Legacy

1. Prologue

(in which you find out how the story ends)

Comic book stories.

They're always larger-than-life. You don't read comic books yourself. You're too cool for that. And the stash of Captain America mags under your mattress doesn't count, because Captain America is a true hero. The first patriot. The guy all the jocks want to be; so it's okay to read about the Cap, because it won't result in your face being used as a punch-bag in the locker room.

No, you don't read comics. But there's this kid who lives down the street… for simplicity's sake, let's call him Bob… and he's a bit overweight, and pimply. The jocks call him 'pizza-face', the girls blank him like he doesn't even exist, and even the audio-visual nerds get the hell out of Dodge whenever it looks like he might try to talk to them.

Bob's not your friend. Not really. But you let him hang out with you every once in a while, because, y'know… charity. And good karma. Plus, your own cool-factor is way up there. You're Doctor Freeze. No… you're the Fonze. So your rep can take the hit of being infrequently associated with Bob. Besides, there are perks. Bob's parents are loaded, and Bob's so keen to keep you sweet that whenever he comes over, all puffy-faced and sweaty because he's had to walk fifty yards, he brings a stash of delectables with him. Oreos. Cheesy Puffs. And if you're real lucky, a jar of crunchy peanut butter you can dip your Oreos and Cheesy Puffs into. Trust me, it's not as gross as it sounds.

There's not much you can talk to Bob about. He has no experience with girls (it probably wouldn't shock you to hear that Bob doesn't even know what girls are), he's not in to doing outdoor things like any other young person your age enjoys (playing hoop, fishing, making out with girls, stealing cars)—and since this is 1985, computers don't exist yet.

Or do they?!

Alright, fine. Computers exist, but you wouldn't recognise them. For twenty years, the most sophisticated thing you've been able to do is bounce a ball between two paddles. Pacman's been around for about five years now, and that's a novelty nobody will ever get bored of (believe me, it'll be the only game people will play for the next 12 years, and its sales, and money generated by said sales, will faaaar outstrip any silly future-games in which you fight against Nazis, or zombies, or zombie-Nazis, or zombie-Dragon-Nazis—)

Pssst! Call of Duty 26 hasn't been invented in the future yet. Stop spoiling 2021 for everyone.

In that case, I call future-copyright-dibs on zombie-Dragon-Nazis! Anyway, we digress.

Speak for yourself.

It's 1985, and although computers exist, they're inordinately expensive. Especially when money's tight. Which it is for your family. And even though Bob has a computer (his folks are loaded, remember?) you're not allowed to go over there and play it, because ever since his mom caught you smoking out his bedroom window, she's labelled you a Bad Influence and banned you from stepping over her threshold. Bob's too nice a person to tell you about all the fun he's having playing Space Invaders, so you talk about the only other subject available.

Comic books.

Comic bo—hey! Stop stealing my lines!

Get to the frigging point. Can't you see we're losing the audience?

What? No way. This is what they come here for! They enjoy the back-and-forth banter we provide for them, and our well-timed and sexy repartees. If they wanted some boring old story where people go from A to B to C in a straight line without having any sort of fun, they could go read one of Wolverine's snooze-fests.

Ooh, our old pal Wolvie. We should go crash one of his stories some time.

Later. We have this thing to do first.

So anyway, you and Bob talk about comics. And after you're done talking about Captain America, Bob tells you about some of the other comics he reads. You know, the one where the fearless heroes, Poopypants McGee and the Wet-Dream Wonder, go on a fearless quest to thwart the Evil Doctor Von Doomenstein's evil plans to conquer the whole Earth with an evil army… only, in the process, they accidentally trigger a massive overload of Von Doomenstein's tachyon particle accelerator, sending both themselves and the unholy legions of evil tumbling through the very fabric of space-time, and only end up vanquishing said legions and returning to their own time by making alliances with other powerful super-humans whose awesome power awesomely fixes the fabric of reality and everybody is back in their own awesome worlds in time for Happy Days reruns and a brewski? You know that one, right?

All of Bob's stories are like that. He paints you these wild mental pictures in which there are so many characters doing so many implausible things that you're left thinking whoa wait when did the and the what nazis and dragons and evil overlord of time killed by the sentient creator-god of the multiverse WHAT.

The stories are ridiculous. Because Bob gives you the exciting bits. He gives you the over-powered superheros (man, I hate those. Do you hear me, Cable? I hate you so much!… Just kidding bro, I love ya really). He gives you the chiselled men and the voluptuous women and the villains who almost always dress snazzy and have well-groomed goatees.

What Bob doesn't give you is the stale ennui. He doesn't tell you who woke up next to who, or who ate what for breakfast, or who was piloting the magical aircraft when it crashed (it wasn't me, I swear!). He doesn't tell you whether it's raining, or snowing, or whether it's fry-yourself-on-the-beach weather. He doesn't tell you who gets badly maimed along the way, unless it's a maiming which affects continuity. Because even though all those things are there, on the page of the comic, for anybody to see… they're not important. They're ephemeral fluff. They are the building blocks of the action and the dialogue, which is all anybody really cares about in comic books.

Bob dumps you in the action. You're still trying to figure out just how Evil Baron Doomenmeister or whatever managed to build that large hadron collider beneath Chicago without anybody noticing in the first place. And whilst it's all stewing inside your head, Bob does the worst possible thing, the most bastardly thing a person can do; he goes home. He dumps you in the shit and then leaves you to figure out what the hell just happened, on your own.

Welcome to my world, Reader. Watcher. Voyeur. Whoever and whatever you are. Now, let me paint a mental picture for you.

I'm standing inside a bunker. It's deep underground. We're talking Stargate deep. Maybe even deeper.

