Marvel 2000 Proudly Presents...

"ANSWERS!"
Written by Anthony Crute

“You!” Doc Samson yelled at the figure who had stepped into his hotel room with a blinding flash. The door exploded inwards with him.

Stacy Dolan raised her gun. She was the detective assigned to the case to discover who was trying to kill Doc Samson. She was currently naked in his hotel bed. She was already cursing herself, these things always happened to her. She guessed instantly that whoever this figure was he was the man who had made two separate attempts on Samson’s life. Endangering her life in the process.

“Freeze!” Dolan was ready to fire should whoever was standing in the doorway made a move. She was a god shot, she wouldn’t miss. She watched the eyes of the man, they were fixed squarely on Samson. Dolan recognised the hate in them.

She let out a sudden scream, the gun in her hand went from cool to red hot in a matter of seconds. She let out the yelp of pain and tossed the gun sideways from her grip.

Leonard Samson launched forward. He covered the distance between himself and the mysterious stranger in less than a second and then skidded right through the space where he’d been standing. A powerful blast to his back sent him careering across the rest of the room and into the wall.

The wall crumbled as his huge shoulder crashed through it into the next room. A scream of terror from the businessman who had been just settling down for the night let Samson know that the room was inhabited. “Run,” he told the man with a nod.

He slowly climbed to his feet and turned to face the man who he had half feared was behind the attempts on his life. He had been proven to be right. He stared at Arthur Parks.

“I’ve come for my revenge,” he growled at Samson who was dressed only in a pair of underwear.

“Revenge? For What?” Dolan asked. She was pulling on a tight T-shirt which she usually wore under her shirt for work followed by her grey pants. She moved for her gun but could still feel the heat radiating from the metal.

“Oh you don’t know? No one knows what he does!” spat Parks. He was close to six feet tall and had a thick shock of black hair. He also had a muscular build, he was very different than how Samson remembered him. It was also why Dolan didn’t recognise him from file photos she had seen.

“Don’t listen to him!” Samson ordered. His voice was raised but flat. It was a command.

“You wouldn’t want anyone to find out would you? What you did to me!”

“I didn’t do anything to you Arthur,” Dolan noticed the change in Samson’s voice as he spoke to Arthur. The rough tone that he had issued commands in was gone but the strength of the statement was still there. He was now speaking in a much softer and comforting tone.

“My name is Living Laser!” He spat. His fist glowed with a spark of energy. “And we both know what you did!”

“Living Laser,” nodded Dolan. The name struck home to her, she now noticed the differences from his file photo and the facts of the case began to drop into place.

Arthur Parks was a research scientist who developed two wrist mounted lasers and embarked on a life of crime mostly coming up against Iron Man and The Avengers. He’d crossed paths with pretty much every big player on the scene from The Mandarin to Count Nefaria. He had reportedly died when his technology reached critical level, Iron Man unable to save him in time had to blast him into the atmosphere to save the people nearby. Living Laser died that day.

The file in the station gets a little sketchy from there. He somehow came back as super villains tend to do but now structured entirely from light and simply forming his body into a humanoid shape. It appeared he had gotten better at this ability so as he looked entirely human, it also explained his changed features.

The clues fell instantly into place for Dolan. The extreme heat and the explosion involved in the destruction of Samson’s lab were caused by the powers of the Living Laser. The seeming ability to teleport in flashes of light reported by the tramp and Samson in the vehicles made sense. Even the ramblings of the mutant Solomon made sense.

‘Beware the light!
It cuts like a blade!’

The only pieces of evidence Dolan now needed was a motive of why Laser was so desperate to kill Samson. It was definitely personal and she couldn’t help but think she was soon going to get it.

“Laser, “ began Samson, his voice was still comforting, he also reffered to him on his terms as not to antagonise him. “We can just talk about this, no one has to get hurt.”

“You do!” he pointed his hand out toward Samson. The light increased from his finger tips.

