Part I: The Kowalsky Klan

Everything begins some years before the deposition of the Russian Tzar  family.

    1903 - Grigori Rasputin comes to Saint Petersburg and claims to be some kind of sorcerer. After a quick and successful career, he is granted to be the official mystic of the hemophiliac Czarevitch, son and heir of the Tzar.

    1905 - Rasputin, thanks to the Tzar's wife influence, makes a lot of contacts with the local aristocracy and have sexual intercourse with some of the wealthiest women in town. One of them is 17 years old Anna Szalinsky, whose family was suffering an irrevocable process of bankruptcy and looked for the help of the so called 'Mad Monk'. The mental powers of Rasputin permitted him to hypnotise any person and, thanks to that, he always had what he wanted from his 'clients' and gave nothing in retribution... in the vast majority of cases.

    Wasn't the case with Anna. Of course they made love but, instead of just taking her honor and properties for nothing, Rasputin gave her a glimpse of hope through a mental suggestion... and something else.

    1906 - Anna - who had her own latent mental powers - gave birth to a couple of children, Alexander and Katherina , who grew the last name of Rasputin.

    The Szalinsky family run from Saint Petersburg and hide in the fields in the interior of Russia, mixing with all the other farmers who went to work for the Revolutionary Government. At the same time, the sole survivor of the Romanov Royal Family, Anastasia Romanova, flew away - amnesiac - and her story can be seen in the animated movie with her name. What the audiences didn't knew was that, after the events narrated in there, Anastasia gave birth to a pair of daughters and both of them were raised by the Government which had a vague fear about how the Russian people would feel about the sole survival descendants of the Tzar Nicholau. More about the kids later...

    1917 - 70 years old ex-con Rodia Raskolnikov (whose partial life was told by Fiodor Dostoievski in Crime and Punishment) is free from prison thanks to the Revolutionaries and relocated to the Russian farmers. Once
there, he changes his name to Piotr Nicholayevich and becomes friend of the Szalinskys and a great influence to Anna's son, the 11 years old Alexander Rasputin. After the death of Rodia, in 1922, the young man takes the false name of his elder friend as yours and turns himself the first of the Nicholayevich Rasputins.

    1924 - Alexander, due to a series of vicious fights with the family of his mother, change his name to Stanislaw Kowalsky and runs to Polland starting starting there to travel by sea at the age of 12 years old. In

    1927, he travels as a sailor in a merchant ship to America, never coming back to Russia. Once there, he raises a son, Stanley Kowalsky, whose partial life we knew about in the play called "A Streetcar Named Desire", by Tennessee Williams (Williams was a "fantasy" writer in his beginnings and also a great friend of John Reed, who played an important part in the Russian Revolution. Why would he change his style of writing - putting aside the "fantastic" elements of his writing and turning into a "social writer"? Could that be some kind of influence of the facts he knew through Reed regarding what happened in Russia? Or something a little worse? Also the fact that the play was written in 1947 could make us think that Williams was VERY close to the Kowalsky family... why should that be? Maybe he wanted to keep an eye on them?).

    1955 - Stan Kowalsky's first son (and the only one he actually knew), grew up to be a sailor during the late 60's, serving in the USS SeaView and his adventures were shown in the episodes of Irwin Allen's TV serial "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea". The other son of Stan Kowalsky, the bastard child with Blanche DuBois, Jason, who was born in 1955 in an asylum for mentally disturbed, never knew his mother, who died soon after the birth, and was raised by a nurse called Vorhees. Of course you all know who he grew up to be... (just see the Friday, The 13th series of movies. The parental relation among Jason Vorhees and Rasputin could be the explanation for the toughness of the adult psycho who proved to be as his ancestor very difficult to kill... As you can see, the awesome strength of Rasputin and the bad genius of Raskolnikov were a hell of a heritage... ;-)). We also have to mention that Blanche DuBois and her sister were a long distance descendents of the once Templar knight called Brian DeBois Gilbert (with the Jewish maiden called Rebecca), whose story was told by Sir Water Scott in the pages of Ivanhoe.
 
