When finally arrived in his hotel room, Ed jumped over the bed and began to take out the clothes from his bag, impatient to head to the streets looking for information. But it was too early, two PM, at that time of the day it was not really wise to go street hunting.
Rama in the other room was sleeping. Ed had plenty of sleep over the plane, and now was perfectly rested. To let some time to pass, he put the TV on, surfing from channel to channel, trying to get a good idea of how that world was different from his own. The news were the same he saw the previous days on his world... minus here there was no mention of any metahuman affair. with so few of them in the world, it was just obvious.
Unable to find anything worth, Ed turned off the tv and went to the bathroom to took a shower.
It was then the mirror in the room caught his attention. He went there, looking at himself. On his own world the beard and the baldness were sufficient to hide his identity, that as past Olympic Champion was well known across the world. Here that simple camouflage would have be sufficient to conceal his own identity? Or, his parallel twin being dead, nobody would think him being Edulcore Cicciotto even if the face was the same?
Suddenly, a burst of curiosity for his counterpart got birth in his mind. Who was Edulcore on this world? Respected hero, or feared rogue like on his home planet?
"The book!" though Euro, and taking it from the bag, he jumped, landing on the bed on relaxed position, determined to discover who was the Eurostar on that dimension.
Chapter three
Avant-Guarde members files: The Eurostar
The life of Edulcore Cicciotto, cook and ex-Olympic champion, changed the night of XX-XX- 2001, when he was kidnapped by secret agents of the genetic firm Marvenex, based in Nokia, Finland, the most advanced European based metagene researching centre.
It was 2001, actually, the year in which over the metagene began a new armament race between many nations of the world. After five years of research, the knowledge about the metagene was deep enough to let the possible utilisation in the military field become evident.
The hunt for the alpha metas began, and where the money was not sufficient to enlist them in the various national research centres, they become the subject of abduction through military black ops stunts.
That was the case for Cicciotto: after refusing for at the least six months to be enlisted by the 3VX, the Boston based American metagene research centre, by Marvenex and by half a dozen other facilities, he was finally kidnapped and brought to Finlad.
At Marvenex Edulcore Cicciotto was put under the care of acclaimed scientist Dr Henry Quantos, who revealed the world famous Eurostar that his power was augmentable to levels seemingly impossible for a human being, making him able to reach speed bursts of 350 Km/h. What most impressed the ex-athlete were the proofs for such claims: video footage stolen from the 3VX laboratory in Boston, showing a mere months old baby able to walk and run at inhuman speed.
The kid was supposedly a clone of Edulcore Cicciotto, grown from the same blood samples that revealed for the first time to the world the existence of the metagene.
Cicciotto was also made aware that Marvenex took him from home right before an agent of the MCCA, the American agency for the control of metahumans, Shock (see relative file, pag 67) could kidnap him to force him to join the USA metahumans programs. And the true scope of the American hunt for metas was finally revealed for the first time to one of the metahumans subject of that very hunt: to built an army of supersoldier to side an alien race in a war to be fought on Earth with a second alien race.
Edulcore, after the revelations, apparently agreed to join freely the Marvanex project. There, he befriended especially a young Australian, with bizarre animal powers, named Danny Hearn, apparently the subject of an experiment of time travel.
After the process of power-augmentation succeeded, however, Ed and Danny found a way out of the laboratory complex, disappearing in the boreal forest surrounding Nokia.
They reappeared in Chicago, at the O'Hare International Airport, in time for what was dubbed by the press the "Chicago meta-incident" and that caused much concer happening shortly after 9/11. The two were involved in a big fight to stop the mad meta known as Mr. Kaleidoscope, on the run from the police and the MCCA.
The two, joined by Mr. Kaleidoscope's twin brothers, Mick Harrison, a meta with illusionist and super-hypnosis powers, stopped Kaleidoscope after his crime spree, but then had to run away from Agent Shok and others of the MCCA, trying to capture them.
Edulcore Cicciotto, in that occasion, showed for the first time in public his powers, making a everlasting impression over the public with his out-racing of the Boeing 747 in take-off, with which Kaleidoscope was escaping.
In that very first "mission", Cicciotto showed good leading abilities, making his powers and the ones of his two comrades to work well together. After the stunt, he found without too much hassle a perfect place to hide, applying the old adage that the best hiding place is being in plain view, joining a travelling circus where their abilities were more than welcomed, in exchange of being hidden from the likes of the MCCA with fake identities.
