Who: Daimon Hellstrom & Dean Winchester What: Arrival, possible shootings, and likely a disgruntled Antichrist. Where: The park. Somewhere. When: Early morning 6/17/11. Rating: Let's go with R-lite. Status: In Progress.
It probably said a lot that the least significant thing to Lawrence’s new arrival was the change in scenery. He registered it, as well as a dozen other things all SHIELD agents were trained to register, but easily the most important thing on his mind right now WAS THAT IT WAS HIS AGAIN. For the last three months he’d been locked up in his own head, forced to watch as Loki’s little enchantress worked her spells and turned all of the Defenders into little puppets. What made it even worse was that he knew what Loki was doing, at least with him, and knew that the Norse God of Mischief had just stepped onto the territory of the Lord of Lies. By flipping the switch in Daimon’s pre-existing supergenes, Loki had created far worse than merely a “gimmick” of the Son of Satan.
Loki had activated the real thing.
For three months, Daimon had been trapped in his head with the only other being in there, his Darksoul, a demonic version of himself. To say that the experience hadn’t been pleasant was an understatement, and watching the things his body was doing on Amora’s fucked up strings wasn’t a much better option. Ultimately he went with focusing on Amora’s spell, because at least his body’s actions in the outside world didn’t include Darksoul-fueled visions of him raping his female teammates and impregnating them with demon offspring against their will. Yes, Daimon Hellstrom was truly the Antichrist, and no, that wasn’t some stupid comic book thing where he was bad but not really bad. Daimon himself tried his best to be good, but the Darksoul, the demoniac essence he inherited from Satan, his father? It was vile to the very core of its being, the very core of Daimon’s being, and now that Loki had flipped that switch Daimon would be dealing with it for every single second for the rest of his life. It was just that, trapped in his own head, the demonic version of himself had had a lot more access to him.
Dropping to his knees in the middle of what appeared to be a park, Daimon let out an ear-splitting scream of rage and agony and terror and desperation and a million other emotions that were all flooding him at once. Three months of torture at the hands of a being that knew his greatest physical and mental weaknesses, with no way to cry out or stop it, all came pouring out of his mouth as his powers violently shut down and his golden Netheranium trident dropped from a suddenly limp hand. It was a good thing, because the people in the park probably couldn’t have handled a guy with a mane of pure hellfire. With the powers off, he was just a guy with short blonde hair, a couple of piercings, two in his ear, one in his nose, and one in his eyebrow, a sleeveless red trench coat, leather pants…and an inverted pentagram birthmark emblazoned right dead center on his chest, taking up the entirety of his shirtless upper torso and left mostly on display by the dark crimson coat he wore. Certainly not a normal individual by any means, but without the powers, he was just an eccentric freak with an inverted pentagram on his chest and a taste for ridiculous 90s fashion in coats.
The scream went on until Daimon ran out of breath, and for a few seconds afterward, before he finally dropped to all fours, panting as if he’d just run a marathon. He was mentally and physically exhausted from his ordeals, and what he really wanted to do was just curl up into the fetal position and maybe sleep for a week, but he knew he couldn’t quite do that yet. The rest of the Defenders were still back at Patsy’s place getting the crap kicked out of them by the Ultimates, and Daimon had to get back and tell Cap that they were still brainwashed. He’d understand…Daimon hoped. If not he wasn’t sure what he’d do, although he knew for damn sure he wasn’t letting his friends – because despite how he felt about the spying gig, that’s what they had become to him – get thrown into the same cells where they kept maniacs like the Hulk or Magneto. Maybe they’d made some mistakes, been too trusting with their own genetics and, at least in Daimon’s and Barb’s cases, paid different but equally ultimate prices for it, but their crimes hadn’t been their own. So hopefully Cap would understand, because if not…Daimon wasn’t really sure he wanted to finish that thought.
