Jack Parker
Sabrina Knight-Parker
The Voice
Electro-Man
Anvil
Vanguard
Lightsedge
Tomarssuk
Dr. Stephen Strange
Bree Rader
Capt. Monica Kwok, M.D.
Kell
Thresher
Armory
Blind Rage
Clay
Kelvin
Mean Streak
Render
Savannah
Toast
#142
"Fall of the Jackal"
Date: 07/19/03 Game Date: 10/5/02
Guest-starring Forte's Dr. Jackal, Knightsabre, Electro Man, Vanguard, Anvil, Tomarssuk, and Lightsedge...and Armor Security's The Voice!
It’s 10:00 am, and the current members of Forte—those that are in town, that is—gather, as discussed, at UNCLE Seattle HQ to discuss what to do about their situation with this mysterious Egyptian sarcophagus that may or may not have great, dangerous power. Rainier has been up all night studying it, pouring over reference material both online and in his many books, trying to decipher all the glyphs on it. Dyna Girl, Tinker and Nightsable—along with one of the two new heroes in town that got wrapped up in this thing, Moonspider—have all returned after each taking a shift with Rainier to guard the thing in case any of the several parties after the item decided to show up. The other new hero they encountered on the case—Vortex—is still at the hospital dealing with his wounds from the previous night’s villain fight. Nightsable has just teleported in from checking on him again, and both Tinker and Dyna Girl are quizzing her about him and teasing her about her extra interest in the hunky young speedster. But Samantha has no time for such foolishness, as she has some teleporting to do for some rather important and famous people before she can get back to business with her team…
At the “old” Forte base, elsewhere downtown, some of the original Forte heroes are gathering. HBO is producing a mini-series based on the Jack Parker (Dr. Jackal…but HBO doesn’t know that…) Forte biography “For a Day or a Lifetime: The Forte Story”, and executive producers Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg have scheduled to meet with all the surviving members of the team…at different times…to conduct and film interviews. The writers with them will need some questions answered, but they also want the interviews filmed to show clips of at the start of each episode of the series (as they did with "Band of Brothers"). The interviews are to take place, appropriately, at the Forte Museum.
The interviews are being done in groups, with several Forte alumni being scheduled for each session. For this first one, Dr. Jackal will be involved (as he’s easy to access since he still lives in Seattle). The same is true for Electro Man…even easier, since the interviews will be done at the museum that he’s the curator of. As for the out-of-town retirees, Vanguard, Anvil, Tomarssuk and Lightsedge will be rounding out the group.
It’s been decided that before heading over to the museum later for the interviews, everyone will meet up at their old trusty base for some breakfast and a chance to catch up. Dr. Jackal arrived there early, and Electro Man did as well, bringing with him The Voice, the member of Armor Security that will be handling security for Mr.’s Hanks and Spielberg. The Voice will be going to meet their plane in a while, but decided to accept the invitation to return to the base he’d already visited recently (see "The Jericho Effect II: Return of the Saint") and continue good relations between Forte and Armor.
Vanguard appears out of the tunnel that leads to their helicopter, the Silver Bullet. He has some business in Seattle anyway, so he decided to make this a few day trip, so he flew in on his own jet the night before. He showed up early to check up on the Bullet, take it for a test flight, and make sure Tinker hadn’t been messing with it while he was gone.
A teleportation portal opens, and Nightsable arrives with Lightsedge, all the way from Africa. He and his students—the “Order of Light”—had been here not too long ago, too, when The Voice was here. After that adventure, he took his followers on an ocean journey to Africa, where there were some wrongs to be righted. They’ve been there for a while, and he took a break to do this interview thing, as promised, leaving his students in the capable care of another Forte alumnus, Armature (whose interview is scheduled for the next group). Samantha then heads to Anchorage, Alaska, to her pre-determined pickup site to meet with Tomarrsuk, Forte’s mystical polar bear man. She brings him in, and then makes a last trip to Ohio to transport Anvil…who brings his daughter, Bree, with him, and the two of them have decided, like Vanguard, to make a little vacation of this. Bree is immediately disappointed to find out that current Forte member Max is out of the country. Seems Anvil’s daughter has a bit of a thing for Forte’s latter-day heartthrob.