Escaping from the MCCA was not their only goal: Edulcore convinced the three to help him to recover the little clone of himself, to which he always refer as being his son.
Shortly before the arrival of the Circus in Boston, home of 3VX Company and place of custody of Cicciotto's clone, the group was joined by another metahuman, the mysterious Kristogar Velo, a man who came to the circus as the director of a documentary over circus life, but that soon revealed to be an ex CIA agents, involved into the alien agenda of the USA Government. The man asked the help of the three metas for sneaking inside the Leviathan, the fortress-like laboratory of 3VX, to retrieve documentation to expose the traitorous behaviour of part of the government agencies, in exchange of information into how to free the Eurostar's "son".
Edulcore Cicciotto had an instinctive faith into the man, and assured his help and his friend's one.
The night of Christmas eve, 2001, the four men entered dressed as Santa and their elves into the 3VX building, during the employees party. What followed is detailed in chapter 9, "The fall of the Leviathan", but without anticipating too much, we have to remember how the Eurostar was instrumental into the destruction of the building and the exposition of Zachary Knell as a member of the reptilian alien race classified by the CIA as "basilisks".
Cicciotto (now finally united with his "son"), Hearn, Harrison and Velo, joined by the MCCA agent Shok, that was following them and got involved in the spectacular action, with the instrumental help of one of the 3VX top researcher, Dr. Charles Walker, a metahuman himself, succeeded into exposing the plan to gather all the alpha metahumans of Earth to be transformed into superpowered drones of the invading alien force.
Obviously, nothing was ever revealed by the authorities about what happened that night, and we are detailing those happenings for the first time whitin this book, thanks to insider sources. But the enormous amount of special forces of the army converging over Boston, near the location of the fall of the Leviathan building, in the day of Christmas, 2001, is a fact.
Like it is a fact that in the following months many heads in the government, the FBI, the CIA and the Army (and also in the NASA) fell, and there was a general reorganisation of the various government agencies, justified with the necessity for increase necessity of national security, but that we know had another reason to be.
After a month, a new special force for the defence of the free world and the war to terrorism was announced, under the NATO flag and composed exclusively by metagene bearers. Called "Avante-Guard", and based in Bruxelles, Belgium, the first members it counted were those very metahumans that contributed to the fall of 3VX.
Edulcore Cicciotto was the field leader, but that didn't lasted much. During the very first mission of Avant-Guarde, taking place in Helsinki, Finland, for coincidence the same country where the Eurostar was born as a superhero, the Italian found death.
The team had been assigned to stop a band of rogue Russian officers that wanted to blackmail the Finnish government with the use of nuclear weapons.
Edulcore, after much struggle of the entire team, once the bomb was recovered about to explode, ran with it in the Baltic Sea, to save the city. His body was never found. Today, a giant statue of Edulcore Cicciotto stands in Helsinki as a memento of that extraordinary and sad day.
Euro closed the book. In his world Mandelovia never built a monument to him for having sacrificed the life to save the city from a meteor, but at last he returned to life. For an instant, Ed wondered if Mandelovia did exist on that world, so alike and so different from his own, then jumped on his feet, and left the room.
Edulcore knocked at the door of the hotel room occupied by the Indian warrior, and that was right next to his own. "Rama? Rama? It's time to move!" whispered the Italian, but the only answer was the loud snoring of the man. At last in that, noticed Euro, the Swordsman had not changed much from his previous incarnation, the one of Mason Templar, bold adventurer.
Ed knocked again. "Rama? Rama!"
No reply came, so Ed shrugged and walked away, toward the elevator.
.................................................................................
"What direction, sir?" asked the taxi driver, after Euro got on.
Ed remained silent for a moment, trying to judge the grade of filthness of the man, and then asked straight the question: "I am looking for sex".
The man smiled, a smile that gave Euro nausea and disgust. "What kind of sex?"
"Young males"
"How young?"
"Very young".
The cabbie paused, looking at Ed trough the rear mirror, to guess if it was a legit question or the man was a cop in disguise. The heavy accent of Ed's English made the cabbie to believe he was a rich tourist in search of prohibited sensations. "That information will not be cheap..."
"I am going to pay" said Euro, taking a roll of dollars out of a pocket.
"Good. I'm bringing you to a snuff movies director that deals also in the goods you are looking for." The yellow cab speeded up toward a distant part of the city.
