Summus Proelium

Almost Four Years Ago

Throughout the first several years of its existence, the mask had been nothing more than a simple object. It was a good mask, hand-crafted by a true master, but there was little noteworthy about it beyond that. It was one of its elderly designer’s last masks, and that meant it was listed for far too expensive a price for those who generally came to the costume shop looking for something to scare their friends with or to make themselves a hit at the local Halloween party. For years, it sat on a high shelf, occasionally drawing attention from those interested in the jester look. But those people would inevitably blanch away from the listed price once they saw it and go for something more reasonable. The costume shop owner considered lowering the price just to get it sold, but he was holding out for someone who was willing to pay good money for a genuine piece of art from the master who had designed it. Surely that would happen?

Perhaps it might have, had other things not intervened. Namely, a group of teenage delinquents who broke into the shop in the middle of the night, seeing it as an easy mark to get some quick cash and neat costumes to screw around with.

After grabbing what amounted to forty bucks and some change from the register, the disappointed group snatched a handful of what looked like more expensive pieces to sell. They figured someone out there would be interested in the stuff. Maybe one of those Touched people would need a quick fashion upgrade. One of the pieces they grabbed was that expensive mask. The boy who snatched it stood on a stepladder and examined the thing curiously even as one of his companions, standing watch by the door, shouted for them to hurry because a car was approaching. The local security company had gotten an alert about the break-in and were coming to check it out.

Without taking the time to put the mask in one of the bags they were using, the boy who grabbed it jumped off the stepladder and ran with the thing clutched tightly in his left hand through the open back door and into the alley. The security car came to a stop at the front of the alley and turned a bright spotlight on them. The group immediately split, taking off in different directions while the two guards inside attempted to pursue.

The boy who had taken the mask ran out of the alley, cutting left to sprint down the empty street while one of the guards pursued him. Glancing over his shoulder, the boy shouted a derogatory slur at the man who was hot on his heels. That only served to make the security guard even more determined to catch up, and the chase continued down that block before the boy cut through another alley. He gained a few yards on his pursuer, before leaping and scrambling to climb atop a dumpster. From there, he jumped to the bottom of a fire escape and immediately began to clamber up, while the metal structure creaked and groaned protestingly under the force of his motions. It had not been examined in quite some time, and was barely prepared to handle the weight of one teenage boy scrambling up it as fast and recklessly as he could.

It most certainly was not prepared for the added force of the security guard starting to scramble up after his quarry. When the boy was three-quarters of the way to the roof, and the guard only just under halfway, part of the fire escape jerked free of the ten-story building and dipped dangerously to one side. The boy fell on his backside with a curse. Yet the guard fared worse, sliding all the way to the edge before grabbing a precarious handhold on a damp piece of metal, which was sharp enough to cut into his palm. He only managed to hold it for a few seconds, giving him just enough time to see the hard and unforgiving pavement looming over fifty feet below. Then the sharp metal piece he’d managed to grab bent just a little more, forcing the man to lose his grip. With a shouted curse, he began to plummet off the broken fire escape.

And in that second, just as he lost his grip entirely and cried out, there was a terrifyingly loud clang before another hand grabbed his and brought his horrible fall to a stop just in time. It was the teenage boy who had been running from him. Rather than take the opportunity to escape, he had jumped down and reached out to grab the guard at the last possible second. The boy was nearly yanked off the edge of the structure himself, but managed to shove his foot up against one of the railings while grabbing onto the man's arm with his other hand as well. Grimacing and sweating, the boy slowly pulled the man up to a safer position. It took several minutes of intense effort and a couple close calls where he nearly lost his grip. But in the end, he finally managed to get the man up enough that they could both shift around and sit in relative safety. Each was panting heavily, barely able to process what had just happened.

In the end, the guard simply let the boy go. He saw no other real choice. The teenager could have escaped and left him to fall, but he jumped down and rescued him instead. He’d risked not only being arrested, but even falling himself in order to save his pursuer. Letting him go seemed like the only possible response. Though he did promise that if he ever saw the kid doing that shit again, he’d make sure they threw every single book in every single library at him. They shook on the promise that he would stay out of trouble, before carefully getting down and going their separate ways.

And that, for those two, was the end of it. The boy did manage to stay out of trouble, for the most part. After nearly getting caught and arrested, let alone falling to what either would've been his death or at least a crippling injury, the boy had no desire to push his luck even more. He ditched those old friends and straightened up. A true success story for someone who had been on the wrong path turning his life around.