“No I don’t not unless you want me too, you’re in control here…but think. If you take me down then who will you have on your tail? Every superhero across the country will single you out.”

Laser kept his face like stone as he stared at Samson. His voice was very emotional though as it came out. It was filled with anger and confusion. It seemed to both Dolan and Samson that he was projecting a calm face while wherever or whatever form his mind was in was most certainly not stable and calm. “You need to pay for what you did, to me! To the others whoever they might be!”

“What do you think he did?” Dolan was climbing out of the bed but made sure not to make any moved towards the man. Her eyes briefly flicked behind him and noticed one of two people hurrying down the corridors. It seemed the alarm had been raised.

“Laser you’re not a bad man…you’re not a killer! You had almost reformed, you were working for Tony Stark for a while, don’t throw it all away now. Let me help you.” Samson tried to calm him more with his words. Dolan flicked her eyes to him, he had purposefully stepped all over her question. It seemed he was trying to hide something as she had always thought. Despite this Samson still sounded like he wanted to help the man holding him at laser point in anyway he could.

“Not anymore! Not anymore eh? You took it all away! You and your hypnosis. You did something to my mind, made me forget and changed me. I was your patient! You weren’t meant to harm me!”

Dolan watched the reaction of Samson carefully. He was not nearly as emotional as she thought he should be either for being found out or the false accusation. She was finding it harder than she had previously to read him, she could however see his cogs turning.

“I didn’t harm you Laser. You’re confused! Let Officer Dolan leave and we’ll talk things over. See if we can hash things out.” He faltered as he reached the end of his sentence and began to move towards Dolan but it was already to late there was a brief flash of light and Living Laser was directly behind her.

Dolan gagged as the arm of Laser pressed tightly against her throat. Her arm was twisted sharply behind her back by his other arm. The strangest thing was she could feel more than one grip on her arms holding them both in place while one hand was clearly poking over her shoulder pointing towards Samson.

Doc Samson paused and faltered at the sight of his ‘partner’ help hostage. Dolan’s mind was however working out what was going on. His light based powers obviously allowed him to create solid forms as the pressure on her body told her and he was capable of altering his body form to will. “So a police officer?”

“Laser let her go!” Samson held his arm out toward Living Laser. Dolan was gritting her teeth as she tried to struggle free. “The only thing worse than hurting me would be hurting her, you’d have the police and the super community after you.”

Laser stared at his eyes for a second. Samson was well aware what he was looking at wasn’t really Parks. He had turned into a being of pure light and what Samson was seeing now was just the image Parks was remembering to cast, even if Samson had not known this for a fact he could have figured it out. The image wasn’t blinking, shifting it’s weight, it wasn’t even breathing. All the things Samson would have used to judge the situation were missing.

“You!” he jabbed a finger at Samson. “SHUT UP! JUST SHUT UP!” his voice was breaking even more and the image flickered for a second replaced by the more familiar thin pink humanoid shape of light. “Stop talking and let me think.”

“Look you don’t have to do this,” Dolan stopped struggling and ignored the pressure on her throat as much as she could to speak. “I don’t know what Samson did to you but I want to listen.”

There was a moment where Samson caught a glance from Dolan as she spoke. He listened to her words very carefully, she had said she believed the man, it could have been a bluff but the way she spoke seemed not to be the case.

“Dolan you have too…”

“Shut up!” Laser yelled. His body glowed with energy before vanishing in a blinding light. Dolan went with him.

Samson glanced around the room and dove for his clothes and began to pull them on as he headed for the door. He had worried that whoever was behind it would be one of his ‘special clients’. All of his clients were special and dangerous cases, all had some sort of deep seated issues but there were those among them who had a specific disorder which disrupted normal functioning more than others….those who were just too dangerous. Laser was one of these, a man made of light who could make anything he liked from light, was untouchable if he wanted, could move anywhere in the world in second. He had helped Living Laser as much as he could and indeed had put down his reform whilst working with Tony Stark to his help but it appeared all of his good work had been undone.