With everyone there, Nightsable gives her father, Dr. Jackal, a hug, and says she has to get back to UNCLE to meet with her team…and she passes along Holly’s (Dyna Girl’s) apologies for not showing up for breakfast, but they are in the middle of a case, so she can’t make the time. Sam disappears, and the old Forte teammates talk old times, stories which The Voice considers himself fortunate to be hearing.
At one point Dr. Jackal is just looking at everyone and smiling, and he tells them how great it is to see everyone again. He starts waxing nostalgic, talking about the value of friendship throughout all the hardships they’ve been through together.
In the middle of this speech, he starts to look a little distracted, maybe a little ill. Then he starts to seem short of breath. Suddenly, he grabs his chest, seeming to be in extraordinary pain, and collapses. Everyone is stunned and leaps up…did Dr. Jackal just have a heart attack?
Back at UNCLE, the current Forte members are discussing what to do next about the sarcophagus, and Rainier is discussing his desire to get some better equipment moved in to start some proper carbon dating, when Nightsable gets a frantic call on her Forte radio. Her eyes grow wide and she disappears, leaving the others to wonder what in the world just happened.
She appears back at the base, and sees her father laying on the floor, looking lifeless, his friends all around him. The emotional toll is immediately almost too much for her, as on the alternate Earth she comes from, she’s already seen her father die. She’s already grabbing him and preparing to do what Vanguard is telling her to, even as he’s still speaking the words. She opens a portal and jumps through with him to UNCLE, a place with facilities much better suited to handle super physiology than any hospital. The others leap through with her, with Anvil telling Bree to stay at the base and man the phones if needed.
The members for Forte past meet up with Forte present as super-heroes are suddenly all over UNCLE HQ. Nightsable runs with her father to the medical bay, screaming for the doctor, as the other heroes follow and the current Forte folk frantically ask what happened. Captain Monica Kwok, UNCLE Seattle’s second-generation physician, rushes in and gets Dr. Jackal set up on a table. An emotional mess, Nightsable says she needs to get her father’s doctor. She teleports away, and returns quickly with Dr. Stephen Strange…husband of Forte’s Mist, personal physician to Forte, and…oh, yes…the Sorcerer Supreme. He joins Dr. Kwok and immediately gets to work while the heroes tensely look on.
Dr. Strange is quickly puzzled by attempts to figure out medically what’s happening, and starts probing mystically. He finds and tells the other heroes that Dr. Jackal has been poisoned. And whatever the poison is, he’s never seen the like of it before. It’s medical, mystical and spiritual in nature, and he can seem to have no effect on it.
Just as the others are taking in the implications of the poisoning, Dr. Jackal flatlines.
Dr.’s Strange and Kwok work together frantically trying to revive him…injecting him, shocking him, and even Stephen casting a spell. After a tense minute, he has a rhythm back. But he’s still dying. Stephen quickly explains that whatever he ingested is killing his body and draining his life force, and he’d be dead already if he hadn’t switched to his Dr. Jackal form for this meeting today. He needs to keep working on him, but he’s working blind. He needs to find out what it is the Forte founder was poisoned with if he’s going to have any chance to combat it. He also tells Samantha, who’s barely hanging on to her sanity at this point, that she needs to go get her mother, Sabrina (formerly the Forte member Knightsabre), right away. He’s going to need her for what’s to come.
She teleports away and comes back with the panicked but composed Sabrina, and Stephen tells her that Jack is very close to passing to the spirit realm, and he needs her to go into his mind—using the telepathic link she and her husband share—and keep him here. She gets to work doing so.
Tinker lets everyone know what she was going to tell Jack Parker later in the day, and now she feels horrible that she didn’t wake him last night when she found out. She’d gotten a visit from her friends, the Lone Gunmen, at her place last night (see Forte 2000 #141), and they had told her they’d heard that Jack Parker’s new best-seller, “Foreign and Domestic”, a tell-all expose about the U.S. Government’s involvement in many domestic terror groups and shadow agencies over the years, had made him some enemies. This was nothing new, as the controversy around the book started well before its publication. But they had gotten wind that someone was out to get him. She had heard this just hours ago, and now this was happening.
