I have always loved Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons. I watched it when I was a kid, and I loved the action in it, and now I have a copy of it on DVD.
Thank the lord.
Anyway, I was watching the series, and I wondered how Captain Scarlet feels and I came up with this. Enjoy, and please leave some feedback.
The Truth of Being Indestructible.
When he had first been recruited into Spectrum when it had first been formed, Adam Svenson, now known by his codename 'Captain Blue,' had never been one hundred per cent sure of what his new line of work would take him. There were dozens of police and security organisations around the world, from the regular police and army services to the World Aquanaut Security Patrol, but sometimes when Spectrum was still being founded with lists of criteria detailing what their work would entail, he imagined they were making it up as they went along to make Spectrum an organisation that provided a diverse array of tasks.
In a sense Spectrum was as diverse as International Rescue; he knew that despite making it abundantly clear they were a rescue operation, they would sometimes willingly bend that rule, provided it saved lives.
The only reason he was thinking about that was when he had joined up with Spectrum, he had never imagined once he would be forced to walk around one of the major monorail hubs in case of a Mysteron attack.
Thinking about the Mysterons did nothing but anger Captain Blue. As a member of Spectrum who was on the frontline along with his friend and partner Captain Scarlet, he had witnessed some of the atrocities the Mysterons had committed in the name of their war of vengeance against Earth for the destruction of their precious complex on Mars.
So many innocent people dead because of them, and people who hadn't even been involved in the Zero X mission to Mars, the second Martian expedition to take place after that disaster a few years ago, where the first Zero X mission came under attack because they had destroyed a life form on the surface of Mars without even realising it was a life form in the first place, so it was understandable that the next expedition would be crewed by more nervous people.
Captain Blue sometimes wondered if they got further out into space, and they encountered an alien life form on some distant world if they would repeat Captain Black's mistake of shoot first, ask questions about the consequences later. Assuming they didn't defeat the Mysterons in such a way the mysterious aliens could not continue their war of nerves, or if they actually succeeded in wiping out all life on Earth, that was.
But he had something else on his mind, what were the Mysterons doing? It had been eight months since their attack on President Roberts (the ship, not the person), and there hadn't been a peep from them. But he knew better than to expect the Mysterons to just decide to stop their war of nerves against Earth.
The Mysterons had played this little game before. They would carry out a nasty attack, and then they would stop for a while, almost as if they were either strategising or taking a break, but it was believed by Spectrum analysts the Mysterons were simply choosing fresh targets. Either way, they were experts in psychological warfare. It was hard to equate a supposed peaceful race as the Mysterons had described themselves when they made contact with the expedition because nothing they had done had proven to Captain Blue they were peaceful.
Many in Spectrum welcomed the chance to have a break, but they knew it would not last. Sooner or later the Mysterons would be back, and that mysterious booming voice which came over the radios and telephones would blare out with a new threat, but what he was most curious about was why they announced their plans in such a brazen manner. It was almost as though the Mysterons set up their attacks as a means of discovering human weaknesses, but until they could see what happened then they would never find out.
Recently there had been a spate of murders and acts of sabotage, usually in the industrial and transport sectors, but while many doubted it to be the work of the Mysterons, Spectrum had to investigate.
Captain Blue looked around the darkened monorail terminals, his hands around the handles of the camera like the Mysteron detector, taking pictures of the machinery to see if they had been altered by the Mysterons' strange matter/energy techniques, but they were normal.
Captain Scarlet approached him, in his hands was another detector; Captain Blue was delighted the technology existed ever since it was discovered during that mess with General Tiempo, though he wished they had learnt X-rays did not penetrate Mysterons or Mysteron constructs, it would have saved dozens of lives.
"Anything?" Captain Scarlet asked.
"Nothing so far," Captain Blue replied, trying to hide his boredom. He had been on duty for seven hours already, and he had been on his feet for four, and he was tired.
"Same here," Captain Scarlet looked around, his usual alert, disciplined and diligent manner faded slightly. "Come on, let's take a break," he said and he led the way to a staffroom. Captain Blue followed him, noting the exhaustion on his face.
The staffroom was just that, a spartan room with an awful carpet, too bright walls thanks to its lightning which was reflected off of the white-painted walls. Captain Scarlet flinched a little at the decor and harsh lighting, and he wished he could turn down the lights a touch, but it was either this or sit in darkness.
After grabbing some drinks from the machine, Blue and Scarlet both sat in companionable silence.
"Do you want to tell the Colonel we've found nothing?" Blue asked.
"No. I was thinking we take a break for a bit before we report anything," Scarlet replied.
Blue nodded. "Do you think the Mysterons will attack here?"
"Anything is possible, knowing them. This hub is one of the more busiest and well-connected ones; if it is damaged then it would cripple the transportation network," Scarlet replied while taking a sip from his tea and grimacing at the taste. "I prefer the real stuff," he commented putting the cup down.
Blue looked down into his own cup and wondered if his own would taste alright.
"I don't know what to think, Adam," Scarlet went on, "but ever since that mess with the President Roberts, we haven't heard anything from them. When they go to ground, I worry."
Despite wishing that Captain Scarlet hadn't admitted that, Captain Blue noted the use of his first name, and decided to drop his own Spectrum rank; technically they were on duty, but truthfully he didn't care since this was not Cloudbase, and besides it wasn't expected of Spectrum officers of the colour branch to stick to their codenames on cases like this.
But he winced when he was reminded on the last Mysteron case.