He headed for the stairs, he had to get downstairs to the main desk and get word to the police about what had happened to one of their officers.

In the lobby…

Dolan appeared in a flash of light and suddenly felt very dizzy and sick to the stomach. She had never been turned into pure light before and hurtled from one place to the other. It took her a few seconds to even register the screams of the people around her.

It took her even longer to realise where she was, the world was completely white for a few seconds before flashing to a negative for a few more before it eventually began to revert to normal.

It was only then that she realised she stood in the lobby of the hotel. The people screaming around her were those people being evacuated once the alarm had been raised about the super villain in the building.

“Calm down!” commanded Dolan. Her eyes were closed tightly as she tried to focus her thoughts. “Everything is under control, I’m a police officer. Just make your way to the exit calmly!”

“No!” yelled Laser. One of his hands shot out and fired a thin enduring beam towards the door. Dolan could hear the searing metal as he welded the door shut. “If they leave then no one will know. It’ll just be brushed under the carpet.”

“I’m willing to listen,” Dolan tried to turn and look at Laser. “I’ll do everything I can to see your grievances are seen too but I can’t let you hurt any of these people.”

Dolan was sharply shoved forward. She rolled with it as her sheet wrapped body landed with a hard thud on the marble floor. She span to a knee and watched Doc Samson skid across the floor with Living Laser in his hands for a second before the villain seemed to phase through him.

She didn’t know if it was because he was distracted or because he had been holding her but for the moment Living Laser had been solid and had been tackled away. He now however again had the upper hand.

He stood upright looking down at Samson as he tried to leap to his feet. A blast of energy sent him spiralling back into a column in the lobby. Four bands of energy followed and bound him tightly to the column. A fifth one appeared over his mouth as he opened it.

“Let me speak!”

“I’m listening,” said Dolan. She held her hands out to the crowd who were now cowering on the outskirts of the room as far away as they could get. She was trying to keep the situation calm. It was now a serious hostage situation. She didn’t have the Doc’s background but in her professional opinion the man was crazy.

Laser looked at her for a second and then back to the still struggling Samson. Dolan watched as his fist tightened. “You said about something he did to your mind. Tell me from the start.”

“It started a couple of months ago…”

A couple of months ago…

Living Laser looked down from his position in the rafters. He looked as though he stood on the thinnest of lines which stretched across the canopy of the big top but in reality he just chose to hand there. His body was lighter than air.

He waited for his cue as the music changed and then opened his hands bathing the acrobat Ernesto Gambonno below him with a beam of white light. The crowd ‘oohed’ and clapped like performing seals not realising that in seconds when distracted he would shoot through the stands at his top speed and take almost everything they had.

Give it ten or fifteen minutes and they would be in a hypnotised stupor thinking they spent it all on cotton candy. Thus was the way of The Circus of Crime.

Arthur had hitched up with them a couple of months earlier. The new plan had been The Ringmasters idea. They usually hypnotised the patrons and then robbed them but that always took time. This way was much much faster. The idea was of course not directed for Living Laser but rather just super speed seeing as how The Ringmaster was currently serving time in The Vault. Thankfully enough though he had left a spare hat.

Ernesto was caught by his brothers arms to a round of applause. That was a good a cue as any and Arthur burst forward.

He was back in his position after a sweep through the crowd and a short flight to the armoured caravan before the brothers had even finished one swing. He watched the act as it drew to a finish, the brothers truly were amazing in their skill.

Living Laser shot a glance down to the woman who was looking up at him. He nodded and she returned it. She began to turn away from him as she spoke. “Ladies and gentlemen!”

Laser shone a powerful spotlight down onto her from above. It highlighted her thick black hair and the gleam of the snake which slid over her shoulders. Princess Python had taken to the role of ring master well complete with a small red jacket and a bow tie over her bikini. On her head she wore the Ringmaster’s hat which had begun to spin as it fulfilled its purpose and slowly lulled the people under hypnosis.

She turned back to Laser and shot him a sly smile and a wink. She was about to issue the commands and build a false memory for all of the crowd but there was always time for her to flirt first.