A thought hits Anvil and he goes to Nightsable, not wanting to bother her at such a time with yet another teleport, but thinking he needs to. If this was an attack on Jack Parker, not Dr. Jackal, then he wants Jack’s twin daughters—Samantha’s sisters, Monique and Nikki—pulled out of school and taken to the base right now. Shaken from her distress at the thought of her sisters in trouble, she focuses, and she and Anvil teleport to the new Forte base, where Samantha (very) quickly changes into civilian clothes, and then teleports the two of them to the school, where she’s able—known well at the school as their live-in cousin (a sort of half-truth that helps keep her alter-Earth origins a secret)—to explain that their father is sick and she needs to take them out of school for the day. Anvil, meanwhile, having changed to the human form of Mark Spires, is keeping an eye on the school grounds, ready for any sign of trouble to armor back up and protect the girls. But they’re able to get the girls out without incident and get them teleported back to the old base, where Bree agrees to watch them, and where Nightsable tries to explain what’s happening and assure them everything’s going to be all right.
Back at UNCLE, Stephen lets the heroes know they have six hours at the absolute most to find out what’s in Dr. Jackal’s system, or he’s going to die. They start discussing this quickly, figuring, based on Stephen’s description, that Jack must have ingested whatever it was recently, before showing up at the Forte base. While they’re discussing it, Moonspider, who had, like The Voice, been left out of the parts of the conversation discussing Jack Parker and Dr. Jackal being one and the same, decides to take a little initiative and grab Dr. Jackal’s Questpad out of his jacket pocket and check it out. Maybe there might be some clue as to his schedule. Well, looking through this, Moonspider quickly DOES find out that Dr. Jackal is actually Jack Parker, famous writer and editor-in-chief at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Oops. He also finds out that Jack had an early-morning breakfast meeting at the Crowne Plaza Hotel with Peter Millhouse, Washington editor at the New York Times. He lets the others in on this (and apologizes for finding out the Doc’s secret I.D.). At least now they know…this is probably where the poisoning happened. Vanguard hacks into Jack’s work e-mail and finds out the Millhouse was in town for a day for some meetings, and arranged breakfast with Jack…sort of a journalism networking thing. Vanguard also finds out that he’s staying at the Crowne Plaza, and some quick hacking of the hotel’s computer gets the heroes his room number.
Having nothing else to go on, they decide to rush down and check this out. Rainier and Tinker stay behind at UNCLE…Tinker’s going to coordinate things there with UNCLE and keep radio contact going with the others, and she and Rainier, anyway, still need to hang around and guard the Egyptian thing.
Since none of this group of heroes can fly but Dyna, they requisition an UNCLE unmarked van and race over to the hotel. They fan out, some staying outside to watch the perimeter, some going inside in civies. A pair of them head up to Millhouse’s room and break in (ignoring the “do not disturb” sign). Nothing looks out of the ordinary at first. Until they find the corpse in the closet. It’s Millhouse, quite dead. They also find, in a drawer, a very old and suspicious-looking wooden box, with strange symbols carved into it. When its opened, they can see two cutout areas inside the box, where some kind of objects (vials, maybe?) should have been…but aren’t anymore.
Suddenly, the door opens. A non-descript young man steps in quickly, and spots them. He makes a run for it. Heroes pursue, other heroes are radioed. He’s chased down the stairs, and while he’s running, he fires some kind of mystical blast at them. He seems to be able to take the hits that they throw at him. But outside, he’s finally cornered, and, saying something in a language they don’t understand, he pops something in his mouth and bites down before they can stop him. He falls dead to the ground, and his form suddenly changes. He’s not human at all…but a blue-skinned Cassian.