With a spare thought he summoned his trident back into his hand. He could have picked it up, of course, but Daimon often obeyed the Rule of Cool more than the Rule of Man That Thing Is Right There. He was still weak, and definitely knew he wouldn’t be able to stand for long on his own. No matter how he felt about this trident, it was a damn good support for someone who was just getting beaten on by a super-soldier and had just been released from three months of being trapped in his own head. Daimon shakily rose to his feet and braced himself as best he could with the trident. After a few experimental moments as Daimon held his breath and waited to see if the trident would slip, he began attempting a slow walk out into a more open space. He needed to do a little recon on where he’d ended up before he could open a gate back to Patsy’s place. Also, now that the immediate emotional flood was fading, he was realizing that this shouldn’t have happened. He’d been fighting Captain America, and while America’s super-soldier was one tough bastard, he wasn’t a magic guy, a science guy, or a divine guy. He shouldn’t have been able to teleport anybody, and neither should Hawkeye or Iron Man. The only one in the whole lot that could was Thor, and he was busy with Power Man. So how had he gotten here?
The SHIELD agent in Daimon kicked in and he narrowed his eyes. Had someone opened a gate on him? Who would do that? His father? It was possible, but he’d heard from idle chatter between Loki and Amora that his father was gearing up for the release of his bounty hunter, the Ghost Rider, some soul he’d collected years ago and trained up. Daimon didn’t know who it was and he didn’t want to know, but he knew what a Ghost Rider was from reading about a few of his father’s past exploits in some musty old demon codexes, and somehow he figured a seven foot tall cowboy – or, more likely in this decade, a biker – would probably draw a lot of attention from the various hero teams dotting the world. Especially since there was still very little public or even government knowledge of the supernatural, at least on a large scale, someone like the Ghost Rider running around claiming souls that were outliving their deals would be a huge deal. If even half of what he’d read was true, Daimon knew there was very little chance of the Rider’s murders being looked at as anything other than supernatural. So that also meant Fury was out, he was running some super secret black ops team and would very likely be handling the Ghost Rider matter, according to some rumors Daimon had heard about Vice President Blackthorne’s past. Thor was busy fighting Power Man, so that was out, and none of the other Ultimates could have possibly done it. Richards? Maybe, but he’d never met the guy, and his zombie duplicate was no longer in-universe. Daimon supposed there was always the possibility that his twin sister was tormenting him, but considering this actually helped him, that seemed unlikely. Loki was dead, and even if he’d found some way out of Hel, he would likely have moved on to new toys rather than helping out the old. Amora had never actually found them to be of any real significance, she’d just been hanging around to help Loki, so she wouldn’t have done it. And if she had, why would she have released him from the spell?
Daimon really didn’t like this. This stunk to high hell, and somehow he got the feeling that even if he did open a gate to Patsy’s place, it probably wouldn’t be there. The zombie duplicates had flat-out proven that there were other worlds out there, and they seemed easier to access than time travel tech. There was certainly magic that could handle both, but the time magic tended to be used less frequently, because even the craziest would-be warlocks could see the dangers in it. Had someone sent him to another world? It was looking more and more likely. “Crap.” He glanced around again, this time really taking everything in, and decided that yes, he was most definitely in a park. That was good, at least. A public place with witnesses, even just a few of them, would be too much risk for a supernatural. Especially with the advent of the superhero, the people and things that went bump in the night had a tremendously added incentive to keep things secret. Nothing would ruin a vampire’s day worse than Iron Man building a UV lamp into his Iron Man suit and storming the undead castle, for instance, and Thor wrecking some sorcerer’s shop would be a very bad thing for that sorcerer. It wasn’t really a pact, but it definitely was an unwritten rule that most supernaturals seemed to agree on. Daimon and Dr. Strange were two of the most public figures in the supernatural community, and Daimon only recently joined the supernatural community officially. Even Doc Strange was treated publicly like one of those “Late Show Mystics” and less like a real sorcerer. That was the way it had to be when you had guys like Captain America, Iron Man, and Thor running around.
It was safe enough, at least, for Daimon to take a second to check his iPhone. Still leaning heavily on his golden Netheranium trident, he fished his phone out of his pocket and with a few slides of his thumb, had the information he needed. He was in Lawrence, Kansas. He was over a year into the future, in the middle of June 2011. And just as was expected, when he did a quick Google search for people he knew, he got results that pointed toward…comic books? “Double-crap.” He didn’t click any of the links. He was nowhere near prepared for that. That meant one thing: Daimon was going to have to do some research on the internet. “Triple-crap.” He hated having to pay an internet café for internet access, but in this case, there was no help for it. Left with little choice, he did a quick Google search for internet cafes in Lawrence and then began slowly shambling toward the address his phone chirped out at him, still relying heavily on the trident to take most of his weight.