Last night, I watched Æon Flux, which was not very good. I mean, not awful, except perhaps in all the ways that it was awful, but not a successful movie by any stretch. It’s best when it rises to the level of interesting and colorful mess. I can’t really blame it for being so very untrue to the original cartoon, if only because the original cartoon was so often untrue to itself. (It’s not exactly a spoiler to say none of the episodes are directly connected…or even that Aeon dies in a lot of them.)
Today, I went to see Man of Steel with friends. It’s an entertaining summer movie…and apparently it has something to do with Superman? In all serious, I enjoyed it. (And a whole lot more than that other summer blockbuster that pretended to be the thing in its title.)
In between all that, I wrote this from a couple of prompts:
When they found it, when Jacobs split the final stone with his pickaxe and pulled the artifact from the rubble, none of the others knew that this would be the thing that made each of them famous. They were concerned just with trying to survive the discovery.
“Do you feel that?†asked Jacobs, who would not be so lucky. He held the object up to the light so that there could be no mistake. He was just as shocked as all the others to see this impossible thing. But none of the others, and perhaps not even Jacobs himself, noticed that his hands were shaking or that the impossible thing he held in them was starting to glow. “It’s kind of a hum, you know, kind of low-level. I think maybe it’s — “
But they never learned what Jacobs thought. The artifact, which should have been destroyed — if not by the cave-in that had trapped them there, or by the pressure that had trapped it for centuries inside of rock, then certainly by the clumsy swing of Jacob’s axe as he’d tried to force his way out and back to the surface. It was an impossible thing, ridiculous even, and Jacob had been an idiot to go picking it up.
He had no one to blame but himself when it exploded.
At least, that’s what they would tell themselves in the days and weeks to follow. Murdock, who’d been close enough to Jacobs that she was knocked backward by the blast, then knocked unconcious when her head thudded against the cave wall, would blame Jacobs most of all, even if she knew in her heart that she probably would have done exactly the same thing.
“It was a lightbulb,†she said. “It was a goddamn lightbulb hidden inside the stone. Buried for a thousand years, how did a lightbulb even get down there?â€
None of them could say; none of them even would say for sure if that was the thing they had seen in Jacobs’ hands. It was too ridiculous, and whatever it had been, the artifact was now gone. The explosion had taken care of that. Dawson had his theories — he was the one who’d started calling it the artifact, and who would later popularize the term when the media started calling, when their powers were revealed. But his theories were only guesses — born out by a little research, he would say, even if he seemed unwilling to share that research with the others.
For the time being, they had their powers, and if it had been an ancient artifact, or the energy expelled in its explosion, or dark matter, or time travel, or even mad experiments from the future gone horribly wrong — again, Dawson and his theories — what did it matter? They couldn’t go back to what they had been. Even Murdock, with her fangs, wouldn’t have wanted that.
The blast hadn’t just killed Jacobs, or tossed Murdock against the wall, it had cleared the way for them to escape. That’s what they told her, when she regained conciousness in the woods outside the cave, and she saw bo reason for any of them — Dawson, Phillips, or van Houten — to lie to her. They’d never found their way back inside, of course, even when she suggested there might be some value in investigating the scene, even after their powers had started to emerge and they had good reason to investigate. She knew she was quicker to distrust — sometimes it took all her strength to just not tear them literally apart — so she decided to give them the benefit of the doubt. If they were lying…
I don’t know either.
Anyway, um…happy Father’s Day!