An anthropomorphic shape moved in the dingy blackness which coated the
obscure scene like a habitual rain cloud. Martin Iron; the unwilling protagonist, stepped
through the invisible gateway of pride and authority which he felt in a sudden chill as he
ascended the uneasy staircase. Every lingering plot line; each fading simile would soon
be wrapped into one admonishing finale; of that for some inaccessible reason he was
fiercely aware. For once he observed that all the twists and turns of the future had
already been written, and as the weary sensation of inevitability scuttled away into a
mumbled cluster of condemned memories, he experienced that deep desire to be
knowledgeless; to be forced to fight for control in a somewhat more interactive world
rather than curse the fact that control remained the one thing he had in a place where
each action meant as little as the last. He had transcended his boundaries; he was the
champion of the unchampionable; the campaigner for the campainless. He was a being
without caste or conformity; a being in command of his own destiny; a being of choice.
In reality, it was of little consequence that he had very few choices available; the point
was that when he acted, he chose to do so.
He gazed with a new clarity across the empty landscape and suddenly saw
shapes where they had been none; movement where there had previously been stillness.
The shape in the center of this montionlessness moved; tweaking that it's demonic
masters had called it; ordered it into furious action. The contingent world is one of
inalienable opposites. Without its counterpart, no entity or concept can exist as things
can only be meaningful in comparison. For one side of a coin to exist the opposite must
also be present. For every free man who knows he is free, there must be an imprisoned
man who does not know he is imprisoned. Loki Japingka was such a man, but true to
form he did not know it. He sat amid the bawling darkness on a crooked teak chair, his
eyes fixed on nothing at all for there was no more that nothingness to observe. He
crossed his arms and gloried in the certainty of it all. In this bland, empty warehouse of
a room which he complacently called his own domain, any visitor whose presence
contested the inconceivable blankness of his kingdom would be vanquished. Any living
thing which brought life and movement to stir the sullen stillness of it all would be
silenced. Japingka's job was to tie up loose ends; he was the last defender of this cruel
citadel. He had no concept of where he was in the geographical context; how high, how
far east or west of his former home. To him, all was darkness. He had denied his own
culture to the disdain of his family, and scoured the world for his own financial
betterment. When he had found out his family had been killed in the bombing of the
pacific islands he hardly batted an eyelid. Culture, to him, rose and fell. Only conflict
remained.
Iron approached the beefy executioner with an uncertain frown and the strange
inclination to think he was immediately having to facilitate a defensive position; gasping
for air rather than screaming his defiance. Japingka had that effect on people- a fact
which he continually exploited. His combined height and size; even when seated; were
enough to impose on the most ardent challenger a protective outlook which partook of
the suicidal. Iron, never having faced a seated opponent before, wondered weather
striking such an obvious foe would neglect some sort of universal courtesy. Concluding
vaguely that it would not, he pitched his right leg in a sweeping motion intending to
deprive the sedated Japingka of his impregnable stature, but all of a sudden felt his own
back leg give way as the uncompromisingly placid guardsman hacked it off the ground
with a pole like foot to the midsection.
Japingka breezed a lopsided smile and rose almost wearily from his chair to
display his towering form. Iron dusted what seemed to be a sasquach footprint off his
front and clambered wearily to his feet; feeling a little vertically challenged. He stepped
back, tapped his feet on the elegant wooden floor, leant back into his fighting stance
again as if doing so twice would make all the difference and contemplated a complaint
to whichever Godly board of control had allowed this mismatched bout to take place.
'Whatever happened to small is beautiful?' he objected; attempting to uncover the
inspiration required to oust this formidable giant from his aggravatingly high position.
'If this was a boxing match,' he fantasized, still fixated with the bizarre height and
physical strength disadvantages, 'I'd never have to fight someone who'd outweigh me
in every department.' Bar one. The uninvited guest rewarded himself with an easing
roll of the shoulders and watched his opponent raise a substantial guard. 'Isn't it
fortunate that real life is nothing like a boxing match?' He pooled together an
unlikely confidence and stormed towards the man mountain with what was supposedly
a waist high roundhouse which made him strain as he realized that against a regular
opponent this would instead have been a kick to the head. But Japingka displayed a
regrettable tactical proficiency as he cut the blow down before Iron had even
completed it and ventured forward himself like a runaway train given a rocket like
turbo boost and landed with a rolling right hook, a hacking roundhouse and a
ramraiding right sidekick; the latter pair to the stomach; and an overhand punch which
applied the decorative icing as the interfering vigilante collapsed to the floor like a
murdered springbok in an uncouth hunt.
He was back up a tad too quickly, staggered and fell down again as his brain
only belatedly registered the impact of that last assault. Japingka paced a little and
growled orkishly. Fighting was his life; street tussles, demonstrations, competitions.
