That Old Magick: A Marvel SI by AkumaOuja

Words: 62k+

Links: -https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/that-old-magick-a-marvel-si.1070198/#post-90042398

( A poor choice of transportation finds a man in a sleepy town half a continent away, several decades behind, and oh, did we mention people in spandex? A trip into the Marvel Comics around the turn of a Decade and the end of an Age, the decade being the 1980s, and the Age being the Bronze Age. It's going to take just a bit more than two fists to make it in a world of Marvels, for solving this problem, and a dozen other pithy taglines, a man's going to need a bit of That Old Magick. )

AN1: Alright then time to get to work. New concept, new idea, let's get ready to put this all together. In general I've been wanting to do some kind of comic book thing for awhile but I just never get around to it. With a friend of mine doing her own I feel like maybe now would be a good time? I've wanted to do something along these lines for awhile

Anyway, here we go, and thanks to AshlingWaltzes , Leonite and SparraNova for their help with this.

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Issue No.1: A New Snake In the Garden

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The thing about getting lost is sometimes, you find where you are but you don't quite actually get found. Which is a lovely philosophically bullshit way of saying that I have no idea how I got where I am or what in the world had happened to bring me here.

It'd been…simple enough. Call an Uber, which I normally hated doing, and get a ride to a local dealership. I needed a new car and I just about had the leg room for it in my wallet. Which is why now that after a brief nap in the back of this admittedly rather nice car, I was very, very confused as to what the fuck had happened.

Had I been kidnapped? Who kidnapped me? Who would bother?

"Hey, this isn't the dealership." I said dumbly, thumbing towards the….the cliff side town I had found myself in, a lot of old stone work standing against a stiff new-england breeze. Maybe a small city if you pushed it, going by the small amount of build up when I checked over my shoulder.

"What can I say, friend. It's where you need to be." The driver said, a slight man with a tanned complexion, lowering his shades for a moment to look at me.

"It's where you were headed, anyway. Good luck, and Adiosssss". He said, a hissing lisp as he gunned the engine, and I stumbled back from the door as it slammed shut

"Hey, wait a minute this, what the fuck is going on!" I snapped, but the car, a sleek, dark green dodge viper, sped off, leaving me alone in the middle of what I could only call nowhere.

"Fuck…" I swore, heaving a breath, trying to stamp down anger and stress. After a moment, I ran a hand through my thick mane of blond hair, and took stock of things.

"Right, just…I just need a read on the situation. Fuck it. Get my feet under me before I get walking." I told myself, as I took in myself and my surroundings.

Old stonework, the kind of old post-colonial build up you saw on the East Coast. A sign nearby, decorated with vines and one of the old "House Divided" snakes holding the writing, told me "Welcome to Starkesboro, Maine!" with a small footnote of "Founded 1670" that confirmed that New England old town air that I knew reasonably well once upon a time.

Before me the road fed into the town proper. Heavy stone and brickwork common to this kind of place, short, tough buildings, some of which were probably a hundred years old at the foundation or maybe more. A surprisingly well kept set of roads snaked their way through into a reasonably built up center, it seemed. No proper skyscrapers, but a few small office buildings and similar past an old town square and market road you'd see in about a thousand other old towns throughout the country.

Better kept than a lot of ones back home, though. The signs were newer and the brick and mortar was actually maintained.

"Alright." I said, and I got walking, taking stock of myself as I went. No use standing around. It was early morning, somehow, and people were already popping out to start giving me odd looks.

Got one of my nicer coats, wallet with 20k in cash, since mama always said, the dealer is fairer if you've got it in green. Really just that should have kept me awake but in my defense, it'd been a very long week.

"Left my fucking gun at home of course because I just was begging to get mugged." I grumbled to myself. Laws changed recently, needed time to read up on them. Figured it'd be fine, because I'm an idiot.

This situation was impossible. I was making busy work to keep myself functional and focused but nothing changed the fact that I got into a car in the mid-west in the middle of the day and woken up in New England in the morning out of nowhere. If I didn't know any better, I'd assume I was drugged.

I kept walking, taking myself along the edge of town through a short set of local storefronts along the market road and through what was once the town square I imagine, taking calming breaths as my heavy boots strode along the concrete. I pulled out my phone after a moment, already having a feeling…

"That I would have no signal. Alright." I said, looking at a lack of bars. Right then. Kind of expected that, I can deal with it. I kept moving, trying to keep my calm and just, try to get a feel for the lay of the land, and just ..

Well if I was honest with myself I was wasting time to try and come up with a plan. I needed to just, well, figure out how to get the fuck home and then I could figure out how I got the fuck here in the first place. So I kept walking, looking for like a gas-station or something, some place I could borrow a phone.

