Marvel: Step in the Shadows

It's Wednesday, Oct 31st. The city streets are crowded for the holiday. Even with the rain and cold winds. Not me though, I was at home, comfy. In my sweats, under a blanket in my living room, drinking my Earl Grey with my PB&J sandwich, rewatching The Batman for the 50th time, and enjoying every minute of my day off.

When I first heard the casting for The Batman, I wasn't too worried. DC had a great record of choosing great actors for Batman. What killed them was usually the script, case in point Ben Affleck. Plus having watched Petterson in Cosmopolis and other indie movies he did after Twilight, and not having watched any of the Twilight movies, I didn't have any actual hang-ups on him.

The question was whether the script was going to be good and when I was there at the movie theaters and saw that iconic intro I knew two things. One: That the movie was going to be great. I was wrong it was spectacular. Two: They just surpassed The Joker intro from The Dark Knight as the best DC movie intro and probably up there with The Godfather, Raiders of the Lost Arc, and Up as one of the best movie intros ever made.

How they made a twist on the bat symbol going from what I believed was a gimmick from the forty that they kept as it was so important lore even if they had modern tech such as smartphones to do a better job in alerting him to various crimes. To something to be feared by panning to a bodega robber who sees that light on and thinks he sees something in the shadows and running off. To the half-faced skull member in the movie who saw it and got nervous and later on when you get the Vader-level intro scene where you hear Batman before you see him at the subway, and saw the same kid look like he was shitting bricks. There was a reason he wasn't part of the group that fought back and that he ran off as soon as he could. The person he helped was just as scared and shitless. They drove that point that it was early Batman before he realized he could be more than just fear and vengeance.

What stuck with me was how he said; "they think I'm hiding in the shadow, but I am the shadow." Got me thinking that ability would be so sick to pair up with him. When most people think of what powers would fit best for the Bat, most people jump to giving him a healing factor something like Captain America and Deathstroke so he can heal from injuries quicker or enhanced senses so he can do the detective mode like in Arkham games full time but that movie just pointed to me how I was right in by giving him shadow manipulation power would be a force. Which lead me into a rabbit hole that lead me to Cloak.

Cloak aka Tyrone Johnson, is a Marvel character that screams out wasted potential. Until the recent run of savage avengers, where he got back together with Dagger and saw progression in their relationship, and hopefully this current event Bloodhunt, where vampires plan to block out the sun using the dark force dimension straight out from Skyrim, I felt like marvel wasn't doing enough progression with the character but that is something the big two struggle with. Keeping to the editorial mandate of the status quo.

You see I saw kinship with Tyrone as we were both black kids from Boston that moved away there because of some personal problems. For me it was my mother getting sick, causing my parents and I to head for Minnesota so she could be closer to her side of the family. For him though he watched his friend get gunned down by the police for something he didn't do. The helplessness and guilt he felt from freezing up during the confrontation with the police due to his speech impediment and anxiety had led him to run away to New York and live on the streets.

It's there he meets Tammy ( Dagger ) and eventually gets captured and experimented on and given a connection to the Dark Force and forms a duo with Tammy becoming Dagger and Cloak where they were introduced in a Spiderman comic and had a meh comic line before they were background characters that showed up in other people comics and events like the Runaways, Civil War and Secret Invasion.

The reason I say he's wasted potential is the Darkforce has the potential to be such a broken power on its own. You see the Darkforce is an alternate dimension that sucks energy in all forms whether it solar, heat, or even life force, and corrupts the users the more they use it with the various monsters and demons that live there like Predator in exchange for the abilities to create constructs, illusions, teleport, sense or manipulate people through their darker emotions like fear, anger, sadness. All he ever does with it is pretty much teleport and has the same character dilemma between balancing the light, and his morals with the temptations of his darker powers.

