SECRET ORIGIN: STARBOMB

HISTORY:

Life has always been tough for Nicolette Sheridan. Growing up with a father in the army, the family moved around a lot. From base to base and from state to state, Nicolette moved dozens of times in her young life and it wasn’t until her father Sam, retired and took a job in the aerospace industry that Nicolette, her mother, Virginia, and two brothers, Vince and Vonte, finally settled and laid roots. 

Nicolette’s formative years were not only lackluster, but in many respects also quite troubling. Young Nicolette showed outward signs of being maladjusted and somewhat prone to conflict. Ironically these were characteristics that were encouraged by her by-the-book-father, Nicolette's rebellousness during her early years was embraced, and embellished in jokes as showing a certain toughness that the retired army ranger liked seeing reflected in his daughter. Yet her record was comprised of far too many fights.

After high school Nicolette joined the army. Within a year after that, at age 19, she fell in love with a fellow soldier. Months later they were married. Though she never intended the army to become a career path, really she had only joined because she felt she owed it to her father, still to her great surprise, Army life settled on Nicolette Emerson and she found she rather liked being a soldier.

Over the next 12 years Nicolette Emerson changed into a different person altogether. She had a son and became a mother. And she evolved into a soldier in the United States Army. It was an evolution that was so complete that Nicolette became one of the first generation of women to sign up for combat roles when combat duty was finally open to female troops.

She opted for airborne training and soon after that Ranger school. She had to face the hardest obstacles of her life but somehow she made it through each day. And when her marriage which had been crumbling for several years took a violent and deadly turn, somehow she made it through that too. Not only that, but she also managed somehow to protect her son, Jason.

Since the divorce she has spent countless hours with her own thoughts, staring out of her son’s bedroom window and looking at the stars. She often wondered what future awaited them and she often worried that she was not strong enough to face the challenges she may face. She could not help but to gaze at the stars but the stars never provided any answers. In fact the stars didn’t seem to care about Nicolette Emerson at all.

Quite possibly this is not true, for even if the universe did not mean to answer her, nevertheless, it did. One faithful, lonely night the being called Eon appeared to Nicolette Emerson, and he abducted her.  As she sat next to her sleeping son, Eon appeared like an angel from heaven, a beautiful and frightening sight, and with barely little warning or explanation, he stole the young mother away from her son, and kidnapped her, taking her back a trillion lightyears across dimensions to a place called the Multiverse, that great intersection of spacetime where all dimensions and universal realties touch and meet. To the capital city of the entire realm Nicolette was taken, arriving after her interdimensional journey in a place few beings have ever heard of or seen, the High Council of the Galactic Halls.

The High Council of the Galactic Halls remains a place that falls out of comprehension. It somehow occupies all of the multiverse and yet it is also not much more than a grand spectacular chamber room. Not matter its physical composition, the High Council seemed to Nicolette like a kind of  tribunal or parliament, or possibly even a military court. The “judges” were beings who called themselves Guardians, they announced themselves as keepers of the proceedings and they proclaimed that they would serve as the prosecutors too. Justice would be swift the Guardians assured and in this manner the case of the High Guardians of the Multiverse v Jason Emerson officially began, with a stipulation that adequate representation for the defense is also present.

The indictments brought forth by the Guardians included the charge of murder. According to the charges, Jason Emerson, Nicolette’s 12 year old boy who she had seen minutes before soundly sleeping in his Star Wars themed room and jammies, would one day destroy much if not all reality, or so the Guardians said.

“The undoing is upon us” the Guardians described for the galactic record, “the fabric of space and time have started unraveling. We have nearly reached the limit of our understanding as the future is now unknown and uncertain.”

Nicolette Emerson could barely understand what she was hearing or seeing. The Guardians and the High Council were like nothing she had ever imagined before, so different from anything she had ever known that she thought she was dreaming or delusional. She did perceive something though, perhaps as a result of her maternal instincts being keenly aware, it was a feeling Nicolette had that there was something about these beings that seemed confused, even panicked. There words kept rattling around inside her mind and she struggled to understand what they meant, what did they mean when they said “the future is now unknown and uncertain”?

This was what passed for galactic deliberation in the multiverse, with the so called Guardians of galactic realty putting on a show trial for a jury of themselves. Very quickly they completed their proceedings and rendered a verdict that was never in doubt. They found Jason Emerson guilty of murdering a third of the multiverse, but not guilty of destroying all dimensional realities. There verdict was the sentence of death. It was sentence intended to be carried out immediately but was haulted and given commutation when one of the Guardians interjected to point out that because of the coming rupture in spacetime they could not be certain of the future or of the facts.

For these reasons the Guardians issued a curious verdict. They decried that the sentence of death would be commuted until and at such time that it seemed likely that young Jason Emerson would fulfill his cosmic destiny. As part of that commutation, the Guardians issued a galactic order requiring Nicolette Emerson to wear a neural sensor monitor which would gauge on regular intervals the stress levels of the wearer and all biologic descendants. In addition to the sensor monitor, the Guardians also decried that Nicolette Emerson be fused with stardust dark energy and that her cells be made to contain the plasma energy of a starbomb.

As the Guardians said the future is now unknown and uncertain. Therefore the choices Nicolette Emerson will have to make to protect herself, her world, and her only child, are not predictable. If she can learn to tap into the awesome power that the Guardians have given her and not be destroyed by it, perhaps the Starbomb can save us all from the destruction of all reality.