But along the way I caught sight of a newspaper stand, of all things. And as I did so, valiantly managing not to crush the expensive little pocket computer in my hand.

In one of those old plastic dispensers, there was a paper with a striking Sunday spread.

"The Maine Manuscript, January 1st, 1987" It read proudly. And it was a new, crisp paper. Couldn't have been printed more than a half dozen hours ago.

That was…was a lot, but that didn't make me stop, or lock up like I had. What did, however, was the headline and picture that were spread across the front with bold colors and lettering….

Depicting Iron Man and Spider-Woman fighting three armored men, with a footnote crediting the image with "Courtesy of our Distinguished Competitors at the Daily Bugle".

"Iron Man and Spider-Woman Fend off Supercriminal Hit-Men in New York City!"

….

"Well fuck."I said dully, even as I looked at the stand's "Yesterday's Issues" to see more familiar faces in various colorful costumes. After a moment, I walked over>

"How much for one of the whole run, yeah? I could use some change." I asked the man seated behind the stand, who eyed me for a moment from behind some of his own stock. A lanky fellow, with narrow eyes and a bald head.

"Just a quarter a pop, so about, you wanting back issues?" He asked, and I shrugged, "Yeah, figure I might as well. I've got a bit of catching up to do>" I said, and he did a quick bit of math in the air, double checking his count.

The entire lot cost me about five bucks, and I broke a few twenties. I didn't have to worry about money in the short term at least. Still I'd need some information, that much I could tell even as I flicked through a few.

"There a library in town? I've got some research to do for a bit of writing." I asked him as I took my change, and he shook his head.

"Used to be, big old monster up near the cliffs, but funding ran out and they shuttered it all up." He said, "Too big for what the folks around here needed, especially these days. They're thinking of opening a new one that'll cost less to keep up but good lord knows the city council'll drag their tails through mud before they get that done." He said, building up a head of steam as he started to vent his spleen, "They didn't even pay for the old one to be emptied out. Not sure what they pay for though with all that tax money. Sure ain't law enforcement what with the disappearances, ain't infrastructure, and it definitely ain't culture or good education around here!"

I faked a wince of sympathy. Well, not entirely, but I had a bit bigger problems than gripping about poor local government, really.

"Damn, and here I was moving here." I said, playing things off, "Thanks for the papers though. I'll probably see you around again."

"Your mistake friend. Still you need more papers or what have you, I've got you covered. Shaw, by the way, Solomon Shaw." He said, and I nodded, giving a wave.

"Cairn, Benjamin Cairn. Good to meet you." I said, starting off again, papers under my arm.

I needed a bit of time to plan something, or, well, just…make sense of things. Right now I was too confused, and didn't have enough information. It was just too much to deal with.

An old, boarded up Library would at least probably be enough to squat in until I could try and…well do something with myself and figure out what the fuck I could even do.

So I kept on moving along, heading up the cliff by the sea that wrapped around one edge of the small town, hearing sea birds and the wind mingling with distant waves.

"I'm half tempted to say that the real proof I'm in a comic book is the fact that its so damn scenic." I said to myself, even as I moved up the road, passing a few small buildings that had probably been some kind of crafts quarter, before this place had outgrown it. Sleepy little brick and mortar two stories that the larger town had left behind, most of them closed with dusty windows, though I could see one or two still running. A small bar, what looked to be an auto-shop that probably used to be something else a hundred years ago, and so on.

Eventually however I came to a larger building, just past the main road turning around back to rejoin the town proper. It was old, worn, and looked moderately more ornate, like it'd been a church, once upon a time. A short steeple crowning a rather nice three story building, narrowing at the top, with two short, single story wings out of the sides. Once upon a time, it had likely been rather grand.

"Starkesboro Public Library" proclaimed a sign at the front, and it seemed newer than the library itself. I strode on towards the building, walking past what appeared to be the typical "crouching lion" statues, though in this case it was seemingly a rather atypical set of concrete snakes holding apples. An architect had likely gotten cheeky I imagined. I came to a stop at the front. Its double doors were barred, and the lower windows were boarded up. So I strode on up, stopping mainly to take a look around and see if anyone was watching me.

Thankfully, the place seemed a little deserted. And if, like that guy said, this place isn't well attended to, then there shouldn't be. I've only got so much cash so I needed to use it sparingly and I could use a place to crash with a roof.

"Ah, one of those old bike locks." I said to myself, taking in the situation. Someone had just slapped a bike lock over the double doors and called it a day, or so it seemed. One of those adjustable, flexing ones rather than something more solid. Which was good for me.