The room in which I stand is cavernous. There are a lot of dead bodies inside it. You look around, and you wonder how did all this blood come from these bodies? Then you see the parts of bodies, strewn about like someone had a really bad chainsaw juggling accident. Arms here, over there a few legs, a pile of torsos littering the floor. The heads are… suspiciously absent. That's because they roll. You separate a head from its body and it'll bounce and roll, and if you take your eye off it you've lost it. That's why head-bowling has never been a popular mainstream sport.

You're struck by how similar these bodies look. They're all wearing the same uniform. It says US Army on the breast pocket, though most of the corpses are too blood-soaked for you to read anything.

The carnage does not end here. Parts of the bunker are scorched; the soldiers had flamethrowers, those bastards. Bullet-holes riddle the walls, plaster blasted away here and there. Parts of the ceiling have caved in. Maybe some of the soldiers threw grenades? You'd be forgiven for jumping to that assumption.

Amidst the ceiling-dust and chips of plaster, and occasional stray bullets, you find curious little piles of metallic grey dust. There are at least as many piles as there are corpses. If you stopped to count them, you'd probably find that there are more piles of metallic grey dust than corpses. And if you really stopped to take a closer look, you'd notice that if you were able to put together all the grains of dust in one of the smaller piles, you might end up with something roughly handgun sized. The medium-sized piles? Yeah, there's enough dust in one of those piles to make something rifle-sized. And what about the daddy-bear sized piles o' dust? Well, Goldilocks, the flamethrowers had to go somewhere.

If you want to take a momentary break from all of this bloodshed and carnage, you can leave the bunker and go up to the surface for a few minutes, get yourself a breath of fresh air… but you won't find things much better up there. I won't bore you with details about the weather, or the local vegetation; you don't even need to know whether it's night or day. The only thing that matters, is there's enough light to see by. Enough light for you to see the very large piles of metallic dust which, conceivably, could have been jeeps at one point. And over there, where there's now a veritable mountain of the ubiquitous grey stuff? There's enough dust there to make a tank. Oh, and there are bodies and body-parts up here too, but you wanted a break from the gore… didn't you?

We're back in the chamber now. The air's clogged with the smell of blood and the clouds of dust which are slowly settling on all the dead peeps. Despite all of this death and destruction, I have only a few scratches and my healing factor's already working on those. Give it a few minutes and I'll be back to my healthy, cancer-ravaged self.

I'm standing in the middle of the chamber, barely able to take a step without standing on some guy's fingers. But I quite like the crack and the snap that finger-bones make when they break, so I don't care too much about where I'm walking. I can't bring myself to care about broken bodies and showing respect for the dead… it's not like they ever showed respect to me when I was alive. Not unless respect has reached a whole new level I'm not aware of… one that involves napalm.

I can't bring myself to care, because the world as I know it is ending, and I don't know how to handle it. My task is complete. My self-imposed mission of revenge has ended. I've meted out justice and vengeance, enough to satisfy both angel and devil on my shoulders. I have waited for this day for months. Years. But now… my victory feels more hollow than I ever dreamed it would.

I'm watching as my best friend… hell, who am I kidding, my only friend… puts herself willingly into a self-induced coma-type stasis field thing, possibly forever, just to prevent herself from 'maybe' accidentally destroying the whole world and every living thing on it.

Now, here's how it all began…

Wade's note: Hey, readers, it's me again! Been a while, huh? July 2014, if The Author's profile can be believed. I bet you're wondering why I've been gone so long. And if you aren't, please do. Well, you'd be gone for ages if you had to shoot your VERY OWN BRAND SPANKING NEW MOVIE. Amirite? The Author has just this very evening been to see my new movie, and totally loves it. Loves it so much that in celebration of seeing my fantastic self on the biggest of all screens (at least, the biggest of all screens on Earth—I'm betting Thanos has a MASSIVE screen to watch me on, but that guy overcompensates waaaay too much), The Author has decided to release the FIRST EVER CHAPTER of the THIRD EVER STORY which he and/or she has written involving yours truly. So, to the boring part:

This awesome story (full of bad language and gore and sex and absolutely NO CABLE) is a sequel to my last story, "Lazarus", which in turn was a sequel to "No I In Team" (in which The Author very nobly attempted to correct the HEINOUS things that those IDIOTS AT MARVEL did to me in Hugh Jackman's origin story). If you don't want to go and read those stories (you should, at the very least, read Lazarus), then ON YOUR HEAD BE IT. But don't worry, The Author will very cleverly wind snippets from Lazarus into this super-cool story about me, so you lazy voyeurs who don't want to read Lazarus at least have some idea about why I'm all about the vengeance in this story, and who all the OCs are.

Now, sit back, relax, and enjoy the sh—oh wait, I'm getting another message from The Author. Apparently, I'm to tell you that The Author really doesn't like releasing WIPs. WIPs? Sounds kinky. I got WIPed once. So, uh. anyway, this is a WIP. Something like 10.8 chapters have been written so far (plus 3.1 chapters of yet another origin-story spin off which is totally relevant and mandatory) but The Author will not be releasing any further chapters until this story is close to completion. Why tease you by publishing the first chapter now and then making you wait? Because The Author is a bad, bad person who likes to touch me inappropriately. And so that those of you clamouring for this sequel (and the one of you asking to be informed of when this sequel was published—YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE) can hit the goddamn FOLLOW STORY button and rest assured you will receive timely updates once publishing begins in earnest. I don't know who Ernest is, but it sounds uncomfortable for him.

And just to reiterate, this story is like the sixties. It doesn't have any Cable. Heh. You'll have to wait for my second movie for that. Or you could go play my video game or read my comics. I can confirm that The Author is not actually Rob Liefield and does not earn any sort of commission on Deadpool games and comics sold.