The Cassians, a race of aquatic people living in a hidden city out beneath the ocean off the Washington coast, were first discovered by members of the new Forte team (see Seahawk #0 and Forte 2000 #’s 1-3). They live in secret, away from the world of men, one-time guardians of the Earth who, ever time, decided to leave man to his own destruction, seeing how he treated his fellows and his world. They had been convinced to help when Seattle was invaded by their racial cousins—the Karrigon—who had been banished to another dimension and longed to return and conquer. But they never come to the surface world…and there’s certainly no reason anyone can think of why one of them would be using some kind of glamour to pass for human and poison a newspaper editor. The heroes surmise that this one must have been coming back for the box…a box that probably contained the poison and, they hope, the antidote. But neither is on his person, and they’re not going to be getting any information from him now.
They now need answers from the Cassians…and the only way to get those is to travel to the underwater city called Stronghold. Dyna lets them know that the only one who has much sway with these people is Rainier. They’ve listened to him before (it was his speech that turned their opinions about fighting the Karrigon), and he’s made semi-regular trips down there to get to know them and their culture in the past couple of years. They decide they’ll need Lucy, too, to pilot the new team’s submersible jet, The Mariner. So they radio them to prepare for pick up. They’ll have to count on UNCLE, and Nightsable, who will now not leave her father and mother’s side, to handle things if someone shows up looking for the sarcophagus. They head to the new Forte base and load up in the Marinier. With Tinker behind the controls and Vanguard co-piloting, they race to the coordinates of the mystical gateway to Stronghold.
They dive into the dark, deep waters, and eventually Cassians on their aquatic steeds show up to greet/stop them, as usual. When the guards look through the windshield and see it’s Rainier, they allow them passage, and take them through the portal into the vast city. The group is taken inside after they park and exit the Mariner, taken to Kell, the Prince Regent of the Cassians. He’s the first Cassian they met (met first by Seahawk, then by Rainier), and with him is his human love, the 18ish girl called Thresher (the younger sister of the fallen Forte hero of the same name, who seems to have gotten over her big fight with Kell (see Forte 2000: “Four’s Company”)).
Rainier quickly explains why they’re there, and it makes no sense to Kell. Once they show him the box, though, he recognizes it. He calls an emergency meeting of the Council of the Watch, their people’s ruling council. The magics contained in that box were forbidden, and from long ago, and were kept sealed in a great cave with other such relics of their distant past. The only ones with access to the cave are high-level council members. And when the members all show up, there’s one member conspicuously missing. A high councilor named Tayo. Who, wouldn’t you know, has, in the past, spoken out for the idea of rejoining human society and not just letting them continue to despoil the Earth. He’s missing, and several members of his staff are missing. It’s obvious that he’s the one who took the box…and who knows what else. The lingering question is why.
But there’s no time for why, and the heroes ask about an antidote. The antidote should have been in the box. If it wasn’t there, then Tayo still has it. The heroes say they have to find him and that cure. Kell says he’ll go with them personally, to find the traitor to his people and bring him back. Being the Prince, the magics of the Cassian people flow through Kell, and as such, he should be able to feel out any magics being used Tayo and the others. Thresher will go, too. The pair of them take to the sea, with the Forte heroes following in the Mariner, watching the time tick away, and with it, the hopes for saving Jack Parker.
Kell guides them through the sea, and finally comes upon a cargo ship. They stop some distance back. Vanguard runs a check through the Mariner’s computers on the registry, and it turns out it’s a U.S. Government registry. Something very strange is going on.
The team comes up carefully and quietly underneath the ship, breaking the surface just next to it. The heroes sneak aboard and split up. On the deck, Kell, Thresher and some of the heroes meet up with Tayo, along with his councilors Tak and Renta…and some Mandate guys. Mandate? Ok, seems it goes like this. Tayo has been keeping watch on the surface and making regular trips there, as he has secretly been a subscriber to the Karrigon heresy, believing that the Cassian peoples should come out of hiding, rejoin the world above…and conquer it. Using cloaking glamours, he’s learned his way around and made contacts…including Mandate, an organization bent on overthrowing America. Having seen that overthrowing America is the key to overthrowing the Earth, Tayo has thrown in with them. In fact, he’s brought special mystical bio-agents aboard this captured ship, and they plan to dump them into the waters off Seattle—in a U.S. Government ship—and kill vast amounts of sea life and humans, planning to sow much discord is mistrust among the people. Just part of their master plan.