Back in New Zealand he had been a master of the ultimate fighting game. His father
had hailed from the other side of the Tasman, and since he had been killed in a war in
which his country and certainly his race had no genuine place to be involved in over in
China, he had been brought up by his mother in her country and under her traditions.
As a matter of respect he retained the paternal name, and mused that if his dad was
looking down on him from somewhere, he would have reveled in his son being the
champ; the figurehead; of one of the more brutal international fighting contests. He
brushed down a sprawling, elegant tribal tattoo which coiled along one half of his face
like the tentacles of a thorny rosebush with a cullus encrusted knuckle and imagined
himself back in the cage; back in a geographically defined arena in which the only rule
was said to be that there were no rules.
Iron licked his finger as if a baker sampling the icing of an experimental cake
and rewrote his strategy on the spot like an inastute administrator suddenly realizing on
his way to a board meeting with his corporate superiors that all his calculations had
been based on flawed sales figures. Japingka encroached his way forward as if a cheeky
musketeer crawling into no man's land during a Christmas day truce with a sky high
round kick which this time his differentiatingly diatomically proportioned opponent was
ruefully ready for. The gawping giant was soon to conclude that Iron was so quick that
if he had been a beggar he could have taken a five dollar bill from his pocket, buy a cup
of coffee with it, sit relaxed in the sunshine on a nice restaurant verander in Central
Park sipping it in leisurely comfort and put the change back where he'd snatched the
note from before he would even have noticed he had been pick pocketed.
Unfortunately, if Iron had been a beggar, only financial losses would have threatened,
but as a fighter there were a lot more serious concerns on the agenda.
By this time the resourceful reactionary had evaded Japingka's long forgotten
kick with a deflecting forearm and proceeded to drop down onto his back and tie up
the behemoth's striking foot with both of his own in a lounging leg lock which left the
indomitable figure writhing on his front like a fritter in a frying pan; grinding his iceberg
like teeth against the sap sour wooden floor like a split spined marsupial in a malicious
mantrap. Successful as this approach may have seemed, Iron was well aware that an
adversary of this size was unlikely to quit when shackled by a comparably measly
sparing partner, and promptly released the hold, rocked back into a steady stance and
thought about powering in with a histrionic hook, but was deterred as the kneeling
Japingka protected himself with meaty palms which acted like a streetwide police
roadblock which could never be traversed with any conventional technique.
The embittered equerry took the floor with a searching sidekick for which the
perspective recipient had already made reciprocal provisions as he moved first away
then in with a front foot shin sweep which may well have failed to fell the bipedic
building of a man, weight and height disparities taken into consideration, but did make
him stoop enough to allow him to hold the boisterous beast's curtain sized sleeve like
an otherwise lost toddler to his mother's arm while he applied a beguiling broadside of
a hooks to the stomach and finally the hitherto unscalable target of his patrimoniously
patterned face. As Japingka fell the whole titanic tower transgressed into a trembling
tango as if tossed onto a tremolo trampoline, but Iron made sure he clang onto to
enough composure to court the colossal creature again with another confuting crack to
the jaw with which the enraged rapscallion remonstrated that it was time to change the
record.
One floor up and rather more alone, Lincoln jiggled a loose tooth with her
tongue then dictated to herself that such a time passing distraction could easily become
a damaging habit. She giddily looked down the winding set of service stairs which went
on for an epithetical eternity and forced her to dizzily drop back into an enforced cross
legged seated position to allow her vision to recover unabated. She sat up against the
cold stairway wall as her soul squealed with virulent jubilation somewhere within her.
This experience was agonizingly reminiscent of some existential abandonment. She
pressed the barrel of her gun against her forehead as if it were a children's toy and felt
the stark contrast of cold metal and impatiently pulsating blood vessels. Huddling
herself up and yanking her jacket closed with a flinching shiver, she fixed an eye on the
twirling wooden stairway in the corner from which she supposed Iron would presently
emerge as if it was glued painfully to her retina with an invisible ten foot stalk. As the
kalpa long moments ticked away her soul felt like it was falling deeper and deeper into
a wily abyss; gathering speed as it became more and more likely she would never see
him again. "Silence is one of those things you tend to love and hate in equal measure;"
although its searing presence prompted her to break it; "it can grant you either a cosey
comfort that there's a wonderful, boundless nothing around you that invites a gorgeous
mystery, or it can facilitate a fierce forbidding over what really amounts to the same
thing. When its in the second of its moods it tends to prompt you to pray for noise."
And a noise there was; which made Lincoln's brittle heart jump, until she realized it was
coming from the other side of the hall; from a creaking pair of glazed glass doors which
assumingly led up to what surely to god must have been the top level.
