[The cover has a banner in the upper left reading "HIGH CONCEPT #4". The cover art is an homage to pulp style, with an adventurer in a torchlit cavern, fending off shadowy attackers with a torch in one hand and a pistol in the other.] ____________________________________________________________________________ .|, COHERENT An ASHistory Series --+------------------------------------------------------------------------- '|` SUPER STORIES #18 - The Black Buddha of Bhutan Featuring Jack of All Trades copyright 2009 by Dave Van Domelen ____________________________________________________________________________ Dearest brother, I'm afraid that the matter of the so-called "Black Buddha of Bhutan" will have to fall on the "or not" side of the fence. As you'll see from the statuette accompanying this letter, it's not actually a Buddha, it's more of a pot-bellied pig demon of some sort. I found it in China rather than in Bhutan, and the thing is no longer black. Still, it's an interesting piece of art, I'm sure you'll find a place for it in that mansion you bought just before I left. I've enclosed the relevant pages of my travel journal. I haven't had time to copy them myself, so for heaven's sake don't lose them! You may want to get someone you trust to make copies and send one off to our wheelchair- bound acquaintance in Chicago. This all seems to have been his sort of affair. (It would have been nice to have had his gizmos along!) Jack Ripley Lhasa, Tibet September 12, 1935 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- June 5, 1935 The safe-passage from General Eight Ox proved to be well worth the bribes, we haven't been significantly molested by the local bandits. Out here in the Himalayas, the Japanese invasion, the Nationalists, the Communists...they all seem like fairy stories. General Eight Ox is the law of the land, and will remain so until someone is willing to devote the energy to ousting him. Still, for a warlord he's proven fairly honorable. Today we reached the village where the "Black Buddha of Bhutan" is reputed to have been removed to shortly before Bhutan's monarchy was put in place in '07. I haven't broached the subject yet, as its dire reputation is likely to tighten lips. Making things more difficult, no one here speaks any of the dialects of Mandarin I've already learned, so we're having to make do with written communications for now. I wish handshaking were universal! It would make life so much easier if I could make physical contact with one of these people and pick up their dialect with my "knack". I could listen to their unguarded conversation during that period where they think I can't have learned their tongue yet, and...ah, I guess I'm too greedy. Anyone else would have to learn these things the hard way, like I had to before that incident at that shrine in the Deccan in '25. I suppose if I'm being greedy, I should wish that my knack let me take memories and not just skills. Then I wouldn't need to ask questions in the first place. * * * * June 8, 1935 I managed to contrive an "accidental" skin to skin contact that avoided giving offense. It wasn't long enough to pick up more than the language, but that will do for now. I expect most of the skills available in this village are things I've already acquired from my porters. They're still assuming I don't know how to speak their dialect, and we're communicating via the written word. Based on what they're saying, they seem to have bought our cover story that we're working for a British company that seeks to find a good path overland from Bhutan to China. They know just enough about the outside world to be guessing that we're planning to support those who are fighting the Japanese, and they don't seem to care. The war is rather far off when you're limited to foot travel through mountains, I suppose. We've started some general surveying as part of the cover, and we might find some interesting rock formations worth sketching for Robert's books. * * * * June 9, 1935 When they think I can't hear them, the villagers sometimes offer blessing in the name of a "dark lady" rather than Buddha. Interesting. * * * * June 11, 1935 I finally found a way to casually bring up the Black Buddha, and that we'd heard it had come this way. They claimed it had been in their village many years ago, but been taken elsewhere after only a short stay. One talent I've never needed to acquire with my knack has been my ability to read people...and the village elder was lying through his few remaining teeth. Hopefully he can't read me as well as I could read him, but I think I have a pretty good poker face. I simply moved on to another topic, as if my interest in the Black Buddha was a passing fancy. The glances of the villagers have become somewhat more wary, however. Maybe even a little hostile. I've told my people to not let their guard down. Hopefully it's just my imagination. * * * * June 13, 1935 Lost two men to an "accident" on the trail today. Villagers claim to have seen it happen, that the men lacked the skill needed to walk where they were going. I