Chapter entry in which Kane meets his Praetorian doppelganger to ask him for a favor, and backstory is revealed. This is part of ongoing story in a comic book universe based in the universe of MMORPG City of Heroes.
“Thank you for meeting me,” Kane said into the dim light.
“How could I say no?” returned the voice, “I hope you’ve come with payment of some kind for my last favor.”
A pause extended between the two men, dripping with unspoken ire.
“...No.”
Novak sighed, “You’re asking a great deal of me, Peter Kane. I already offered copies of my notes. I’d have expected you of all people able to make sense of them.”
“I can and I have. Lack of intellect is not the obstacle. It’s resources...and time.”
Novak approached his much older doppelganger. His head tilted imperceptibly in the darkness, noticeable only by the brief glint of his spectacles, “What’s changed? You seem…” he looked Kane up and down, still infected by the mysterious Devouring Earth plague, “Well… hardly normal, but no worse than before.”
Kane didn’t answer.
It seemed to dawn on the Praetorian, “Unless…. it’s not you racing the clock this time, but someone close to you. Someone you’d do anything for. Even if that meant… asking me for help.”
Kane stood completely still with a tight jaw, “Doesn’t matter.”
“I think I know who it is—”
“I said it doesn’t matter. It demands my full attention. So, for the time being, I need you to work with the others: Irons, Mag, Marissa, Dane, and anyone else who joins the project. I need you to find my cure.” He couldn’t believe he was saying this, “I am officially your patient Dr. Novak. Do whatever needs to be done.”
There was a long pause as Novak considered his options. He admitted he liked the sound of that, but…
“Right, well, again, what do I get out of it? I’m still waiting for you all to deliver on my last request.”
Kane huffed a single laugh, “Experimenting on me isn’t enough for you? Me, the Primal Earth iteration of you that happens to be infected by the same plague that destroyed your world? Come on, Novak, you’re overreaching.”
“I hardly think I’ll get anything useful out of you,” he snapped. His eyes glowed with the faintest of blue light. Kane was taken aback, almost hurt, definitely threatened; however, he tried his best not to show it.
Novak continued, “No, saving your life would only serve to distract me from my goal, I think. As far as I’m concerned, there is no reason to involve me, so why should I give a damn?”
“Good God, you involved yourself the second you walked into Alpha Division looking for trouble.”
“I wasn’t looking for trouble. I was looking for you.”
“You tried to KILL Mag.”
“She was being stupid. And she was in my way. She was going to blow my cover before I’d even gotten to meet you.”
“But WHY then?” Kane sputtered, “Why did you need to meet me so badly that it would merit murdering someone? What is this obsession that drove you to traverse time and space just to fuck with me?!”
Novak paused again, sizing up the situation, trying to determine if they were close to blows or not. The topic of Mag was always a sensitive one with Peter Kane. He deemed the environment benign enough for now, and he gathered himself up to explain.
“When will you get it through your head that I didn’t come here for you?” Novak said quietly, on the verge of a monologue that Kane was, unfortunately, all too familiar with. “When I learned of the pathways that existed between my world and its parallel dimensions, I started planning my investigation of all alternate forms of the Devouring Earth and Dr. Hamidon. I was willing to do anything.” He glanced at his robotic arm in emphasis for his determination and sacrifice, “Eventually I found myself a part of a cutting edge taskforce on the verge of a plan to defeat the Devouring. But then…. everything came...crashing down. My world died, everyone I knew and loved died. That was the end of Praetorian Earth.”
Novak turned away. He seemed to be expressing real emotion, but Kane knew all too well, it could just as easily be an act.
“I came here. It’s not my world, but at least it wasn’t full of ghosts and the unspeakable keening of Hamidon’s monstrosities. I brought my work, what remained of it. I thought I could try again, pick up where my team left off, maybe even start a new one. There are others like me taking refuge here,” Novak turned back towards Kane, “That’s when I considered my Primal double. My equal. Another mind just like mine working towards the same goal! I searched for you, but… to my dismay all I found was a mourning family and missing son. You were gone.”
Kane started to mentally put the timeline together. He went missing about 7 years ago in the current timeline. He had been 22. He pushed the thought from his mind of his younger self — his correct self — still a prisoner in some distant 5th Column base.
“I even tried to help find you, you know, but I had no more luck than the authorities. It was nice though...seeing the faces of my parents again, even though they weren’t really mine. You have a brother though. That was an interesting difference. I never did.”
“Shut up,” Kane hissed. The fact Novak had been around his family disgusted him. Kane felt his blood pressure spike and tiny capillaries swell under the surface of his mutated skin.