 

Part II - The Helpless Romanovs

ANASTASIA's CHILDREN: TATIANA ROMANOVA

After the events depicted in the "Anastasia" animated picture, Anastasia Romanova and her lover Dmitri decided to marry and settle down in Paris. In 1927, they were blessed with children, twin girls, named Natasha and Tatiana. Dmitri's surname was lost in history: for all the tragedy and sorrow that was to come, the children would always be Tatiana and Natasha Romanova.

    Tragedy, yes. Because, unknown to the lovely couple, the Soviet Intelligence, then known as the NKVD, had plans for the last descendants of the late Tsar. With the help of a French free-lancer and mastermind criminal (there are suspicions, but no proof, that this was no other than the legendary and seemingly immortal Fantomas fiend) Dmitri was murdered; the twin girls, kidnapped; and Anastasia, left insane, deranged, a woman no-one would believe or take seriously.

    The twin Romanova girls were taken to a top-secret branch of the NKVD, Smersh. Smersh's top scientific officer was a mysterious woman named Rosa Klebb; there are some evidence that Klebb was not a human being at all, but one of those alien creatures that comic-book artist Jack Kirby would call, decades later, "The New Gods". One of such "gods", known to Earth as "Granny Goodness", has more than a slightly resemblance to Ms. Klebb. And the methods of them were quite alike. Taken under custody of Rosa Klebb's scientific branch of Smersh, thechildren, no more than babies, were then used in one of those hideous "twin experiments" that the Nazis would make infamous: one of them, Tatiana, was inoculated with alien, probably "New-Goddish" DNA; the other, Natasha, was kept normal, as far as her genes were concerned, but was submitted to a routine of brain washing, physical and intellectual training that would turn her into a virtual superwoman, or, at least, the best woman that could exist, if created only by "natural", "normal" means.

    Now, Tatiana was introduced to a more secluded, common, paperwork-oriented life style. She had ambitions to ballet, once, but was persuaded to accept a job in the Soviet consular service. Nonetheless, her alienenhancements were working to turn her into a kind of superwoman, also; in the end, Natasha was to be Tatiana's "control": Rosa Klebb/Granny Goodness wanted to know which method, hard training or genetic manipulation, would give her the strongest, smartest, the best "animal".

    The measure of Klebb's confidence in her brainwashing techniques is evident in the fact that she allowed both girls to keep their real names, even the imperial surnames.

    Natasha's career as a spy, then double-agent and then defector was hinted, even if highly "improved" upon, by the exploits of Marvel Comics character "Black Widow". Tatiana, even without any special training, grew up to be a most beautiful, athletic and resourceful girl, who was used, in the 1955, by Klebb ñ now head of the whole Smersh operation, in an attempt to destroy the life and reputation of the British secret agent James Bond. This was to be only a minor test to the latent powers that, Klebb believed, Tatiana's enhanced genes would give her, but the whole affair backfired: too concerned with her cosmic-scale machinations and overconfident in the powers of the alien brainwashing of the girl, Granny Goodness underestimated the seductive powers of Bond, who was from a Wold-Newton family and, then, lost the girl to the West. James Bond and Tatiana had a brief love affair in Venice, Italy, and he helped her to get a Western citzenship; then they parted.

    But Bond and, alas, the whole British Secret Service was kept in the dark as to the alien manipulation of the beautiful Tatiana's biology.

    But, in the most secret recesses of the US government (the MJ-12 project, actually) there were people who knew better. The US was waging a secret war against invaders from the stars, the New Gods amongst them; MJ-12 probably even knew the truth about Rosa Klebb. There were double-agents on all sides, and Tatiana's unique qualities were very well known in certain high places (or bunkers) of the American government.

    Two agents were then sent to Venice, after her. Their names are still classified; but we know that they had success in taking her to America. It's also known that she got pregnant of one of them, but ended marrying the other who probably was under orders to keep an eye on her. But these developments were not immediate; first, there was a strong effort to drain the girl's brain for all possible information she might have about Soviet secret ops and alien/New God activities. For this, she was fixed in a "dream-apparatus" similar to the one used by the British secret research team "Phantom Show Project". The mastermind scientist behind Phantom Show, a Nazi defector who had fled to England and, afterwards, to the U.S., one Dr. Gargunza also known by the codename "Dr. Ðberman", ou "Huberman", had already suffered his fall from grace, though his trial for treason is briefly depicted at the first minutes of the motion picture "Notorious", by Alfred Hitchcock., which deals with Gargunza's daughter exploits in Brazil.

