Note: The following is a post I wrote for a role-play by e-mail group that I (and Storm) have joined, The Liberty Brigade. For the hell of it, I decided to post this flashback, a bit of a Lovecraft / “The Thing” pastiche, here while I continue to work on “Isle Of Blood”. It’s not meant to be too detailed or long, it’s just a role-playing flashback post, but I figure I’d put it here. Enjoy.

“Storm was anxious. He had seen some remarkable things, most of which could be explained through reason or science.

“The direction that he was being led now, however, was those realms that belonged to the things he’d seen that COULDN’T have been explained away.

“He was the lone witness once to something that happened in the antarctic circle. He had been flying supplies to a research station, but upon landing he had found it completely empty. He investigated.

“In a chamber in the bowels of the station was the bodies of the research crew… they’d seemed to have been taken apart and put back together in what appeared to be an unsettling attempt to create a new creature.

“They had still been alive in that state too, crawling pitifully across the floor. They looked at Storm with pleading, agonized eyes, and their moans would reverberate in his memory for the rest of his days.

“So, too, would the tittering sound of the other thing in that room, an abomination that was wearing a skinned human face like it was a mask.

“Cliff had shot the thing with his pistol until the gun’s chamber clicked empty. After the shots’ echoes died away, however, an appalling slithering sound came from beneath the room.

“Cliff had hurried back to his plane, then returned to the room with a Tommy-gun and satchel-charges. These he set at the main support columns in the station, then hurried out to his plane. Something beneath the ground chased him, though… something huge and angry… the ice crackling and buckling behind his running feet. He managed to get the plane airborne, thankfully, and as he banked the big Ford tri-motor “tin goose”, the charges exploded, putting the tangled mass of flesh that had once been men out of their misery. His mind scrambled, trying vainly to put the panic and the crawling fear behind him. His curiosity persisted, however, and he looked down into the pit that had once been the station.

“Through the smoke and vaporized ice, he saw…

“He could never recall what he had witnessed as he looked down. The memory of what he saw refused to come back, leaving a whited-out patch in his continuity.

“He was found several days later, the plane a near-wreck where he’d managed to set it down on a small island. He had never been able to shake that tingling fear whenever he thought of that incident, and had never confided it to anyone, even those closest to him: his secretary, Marie; the former MARDL head-mechanic, Willy Avis; or even his best friend, The Red Phantom.

“The promise now, for another excursion into the unknown, had set upon him the same tingling fear somewhere in his mind, like a nest of spiders…”