Arthur’s eyes fell on the hat. The disc on the front span and swirled. He could feel something in his mind. It was most odd considering he didn’t have a brain in the strictest sense of the word.

He felt light headed all of a sudden and felt the solid form he projected dissipate into stray light. In his ‘mind’ images began to flow, memories and unaltered thoughts.

He could see himself when he was still human firing his wrist mounted laser at Iron Man (head and heart) he was trying to kill the man. He next saw himself trying to blow Giant Man’s head off with a blast as he fought the Avengers and almost succeeded. Thoughts and images flooded his mind of other battles and other fights with superheroes and none. A guy he beat down outside a bar and the thin beam of energy he fired through his heart, a short tussle with Moon Knight who barely escaped with his life.

He next saw the form of Doc Samson ushering him to sit down, he couldn’t hear his words but he remembered feeling calm and slowly drowsing into unconsciousness. The images of more fights filled his mind, shoulder and leg blasts. Low intensity hit to Captain America set to knock him out…he paid for it later.

Arthur reformed his body and let out a long scream before he began to fall.

Now…

“You took it away!” he gabbed a finger towards Samson again. “You made it so I couldn’t kill anyone, couldn’t bring myself to even hurt them!”

Dolan shot a look to Samson who returned it. She still couldn’t read him. She wasn’t sure what to think. If it was true she could understand completely what he had done, he had tried to stop a criminal but the sheer way it had been done, to alter someone’s personality and set mental blocks on him was wrong. The story was also coming from a known felon who obviously had issues and had in fact tried to kill them both in the past 24 hours. “That doesn’t even make sense, you’ve tried to kill us.”

“No I didn’t!” The intensity of light around him picked up for a second. “I blew myself up…I tried to run him over. He’s Doc Samson, neither of those thing can hurt him. I was trying to kill him but I still couldn’t, I planned things I knew would fail and even though I knew they wouldn’t work I still did them! He made me useless, I can’t do anything…can’t even trust my own thoughts. I know what he did but I can’t undo it, the survival mechanism is the strongest thing in nature…I’ve seen it. That’s why I’m here now, if I was forced to defend myself against him, forced to fight then I know the block will go.”

His loss of concentration allowed Samson to drop clear of the pillar he was held too.

“Let her go then, let all these people go an fight me!” Samson flexed his muscles as he tried to look more imposing, more threatening to draw Arthur into the conflict. He needed to get the people and Dolan safe and he was ready to toss himself into the fight against the man who had tried to kill him to do so…the pay back was just a secondary motive.

Laser glared at him for a second. Samson was blasted backwards and slid along the floor. He looked up at the form of Laser who appeared over him his fists glowing with energy. He weighed nothing as he sat on Samson’s chest. A blast at the door dissuaded one or two of the patrons who were moving towards it. The fists he unloaded into Samson’s face however Samson could most certainly feel. “I don’t want to be alone with you. I want everyone to know what you did, I want you disgraced and everyone to know what you are! You’re a sick and twisted evil…” Laser hurtled back as the fist of Samson hit him in the face. He’d been so focused on hurting Samson he’d let himself become solid.

Laser vanished before he reached the wall he was heading towards and reappeared a second later. “Laser I want to talk this over, it’s not how you remember it.”

Samson spread his legs a little wider and pushed himself forward as Laser launched towards him. A shell of light wrapped around him bulking the villains size up to something similar to Samson’s own as the two crashed.

Leonard gritted his teeth and pushed against his assailant. He knew he wasn’t fighting anything but solid light but it felt reel. The weight and the strength Laser was pressing against him certainly felt real. “I don’t…!”

Samson growled and then let his body go limp before tensing his legs. The momentum of Living Laser pushing him caused his body to rock back before he launched them sideways. He slammed Laser into the floor hard. “Would you just bloody listen to me!” Samson was beginning to lose his temper as he had done with the truck the previous day.