    When attached to the machine, Tatiana, kept in a state of suspended animation, virtually without aging, lived a dream life, composed of sensory stimuli created by the apparatus and amplified by her own prejudices, ideas and recollections. The American Phantom Show, now known as Project VR, couldn't break the alien mind-blocks present at Tatiana's brain perhaps Gargunza could have done it, but he was no longer available. As things were, all that the machine could do was to get the girl dreaming of a cliche-suburban life, as wife of a young talent who worked for an advertisement agency. Tatiana's background as a guinea pig and the subconscious knowledge of her latent powers were elaborated as comic/fairy tale elements, with Tatiana seeing herself as a "young witch", Rosa Klebb as her "mother" and so on. The mind-tapes of Tatiana's "dreams" were later used as a basis for the popular TV show "Bewitched".

    Tired of waiting for the results that would never come, MJ-12 decided, after almost a whole decade, to take Tatiana out of Project VR and into a real life as an American woman. It was then that the two Venice agents
came back into the picture, and she ended as wife of one, lover of the other.

    Now Tatiana had a new identity, a false background, a fake suburban life. She had two children in the US, named Fox and Samantha; and, when it became clear that Tatiana's own powers would never really surface, MJ-12 had no qualms in kidnapping her daughter for further research. This kidnapping was investigated by a reporter named Carl Kolchak who, unfortunately, could not produce enough evidence to blame the government for the crime. Kolchak's failure made Fox quite disappointed with journalism, a career that the boy was considering to take. When Kolchak ended empty-handed, Fox decided to infiltrate the enemy, to become a G- Man. He would be a FBI investigator.

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Part III: The Shrinking Szalinskis

    In 1919, five years before Anna Szalinski lost his son Alexander (then named Piotr Nicholayevich) Rasputin to a life of perils and voyages through the oceans, she married the man named Yuri Thorkel and they had three children:

    1920 - Piotr Nicholayevich Szalinski Rasputin Thorkel is born (this is the second Piotr Nicholayevich in the family) and Grigori Szalinski Thorkel. 1921 - Aliosha Szalinski Thorkel. Yuri Thorkel was a proud man and his respect for the Revolutionary Government was strong. He only permitted that his first son kept the "Rasputin" name in honor of his wife.

    The three Thorkel brothers soon showed themselves very different innature, ambitions and desires: Piotr - as his uncle before him - had problems with the father figure and refused to use the name "Thorkel". He married late in his life, in 1960, the beautiful Maria and raised two children, Piotr (the third with the same name in the family) and Iliyana Nicholayevich Rasputin. Their story (as all the others Rasputins) will be told in the near future.

    Grigori never married. In fact he suffered an accident in his infancy which made him a sick and ugly child, and his mother had to protect him from the rage attacks of his father who claimed that such a monster was a problem to the farm, to the family and the state. The accident was never fully understood and caused Grigori to became a very short and bald man. He actually never grew up like his brothers.

    What happened to Grigori was that he was exposed to a kind of extradimentional phenomenon. A "mist" that appears on Earth from time to time, linking matter and energy from this Universe to another one and "siphoning" these quantities out of our own continuum; the observable effect of the phenomenon is an alteration of the stature of the living creatures that make contact with it. Animals, plants and people that arelargely exposed tend to "shrink" on and on, till they completely fall into the so-called "Microverse". Problably Grigori was safe from the certain death (or oblivion) by the Rasputin genetic heritage that gave him sufficient strength and stamina to resist the effects of the exposition (different from a certain man called Scott Carey, who was affected by this same "mist" in the 1950's, and the crew of the first America/Europe transcontinental flight, lead by Captain Steve Burton and pilot Daniel Erickson, which flew right through the mist, disappearing without trace. The first case was documented by writer Richard Matheson in his famous book "The Incredible Shrinking Man", in which the author chronicles the misadventures of Carey, who was very famous in his time; and the disappearance of Captain Burton's crew and passengers was transformed by Irwing Allen in the highly speculative television series "Land of the Giants". Writer Stephen King also wrote about the "mist" and the giant creatures that could live behind it, and even DC comics launched a series
 about crossing dimensions and a curious "antimatter mist" in 1984).