Novak held his hands up placatingly, “Sorry. The point is, I had moved on. I continued my work. I even fancied myself your replacement in this world, and it gave me a sense of meaning and validation that I hadn’t abandoned my world for no reason, that this was my purpose. And just when I thought I’d made a place for myself here... you came back. Out of the blue. And not just that, but you were different. It was another you, from a distant future. You had been changed, shaped, broken. I was admittedly fascinated. What could have done such a thing? To reduce a man such as we to such states—“
Kane glared daggers at Novak and gnashed his teeth. Angry black thorns started to slowly twist from his hair. Novak didn’t seem to mind. He continued on, “I felt both invaded by your return and also a sense of renewed hope. I had to meet you. I had to know. But it proved more difficult than I’d anticipated. You had a team of your own by then, and I understand — trust me I do — the loyalty you feel towards them. It’s just that I was…”
“Alone,” Kane finished, perhaps not in the way Novak had intended, but truthful nonetheless, “I had a family, despite everything I’d done, despite who I was, and you didn’t.”
Novak grunted a little. He couldn’t bring himself to admit Kane was right, but he didn’t deny it with a lie. Meanwhile, Kane was starting to make sense of the story: the cruelty, the stalking, lashing out at Mag. It wasn’t all just calculated risks and detached psychopathy, he could see that now. It was envy. He was a man in his 20s, emotionally stunted by loss and the horrors of surviving the apocalypse. Kane knew it all too well. Not everyone would have become the monster he had become in finding a simple artistic bliss in the systematic vivisection under the order of the 5th— how easy it had been to let go of empathy and humanity when faced with such trauma. Novak’s cold egotism was uncomfortably familiar to Kane. The hot canniness of sharp memory flashed through his mind — the man he was 30 years ago, no now, still being carved at by torture. The correct version of himself was out there. He hadn’t yet been subjected to the horrors he had. He felt the tiniest wave of sympathy for Novak well up inside him. Perhaps it was inevitable. You can only hate yourself so much.
“So you sneaked around wearing a helmet?” Kane finally asked, “Pretending to be a recruit? That didn’t turn out very well.”
“Look, I really didn’t think it would be so difficult to get a moment with the Division’s physician, alright? I didn’t expect Mag to be so protective of you. Frankly, I couldn’t understand it. And when I thought I’d gotten rid of her, your fucking oversized metal puppy Irons had been following me the whole time. Everything went to shit, but then I met Doe. And Doe introduced me to the Augury. Honestly, it reminded me of my old team in many ways, and Doe was a refugee from Praetoria like me. You can’t imagine my surprise when I found out you’d been moonlighting with them all along.”
Kane looked down, not really wanting to revisit that bit of his past, “It really bothered you when Doe left, didn’t it?”
“Everyone left. Bleedout missing in the night. Fox Hollow arrested. It was just me, the staff, and the experiments left behind. I took the opportunity to step up to the vacant throne and work on my own goals. There was enough funding to keep most of the staff happy for a while, and I portioned off parts of each department to continue my work on the Devouring Earth projects. It’s not the same, but… it’s progress.”
“And you’ve been a law-abiding not-citizen ever since?”
“Yes. I’m not so bad, Peter, I’ve been trying to get you to see that.”
“Sorry, Novak, but you aren’t.”
“No worse than you.”
“That may be. Perhaps all iterations of Peter Kane are monsters.”
Novak grimaced. He obviously disagreed. He didn’t see himself as a monster, he thought far better of himself than that. Kane was the monster. What Novak had done amounted to a bit of thuggish shortsightedness, sure, but not monstrous. He resented that, “I’m no monster.”
“Tell that to everyone who’s met you. Everyone hates you, Novak.”
“So popular opinion defines truth now, is it? That’s not the Kane I know. Kane doesn’t kowtow to the opinions of his friends, doesn’t forego fact for childish sentimentality. He rages against society for their mindless abandonment of truth in favor of blind ignorance. Peter Kane is alone because he’s the only one who’s willing to tear the wool from their eyes and stamp upon them the painful reality that there is no justice, no fairness, nor meaning or plan or reason for suffering, that the world will always be crushed under the boot of ambition, because selflessness only gets you one thing—dead.”
Kane just wanted him to stop talking. He clenched his fists and felt the pulse of Novak’s heart. Novak knew instantly what was about to happen as he was tugged by an invisible force towards the Devoured doctor, whose head was wreathed in angry thorns and eyes stained near-black from infection. Novak reacted in turn with a blaze of green radioactive energy. Kane grabbed Novak by the front of his shirt and watched as his eyes and nose started bleeding. He coughed, splattering Kane’s face with a mist of blood, “Fuck.” He rasped with fluid-filled lungs.
The green glow shifted to blue as the very air ionized around him. It hissed and popped with atomic fury, and Kane felt instantly nauseated. He let go, and as he did, he felt the beginning of what could only be an unfathomable burning sensation, like every nerve on the skin of his hands was a writhing livewire. He looked at his hands then back at Novak. He was in a readied position, knees bent and hands forward. The room was flooded with radiation, that much he knew, but he had no idea what it would actually take to kill him. Novak didn’t have his gun, but clearly didn’t need it in close quarters. Kane took another precautionary step back; now wasn’t the time to fight. That time would come someday, but not today.