I pulled out my knife from my boot, and got to work. A tap produced a solid click on the lock, no cheap plastic there unfortunately, but I kept testing it, heading down the length of the nylon parachute cord or whatever it was covering. Tap, tap, tap, and on the third one I found the end of the metal and wire mountings.

A lot of these old bike locks weren't well made. It was mainly just a matter of something sharp. Even a moderately nicer one like this wouldn't actually have a full metal center, and even if it did, it'd probably be bundled wires. Cutting parachute cord and metal wire was a pain, but unraveling it enough to cut individual strands? Was pretty easy to do just to save on the frustration. That was the main reason they switched to heavier stuff for the decent ones later.

A moment later, and I had the thing half undone and detached it from the lock on one end. The actual door lock was easy enough to solve with the old credit card trick, it wasn't like this place was anywhere important, so the old fashioned locks were more than enough.

And with that, I stepped inside, pulling the door shut behind me.

The entryway, a short hall with a staircase on either side, one up, the other down, was dusty. Not so much as to be coated, but running a finger over a bannister revealed that it was enough to mark up with a touch. In front there was a short couple of steps into the main room, where an old librarian's desk sat, the dusty placard reading "Ms. Ebora Konstri", presumably the head librarian.

Striding into the dusty old stacks, I went to find a table near a little alcove, and started settling in to work.

"Something to focus on, and to try and figure out what all I need to be concerned about, right?" I told myself, going to grab a few books, perusing the collection.

Sadly, even if this place had been open and actively run, this was the late 80s, so computer saturation wasn't as high as I'd like and the Internet barely existed. So there wasn't any particularly easy way to get information like that. So what I did was, well, go through a newspaper backlog as well as a few history books.

It was pretty wild to crack open a history book and read about the Howling Commandos being deployed to stop the Kannibal Kommando Korps in a fairly dry, textbook style, to say the least. Down right fascinating even just because there was so much that you didn't typically see in comics. You saw the most nailbiting or interesting escapades a lot of the time, particularly later on. But there'd been multiple wars with superhumans, monsters, and aliens involved over the years.

I popped out briefly for a package of pens and a pad of paper from the nearby general store, and came back, already trying to come up with a plan and trying my best to write down anything important I could. It was maybe a bit risky but…well my memory wasn't perfect. I'd deal. The books and papers were a cover of sorts, but also to try and sort of jog my memory a bit on a few things.

But, as I dug through the history books, I came across one that stood out. An older book, old enough that I'd call it a tome, tucked into a corner of a shelf. Leather bound and with a scaled strap bound around it.

"The Long History." Simple and to the point, with no author named. I took it over mostly out of idle curiosity, and largely despite the archaic binding style it was largely inline with most of the others, though rather than pictures for older events it largely had hand drawn sketches.

What caught my eye, however, was that there were always just, minor differences in detail. For one, it only went as far ahead as World War One, still calling it "The Great War" with an additional "Of Europe" thrown in for good measure, implying it was very recent at the time, before the whole "War to End All Wars" thing had really settled in academia.

The second was that, well, that's where it started. Tracing events back from that event. Which was particularly interesting, and honestly I could see some value in it, the whole "culmination of history" thing making it fun to see how it all flowed and tracing it back had a fun mystery vibe, really.

But it really stood out because when I cross-referenced it, it was just a bit more…specific, and complete. Names were filled out. Simple things, at first, like the name of the man who killed Archduke Ferdinand, simple enough. It even explained the chain of events.

But it also had a very "As you know' and "just so" angle when throwing in small details like motivations. Which would stand out less if I didn't start to recognize a few things.

Dracula came up, here and there. The Sorcerer Supreme was mentioned with a straight face as a political consideration. Either of which could be written off as just being more magically and historically savvy compared to the other texts [magic still seemed to be seen with a degree of skepticism, to say the least]...but when lines like "The Ottoman Empire were paralyzed by internal strife during the war, in no small part due to conflict between the native Vampire population and Clan Akkaba" pop up one takes note. Because that's not a name that's well known, last I could recall.

I got up upon finding that, taking a moment to carefully reorganize the books I'd been flicking through, and went to search, passing through the fairly familiar for all that I'd never been here before rows of shelves, taking the time to scan through them for any other…odd contributions to the collection.

As I made my way through, I climbed a set of stairs to a dustier, somewhat less disturbed floor. Picking my way through the library, however, I found a few more oddities. Nothing, well, nothing in and of itself world shaking.