He held his hand across the throat of Laser. The man dissolved effortlessly under his hand. Samson took a deep breath as he tried to calm himself. “Yes I did treat you, I took you into my surgery and I did hypnotise you but not how you remember.”

Samson looked around him, he didn’t know where Laser was (though he was actually all around him) but knew he could hear him and could appear at any moment. “You came to me after a fight with Iron Man. It was after you’d been turned into a light being. You were scared and having trouble dealing with it.”

Samson’s eyes moved to the side as he caught a glimpse of a shimmer of light almost like a heat haze from a fire. That’s as solid as Laser became. “Do you remember what dissociative personality disorder is? I explained it to you back then.”

“I can’t remember, it’s in my head but I can’t remember.” His voice was distant, it whispered in the ears of every person in the room.

“It’s okay, I’ll explain again.” Samson was talking in a calming and soothing tone as he now tried a different tack to try and bring Laser around. The fact Samson was all to aware of now was that Laser couldn’t be physically hurt. He’d have to be talked down.

“A dissociative personality is what’s commonly referred to as a split personality. Its a break which results in two distinct personalities residing in one body, one mind. It’s what you had, can you remember?”

There was silence.

Samson looked to Dolan who motioned for him to keep going. She nodded behind him to the outside where police cars were lining up. Samson mentally swore, the police could only exacerbate the situation at the moment.

“You were a special situation, your powers made you different to all of the others. It’s true most cases the secondary personality is due to a problem in youth or later life, some psychological break facilitates the creation of a new personality to deal with it. In most cases from the very first of Eve Black and Eve White the second personality is the more extravert, the more extreme but in most cases it’s also the most stable. It’s the one most able to deal with the outside world in a ‘normal’ way.”

The form of Laser appeared across the room from where the air had been shimmering. He was hunched and in a skinner body image. He wasn’t angry as he had been and so his body was reflecting that. Samson turned to face him, converse with him directly (as directly as you can a man who isn’t there).

“You’re powers made it difficult. You were already an extreme personality, bright costumed criminal…superheroes and villains have a tendency to be flamboyant,” he smiled and gestured to himself. Laser for the briefest second returned the smile, he’d recognised something within itself. “You came to me…one of you came to me. It was your second personality, he was calmer and didn’t want to hurt anyone. It was part of your coping mechanism, you saw yourself as the source of your problems and this new personality reflected that.”

“You got rid of his original personality instead of the split one?” Dolan spoke. Her voice didn’t give away anything about what she thought about the decision. Samson knew what he did was morally ambivalent anyway so he didn’t need her to tell him.

“No, you can’t just delete a personality like that. You have to integrate them…make the two into one. You take qualities and integrate them.” He brought his hands together and interlinked his finger. “Yes I’ll admit I helped push it one way or another on a couple of characteristics…I made it so you’d be reluctant to kill if it wasn’t your life at stake. I’m not proud of it, it’s one of the worst things I’ve ever done, I betrayed a deep trust I have as a doctor. If that makes me a villain than so be it…I’d do it again, you’d hurt too many people and I couldn’t let you do it anymore. I changed the natural healed form to fit my own ends.”

Laser looked at Samson for a second, he seemed to be weighing up what the green haired man was saying and matching it to his memories. Dolan looked between the two, she was the only one who was in this completely blind. She didn’t know the truth, she didn’t know who was lying.

Laser’s appearance suddenly changed as did his voice. It picked up in ferocity as his old costume materialised around him. “I didn’t want to be made one! I was happy with who I was!” Powerful balls of light exploded around him making everyone in the lobby shield their faces.

Samson exhaled sharply. He had been hoping it didn’t have to come to this. He wanted to help his patients, he wanted Laser to be well but it seemed parts of his old personality were coming back to the surface. There was a reason Samson had made the tough decision he had made all those years ago, a man with unknowable power like the Living Laser with no morals to hold him back was just too dangerous, he could hurt too many people. Everyone in the lobby was in danger and that was just to begin with. Samson was a superhero, he was a psychologist, he was a genius and he was a humanitarian but he was also a man who planned ahead.

