Thread:Undoniel/@comment-5270921-20130617002901/@comment-5270921-20130617125100

CYPHER No mention of a Warlock.



CIVILIAN NAME Douglas Ramsey.

KNOWN RELATIVES Philip and Sheila Ramsey. Parents. Father turned the son in on the amnesty program (second offer), and underwent voluntary sterilization as an X-gene carrier. Mother committed suicide a year later.

COMMENTS We were holding Ramsey at one of the LS (limited security) units on the Pacific Coast. We had him pegged as a low risk, and I still hold to that initial evaluation. His powers appeared to relate to the acquisition of languages, and therefore to be more or less irrelevant in a combat situation.

He still managed to escape, though, by subverting one of the guards (Eileen Haloke). She was part-Navajo, and Ramsey forged some sort of emotional bond with her by speaking to her in the Navajo tongue. She freed him from his cell and then accompanied him when he escaped from the compound. She was sighted with him on numerous occasions thereafter.

But she wasn't with him on August 5 of the following year, when – traveling on foot through the Finger Lakes area of New York State – he was at ground zero for a meteor strike which had been tracked by NORAD as coming in from the direction of the Perseid cluster. First forces arriving on the scene found Ramsey apparently infected by some sort of alien matter whose make-up – judging from inert samples obtained afterwards – included hitherto unknown compounds of both carbon and silicon. This alien matter was able to replicate in a quasi-viral manner, and it spread through Ramsey's whole system in the space of minutes.

Accurate intel as to what happens next is hard to obtain. The units on site, who were waiting for the arrival of Hazmat teams so that they could apprehend Ramsey without risk of infection, suffered simultaneous failure of all electronic systems. Survivors reported seeing Ramsey "speaking in tongues" – screaming out disconnected words and phases in a variety of languages, some of which weren't languages of all but high-pitched squeals like the data squawks of a modem. Some observers thought that he was shouting "help me", identifying that common phrase in five different language clusters.

Perhaps our people dropped their guard because Ramsey seemed so helpless – because he was clearly in agony and more or less incapacitated. If they'd moved quickly enough, they might have killed him at that point with a single well-placed shot. A moment later, the Exonim units turned on each other, discharging all their weapons in a three-second exchange of fire which caused a forty-meter wide crater. As we now know, Ramsey himself was not harmed in that conflagration.

Or, to look at it another way, he died. The thing that uses Douglas Ramsey's shape now is arguably the thing that came down in that meteor.

It's just a crying shame that it still thinks of itself as a mutie.

CBR News would like to extend a special thanks to Mike Carey for all his help with this feature. And if you enjoyed THE AGE OF X COMMUNIQUÉS, check back with CBR in just a couple of days when Carey rejoins us for our new X-COMMUNICATED feature, a special director's commentary style look at each of the issues of "Age of X."