On the other hand, while it was the end of that particular story for them, it was only the beginning for that stolen jester’s mask. Because when the boy had moved to jump down in order to save the falling guard, he'd tossed the mask away and then forgot about it. The mask fell off to the side, but before it could hit the ground, it was stopped in midair. A small, familiar glowing orb had been on the far side of the very same dumpster that they had both used to reach the fire escape. The glowing orb had been rising into view, moving to see what was happening on the cracking metal above. But before either of them could notice it, the mask fell right on top of the thing. The glow from the orb was mostly hidden save for a very small amount coming through the eyes, and for a few seconds, it looked as though the mask was simply hovering in midair before moving back and forth as the orb attempted to shake the mask off. It actually would have been a quite effective tactic for a haunted house, particularly the way the jester’s eyes glowed from the orb briefly trapped within. But the two up on the fire escape were far too distracted by their own predicament to notice, and no one else was anywhere nearby.

Eventually, the orb managed to shake free of the mask before disappearing. But in that time, the mask itself had triggered the same effect so many people and animals (not to mention a few plants and the occasional other object) had in the past. It was sent to that other place, that other universe. And just in the same way that animals such as Lion the mouse and Lucent the raven had been gifted with sapient intelligence, so was the mask. That simple, yet expensive and lovingly crafted jester’s mask came back from that otherworld with the equivalent intelligence of a human being.

It could think, like a person. It remembered its long history of sitting on that shelf. It even remembered being created. And now, it was lying abandoned beside that old dumpster, forgotten by both the boy who had stolen it and the guard who pursued him.

The mask was incapable of its own movement. It could think, but independent ambulatory motion was completely beyond it. Still, it was far from completely helpless. Among several powers the mask had been gifted with, alongside its new intelligence, was the ability to broadcast its thoughts, similar to speech. It could direct those thoughts to a specific person, or multiple in an area. And with some practice, it managed to attract the attention of a passing stray dog. The canine inspected the mask, before picking it up in its mouth. From there, the mask was able to give better directions. It did not exactly control the dog in the sense of enslaving it. Mostly it gave ideas to the dog, directing it on how to go somewhere it could get treats. Specifically, to a nearby pizza shop that the mask had heard people in the store repeatedly mention tended to hand out scraps to strays. The mask wasn’t exactly thrilled about being in that slobbery mouth, but it was better than lying on that cold, wet ground even longer. And it knew that if the dog was given food, she would be more likely to listen to the thoughts it was transmitting to her. It was training the dog, essentially.

Through the next few weeks, they continued like that. The mask allowed the dog to carry it around in its mouth, directing it to shelter and food using the memories it had of what people had said in that costume shop. It had heard enough details to give the animal a distinct advantage when it came to finding all the good places in the neighborhood. All while the mask itself coped with its newfound sapience. It was one thing to be an animal that suddenly found itself intelligent, but being an inanimate object that couldn’t even move under its own power was quite different. It was more limited in many ways.

That limitation came to a head when the dog was eventually picked up by animal control, with the mask tossed away haphazardly into a nearby trash can. Fortunately, the mask didn’t last long there before a garbage man pulled it free and took the mask to a pawn shop to see what he could get for it. The man walked back out twenty bucks richer (not even one-tenth of the price that the thing had originally been selling for), while the mask was left on a shelf.

Several people came to inspect the mask over the next couple weeks, but it didn’t particularly like the look of any of them. So it broadcast negative thoughts when they looked at it. Again, it wasn’t exactly controlling them so much as sending negative emotions and impressions toward them when they examined it. That was enough to convince these strangers to leave it alone, while it waited for the right person.

Eventually, that right person, the person the mask had been waiting for, came into the shop. Jae Baek (not the name her actual birth parents would have given her, but given by a clerk in the social services office who didn’t understand Korean naming conventions) had very recently Touched and was looking for something that could help disguise her very distinctive features. Even at that point, the then-thirteen year old Jae had known that she had a good chance of being identified if she wasn’t careful. She was an albino Asian-American girl in Detroit, the list of possibilities wasn’t exactly extensive. She needed something that could completely cover her face.

Something like that jester’s mask.

