The Funeral of Axel Brass

[planetaryguide]

 He deserved better, I think, and then take another drag off a cigarette. I'd meant to quit again – it's so frowned on now that it's not worth the earful – but I feel something coming, a mean wind. I guess I really am the Ghost of the 20^th Century now. I feel more out of touch than ever. It's not the normal, old-man thought of everyone I know being dead, but he was the last person I actually related to. We were the same age, born on the same day: January 1, 1900. We were Century Babies, part of three autonomic defense systems that protect the planet: The Century Babies, the Elementals and what Brass colorfully called the Maggedon Protocols, the evolutionary spark that lets humans become metahumans.

 

There's a design to all of them. Maybe different designs. Someone, maybe several someones, thought the Earth was important enough to concoct incredible defense systems. To create a planet full of hidden weapons.

 

Listen to me, distracting myself by focusing on business. It's what I do, to keep the weight of more than a century from crushing me. The fact is, Brass and I outlived all of them. Hark and most of Brass' other friends died defending the world from an incursion from a parallel universe's counterparts to the Justice League. Jenny Sparks died electrocuting God's brain to protect the Earth. (No, really. Google it.) Me? My work's not finished, and it bothers me.

The plot here in France where he's buried is beautiful. It was a private estate, formerly owned by the cult that bred Brass, as though he were just some experiment, not a human child. It worked better than they expected, but again, there was a hidden hand in Brass' creation, the whatever it is that marked a handful of us born on the first day of the last century, and again on the first day of this century.

 

Brass had devoted his last days to studying that phenomenon. He wanted to understand the forces at play … the nature of the Century Babies, of superhumans in general. The Planetary Foundation bought this land up and gave it to him, in addition to bankrolling his research. He told me time itself was fractured, and he wanted to know more about that. Someone, somewhere, wanted that research to stop. The name of that person is unknown, but I know who pulled the trigger: A trespasser from a fictional universe, one which Planetary should have tracked down ages ago, except that Planetary was too busy rescuing me at the time.

But now I'm back.
 

I was trained as a detective by Sherlock Holmes. I killed Dracula and John Griffith, and was one of the last people to ride on the Nautilus. I am an archaeologist, and it's my mission to uncover the secret history of the world. I am a ghost haunting this young century, and I want to know what's hiding in its corners.

 

The game is afoot.