EPISODE ONE:
DANE THUNDERBECK STANDS UP

CHAPTER 99 - THUNDERBECK SITS DOWN

He was trapped in an anticipatory state as reality redressed itself. The martian scientist's box protected him, but only a little bit. Memories of things that had never happened still seeped in as he crouched there; some of his old one's went away.

Eventually, the roaring stopped. He opened the lid of his measly box and stood.

He had been Dane Thunderbeck. Now he was nobody very important. And this new Thunderbeck, not a living legend, not a warlord of worlds, hadn't the strength to make things that way again.
He shut the lid of the box and had a sit down. Covered in the dust of a nameless moon, he had a sit down. And he just didn't get back up. When he tired of sitting, he went to the ground, and curled up in the thin air, and went to sleep.

There was, of course, no morning. He lay there, and dreamed a long fractured dream, and that dream was the last reason he had to exist.



CHAPTER 1 - THE MAN WHO ROARED

I was young, and I loved my world, and hoped, and marvelled at the magnificent adventures that filled my own life.

I had been a soldier and it destroyed me. But destruction was as boring as peace, and so I spent three years in Paris as a magician. It was slightly more satisfying;

but only the last trick was real, all of the other times, I was a liar, and I gave them the salve: a way to live through their otherwise bland lives.

Except for that last time.

I came across a piece of dust.

It was a grey afternoon, and I sat with my friends at a Turkish-styled coffee house of the slums. We were enjoying our occasional opiate, and as I brought the black, sticky tincture to my lips, I saw a glinting flake, a shaving of metal. Unable to afford quality narcotics, my friends and I were not unused to such impurities. I picked the flake out with my fingernail, and suddenly felt transformed.

Though I had yet to partake that afternoon, my mind was on fire, and still, simultaneously From the tingling in my finger I deduced that it was the strange metal that was affecting me.

Intrigued, I toook my leave of my friends and retired to my cupboard apartment. My aunt was a chemist in Lyon, and so I set off that night to impose upon her.

Two days later, she and I stood in her modest laboratory running electrical currents through my little flake. I misunderstood much of what she explained to me, but apparently the metal emitted electro-waves, radio signals both very high and very low. As to the metal's composition, my brilliant aunt could not say. We split the piece in two, and she agreed to test further.

I returned to Paris, the half-flake pressed between my forefinger and thumb, giving me thoughts such as I'd never known. I conceived of a marvellous illusion - a magic trick that was not a trick, for I felt as if genius had overtaken me.

And so I stood in that little theatre. Before my audience, I spoke, not with a showman's austentation, but very calmly.

"My friends," I said, "I have before me a simple mechanism. It is a wheel, as you see, like the wheel of roulette. Here is a ball, a metal bearing, that I shall cast upon the wheel in a moment. On the turn of this wheel shall hinge the course of your life. And mine. Red. Black. Black. Red. You see the copper wires that run from this wheel."

The wires of which I spoke ran from the turnwheel to the underneath of a tarp.

"Watch," I said. I pulled away the covering, revealing the dynamite sticks. Piled as high as a man. There where gasps of panic from the crowd, and yet no one bolted to leave. How completely they misunderstood. I spun the wheel, I cast the ball. It was such a quiet explosion.