    Grigori Thorkel never told anyone about the exposure to the mist and, in 1930, at the tender age of ten years old, decided to dedicate his life to study the scientific possibility of shrinking life forms. In 1940, Dr. Thorkel was in an Island at the Peruvian coast and had already developed a functional "shrinking" artifact. Unfortunately, he eventually turned himself as mad as a nut and became known to the world by the nickname of "Dr. Cyclops", thanks to the Hollywood production with the same name.

    After near killing three fellow scientists, Grigori Thorkel was arrested and disappeared from view for a while but he came back years later, in the same place, with the same goals but with a "different" name... In the sixties, after the arresting of Grigori, some others experiments with the Thorkel machine took place. The North American organisation called CMDF - a small part of the SHIELD - where studying the shrinking process while Dr. Cyclops were in jail and was able to built and shrink successfully a small submarine - a ship called The Voyager - capable to sail through the bloodstream of the human body. There were two crews aboard the Voyager: The first one was formed by Commander Grant (probably descendant of the famous Captain Grant), dr. Cora Peterson, General Carter, Colonel Donald Reid (probably descendant of the famous Britt Reid), Captain Bill Owens, Dr. Duval and had the mission of save the life of a very influent politician from a communist country. It's story was told in the 1966 movie picture Fantastic Journey, but the curiosity about the movie is that there was a certain Dr. Michaels with the crew who was portrayed as a saboteur and a traitor... well, the truth is that this was nothing more than Dr. Thorkel himself!

    And no, he doesn't died inside the ship as well as the vessel wasn't destroyed as shown in the end of the movie... both survived and, this time, as Grigori Thorkel was put in prison again, the Voyager was prepared to receive its second, and far more competent, crew. Officially the new Voyager crew was composed by someone called "The Chief"; Pilot Busby Birdwell; Dr. Erica Lane; a man known only as 'Guru'; (then General, now "Professor") Carter and Captain Jonathan Kidd. That was the "official record", but the reality was far from that! The REAL crew of the Voyager was composed by a group of highly trained SHIELD agents and they were comanded by no one else but Colonel Nicholas Fury himself! Birdwell, Lane (probably descendant of the famous Lois Lane) and Carter were real agents but the men called "Chief" and "Guru" were, obviously, disguises projected to protect their real identities.

    There are doubts about who was the Chief. Some say he could have been the super scientist known as Dr. Hank Pym, and others defends that he was none other then Dr Raymond Palmer, both of them experts in the fields of the "Shrinking Science". But there are other speculations... he could have been the genius spy Sunday who was disappeared since the beginning of the XX century (see The Man Who Was Thursday, by G. K. Chesterton)... or even the man known as "Charles Thowsend", who later turned out to be the owner of a private eye agency. Speculation never cease... ;-) About the Guru, perhaps, nobody had any doubts. He was Dr. Anthony Druid, a surgeon and an expert in occultism. But, because of the great success of this group, there was a cartoon tv series which altered the identities of the more recognizable members of the crew.

    Back to the Szalinskis, in the early seventies, Aliosha Szalinski (he put aside the Thorkel last name just like Piotr did before him, since the "DrThorkel/Dr. Cyclops" shame came upon the family), Grigori's kid brother, found him in a high security prision in Peru and tried to restore his sanity but it seemed impossible. Grigori scaped and, for a year or two, he was again trying to shrink people. This time, the Krofft Brothers, two American TV producers, made a TV serial about him called "Dr. Shrinker"... and that's why we never heard about Dr. Grigori Thorkel again. ;-) However, his plans were taken by Aliosha to the USA, where he was living since the World War II, and were lost in the attick of his house till 1980, when, after Aliosha's death, his son Wayne discovered them.