Tranio and Dumain; military rookies by regular standards, kicked the previously
unseen door open in a frenzied effort to apprehend one of their infuriated boss' most
wanted, and thus head the list of honors in the new year. Volscenzi had already heard
of Lincoln's dismissal of one of his prize assassins; the all seeing eye rarely allowed
such significant affairs to go unnoticed. Dumain had marshalled this on the spot
flushing out mission like some super scale rentokill assignment; there were places even
the cameras didn't go. He glared fretfully to and fro like an arachnaphobic in a web
draped loft, police issue handgun flitting frabilitiously in his grasp craving an invaluable
scalp. Lincoln however, had other, brighter ideas. The pretentious pair lurking with
threatening intent, the first priority on her agenda was to duck out of their line of
vision, knowing that there are sizable advantages to being small. The next was to
announce her presence, but not her location. This was achieved with a triple header of
shrill gunfire which struck the floor, wall and drab lead banister and successfully
disarmed the jittery Dumain. Tranio cursed his compatriot's inequitable reactions and
searched for the proprietor of that lame folly while Lincoln crouched in the shadows
and impishly shifted from side to side as if preparing for the killer shot she had no
intention of delivering. That proved unnecessary; Dumain's initial response being to half
topple down the stairs in the general direction of the gunfire. A sound palm to the nose
may well have put him out of commission for the foreseeable future, but the vociferous
strike was also to announce her location to the more restrained of the hunting gunmen,
whose blood lusting display of machine gun fire persuaded her in no uncertain terms to
scoot around the dark stair well and conceal herself behind a stout lead crate which
possessed a purpose unknown. 'Esse est percipi.' Given the circumstances it was
probably advised to keep her comments to less than a whisper, although the threat was
epigrammatically extinguished as she picked her moment to sweep Tranio's traipsing
foot aside; leaping back into visibility and sending her opponent cannon balling down
the next flight with a nasty swipe of her portly firearm. She shrugged at her observed
lack of trepidation over this whole affair. Iron may well have been crazy to suggest the
direct approach, but it had been successful thus far, and besides, the same quality could
easily be leveled at her. Nervousness is an affliction of the considered; the sane; not the
emancipated. She returned to her midnight vigil at the corner of the steps, looking
down on the smaller teak stairway as she had been before she was rudely interupted.
She began to look at her watch then remembered she had never worn one. This
loneliness was getting her down; the old 'friend' called depression she thought she had
rid herself of. She grimaced at the thought of being subjected to that old millstone
again.
Charged down as if by a fired up rugby player desperate to force the ball; or in
this case the man; over the line, Iron submitted to a crucial confusion as he absorbed
the meteor like weight of a swiping right while held to the floor regardless of an
assuredly astute cover-up, and wriggled away like a tadpole between the teeth of a
great white, his head still ringing as if its insides consisted of a jangling belfry at a
punch which had felt more like being run over by a tree trailing timber truck. He
flinched as if his mind had been erased by a sadistic super computer and ignored the
metallic scent of blood which permeated his senses as it began to drip like a faltering
tap from one nostril as one ignores one's own breath when superficially more important
things preoccupy us. He cushioned the effect with a plugging fist and hobbled back a
step to incite Japingka into an additional offensive. The ploy worked a fondant treat;
the cloud high commissar soon finding himself punching mid air; Iron using his superior
speed and agility to great advantage as he looped under his opponent's outstretched
arm into a prolonged full circle and proceeded to crunch an incisive flat of the foot into
the incensed special government operative's rickety cheek bone. But heart warmingly
minor victories often lead into greater triumphs; a notion which the peripatetic
impertinent brought to the fore as he took a long run up, tucked his back leg behind
him and launched himself into an ambitious flying kick which connected probably only
out of fortune with Japingka's jaw and sent him collapsing against the quivering stairs
like a bear with a sore head; almost bringing the weedy wooden walkway down like a
woodworm infested forester's hut at the hand of an atom bomb. Thankfully, the
unsterdy structure managed imploringly to stay up, otherwise Iron would have found it
difficult to ascend to the next level, which may have meant a niggly detail would have
cut his big celluloid style rebellion short on an irritating technicality.
Lincoln started like the juvenile daughter of an intrepid military pilot who was
expected home from a heroic incursion into enemy territory in which for all she knew
he could have perished as a shape trudged tiredly up the veritable legless ladder which
Japingka had so thoughtfully left standing. Overcome with a quintessential joy which
she couldn't quite yet place, she released a deep outward breath as if she had been
holding it throughout the entire scene as she made out the familiar character she had
been waiting for; perhaps the only other friendly face left in the building and hugged
him like a beloved childhood safety blanket saved at the last moment from a high
tensity wash not recommended for woolens. The fact that he appeared just as anxious to
see her was adequate conciliation for the trepidation she had felt, which prompted a
heartfelt promise; "Next time there's a two way junction, we both go the same way."
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