He could still remember the stench of burnt flesh that had flooded the sickbay and kept everyone but Doctor Fawn and his assistants out while the Cloudbase air conditioning system struggled to cope after they had managed to get Paul's burnt wreck of a body back to base, and he remembered wondering something that had occasionally crossed his mind but never seemed to turn up in casual conversation.
"Paul," Adam began hesitantly, "do you mind if I ask you something?"
Paul looked at him quizzically. "Sure, ask me anything," he said, happy that they were moving on with the conversation onto what he believed would be more friendly ground that didn't involve talk about the Mysterons.
"We've never talked about it. In fact, you go out of your way to avoid talking about it."
Paul stiffened as he began to have a good idea where Captain Blue was going with this, but he remained silent as he waited for his friend to get to the point.
"How do you feel about being indestructible?"
Paul licked his lips guardedly, his expression grim. "Why do you want to know?" he asked quietly.
"Because I'm curious, and because you don't seem interested in talking about it whenever someone brings it up."
"No one seems to care."
"Perhaps, but I do. Well, how do you feel about it?" Adam repeated his question.
There, he had gotten it all out, but Adam wondered if Paul would actually answer his question. For a while, Paul didn't reply, and he looked down into his cup of tea.
While he sat in his seat, watched by a hesitantly waiting Captain Blue, no Adam, Captain Scarlet thought about the subject and his reasons for not wanting to talk about it though he was surprised by the way his friend had basically told him that it had never come up in a civilised or casual conversation but had he really given the impression he didn't want to talk about it? Yes, he had, he realised.
Finally, he sighed under his breath and took another drink of tea - he wished he could forego Spectrum regulations not to drink alcohol on duty, but if he had some brandy then he could fortify the tea and make it more palatable - and looked at Captain Blue seriously.
"Do you remember when it all started, when my Mysteron counterpart took the World President hostage at gunpoint?" Paul asked.
"Of course," Adam replied, remembering that terrible time. It had been during the early days of the Mysteron's war of nerves when they still didn't fully understand the Mysterons or their powers. The Zero X expedition members, well the ones who had gotten out whereas Captain Black had vanished out of sight, had described the way the complex had been reconstructed. They had just made their threat of destroying all life of Earth slowly and gradually after Captain Black's Zero X mission to Mars, and they had gotten itchy trigger fingers and destroyed that complex on the planet.
Adam sometimes wondered if the Mysterons were even aware of the original Zero X mission to Mars, how the astronauts inside had arrived on Mars and had completely different ideas of what life was before they encountered those rock snake things. Like everyone else back on Earth, the astronauts had no way of knowing that the weird coils of rock they shooting were actually living beings that were capable of firing blasts from their mouths until it was too late, and the first Rock snake that uncoiled began the attack that resulted in them cutting their mission of exploration short.
He would have been truly surprised if the Mysterons hadn't known about the incident, but they'd probably never know. But seriously, if they had known, then surely they wouldn't have pointed those devices Captain Black and the others had taken for weapons of some kind.
"Well, I still don't have any memory of what happened during the time Captain Brown and myself were thrown off the road, and waking up after it all happened," Paul went on even if Adam already knew about this detail, but he had come to realise that Paul didn't want to remember since it had been told in such vivid detail. "All I remember is the car falling to the bottom of that ravine, and feeling the heat of the flames on the back of my neck when the car exploded. But when I came too everyone was looking at me as though they expected me to pull a gun on them."
Adam sighed, he certainly remembered that, but truthfully he wasn't surprised by it. Unlike his friend, he remembered the whole event in question; the figure of Captain Scarlet standing on that girder with a gun in his hand, the World President with a cut to his lip behind him, hanging on for dear life and looking frightened and scared for his life, desperate to escape.
The scariest thing for Adam was the memory of his friend's blank-eyed stare, which he had learnt was common to all Mysteron agents. But he hadn't been surprised by everyone's reaction to the aftermath. Captain Blue had only just managed to fight off Captain Scarlet, and the shot had made him fall a long way down, but his amazing recovery had taken them all by surprise.
No other Mysteron agent had recovered in the same way, and Blue had the feeling that at the time the Mysterons were still coming to grips with human bodies. Now, none of their agents returned to normal, nor were they indestructible. Captain Scarlet was unique.
"When Doctor Fawn put me through that battery of tests and told me honestly about what had happened, I couldn't believe it. But as he went on, he scared me," he admitted.
"Scared you?" Adam repeated in surprise. In all the time he had known Captain Scarlet, he had known that Adam had been a combat soldier, and a good one as well, but he had never heard the man admit anything about being frightened.
"How would you feel if you suddenly woke up from what you thought was a conventional car crash, only to be told you'd become a virtual zombie or robot programmed to carry out a task, destroying anything and anybody in the way, and kidnapping the World President and taking him up the London Car-Vu only to recover and be discovered to be indestructible?" Paul's voice was quiet, and the haunted look in his eyes as he obviously tried to remember what had happened even though all his attempts at doing so in the past had not worked.
Adam couldn't reply to the question, but he didn't have the chance of actually coming up with a decent response because Paul began to speak again.
"I couldn't cope with it, Adam, that's why I became almost suicidal when the DT-19 went after the plane carrying the Director General of the United Asian Republic," he admitted, "I was still coming to terms with being indestructible, and I wanted to have a chance to redeem myself for what had happened with the World President even if I couldn't remember anything definite about it."
"I don't understand," Adam said.
"I was trying to see if I was really indestructible. I still couldn't take it in, I didn't like the idea of taking bullets or injuries where you could either be paralysed for life and going through that pain, only to recover a few hours later."
Suddenly the penny dropped for Adam. "You hate being indestructible, don't you?"
Please review and follow.
Cheers.