’t easy. With a name like Thoric, what’s easy? I couldn’t really adapt to the social pressures of my age group, and preferred to be alone most of the time in my books. Graduating from college at the age of sixteen, I was soon noticed by our government for my expertise at biochemistry. I had a job right away, working for their research facility out in Washington.
Both my parents died when I was only ten in a private plane accident. At least, I think it was an accident.
Until the government hired me, I was raised by an old professor over at UW Madison in Wisconsin. I still try to make trips there from time to time. The professor is gone too now, but I go there for the camping which I like to do in my off time.
That’s where it really began to get screwy. It was on one of them camping trips that I acquired these powers of mine. When the facility blew up and the investigations had reached a dead end, I was transferred back to Washington D.C. to work at the pentagon. In 1986, I decided like I had done many times before to go camping back in my home state not expecting anything out of the ordinary to happen. Since I had a love of spelunking, I went cave exploring up near Rib Mountain near Wausau.
As I descended the shaft about fifty feet down, I could see that the walls were starting to buckle. To complicate matters worse, my cable snapped and I fell some thirty feet further down into the shaft. I landed hard, breaking one of my legs, and then passing out. When I came to, it was pitch blackness and I didn’t know whether I was dead or alive at that moment. I fumbled around in the dark, groping the ground, trying to find something that would allow me to see. I stumbled across my lantern quite by chance and was really grateful that I did.
As I lit the lantern, I found myself trapped in what seemed to be an abandoned mine tunnel. I followed the ancient tracks of where mine cars a century ago had operated. I then noticed a passageway off to my right that wasn’t part of the tunnel. It must of opened up when the walls crumbled in. I decided to follow this new airway. With my backpack only set up for rations that would last me one week, I had to find a way out and maybe this was it.
To help me walk, I carved a walking stick out of one of the old beams down there. Soon, I discovered unfortunately that I wasn’t going anywhere. The passage ended in a large cavern filled with stalactites and stalagmites. I had to make the best of a bad situation. Lucky there was an underground stream with a low ceiling where I believe the air was coming in from. The ceiling was way too low for me to swim out of there, and I had no idea of how long the stream stretched so I just had to stay put and wait. But wait for what, I didn’t know. Nobody really knew I was down there. Some people only knew the general vicinity where I was cave exploring, that’s all.
Off to the side, there was an enclosed pool of water which was cut off from the stream by a good ten feet. I tested both bodies of waters with a portachem test kit I carried with me. The test showed only that the pool was potable. The stream was too minerally concentrated with heavy elements to be drinkable. I was tired by this time from the walking on one bum leg now so I rested.
The next day, I explored other options in case my food ran out. I knew I had plenty of water, but I also needed solid nourishment as well. I found that I wasn’t the only inhabitant down here. There were cave crickets and little ghost frogs hoppin around. In the stream, I discovered cave fish and small crustaceans that would fulfill my needs until hopefully I got rescued. Never did see any bats down there. If there were any, they probably flew out when the shaft collapsed. I marked time on a wall as long as my watch held out. I had no choice. This was to be my home for a while.
I drank from the pool, fished in the stream, and caught the creatures that were there. I even studied the creatures down there besides eating them. I bathed in the pool as well, not thinking anything of it at the time. I wrote everything down in my journal to keep myself occupied. My rations ran out and I was only subsisting on what I found there. My leg was still broken, but the pain never seemed to bother me that much and was actually receding as the days went on. At the time, I didn’t know why because my chief concern was a rescue. The rescue came about a month later. It made the Wausau news, but that was as far as it went.
It seems that my government security at the pentagon put a lid on the rescue and dampened the story a bit over there in Wausau. Being a prodigy has its drawbacks in that respect. I mean for the length of time I was trapped down there, my rescue was miraculous to say the least, but alas the government didn’t want the public to know anymore than they had to. I was placed at Walter Reed Hospital for a week and underwent their battery of tests.
They may have noticed nothing out of the ordinary, but I did. After the week was over and I was given a clean bill of health, I was to resume my job over at the pentagon. I decided right there that I wasn’t about to say anything to anyone about what I knew to be strange. I kept it as much of a secret as I could.
I never did tell them that my good friend Derek was alive and that I wasn’t the only survivor of the facility meltdown. I sure wasn’t going to tell them this. I couldn’t really understand it myself.
When they rescued me and took me over to the hospital, I didn’t know or even feel that my leg was okay. But after I was released, I was confused and quizzical in mind as to how this could be. I kept my mouth shut nonetheless and just did my job.
In the meantime, I spent my spare time researching what might have caused the miraculous healing of my leg. I went to the Library of Congress and pored over every medical text I could, but I didn’t and wasn’t going to find an answer there. I did self testing on myself with my own private lab and found nothing that would explain it either.
It wasn’t until a month later that things were going to get even stranger.