Jae’s powers were very new. She had no idea if she was going to join the local Minority group, or maybe try to get into Ten Towers. Or maybe there was a local independent team she hadn't thought about. She knew that she wanted to help people, but not exactly how. Her power was a pretty odd version of telekinesis, given the way objects shrank while spinning around her until she sent them flying. She knew that would require some sort of theme, yet she'd been lost when it came to the details. But in that moment, as she stared at the mask, Jae had wondered if some sort of circus or clown motif might work. The jester was sort of like a clown, and she could work in a full body-covering costume with that theme.

While she had been trying to decide if this was the right choice or not, Jae picked up the mask and put it on, just to see what it felt like. Immediately, both she and the mask itself knew something dramatic had happened. They were linked. For the mask, this wasn't like when it had touched the dog. Nor was it like when other people had picked it up since then. The garbage man who brought the mask to this place had put it on for a moment out of curiosity and hadn't had this sort of immediate connection. The moment Jae put it on, however, it knew so much about her. It knew her thoughts and feelings. It knew her fears.

It knew she was lost and grieving for her recently deceased adopted mother, a death that had led the thirteen-year-old to feel so alone in that big house that the orb had appeared. The orb that gave Jae her powers.

It was precisely those powers that made this connection possible. They would eventually realize that the mask's connection to the people who put it on was much greater in those who were Touched. In normal beings, it could influence them, direct them subtly. But in Touched, the connection was great enough to allow the mask to literally move their body, to control them under its own direction. They could resist, creating a tug-of-war between who was in control. But if the Touched relaxed, the mask could move them like they were an extension of itself.

That connection went two ways. Not only did the mask get so much information about her, but she also knew everything about it. She knew its history, the way it had been given intelligence, the brief friendship of sorts it had developed with the dog that had found it. She knew how long it had sat on its original shelf before being given intelligence, waiting around for several years without being chosen. It was too expensive, not special enough to spend that money. And now it was in this shop, looking for the right person while pushing away anyone who it didn’t feel was right. It had spent so long not being chosen, and now it was the one doing the choosing.

Perhaps many would have been horrified by this sudden revelation. After all, putting on what should have been an inanimate mask, only to find that it was actually conscious and knew your thoughts, would have been a rather shocking and even terrifying realization.

But Jae didn't see it that way. She had been lost and lonely for so long that she immediately saw the parallels between their histories. The mask had spent a long time with everyone refusing to buy it. By the same token, she had spent a long time being bounced from foster family to foster family with no one adopting her. The mask had found a brief friend with the dog. Jae herself had finally been adopted into a large family. But then the dog was taken away, and the mask was left in the trash. Meanwhile, Jae’s adopted siblings went on to college and careers, and her adopted mother had died. Jae wasn't thrown in the trash, of course, but she had been left alone in that house.

They connected with one another, not merely through sharing memories, but through an understanding of their own histories and how they were alike. And in that connection, the mask had come to another realization of its own--or rather, his own. The mask was not an it, the gender expression he saw for himself was male.

Jae left the shop with that mask. She built her costume around him, and her identity. But it wasn't simply her identity. Not by a long shot. The mask became as much a part of that identity as the girl was. They were partners, siblings in a way.

When she met the mask, he had no name. Of course he didn't, no one named a mask, and he had no idea what to call himself. But soon, they had a name for him. The mask was Carousel. After all, their defining feature, the way they always rhymed, was part of the mask's power. Beyond simply being sapient and able to share thoughts and feelings with those around him, the mask was Mind-Touched with a focus on language and words. He could translate almost any mundane language immediately, something Jae had to be careful not to expose when they were in costume together. And, of course, he automatically knew how to rhyme any word.

Beyond those aspects of his language power, the mask had a tendency to know the right thing to say. That wasn’t a completely dependable thing, but if push came to shove and they were desperate, Carousel could sometimes simply guess a word or phrase and it would end up being helpful. Even if they sometimes didn’t understand how it was helpful until later. Or even too late. Other times, they were capable of guessing passwords to computer systems or other coded situations. The right word or phrase simply came to the mask.

When Jae was in costume, they were both the hero. Carousel was both the mask and their identity together. They joined the Minority together, even if no one else, not even Jae’s own father, knew about that part.

For the past several years, Jae and the mask had kept that secret from everyone. Not even Amber knew, a thing Jae felt guilty about. But she hadn’t known how to bring up something like that. After all, she’d been keeping that secret for a couple years by the time Amber even joined the Minority. No one else had the slightest idea that the Carousel they knew was actually two beings working in concert together. Until now, when Grandstand and the Chambers twins were shown the truth.

And now Jae and Carousel had no idea what they would do with that truth.