“Power cut!” yelled Samson. The building light around Living Laser instantly dulled. Laser looked so much smaller now that he wasn’t been powerfully lit around him.

Laser gritted his teeth and tightened his fists, nothing happened. He tired again and once again nothing happened. “What did you do?”

“I ended it.” His voice was flat and spoke his words as facts. “I stopped your powers, a post-hypnotic suggestion planted in your brain…it’s only temporary. It’s just like your personality I can’t keep them buried forever but a minute is all it will take.” Samson held out his hand and pointed his two fingers like a gun before tossing his hand to the side. His other hand stretched out and gripped something small in the air.

“What are you doing?” Laser asked. He was still glancing at his hands as he tried to summon his powers. Dolan’s look seemed to mirror the question.

“How do you stop a man who’s indestructible?…whose unable to be touched? You make him stop himself.” Samson was loading whatever he was holding ‘into’ his hand. “Another suggestion routed in the centre of your brain…just on the off chance that something like this happened, just in case you got out! Just in case I was stupid enough to give you the benefit of the doubt and it came back to bite me and everyone in the city on the ass. I made an imaginary gun!”

Laser was now frantically contorting his face as tried to channel his power into his hands. He tried to fight back.

“One word,” Samson finished ‘loading’ his hand and then turned it back to Laser. The entire pantomime was part of the trigger to the suggestion. “All I have to do is say the one word…everyone can guess what it is and you blow your own brains out…figuratively of course, turn out your own lights forever. I’m giving you a choice though…believe me that I want to help you. I want nothing more than for you to walk out of here and come to me for more help to handle this in the correct way but I’m giving you the choice I didn’t last time. Walk out of here with me or don’t walk out.”

The hairs on Dolan’s neck were standing up. She had only met this man yesterday and had already seen him take down a super villain, held him at gun point and slept with him. She thought she had him down in her mind. She had never thought for a second that he had these levels of dark depths within him.

Laser glanced up to Samson and then back at his hands. He was screaming as he tried to activate his powers. Samson pointed his fingers towards Laser “10….”

“…9…8…7…6”

Laser tossed his head back and gritted his teeth as he pushed with everything he had to reach inside of himself and use his powers. He had never wanted to do something so much in his life as he wanted his powers to work but absolutely nothing was happening.

“…5…4…3…”

Laser tossed his hands up in the air. His head dropped forward as he costume dissolved around him and his muscular body was replaced with the skinny pink featureless form he had been inhabiting earlier. “I give up…I want to get better.” The aversive personality seemed to have went back wherever it had came from for the moment.

Samson relaxed his hand and held it out to Laser. The small man crossed the room surrounded by silence and took his hand carefully. “Good man,” Samson nodded. He turned and waved some of the policemen from outside in.

They began to slowly approach, their weapons still drawn as they were apprehensive about the situation. “Take him to the station, put him in a comfortable interview room with a cup of coffee and I’ll be there within an hour. The cop gave Samson a worried look. “I’ve got SHIELD clearance if you want to check.” The second cop nodded and proceeded to put the cuffs on Laser and slowly began to lead him away.

Dolan was next to him in a second. “That was pretty cool…stupid but cool.” She nodded. “You didn’t really take his powers away from him did you? He changed just after he gave up…you psyched him out right? That whole thing with the gun was BS too right? You can’t hypnotise someone into killing themselves you were bluffing?”

Samson grinned weakly. It caused a shiver to run up Dolan’s spine. “I’ll tell you over dinner if you’re interested?”

Dolan thought for a second and nodded, she was blushing slightly. She swore mentally.

“It’ll have to be at your place, all of the places I can sleep have blown up recently.” Samson smiled as the two began to walk towards the stairs up to the remains of Samson’s room.

“What? For all the crap you’ve put me through you’re at least springing for a restaurant…you were bluffing weren’t you?”

Samson just laughed.

THE END