Speaking of their plans… Their plans have been hindered quite a bit thanks to Jack Parker’s latest book, one which has closed many avenues of support Mandate used to have. Continuing his crusade after the book’s publication, Parker has become a threat. So Mandate and Tayo decided it was best to remove that threat, using an undetectable mystic poison that would make his death appear as a heart attack. Mandate’s tracking of Parker gave them info on his breakfast meeting. Tayo killed Millhouse and used a glamour to take his place, and poison Parker’s orange juice over breakfast. However, his fellow turncoat Cassian that was hiding the body upstairs went and left the box that holds the poison and antidote behind. He was sent back to retrieve it, only to run into some snooping super-heroes.
Tayo rants at Kell, speaking of how the age of Cassian cowering must come to an end and they must rise up and wrest control of the surface world back from the humans that have despoiled it. Kell calls him a traitor that has endangered their people with his schemes, and will see those schemes stopped. Tayo doesn’t seem to think so…
Meanwhile, Tomorssuk is creeping around the ship, when suddenly, and alarm goes off (set off by Tayo), and, behind him, a door opens and a bunch of villains come running out. Fortunately, they don’t seem to notice Tommy. They run out on the deck to join in the fight. It seems these are all freelance villains hired by Mandate, knowing only that their job is to attack a local Seattle mall to create a distraction. Well, keeping super-heroes distracted doesn’t seem to be a big need anymore, since they all sort of seem to be right here…
Aside from Tayo, Tak and Renta (all Cassian mages) and a group of Mandate agents, the heroes face off against a cadre of villains-for hire. They are Render (very strong masochistic guy), Mean Streak (a very speedy fellow), Kelvin (a former scientist who gave himself the powers of both fire and ice), Savannah (a lizard-girl), Blind Rage (a blind but deadly fighter), Toast (a girl who transforms into living, lethal electricity), Armory (a soldier of fortune armed to the teeth) and Clay (a whimsical wisecracking stretching guy).
The battle is fast and furious, heroes trading opponents as they go, all the while trying to keep Mandate from dumping the bio-toxin over the side. Lightsedge’s energy blade is everywhere, deflecting blasts and bullets. The Voice takes control of Toast and gets the girl to do his bidding. Dyna Girl and Rainier face off against Render. Tommy and Clay mix it up, while Vanguard has his hands full with Mean Streak. Moonspider and Blind Rage spar across the deck. Tinker and Armory pit lethal versus non-lethal weapons head-to-head. While Kell and Thresher mainly stick to fighting their own.
In the end, the heroes get the upper hand, and Mean Streak manages to grab Savannah and run across the water, getting away. The rest of the villains go down, as do the Cassians and Mandate agents. The toxins are not released. And the fallen Tayo does have the antidote on him. With a quick radio call to UNCLE, Nightsable is called and teleports over, and teleports back with the cure her nearly-dead father needs. It should be too late, but Sabrina has managed to keep his spirit present, and Stephen administers the needed cure.
Kell calls to his people, and Cassian troopers come and take both their prisoners and their stolen toxins back to Stronghold to be locked away. Kell, as Prince, apologizes for the actions of a very few of his people and hopes that the heroes’ comrade will be well. He entrusts Rainier to return the remaining antidote to them when the mending is done.
The heroes return to UNCLE with the captured villains and Mandate men, and find that Dr. Jackal is alive, and conscious. He’ll have a long road of recovery ahead of him, but thanks to his friends—old and new—he’ll still be around the write that next book that makes people want to kill him…
Moonspider speaks to him privately and returns his Questpad to him, and
apologizes for finding out his secret while promising to protect it. Seeing
as how it was his initiative in doing this that probably saved his life,
Jack smiles, shakes his hand weakly, and says, “Welcome to the family”.
