--- Osbie Z ---

When the Vaders finally showed themselves, well I mean I don’t mean to cuss, but it was some kind of hell.

The first one struck at New York City like some kind of superhero, but gone evil. A villain. Todd, you know what a superhero is, right? Super Kilo, Mega, Giga, Yotta Marsupialman or whatnot?

NO!? Wow. I mean I guess… I guess you haven’t ever seen a comic book before. Sorry, that’s just wild to me. Every boy I ever knew used to...

Um. Well ah, anyway the TV didn’t get a good look at him. I mean, it was crystal clear that he wasn’t normal shape, but they only were catching the blur and shadow of him. But he jumped right up from street level! Off the road to something like six stories high; which is (let me tell you) supposed to be beyond impossible. On every channel, we saw it happen: that awful shatter of glass. We used to do that, build whole towers out of nothing but glittering windows, so tall they tickled the clouds.

Though, now that I think about it, I actually think that particular tower was just as much marble as glass… sort of hard to remember.

Aside from all that – it was terrible. That thing was unstoppable. It was throwing… desks, and people. And things, I wouldn’t even call them spears so much as nails, but it was leaving behind these ugly wedges of iron driven into everything like thorns. Just on its own, it could tear up steel with its bare hands or claws or whatever it had. The holes in the building kept growing both more and wider. It was bizarre too: everybody was getting more and more anxious as the whole time, not a single network could keep the ’Vader in camera frame – not for the length of a second. And aside from all that, all of its brutality and anti-photogenicism, it brought some… thing with it we couldn’t have imagined to be real. That thing was so purple it pickled the world around it. That was the first I’d seen juice and even so, I haven’t even ever seen anything so much in the purple since then. Steel would rust, and skin would curdle. Moldy fungus was blooming in the aftermath of where it walked. It hung in the air like a miasma – until those sometimes where the enemy would choose a direction for its Opinion.

Then it would be like a horrible avalanche of shadows, crushing everything in its way to ruin. In that way it broke across stories and through floors, and sweeping through offices like the broomstick of the reaper. Oh, it did things so terrible we couldn’t even understand! Fire was licking the edge of every broken gap, black smoke oozed from everywhere. Among all the business people and office folk which were numbered as victim, there were police and rescue people tossed right out into the air to fall (crash!) below, folk who didn’t even make sense to have been there. And three days later, when a fire man vanished out of thin air while helping in the rubble after, and then another, and then again and again and again, we realized what the monster had done.

It had plucked him straight out of time itself to do him in. It had murdered a dozen folk from out of the future, like it was nothing. Then by the time we’d passed just only seven minutes of horror and before our brains had even caught up with our eyeballs, we were already saved.

Obviously we’ve skipped ahead a bit. I haven’t even mentioned the New Year’s Address of 2002, which even if… we don’t talk about it around here, well it was important. Even after everything the tyrant as done since then, some of us needed to hear her voice. At that particular time, I mean.

But less my regard, it’s not right for me to discuss it further, not without the permission of your mothers.

I only mean to mention it in order to say: that when the Businessman stepped from the wreckage of 11 Wall Street to challenge the enemy, he was the second of the Twelth we came to see.

The smoke was rolling out thick, and the floors that weren’t collapsed were sagged. He appeared to us in the far corner of frame as nothing more than a tiny figure from out of a shattered hallway. We watched him cross the distance over rubble, and he drew our attention with his sure confidence of stride. Unassuming, that’s the word I’d’ve started with. Then I’d change my mind as we huddled around that screen closer and really looked at him. It was almost impossible to place the man, his complexion was what I can only call medium, and his hair was white as bone. Everything about him screamed the severity of a mortician, which meant a looming gauntness trimmed in the finest possible suit that could be made whilst still being featurelessly black. For his badge of office, he carried nothing but a calculator in one hand and a briefcase in the other.

Even though he’d come into the light of day from the pits of the incendiary, he’d not a mark of ash or blood on the whole of his accoutrement. Simply by being alive, he drew the lens and zoom of every camera there until we saw him clearly; by stepping forward over the crunch of shattered glass, he shamed the fires to dwindle in respect out of his way.

The shape of his face? It could have been crafted on any continent but Antarctica. The only expression he wore? It was that of a man who hadn’t the time to be angry that his building was aflame. Oh! And his watch! Good glory, it would have beggared Tutankhamen, I swear to the Lady.

So there he was. And there they stood. One a shadow, blooming in colors which were burning holes in the newsfilm, the other a man who was more than man. And then they fought - though the means of our defense was so plain and dull, so banal that it struck me as nearly impossible as the harm it was set against.

The purple was boiling off of creation to make way for the smart tap of impeccable leather oxfords. The dark, billowing grains of shadow-stuff were winking out as digits were punched into that little square calculator. Our man’s very presence was a weaponized normalcy, reminding creation of the way it ought to be and ought not be, and coming out the victor of the Argument.

The enemy recoiled as the sorceries of its obfuscation were overruled. The iron nails it flung landed short and astray, like its strength had been unraveled by long division.

When it lunged – like some animal – when we caught the length of its swept horns and its reaching claws, and for just the barest moment could intuit its shape; I did not dare breathe.

Right up until that fraction of divinity swung a briefcase into the face of a catastrophe and laid him flat. It didn’t make a lick of sense. Not one bit. When the ’Vader whipped the last of its Opinion ’round itself like a mantle and poured into retreat as a river of violet sand, when the man turned back gone into the wreckage, when all that was left was broken bodies and brokener concrete… we near convinced ourselves that the whole spectacle had been a hoax.

But like I said. On the third day, one dawn after the tottering remainder of that architecture would collapse (on the second eve), the first poor souls vanished from their duty. They’d be combing the debris for the fallen one moment, then gone completely; only to be found as already matched and tagged by the city morgue.

The stories say that one Officer actually got a telephone call to come in to identify himself, a minute before he disappeared.

So. That was the state of things. Our two thousand two.

That very same month, the ocean titan rose from the deepest blue to lay siege to Australia. In May, the shadow devil struck again in London, then in Italy, then Egypt... In October, the whole of the Earth wept when a meteor was plucked off course to crash on Beijing. Not to mention the winter, which would come to be the worst of the entire ’vasion: B. W. 2.

That was the year of nightmares.

Which you are not allowed to have.

Because if you do, I am NOT telling you more of this story. You promise?

Okay. All that aside, the tale we’re telling in particular is on the subject of the dragon: who they say was called Leilung; who was ruination of Brazil and of the Yucatan, and the doom of the Mississippi. A fortnight after the landing of the titan, the dragon descended in golden feathers and tempests from out between the stars; a mammoth invincibility of flying lizard. He was so big, so vile, so cruel: the first thing he did was make a meal of Saõ Paulo, Brazil. The Vaders themselves called him: the Heavenly Duke of Fulminous Thunder, so fullsomely ’lectric and yellow he was in flavor. From then on and for thirteen months, we lived apoplectic in fear.

For he could not be stopped...

and

he was headed

north.