Nightscream
Skull turned superhero.
I was born Benedict Jameson Scott, in Kings Row. My father, ‘Jimmy,’ was a marine, stationed overseas on embassy guard duty, and I rarely saw him, and could never find anything to say to him when I did. Mary, my mother, worked as a nurse in my earlier years, but after an accident with a drug prescription, found herself stripped of her nursing qualifications and ended up working at the King Garment Factory. She started on the floor, assembling clothing, but was a supervisor, and then a floor manager, in only a few years time, as she said that the job was far less demanding than her previous work. She joked that her title was ‘overseer’ and that those who worked under her called her ‘slave overseer’ behind her back, due to her strictness. I was well aware of that, since she was just as strict at home, with rules and curfews for everything.
I was eight when my dad died in a bombing at his embassy, and the information provided to us by the military made it sound like he died a pointless death, one that would never be addressed. It was about that time that my mother lost her nursing job, and I later learned it was because she had taken up drinking, and had gotten sloppy. She abandoned the drinking after losing her nursing registration, but grew ever stricter.
I rebelled. By the time I was in high school, all of my friends’ parents seemed much more lenient, to my mind, and I felt that I was a model child, with outstanding grades, no interest in drugs or gangs or smoking or any of the other things that were starting to take hold in the local high schools. And so I began to break the rules. I started to hang out with the people that broke the rules, and I thought of them as my friends, even as they thought of me as their meal ticket to a passing grade.
I was introduced to the Skulls when I was still only a sophomore in high school, and I never looked back, taking an interest in the occult leanings of some of the more secretive members (and not sparing a single thought for the drug use rampant among some of the less intelligent members, since that wasn’t for me). They humored me in my wish to graduate high school, and by that time I was the only one of my ‘new friends’ to have done so. And yet I found myself almost being groomed by the leaders, who called themselves ‘Bone Daddies,’ and not assigned to the rank and file, like my former friends.
Two weeks after graduation, I moved out, my mother crying about how I didn’t even have a job, or a plan for life, that I was giving up everything to be a ‘hoodlum,’ and moved in with my new friends. They introduced me to the night, and the things that whisper in the darkness. I didn’t know at that time that only one in three prospective ‘Bone Daddies’ wake up from that experience with their mind intact. Some don’t wake up alive. Some disappear into the darkness and are never seen again. Others wake up, but are alien, their minds consumed by the things that live in the outer dark (and I suspect that they are the source of the strange ‘Eidolons’ that serve the cause of the Vazhilok).
I heard them, they spoke to me, and the secrets I learned from them were not the things they meant to teach. Instead of just learning to manipulate the darkness, I also reached into their minds, as they reached into mine. The mystic joining was far more complete than anyone had intended, and I barely retained my sanity. I spent a week in a coma before waking up, having completely forgotten how to walk or control my limbs. I remembered everything else, far more than I cared to remember, in truth. I spent months in physical rehabilitation, under my mothers care, as the Bone Daddies declared me a lost cause after I didn’t wake up and dumped my body in the street, where a street-cleaner found it in the early hours of the morning.
To this day, my mother is convinced that I suffered some sort of brain damage as a result of drug use. I’ll let her think that, as it will be easier for her than to think that I nearly lost my soul to powers that exist outside of space and time…
My mental abilities have grown tremendously. I was always insightful, and gifted intellectually, but now I can feel the unease my nature engenders, and I can reach into myself, where the darkness murmurs and roils, like an oily stain on my soul, and fling it forth to enmire those who stand against me. A glimpse of the shapes I have seen, a whisper of their teachings, is enough to make a strong man fall faint, or be frozen in terror. My knowledge is now a weapon, and to my former allies among the Skulls, it is one that will prove to be their undoing, as deadly as any gun. I have seen things in the night that they cannot understand.
I have spoken to my father, dead these many years, and learned how he died a hero, rushing into the crumbling embassy to try to save embassy support staff and their families. Things that the government never saw fit to tell his family. Knowing this, it made my decision easier. I would not hide my abilities, I would not live my mothers life and be less than I could be, burying my talents with menial work or hard drink.
When I registered to be a ‘superhero’ for