    What happened to the Szalinskis after the "Dr. Shrinker" events are well known to us all since the movies "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids" and "Honey, I Blew Up the Baby", where Wayne Szalinski is portrayed messing with the size of his own family... To the great audience, those films were mere comedies and the horror that was a rampant giant baby running through the streets of Las Vegas was transformed in a lighthearted story. The truth, instead, wasn't so "cute". The giant baby, Adam Szalinski, victim of a reversal effect of the shrinking process, became, just like his ancestors, a progressively mad and the sad truth is that he had to be gunned down by the Air Force, just like other giant aberrations before him (King Kong, Godzilla, etc). All of the events were totally erased from the memory of the people who saw it all thanks to the efforts of the VR
 program (see the Romanovs' file) which rebuilt the collective memory using a mix of hypnotic lights and gases. Even the Szalinski family forgot the very existence of their youngster and they keep living till today eventually shrinking each other, but now under the eternal vigilance of the SHIELD.
 

Part  IV The Rage of the Rasputins, or Secrets of the Soul

    The baffling fact that the so-called human "soul" is nothing more than an electromagnetic field was established, experimentally, by American physicist Lionel Barrett, during a series of definitive investigations of the so-called "Hell House", built by the infamous Emeric Belasco. Barrett tests were conducted at December 1970. Barrett didn't survive the experience, and his results were later worked on and published by a colleague of the "Hell House" events, a medium called Benjamin Franklin Fischer. Fischer memories of the events at "Hell House" were narrated to Richard Matheson, noted science fiction writer, and later appeared in a novel of the same name.

    Barrett, with the help of Fischer and others, proved that the soul is electromagnetic in nature, and that it can be "dispelled" by an opposite field of the same nature. His finds were the first to be made widely public, but the fact was known, in certain circles, long before that; according to the "Planetary Guide" (Elijah Snow, ed.) a group of Soviet scientists knew that "the human soul is an electromagnetic field that Heaven and Hell are nothing but siege engines and souls provide de coal".

    This discovery took place at the beginning of the 60's; the data soon came to the attention of American scientists, also, and by the mid- 60's both superpowers had their own versions of Heaven and Hell ñ two supercomputers-accumulators of souls, known as "Guardian" (the Soviet and "Colossus" (the American). The story of how both systems tried to take over the world is told ñ in a highly censored version by the motion-picture "Colossus", produced in 1969. Science fiction Philip Jose Farmer also had some glimpse of the truth, since his references, in the "Riverworld" books, of soul-accumulating devices is very, very close to the mark.

    What does it have to do with the Rasputin family? A lot. The source of Grigori Efimovich Rasputin powers ñ i.e., his ability to use the power of his soul-field (or "wathan", as Farmer put it) to physically influence and control others is not really known, as the time of this writing. It is possible that some genealogical research of the Novykh (Rasputin's real last name) line could give us a clue someday. Perhaps it would be advisable to note that the Novykhs were a Siberian clan; and, even if Rasputin himself wasn't in Siberia when of the Tunguska event of 1908 a huge blast of energy that leveled a whole forest in that region of Russia ñ took place, said event may be a serious indication that there was some sort of damaged wathan- storage device working there, perhaps leaking soul-power for years, before the final blast.

    The wathan-nature of the Tunguska event can be deduced from some of its effects at other parts of the world mainly, by the sudden surge of religious fervor in Portugal, with the Virgin of Fatima appearances; it is relevant that the Virgin alerted Her followers to dangers that would come from Russia

    What we know is that one of Rasputin's lovers in St. Petesburg, Anna Szalinski, had similar powers; but in her, they were dormant. This doubled superhuman heritage was passed on through the Rasputin- Szalinsky line, as told in previous articles of this series; till, in 1961 there were born, from the second Piotr Nicholayevich Rasputin and his wife, Maria, a third Piotr and his twin sister, Illyana.

    Now, it is known that a very successful series of comic books have, as two of its characters, a pair of Russian brothers, Piotr ("Colossus") and Illyana; that this fictional "Colossus" is said to have a skin of "organic steel", and that Illyana was once abducted by a "demon" called "Belasco". These are all hints to a truth too horrible to be told in children's books.

    Here to the facts:

    It is not known if the birth of the Rasputin pair, in the first year of the sixties, had something to do with the discovery of the Heaven and Hell war by Russian scientists; it is known that the arrival of the couple did send a powerful shockwave through Earth's wathan- field Soviet scientists may have detected it. It is a fact that Emeric Belasco did so.

