Last week you would have called me crazy, right? Flying robots. Hell of a thing. Grabbed that guy Marlowe right out of the air. I was across town, you understand. I have a lot of places I need to check up on. Can't be everywhere at once. But if you know to look out for flying robots, you should, right? You take care. This city gets weirder all the time. I can't be everywhere. 
- — "The Mayor"
The Wild Storm #10 is an issue of the series The Wild Storm (Volume 1) with a cover date of February, 2018. It was published on December 20, 2017.
Synopsis for "The Wild Storm - Chapter Ten"
In the safehouse, Jacob Marlowe's wild CAT are strategizing the best way to destroy the I.O. blacksite codenamed 'Hightower'. Kenesha immediately suggests that they blow it up, but this is vetoed by Cole, Adrianna and John. Cole presents the ideal plan: trick the occupants into leaving the building, by faking an environmental breach or by pulling a fire alarm, and then after everyone has left, inflict damage which destroys the facility but can plausibly be written off as coincidental.
After John and Adrianna give a brief explanation of "event shielding" - a technology at I.O.'s disposal which can generate a screen of "fake time" around a space, rendering it physically unscannable by an outside body - Cole hits on the idea of using one of the microdrones Angie used back at Camp Hero to remotely hack Hightower's systems to get the results they want. Kenesha agrees with this, thinking she can put explosives in the drone also.
As it is time for her to come home, Adrianna goes to retrieve Angie from the warehouse where she is working, taking Cole with her. At the warehouse, Cole asks for her help, making the suggestion. Angie is initially leery of the idea, but warms up when she realizes that they want to blow up an I.O. facility. She remotely interfaces with the safehouse's computer hub and downloads the drone stats for Kenesha's use... which causes Kenesha to become defensive, as she had not given Angie the passcodes, and Kenesha prides herself on her ability to secure data from people.
On Skywatch's space station headquarters, Ms Pennington walks into Henry Bendix's office, where he is reading a report from Christine Trelane. Bendix is pleased: Trelane was able to use the chaos surrounding the Marlowe Incident to recruit Michael Cray, an assassin, away from I.O. and into Skywatch. Now he is on the other side of the country, merrily working for them, oblivious to his new employer's true nature, and ensconced in a support structure of her creation. But the most surprising part of the report is that Michael Cray joined the organization saying he needed medical treatment for a brain tumor - but the tumor is anything but, and the doctor wants to do more scans.
Ms Pennington wonders aloud what could be causing the tumor. Bendix has a suspicion - reptilian humanoids. This exasperates Pennington, who has heard this line from Bendix before, but has gone over the files available to her and found nothing to support this old story. As they walk, Bendix reiterates that when he is dead and she has his job, she will understand everything.
Bendix pivots the conversation, announcing that he has put Lucy Blaze on the task of surveilling I.O. Analysis, to see what she can get out of the most guarded office in I.O. Bendix wonders aloud if he can have a few I.O. agents killed to "send a message". As he pulls out a syringe and gets Pennington to inject him with it, he muses on what Skywatch could have accomplished by now if they didn't have to maintain their secrecy.
Enervated by the syringe contents, Bendix marches off through an iris doorway. Pennington, turning the other way, pulls out her phone and makes an open transmission to all Mission Control officers - the Weatherman is on deck.
In London, Jenny Mei Sparks is waiting at a bus stop when Shen Li-Men steps up to her and starts talking. Jenny's eyes glow and she refuses to answer, but Li-Men smiles as Jenny glances around in dull confusion. Li-Men explains that she has turned all the communication signals within fifty meters into music. Jenny acknowledges that she owes Li-Men an explanation, preferably in conjunction with alcohol, but she begs Li-Men to turn all the music off, as it is giving her a headache.
So at Jenny's flat, Jenny gives Li-Men her whisky and explains what she knows: International Operations is an American intelligence agency that has grown to the point where it subtly controls society. Skywatch, meanwhile, is a secret space program which carefully controls who gets to leave Earth. The two organizations have a non-interference agreement, because if they fought, civilization would collapse. Li-Men asks how Jenny could know this. Reluctantly, Jenny admits that she was there when the agreement was hammered out. Belying her seeming youth, she is in fact roughly 120 years old. However, after the agreement, Jenny fell into a decades-long drunken stupor. When recently she came to the conclusion that she could not die of alcohol poisoning, she forced herself to recover, and is now researching the state of the world.
Swirling her whisky, Li-Men taps on a point on Jenny's board, "reptilian aliens". Li-Men believes that this refers to The Daemon, a class of beings she has seen in visions. Jenny admits that she heard stories about reptilians, but has never seen hard evidence for them. Li-Men says that she never left evidence, but Jenny still came looking for her. Stories have to start somewhere. Underlining her position as the Doctor - a planetary shaman who is part of an unbroken spiritual tradition going all the way back to the earliest humans on the African savannah - and, crucially, who has the ability to draw on the knowledge of her predecessors - Li-Men explains that when Jenny came to see her, she looks into Jenny's head to view Jenny's lineage. And while the things she saw were presented mostly in visual metaphors, the earliest image was a machine, built by the Daemon, which Li-Men believes is what created Jenny. If she is right, Jenny is a planetary defense system, created by aliens to protect the human race.
Jenny takes this information with a mute scowl, and then says she will need more whisky to accept this knowledge.
In Brooklyn, Kenesha is going to a bodega. She stops outside to ask an unkempt man in a suit why he is looking up in the sky. With a sheepish grin, the man explains that he is watching out for flying robots which might attack people. He advises her to look after herself as he "can't be everywhere".
Going into the bodega, Kenesha asks the shopkeeper who the guy is. The shopkeeper says he knows him only as "the mayor", a homeless man who wanders the city, asking people if they are alright. Sometimes he can go missing for months at a time, but always shows up... and he has a way of lifting people spirit's. Everyone feels valued after a visit from "the mayor".
Outside, "the mayor" picks a cigarette butt from between the silvery treads on the soles of his feet, and curses the litterers of New York. He remarks that Copenhagen is usually clean this time of year. Running up a nearby wall, he backflips into a dive, landing head-first in the middle of the road... and vanishes with a ripple, like a swimmer.
A nearby limousine stops on the road, disgorging Pris "Voodoo" Kitaen, the pop singer, and her assistant. The two have been on a hedonistic tear of cocaine and fine champagne for at least six hours, but Pris has just enough presence of mind to recognize what "the mayor" just did as something she saw in a dream recently - and if the rest of the dream is true, then a war is about to break out!
Appearing in "The Wild Storm - Chapter Ten"
Featured Characters:
Supporting Characters:
- John Colt
- Angie Spica
- Adrianna Tereshkova
Villains:
- Skywatch
- Henry Bendix
- Lauren Pennington
- Lucy Blaze (Mentioned only)
Other Characters:
- Pris Kitaen
- "The Mayor"
- Michael Cray (Mentioned only)
Locations:
- New York
- New York City
- Brooklyn
- Jacob Marlowe's safehouse
- Diego's Bedega
- Brooklyn
- Camp Hero (Mentioned only)
- New York City
- London
- Jacob Marlowe's warehouse
- Skywatch Satellite Headquarters
Items:
Vehicles:
Trivia
- The report Bendix is reading is about the events of the "Wildstorm: Michael Cray" series that spun out of the first arc.
See Also