Novak wiped his nose and coughed a few more times, staining the sleeve of his white coat crimson. “Stay back,” he said suddenly through clenched teeth. Kane did. He watched. Novak was a true meta, and now Peter could see it for himself. Kane was more a walking series of disasters and mistakes, he bore countless scars for it, and had spent the better part of the last decade on death’s door. Novak was something else. Novak was powerful, alive, finely tuned, and devastating. And yet…
The glow faded, the heat receded, and the room once again was dark. Kane’s gaze never left the other man. That power wasn’t altogether contained, was it?
“Rather nasty gift you have there, Peter,” Novak finally managed, “I’ve seen you do it but… living it is another story. It felt like drowning.”
“It was,” Kane replied flatly, still more absorbed in his curiosity about Novak’s condition, “I could say the same for you. How did it happen?”
“Not so different than you. I was impatient.”.
“When did you know you had powers?” he asked in the tone of asking for a friend.
Novak was a bit surprised to be the subject of questioning after he’d just been assaulted for what he could only imagine was monologuing. He tried to keep it succinct, “Cancer, Peter. I gave them all cancer.”
Kane paled as much as a plant-ified man could pale. A look of comprehension and horror flashed across his face which he attempted to hide by adjusting his glasses, “A-and now? Is that...still a risk?”
“No.”
He nodded. He was angry. It wasn’t a pure and focused anger that normally helped him laser in on a goal and wipe everything else from his mind, it was a chaotic confused anger like wildfire. He dug his nails into his palms, he needed to feel it, he needed the pain to make sense of things. Memories flashed again: Sayterra confiding in him the sickening truth. Irons tearing at himself in a fit of rage. Mag’s apartment and the book in her drawer When Friendship Hurts. He shook it away.
“Good,” Kane said coolly, “then I don’t have to worry about you working with my colleagues.”
“As long as they cooperate.”
He nodded, “Just know this… if you lay a hand on a single one of them, I will destroy you. Even if it kills me. Do you understand?”
Novak suppressed a smile, “Yes, Peter, I do.”
“So you’ll help me?”
“Mm, yes. But… I’m going to need one more favor from you. I promise, last one.”
Kane sighed.
“There’s a woman, I believe you’re familiar with her. She was at your hearing. Her name’s Mirian Vanek, aka Fox Hollow, I mentioned her. I’d like her out of prison.”
Kane leaned back and shook his head, “Absolutely not.”
“If I’m going to be focusing on you, Peter, then someone is going to have to run The Augury.”
“Or, I could not aid a supervillain organization. Novak, have some sense.”
Novak braced himself, standing up to his full height and throwing his shoulders back. Despite being doubles, Novak had a generous amount of build on him that Kane did not possess, be it thanks to his age, background, or whatever experimentation he’d done on himself over the years.
“Then go ahead and die, Peter. You came to me, remember?,” he almost shouted, “That’s my deal. I’ll save your miserable life, and I ask nothing in return for myself, but that you help me make good on the promise I made to Mirian. I’m not a crook, Peter, I’m a man of my word. And I’ve done nothing but keep my word, even if it so clearly disagrees with your pathetic excuse for morality.” The blue-green haze around Novak’s body returned dimly in the darkness. Kane stepped back reflexively, not wanting to be near it, knowing what it would do. Novak took a deep breath and the glow faded. There was a long pause between them, trying to gauge what the other was about to do.
“I’m not trading my life for letting a mass murderer out of prison. No deal.” Kane held firm. Novak was being unreasonable.
He scoffed, “Oh don’t give me that high road bullshit.” Novak laughed, “You’d really choose the law over all your friends? You think they’d give a damn about Fox Hollow going free if it meant not losing you? You’re going to die without me, Peter, and it’ll be your fault.”
Kane's heart sank. He couldn’t agree to these terms even if he wanted to. He didn’t have the authority to release a prisoner like Fox Hollow. It was hard enough figuring out a way to clear the charges against Novak which were monumentally less than the charges against Mirian. But Novak was right. He could hear Say’s voice scolding him.
I can’t lose you.
“what’s zhe timeline on this? It could take a while to handle Mirian, and time is what we don't have.”
“I’m not unreasonable. As long as I know you’re making progress, I’ll keep working. You have such little faith in me” Novak nodded and slung the rest of his armor over his back, switching it on with a hum. The glow around his body returned, then vanished, sapped away at the same time the machine spun up and the thrusters sparked on his jetpack.
“Goodnight then.”
“Goodnight.”
Roger Novak strode out of the cellar. The metal door opened, piercing the dark with a shaft of golden evening light, then shut again with a bang. Kane leaned against the wall. His hands were still burning. He looked at them, and in the dim light he could see small blisters forming on his palms. He concentrated and in a few moments, his hands were healed.
Small blessings. He thought. He wasn’t a walking nuclear reactor, no, but he could at least fix some of the damage of one. It remains to be seen if he could fix the damage left on someone else. He needed to get home.