    Emeric Belasco (1879-1968?) was an intuitive genius of the true nature of the so-called soul. His powers of suggestion and domination have been compared to those of Rasputin, but Belasco was raised and educated in the most cultured parts of the U.S. and Europe; he was not the poor son of a poor, illiterate Russian peasant of the pre- Revolutionary days. He knew what he had, and he studied it, used it. Died by it.

    His experiments included the building of the Belasco House which, during the 1920's and 30's was turned into his own private hell: "He attempted a literal enactment of De Sade's 120 Days of Sodom" is how B.F. Fischer puts it. Guests of the house were induced, by Belasco's suggestions and sheer willpower, to commit murder, cannibalism, necrophilia, rape; women would get pregnant and their babies were drowned in a bog close by. All the wathan-power so generated was collected by the house itself. In 1929, the house was broken in and everyone was found dead but Belasco. His body would be recovered only by the Barrett expedition, in 1970.

    Between 1929 and 1968, when he finally died, Emeric Belasco traveled the world, looking for especially gifted youngsters. He had grown weary of experimenting in "normal" human beings; he wanted to try his hand with people as strong as he, and to create a new menagerie, now composed of "eXtraordinary people". He would go back to the Belasco House from time to time, namely to manipulate the wathan-power of the place against uninvited guests, as the 1940 ill-fated psychic expedition.

    As far as his recruiting efforts were concerned, it was only obvious for him to believe that the descendants of the infamous Rasputin would provide "good students/specimens". What other families and "specimens" he found, what other lives he manipulated and destroyed between 1929 and 1964 is open to debate, though. While acting in Western Europe and the U.S., Emeric Belasco had to cover his tracks with good care; he was officially missing, presumably dead, and wanted to keep things this way.

    All that is known is that as part of his disguise, he would put aside his prosthetic legs and move in a wheelchair. His influence over Blanche DuBois and nurse Vorhees cannot be documented, but can be inferred; it is quite possible that he himself "programmed" young Jason's successive resurrections, by acting directly in the boy's distorted wathan. He might have had some influence over the boy that would be sailor Kowalsky, also: why, after all, would every single monster or alien or giant creature from the bottom of the Earth's seas try to take over that one submarine? And why would each one of them monsters attempt to control Kowalsky's mind as first step to do so? In the USSR, however, Emeric Belasco could become Emeric Belasco once again; it suited better his over-inflated ego. He negotiated directly with Soviet authorities; it is possible that they even pumped him for information and insight to be used in the "Guardian" project of the wathan Cold War. Belasco wouldn't care: he wanted to keep going with his own experiments, and the rest could go to hell. So he bought one of the Rasputin children from the Soviet State Illyana, perhaps choosing the girl so he could give free course to other perversions and took her away. It was in 1965.

    What happened afterwards is a matter of inference. It is known how the Lionel Barrett expedition found Belasco's body in 1970: perfectly preserved, a brandy glass by his right hand, inside a secret, wathan- proof chamber of Belasco's house. Ben Fischer suggested that he just went there to wait for death. In such an evil, powerful genius, this seems unlikely. It's more probable that Belasco was cornered there, pushed into hiding by the smashing power of the Colossus wathan- storage system, that went amok in 1967. But Colossus went amok because it was under the control of the wathans of two very hurt, vengeful children Piotr and Illyana Rasputin.

    The story of the Colossus event is told, in a very bowdlerized way, in the motion picture Colossus: The Forbin Project. The movie was made in 1969, just two years after the fact, and it is probable that it was financed by the U.S. government, to hide the true facts. Another movie, "Night of the Living Dead" (1968) was also based metaphorically ñ in the Colossus crisis, but as an attempt to reveal the truth. As the movie estates, there were two top-secret projects -- "Guardian", in the USSR, "Colossus" in America that were cornerstones of the Cold War. But Colossus and Guardian were not super-artificial intelligences that would control the nuclear arsenal of their respective nations; nothing so mild. They were two huge wathan manipulation-storage devices.