But here and there were oddities. A mythology book with a near picture perfect drawing of Thor and Loki that was probably older than me and which was clearly translated by hand at one point. And poorly at that.

A book on metallurgy listing among other things the occult properties of Vibranium in rituals of warding against demons, of the "Second Class, but not the First, and rarely the Third" apparently. A cookbook with a recipe buried in it for slow roasted Skrull that seemed to descend into various euphemisms for "rare species of two legged mutton" throughout, only grudgingly offering alternatives, most of which were things I was also very certain were sapient. A book on carpentry with of all things instructions on the importance of making sure to not accidentally carve certain patterns into furniture unless you want it to eat people.

I took pictures, my phone essentially a glorified camera and PDA after all, and kept searching. Again and again, here and there as I passed through dusty stacks, I found something here and there. Until finally I ascended into the steeple tower, and found a final trio of bookcases. At this point, there were no more sections or categories. Most of what was on the shelf were books of mythology, fairytales, and an oddball selection of works related to a bit of everything.

But most notable was a set of black, leather bound books with silver etching showing a human skull on each spine, lashed together and shut with a set of belts and buckles of some kind of reptile. I took hold of them, and carried them down to the library proper again, settling in to try and read them.

Which proved…an interesting experience, to say the least.

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Starkesboro was a fairly quiet town. The bulk of the urban growth throughout the turn of the decade had left it behind, compared to many a town throughout the East Coast. Were one to characterize it, it would be perhaps as a city half grown, a snake that only partially shed its skin. Its small town roots worn proudly, though left to sleep, right alongside the small amount of built up business it had grown to support.

It was a quiet place, compared to how it had been close to a decade and change ago. And if one were to try to describe it, perhaps the worst that could be described about it was an air of melancholy to some of the residents, mostly the older families who could trace their names back to the founding.

All in all however it was a town where children could play unattended and people could walk home alone without fear.

And as she strode down a road close to sunset, certainly Tricia Wallace felt so, as she made her way home after a long day of work. A warm tan coat wrapped around a thin frame, her dark hair still coiffed and dolled. She had a slight slouch, either from poor posture or simple tiredness, a delicate, thin throat graced by a simple silver necklace with an emerald pendant that contrasted nicely with her pale, almost pallid, features.

She turned into a small alleyway, heels clicking along as she went towards her apartment. As she went, she failed to see a shadow trailing in her wake.

Passing a fire escape and moving around the foot of her apartment building, she tapped the buzzer next to the front door, waving to the camera above her. She turned away from the cold air, gathering her coat to her as she shifted slightly to rummage in her bag for a moment. She heard the short ring and the solid shunk of the door unlocking.

She did not hear or see the man behind her, trailing her footsteps, even as he followed after her. He passed under the arc of the camera, ill-placed to keep a proper vigil beneath itself as it was, and strode into the brick building after her, catching the door for just a moment to let himself inside.

She returned to her apartment without incident, settling about turning in for the night after a quick meal, when a knocking came at her door.

She stopped, a plate of half eaten italian sitting before her, as she felt a chill up her spine, before she stood up and walked across her small living room. She peered through the peephole for just a moment…and then relaxed, opening the door wide.

"Oh, Uncle Ambrose!" She exclaimed, delighted. Before her stood a small and slight man, once tall and whipcord thin like a palm tree, now bent with age. Leather features and somewhat yellowed eyes behind a small set of glasses.

"Ah, Tricia, my dear!" The man said, "So sorry to bother you at this time of night, but I just had to visit, you see!" he told her as she welcomed him in.

"Oh its no bother, Uncle! Now, what can I get for you! I wasn't aware you were in town! Oh its such a mess. Would you like some spaghetti? I know its a favorite of yours!" She asked cheerfully.

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"Oh I'd just be delighted Tricia my dear. I've been in town to do business with some old friends," Said the thing wearing the cast off skin of one Ambrose Wallace, a smile on his stolen lips as he settled into an offered chair.

"And I do have to say that I am just absolutely famished."

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AN2: Well that's done. I'd be the first to admit that I'm rusty and out of practice, but here we are! The start, however simple and admittedly just a touch rough, of a Marvel SI! I've been meaning to put in something along these lines for awhile and with my friend Ash putting her own out, well we talked about a few varied ideas for awhile while working on her own. You all should check it out, its over here at https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/maverick-solutions-crime-doesnt-pay-enough-marvel-si.1066868/ and its really quite good.

I chose a different time period, and focused it on a bit of an open beginning of sorts. Rest assured, at the very least, this is all based on a canonical oddity, with just a bit of empty spots in various histories used to help weave a narrative.