know that to be a lie. One of the two was McGinty, and I took my mountaineering skill from him. I could handle that particular section of mountainside easily, so he should have as well. Can't say for sure about the porter with McGinty, but he's a mountain man from Bhutan, so should have had no troubles. * * * * June 14, 1935 I confronted the elder, and used my agitation over the deaths of my men as a pretext to grasp his hands long enough to copy all of his skills. I got nowhere overtly, the elder simply suggests that we might seek a safer route for our road. Now that I've had the time to assimilate my new skills, there's some very interesting points. For one, he can speak Bhutanese, so it's fairly safe to say he's heard enough from our porters to know we're not actually surveying for a road. For another, he's quite the occultist. I now know a whole raft of rituals regarding the Dark Lady they've been whispering about at the edge of hearing. I can't say I LIKE knowing exactly how to best drain the blood from a sacrificial victim. But I like even less the prospect of that particular skill being used on me. I expect the next entry in this journal to take place after the matter is resolved, if this isn't to be the last entry ever. Normally, I'd take some precaution to make sure word reaches my brother in the event of my demise, but we're too isolated. If we send a runner back to Bhutan, there's every chance he'll be intercepted and bled out for the Dark Lady. * * * * June 27, 1935 Finally able to stop long enough to order my thoughts and put pen to paper. We've been running for nearly two weeks, but finally met up with a unit of General Ox's troops, who obligingly gunned down the last of our pursuers. Apparently the troops were from the area, and had little use for the worshippers of the Dark Lady either, but avoided their village when possible. Something tells me the General knew all about this, but let us blunder into a trap to see if we could deal with the problem for him. My estimate of his sense of honor has dropped slightly, but my estimate of his cleverness has gone up. Things reached a head at a ceremonial dinner they threw for us on the 15th. I've acquired enough knowledge of poisons that I recognized the drugs they attempted to feed us, but I was unable to warn more than a handful of the party without forcing the villagers' hand and bringing out more immediately deadly weapons. Isolated, yes. Totally backward, no. Several of them had perfectly functional rifles that looked to be surplus from the Great War, and while we might have won an initial gunfight...well, I doubt the overall outcome would have been in our favor. So I pretended to eat the drugged food and feigned a trance. Jones wasn't a very good actor, and they ended up force-feeding him once everyone else had passed out. That left me with only Owens and Barr conscious as help as they trussed us up and took us to be sacrificed. I dared open my eyes only occasionally, but it was enough to tell that we were being taken into a cavern, the entrance of which must have been very cleverly camoflaged, since we hadn't found it in the week of "surveying". They stacked us like cordwood, giving me enough cover that I could observe what happened next. One of our porters was chosen to be the first sacrifice, for reasons known only to the elder. He was placed on a short altar in front of a small statue that could only be the fabled Black Buddha. It wasn't merely black like ebony or ink, it drank in light as if it were made of a slice of the night sky. The darkness blurred its outlines, washing out any details there might have been. The porter's hands were untied and one was carefully placed on the Black Buddha. I could see that none of the villagers touched it themselves, and in a moment I saw why, as the porter was shocked awake and into a scream! He struggled to pull his hand away from the ebon statuette, and I could see him withering away before my eyes until only a mummified body remained, released by that horrible idol to slump back onto the altar. Suddenly, the context of so many of the rituals I had learned made hideous sense. None were necessary in order to feed the Dark Lady, mere contact with her token was enough. And once she had fed sufficiently, the ritual killings would begin, spells to curry her favor and gain specific blessings. The porter's corpse was tossed onto a firepit, where the dessicated husk caught fire like so much tinder. A second unconscious Bhutanese was being dragged over to the altar. Now I could see that they were saving the "special" visitors like myself for the rituals. Low-class laborers would serve for the initial feeding. All that time I'd been working out of my bonds, thanking the time I'd shook hands with Harry Houdini shortly before his death. I'd also managed to locate the ritual I wanted, and when all eyes were upon the victim I surged from the pile and made my move! Hurling the villagers aside with some jujitsu, I grabbed the elder and pushed him against the Black Buddha, shouting out an incantation in words I didn't