One morning as I got dressed and went into the bathroom to shave, I started to notice some bumps on my face that were definitely not there before. Something seemed to be crawling just under the skin that I could feel. I was getting scared. I contacted the pentagon and got me a leave of absence from work until I could figure this one out.
Several days went by and the bumps were getting more pronounced. Still, I had no answers. Then in November of ‘86, my hair started falling out. First a little, then in large clumps. I thought for sure, it was cancer of some sort.
Even the doctors I went to, thought the same thing, and in fact, so did their tests.
I just didn’t believe that. I mean cancer. Come on. Since when do bumps move in a cancer? It was a mystery for sure. Anyway, at least the government wouldn’t be trailing my backside on this unique enigma. I continued to monitor my situation in the meantime since I had no more job to worry about. Then one morning, I really got a shock. I went along my daily routine of showering in the morning when I looked in the mirror. I thought I was going to fall over.
My face was turning colors and not just one color, mind you. I had a whole palette painted to my face. This lasted another three days where upon it settled on an orange shade. The pupils of my eyes had turned purple. The rest of my body was changing too into different colors of the rainbow. This was really getting weird. I kept myself dressed whenever anyone would come by, and wore a hood to conceal my features. From my apartment, I paid bills and ordered groceries through my computer. I didn’t dare risk being seen like I was. I had become a freak of nature.
I never went out, and felt trapped like I felt when I was in that cavern. Then, it dawned on me that perhaps something I ate in the cave did this to me. I packed up some gear and stole away into the night so as nobody could see me. I was an outcast anyway. I went back out to Wausau to investigate on my own. I set up my tent near the collapsed shaft through which I fell. The government barricades were long gone from August when the rescue took place. If this was a cancer, it sure was unlike any I ever worked with or heard about. I wasn’t weak or anything else related to a course, a cancer would follow.
I figured in the morning dawn, I would descend again to the cavern. Just before the light cracked over the eastern horizon, I was awoken by a tremendous roaring sound. I found myself staring eye to eye with a huge black bear. He must of stood at least six ten and weighed maybe about five hundred pounds. I couldn’t be sure on that, but he was big, that’s for sure. I managed to react in time to avoid the first sweep of his paw as it blew by my neck. I could smell his mangy hide and he stunk. That bear must have had a previous encounter with a skunk, I figure because he really reeked and was extremely angry about something.
Anyway, he managed to corner me up against a copse of woods. I thought for sure now, I was a goner. He took another swing at me and his claws met my body. Instead of slicing through me like I thought his claws would, they broke off the bear’s paw. All he did do, was tear up the clothes I was wearing in this brief fight. The bear was now frightened and ran off to soothe its wound to its paw over at a nearby stream. The sound the contact made when he hit me was strange like everything else before this wasn’t. Heh heh. Only I wasn’t laughing because it was funny. It was more like sardonic humor. That sound, I will never forget. A clanging like metal. Then as the bear went away, I noticed my skin turning back to what passed now for normal.
I saw that my skin was like iron. In fact, it was iron if just for that moment. Now I was getting even more scared. What the hell was going on, I wished someone would tell me. As if it was a silent prayer offered to some deity, I got an answer, and it was coming from inside my head. To be more specific, the message was within my entire body, not just my head. Something or someone was trying to make contact with me. It wasn’t just one voice either, but a cacophony of voices which at the time, I couldn’t make out.
This was a relatively mild winter. The snows had not come early this year. Already, it was January and there was just a dusting of the white powder up here. The hibernation of the animals, I could see, was greatly off schedule because of this weather. I can understand why the bear was out of his cave and searching for peace and maybe some food. That was all natural, but what was happening to me was far from it.
After a while, the voices seemed to had taken a protocol structure, and I was getting better at understanding what was being told to me. At first, I was a mixture of anger, frustration, and still confused in my thoughts. Then after their story, I felt sorry for them instead. Theirs was a race of aliens who had set out to explore new territory in the hopes that they could preserve their race.
Their world was dying and they set out into space. After many millenium of years and generations gone by, they arrived on our world about the time of our Jurassic period when dinosaurs were the only animals dominating this planet.
Unable to communicate with the giant beasts, they were also unable to leave. Their ships were not powerful enough to escape our gravity field. In fact, their scientists discovered that if they didn’t get protection from the outside air pressure, they would all be crushed under the weight. Surprisingly, they found that water pressures of the earth worked in reverse. So they moved their civilization completely to a watery environment.
Many years of growing changes on our planet were studied, but for the most part let go. By the time we humans appeared on this world, their scientists had given up looking for any intelligent life forms. It wasn’t until they encountered me through a mischance of circumstances in that cavern that they even knew, intelligent life existed on this world. They explained to me after taking a while to assimilate our language that they had been living in that pool since they came here. Generation after generation of them, continuing to live their lives as normal as their culture dictated. When I drank that water from the pool, I was drinking them in a sense.
