not so ancient.

Greg was late, as usual. He was always late for things, nowadays, it seemed: his wife had perfected her exasperated sigh when he showed up ten minutes after their son's baseball game had started, or with his dinner getting cold on the table. But things were busier now than they had been even in the height of his days as boomerang: with a wife and child and a full time job and the occasional (lately, more than occasional) superhuman threat, he seemed to be running late everywhere. He sometimes wished the team was back together, if only so he could have the occasional night off. As it stood, Boomerang had had to make three appearances before Greg could even get into the neighborhood of the EMP: two nasty car accidents the police couldn't handle on their own, and a store hold up on Granada that would have left the shopkeeper dead had Boomerang not stepped in. Now it was nearly midnight, and he was still three blocks away from--

What the hell was that?

He could see the EMP looming in the distance, and the floodlights beaming up into the darkness. For a moment, he could see the acrobats and press still crowding around the doorway--he turned down his radio--and then a car went flying up into the air and landed with a crunch and screams in the middle of the street. It didn't take long for the panic to start. First there was a pregnant silence, and then an indistinct roar, and the crowds around the EMP started shrieking and fighting with the civilians stuck in their cars to get as far away from the museum as quickly as the could. Greg could see a great looming shape rising over the cars, and when it stepped into the beam of the floodlights, he caught a full glimpse of its hulking, monstrous mask.

( It was a good thing he had left his costume on under his tux after the Granada incident. )

Jacob Aster was what someone might call quiet. He was nice, but shy, and when he did speak, people usually had no idea what he was going on about. The price to pay for brilliance, his mother had called it, back when she was alive. Brilliance--that was why he got such a nice job at Mammoth Shipping; it was why they tasked him with some of the more difficult biochemical analyses, why they trusted him to work independently. Though he didn't often talk to his coworkers--they got on fine, but he was just awkward--he had heard whisperings that some of the higher ups in the Mammoth labs were looking at him for a promotion. It was why he had volunteered to stay in the labs while the rest of Mammoth's employees filtered out to the New Year's Eve ball; they still had work to do on the recent shipment from the Crete dig. His superiors had smiled, pleasantly surprised. He was sure he'd get that promotion now.

And really, why shouldn't he? Jacob--and everyone else in this department--knew he was miles ahead of his coworkers in chemical analysis and development. When the vast anthrax scare took Mammoth by surprise, it was his formula that made the most potent vaccine. When they had received that shipment of Greek urns from the Turkey dig, had he not worked three days straight to analyze the bacteria present? He deserved a promotion, and it was high time he received it.

In precautionary suit and gloves, he removed the bovine horn from its case in the sterilized room they had set aside to study it. Something seemed to ripple through his arms. He felt strangely warm, and the brief thoughts of entitlement and anger--he deserved the promotion, the recognition; he was better than all of them; who were they to relegate him to the bottom of the labyrinthine labs while they got drunk and rubbed up against each other at the company party?--the bitterness surged up inside him, and worms or slugs or snakes seemed to burrow and slide under his skin. His forehead boiled, like bubbles of flesh were bursting underneath his mask, pushing out and up like horns. He dropped the carved horn he was holding as his stomach turned over, and when he looked down at his hands, they burst--covered in coarse brown hair and twice their natural size--out of the gloves of his suit.

His bones crunched. His skin stretched. His nostrils flattened wide against his face as pale ivory horns ripped from his forehead. In Jacob Aster's place was a ten-foot tall creature, three times as wide as a man, nostrils flaring and eyes rolling in a head shaped distinctly, horrifyingly, like a bull's. And he could only think of one place to go: the place where his keepers were gathered, the Mammoth Holiday Ball.

“Good evening, Athena.”

Athena had locked that door. She knew she'd locked that door. But there he was, hands folded behind his back, hair slicked down, face grim. She got up hastily from the oils and herbs she'd been poring over for the past week, the clues and spells she'd been desperately searching in for some reversal. He shifted lazily from foot to foot, but she could see the line of tension in his shoulders.

“What are you doing here?” she asked sharply. She was nowhere near his height, but had learned in their years together that she needed to cut an imposing figure. Imposing, but not defiant.

( That seems to me a stupid question. )