understand...meaning that the elder hadn't understood them either. They'd been passed down without meaning, perhaps because their meaning was too terrible to contemplate. As I'd hoped, the blackness in the elder's own soul clashed with the Buddha's own, and there was a powerful pulse of...un-being is the only way I can describe it. All in the room were stunned, but when I recovered my wits the elder was nowhere to be found and the "Buddha" had lost its shadowy cloak, standing revealed as an ebony carving of some sort of demon. Only the softening effect of the shadows had allowed it to pass as a Buddha. The villagers must have been more intimately connected to the power of the statue, for they remained dazed for long enough that Owens, Barr and I could rouse the rest of our party and escape. We took as many of their weapons as we could quickly grab, but it was still a harrowing time fleeing through the mountains with angry villagers on our heels. Gunfire from out of nowhere would sometimes fell one of us, but we got our own back whenever one of them showed his face over an escarpment. Now I sit here, as safe as I suppose one can be after having earned the emnity of a dark goddess of some sort. I hope she doesn't look like her idol, though...this is a very ugly pig-demon statue. All that effort and all those deaths, and I doubt more than a handful of men alive would even believe it. Robert will, of course, he's seen things equally strange in his own travels to the Orient. A few men in the government would like to know about this, I expect. But rather useless for the old BION, yes? Very much "or not" this time around. Of course, if they were all believable, I suppose I'd get bored fairly quickly, and that wouldn't do. After all, once you've mastered all the skills known to man, what's left but to go after the skills NOT known to man? ============================================================================= Author's Notes: This story was written for High Concept #4, "the kitbashed superhero" aka "trolling for Dave to write". I decided to go for a subtler effect and write about someone who modified himself by acquiring skills rather than actual powers or physical parts, which in turn suggested a pulp setting where a guy with all sorts of skills could be impressive. I was originally going to title the story "Jack of All Trades" until I remembered that I used the name of the character as part of the Coherent Super Stories logo, so I switched to the story's macguffin as the title. The macguffin itself underwent a slight name change as well, originally being the Black Gold Buddha, but I decided that alliteration of "Black Buddha of Bhutan" worked better for a pulp-style story. Jack Ripley is a fictional brother to real life Robert L. Ripley, of "Believe it or Not" fame. In the ASH Universe, Jack Ripley was born in 1903, and made his first serious trip outside of America in 1924-26, a few years after Robert's first round the world voyage. In 1925 he had his origin story in India (the Deccan is part of India), unlocking his paranormal talent. In the decade that followed, he acted as his famous brother's agent in matters where publicity would be counter-productive, seeking out those things at the fringes of the world that might or might not be believable (regardless of whether they were true). Robert Ripley died in 1949. Jack Ripley may or may not have survived past that...odds are good that he got rather mixed up in OSS matters during WWII, which would have significantly raised the odds of him predeceasing his older brother. General Eight Ox might be the ox spirit who becomes Premier Niu in the 2020s. Early ideas for this story had Eight Ox as the main antagonist, in which case I would have had to make it clear one way or another, but as a background character I can safely leave the question unanswered until such time as I want to use him at center stage. :) The wheelchair-bound acquaintance mentioned in the cover letter is Harry Parker, AKA the original Beacon. Beacon's story is mostly told here: http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/ASH/history.html (he had largely retired from the costumed phase of his career by 1935, and wouldn't go back into action until the war started, but it's still reasonable to expect Jack would recall him in connection with darkness cultists). ============================================================================ For all the back issues, plus additional background information, art, and more, go to http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/ASH ! To discuss this issue or any others, either just hit "followup" to this post, or check out our Yahoo discussion group, which can be found at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ash_stories/ ! There's also a LiveJournal interest group for ASH, check it out at http://www.livejournal.com/interests.bml?int=academy+of+super-heroes (if you're on Facebook instead, there's an Academy of Super-Heroes group there too). ============================================================================