Thunder City Gazette offices, 11 p.m.:
Ben Fowler sat at his desk in the lonely, nearly empty office. Only a skeleton crew operated the newspaper at night, and none of the others were particularly friendly. Fowler had been working the night shift for a month now, and he was completely drained of energy. He felt his career was stalling before it had begun.
It was in late October, after submitting his interview with the Write Guy, that Fowler was sent to the night shift. Fowler had managed to do some digging and found a few more discrepancies in the official history, thanks to the Write Guy's tips. But Paul O'Hara, the Gazette editor-in-chief, was apparently enraged when he saw Fowler's story. O'Hara didn't speak with Fowler directly, but reporter-turned-acting manager Jack Stetson had relayed the information. Fowler thought Stetson took a bit too much pleasure in that.
O'Hara completely rewrote the Write Guy interview, discrediting everything the former metahero had said and making him look like a lunatic. He also editorialized the interview, making suggestions that the city should cut him off from any possible metahero compensation, since he was obviously a fraud. The fact that O'Hara had rewritten the story with such a slant was not the worst part. The worst part was that he had left Fowler's name on it.
The edited story was printed on November 1st, and now, on December 5th, Ben Fowler received a letter from the Write Guy. He dreaded opening it, knowing that the metahero thought Fowler had betrayed him, but he needed to know what it said. Opening it, he read the following:
Fowler,
We thought we could trust you, alone, in the media. Finally, we had someone who was willing to listen to us and tell our story. But all you wanted was to exploit us for your paper.
I've put the word out. The next time you want to talk to one of us, you're out of luck.
Goodbye,
The Write Guy
"Shit," Fowler muttered under his breath. He was about to throw the carefully handwritten letter away, when on impulse he flipped it over. Jotted on the back was a messy note that said:
The world you know is not the way it always was. The world's been destroyed several times and brought back to what we see as "normality." Ever wonder why there haven't been major catastrophes associated with metas? There actually have been. Many of them, in fact. Reality's been changed back with a reset button again and again. You know this is true in your heart. Look into it with an open mind. Dr. Dusk knows all -- he's been around since the beginning.--WG
Fowler read and re-read the note. Something about this rang true. He had long had dreams about such things as alien invasions, demonic hordes ravaging the earth, even metahuman terrorists committing mass murder and taking over a major U.S. city. But they had all just been dreams, hadn't they? Despite the craziness surrounding metahumans, the real world was relatively normal. Almost untouched... as if... as if someone had reset the world after each disaster, after each event that took history veering off the same course it had always been on.
Ben Fowler had nothing to go on other than his hunch that the Write Guy was telling the truth. The former metahero seemed unglued to reality, but was he actually just unglued to reality as it was now?
And this note about Doctor Dusk troubled Fowler. He recognized the name as that of a crimefighter who had recently surfaced in San Diego, California. He had read about Dusk during his research into metaheroes, but Dusk had only been operating for a few months now since around August, 2008; how could he have been around since the beginning?
Even though the Gazette was keeping him on copy-editing duty, Fowler still had a lot of free time to continue his research.