With the Darkforce he could do anything, taking examples from other forms of media, like Naruto's Batman, Shikamaru Nara shadow based jutsus, replicating cursed energy manipulation from JJK, and Megumi shikagami or even Yami abilities from Black Covers, and Shadow magic from Warcraft, there such a wide range of things he could do with it. I feel like I can do so much better with it. That's why I filled out the marvelous adventure you after watching that movie just imagined how dope it would be to have those powers. Making a build inspired by those characters I took the cloak's connection to the Darkforce, reimagined Megumi and JJK cursed energy and techniques as a form of chi manipulation like Iron Fist instead of a dragon life force it would be through the Dark Force. This gives him the potential to learn magic to enhance those abilities since in Marvel it's all about using your natural energy, energy from the earth like key lines or alternate dimensions, and divine patrons which lets him learn spells channeling the dark force to power the spells. Shikamaru and Batman's greatest strengths are their intelligence and wealth added on so making him gifted intelligence with an inheritance of like 20 million. If I went with actually doing the Tony stark level wealth I'd have to deal with running or hiring someone to run a company for me and it'd get in the way of the whole street-level occult detective who can pull off crazy shit with proper planning and training to level, I've got going on.

As I finished the cyoa and walked back to my kitchen, to put my cup in the sink, I felt something grab my foot. Looking down I saw shadow tendrils that come from underneath my couch. I tried to shake it off, slowly backing off when the shadow started to expand. I tried to run when the shadows came for me but it was no use. It latched on me and tried to pull me into a white portal. Nothing I could do but scream on the way down.

Next thing I knew, I found myself waking up in a beautiful covenanted warehouse loft, watching a news anchor talking about the House of Magnus's big day.

Just as the news broadcast went on a commercial break. I turned the TV off and reassessed my options. I had gotten a huge headache from the memories and skills I got from the cyoa.

Amir Zell is a 21-year-old Muslim who's a teaching assistant to underclassmen at Empire State University. He owns a nice converted warehouse in Red Hook and a 20 million dollar inheritance from the inheritance he got from his parents. His parents were killed when he was younger by vampires and he was saved by Blade. It led him to being a ward of the state living in foster homes waiting till he aged out of the system at 18 so he could get his inheritance.

He eventually ran away from an abusive foster home and lived on the streets when he was kidnapped at 15 and experimented on and rescued by Spider-Man, Cloak, and Dagger when they stopped Marshall's plot to create a new synthetic drug for the Maggia. Leading him to get fascinated by the occult and mysticism going for his PhD in Anthropology with a focus on mythology and masters in Parapsychology and History.

I also got other skills and knowledge like the blueprints and inventions of Peter Parker his trackers, and various suits, and knowledge in the various sciences like biology, chemistry, and the more advanced ones like how to make generation 3 unstable molecule suits, shadow physics from Wakanda. With Danny Rands' knowledge of martial arts Asian mystism and chi manipulation. The dark pit in my stomach that I know is my connection to the Darkforce and a basic understanding of how to channel it through magic or chi. With some knowledge of spells he picked over the years looking through articles and books he found online or in antique bookstores.

Now that I had a handle on myself, I noticed that the headache disappeared. That leaves me to deal with the aftermath. The fact that I was in a different reality wasn't all that big of a deal. I didn't leave any close family behind. My parents died years ago in a car accident, a drunk driver swerved into the wrong lane hitting my parents head-on. Worried about my mom dying from a brain tumor just so she died in a car accident. Like a sick joke. I didn't get along with my aunts and uncles and numerous cousins so I pretty much lost contact with them when I joined the military and moved away never looking back. I had a few good friends from the service and at the warehouse that I was a night shift supervisor, that would mourn me for a few months, make a couple of RIP posts on their Facebook or Instagram on the anniversary for a couple of years before moving on. No, the problem wasn't what I had left behind, it was what, I was entering. I was stuck, deposited into this world, a world where villains regularly kill enough people that make even the worst of the worst dictators in my universe squeamish. Where gods and myths walked around and I was told to have a marvelous adventure. I guess what they say it's true be careful of what you wish for, you might just get it.