Their race was a sub-microscopic race that was even smaller than our viruses. Our finest electron microscopes could not even begin to pick them up on scope. Their civilization was now at three hundred billion and that I had drank their entire race in my stay within that cavern. I was accidentally granted a unique opportunity. I was the only individual in the world who would ever feel these powers that have somehow permeated my body.
I was elated but at the same time, felt the responsibility that goes with having any kind of power. In return for my powers, I provided a mobile home for this race of aliens whereby they could begin to study our world anew.
They allow me limited telepathy with another as well as a mental shield to block out others from reading my mind. It is a double-edged sword of safety so others would not discover them as well.
We enjoy a symbiotic relationship unlike any other, I’ve ever heard of. They told me the bumps have stopped moving. The only reason they were, was because they were travelling within my body to re-orient themselves with a new set of surroundings. My leg being healed like it was never broken was also their doing. Sort of a preliminary thank you for my body accepting them.
The year 1987 was mostly spent in isolation, training my powers and following the teachings of this race on how to use them. This molecular body morphing transmutation allows me to transform parts or my entire body to any element which has its own strengths and weaknesses which they made me painfully aware of. As long as my vital organs aren’t damaged seriously, I can regenerate lost molecules. In practice, I’ve already lost and regain a few parts. I was still having doubts about how to help anyone out so I went back to my old friend, Derek.
Seems I was hearing quite a bit about him under his new title, The Traveller. Nobody still had any idea that he was the Derek Williams, I knew. I gave him a call and he agreed to meet with me and talk this over. After a long conversation with him, he convinced me about turning super hero, but he couldn’t get me to join his organization.
I had no reason to join FIST. Just wasn’t my thing.
My symbiotic friends also told me, I wouldn’t age and that twenty eight earth years would be my permanent age. That made me at least accept my role a little better. Not aging was great, let’s face it. I decided to keep it small in scope, my superheroing. I started in and around Wisconsin. I even got good at changing my appearance a little so as not to frighten anybody too much. I remember the first time as if it were today that I used my powers to stop crime. It was exhilarating.
We have a lot of small towns here, and in Clam Lake it happened where the local bank was being robbed. I just happened to be in the vicinity, camping again of course. There were three of them who walked into that bank, and at the sound of the sirens from the local police, they were taking hostages. Feeling trapped, they knew they had everything to lose so they weren’t going to hesitate about taking someone out along the way.
I hovered behind the bank and above it. Since it was my first time, I didn’t want anyone to notice me. I saw the air duct on the roof of the bank, and since the police were busy down below with the people that had gathered and what was going on inside the bank, they didn’t see me. I changed to pure nitrogen gas and entered the duct. I allowed myself to flow through the ducts and out into the bank proper, blanketing the entire inside of the bank.
Before anyone really realized what was going on, customers, bank employees, and the robbers were dropping into a sleep. One of the robbers who was kind of trigger happy, tried to fire off a shot, but with the oxygen in the air snuffed by my being, it never went off.
I exited as I came in, and the police upon entering the bank didn’t know what to make of everyone sleeping like that. They were bewildered as they hauled away the would-be villains. Nobody had an explanation for it so it remained a mystery. I was just glad, I was there to help. Didn’t need the limelight. In the twelve years I spent superheroing in Wisconsin, I eventually did become known to the press who dubbed me the elemental wonder.
I decided if I was going to have a name, I might as well choose it myself and I settled on Amalgamite. In 2000, I packed up my bags and headed out for Paragon City where a new threat I heard was coming.
At first, I thought this threat was some group calling itself the Freak Show, but then I found out, it was some demonlord headed for the city. When I first came to Paragon, I fought with this Freak Show when I saw them trying to poison the reservoir north of the city. A group of heroes calling themselves Outsiders were at work fighting them when I arrived. I came in and gave them a hand. It was then that they surprised me by inviting me to join their group.
I accepted their invitation. I was never asked before to be part of anyone’s group. I was always the loner. Except for my symbiotic allies and Derek, I knew nobody when I came to Paragon. The government was just a job I had. Never got involved with anyone there socially. It was all business. Here, I finally felt, I had a home.
The demonlord did come, and I along with several others helped a hero named Infinity vanquish it. We even had help from one of Traveller’s friends whom I have only met briefly.
For the most part, I have made myself available for rescuing others when they needed my help. Like when Team1 headquarters fell and people were trapped. I know what it is like to be trapped. I was working for the carnival here until recently when they were closed up by order of the mayor. Only job I actually could get being the freak now as I was.
It seems, the mayor has this real fear of carnivals lately. Don’t know why that is though. You see, I can only use my limited telepathy if the aliens will it so, and they won’t for this.
Right now, I’m in a down period. My alien friends aren’t talking lately and that has me worried as well.
I can only hope that whatever it is, they can resolve it so I can get my mind on something more important.
Until then, it’s just another beer, and see what tomorrow may bring.