    They would suck soul-power from the dead, and use it to process information, generate power and influence/control the wathans of the living. They were, in fact, both large mass-brainwashing devices. If needed, they could be used to generate powerful bursts of energy, capable of disrupting the neural functions of the human body and, even, erasing the wathans of whole populations if they were left unprotected. The "spiritual" nature of the Colossus project is even hinted at in the movie, perhaps by a screenwriter who knew too much: there's a female scientist named "Markham", the same name of the doctor who investigated the classic Haunting of Hill House. In he movie "The Haunting", based upon Shirley Jackson's version of the facts, the name is "Markway", a better approximation of the original in Jackson's book, the doctor is called "Montague", a more distant alias.

    As shown in the "Colossus" picture, Colossus and Guardian merged under the Colossus common identity and threatened to take over the world. Why and how this happened, however, was not depicted there. Again, these are the facts: In the U.S., Illyana Rasputin, tired and sickened of the abuse by the old man Belasco, felt that the Colossus engine was going online and literally fled voluntarily sent her wathan there. We can only imagine what amount of effort, of courage, was needed to commit this soul-suicide. In the USSR, the Soviet military just decided to make a field test of the wathan-stealing properties of Guardian. And, what a better way to do this than aiming it to a God-forsaken farmer village in Siberia? The Guardian attack didn't strike the Rasputin-Thorkel farm, but a small town nearby; nevertheless, the child Piotr was there at the moment, with a friend of the family.

    Once sucked into the huge wathan-banks of Colossus and Guardian, Piotr and Illyana soon found out that they were the most powerful entities there; that they could control not only themselves, but also the others and the machines; and, finally, they felt the presence of each other. They knew they were brother and sister; they merged. They partook of their common anger, and the first action of the new Colossus-Guardian complex was to deliver a killing blow on Emeric Belasco. The old devil tried to protect himself in his wathan-proof chamber; the brandy glass was a last touch of defiance. Anyway, his brain could not stand the pressure; only his wathan lasted, imprisoned there, the only place where it would be safe, but slowly growing in power till the final destruction brought to it by Lionel Barrett and Ben Fischer, in 1970.

    Having dealt with Belasco, Colossus diverted its attention to the world. What it did then? There is no reliable documentation. It may have sent thousands of dead people wathans back to their bodies, as implied by the huge amount of "zombie" films that appeared afterwards; it may be ruling the world till today, those two angry children, and we not knowing about it. Fragments of data show, however, that an American scientist, depicted in the movie as one "Dr. Charles Forbin", was able to communicate with Illyana and Piotr, in their new identity as "Colossus", and talk to them. The movie also implies that there was a "Dr. Fischer" involved in the project. It is unclear if this is the same Ben Fischer that would help Barrett to destroy Belasco. Perhaps Colossus, feeling that Belasco's wathan was protected, made a bargain with these scientists?

    Was Charle Forbin really Lionel Barrett? We don't know. We may never do.

    An addendum: some self-proclaimed "time travelers from the future" probably delusional ñ have being known to say that, at some point in the XXI Century, a giant supercomputer will take over the world and use human wathans as main power source. This nightmare machine is described either as "The SkyNet" or "The Matrix". One can hardly avoid the thought of this future menace as a new, or only a different, older, Colossus perhaps Piotr and Illyana will get tired of mankind?

    This "time-travel" evidence is not quite reliable, but Who knows?
 
 

Carlos Martinho's references:
 

MATHESON, Richard
1. "The Incredible Shrinking Man"
2. "Hell House"
 

FLEMING, Ian
"From Russia With Love"

KIRBY, Jack
"Mister Miracle" (numbers 8, 9 and 10)
 

CARTER, Chris
"The X-Files" TV series mythology
 

MOORE, Alan
"Miracleman", book one
 

CLAREMONT, Chris
"The New X-Men" comics
 

TUCHMAN, Eric
"Anastasia", screenplay adaptation for animated movie
Anastasia, 20th Century Fox, 1997
 

JONES, D.F. and BRIDGES, James
"Colossus: The Forbin Project" screenplay
Colossus: The Forbin Project, Universal Pictures, 1969

CAMERON, James
"Terminator" screenplay & movie
The Terminator, Orion Pictures, 1984

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Octavio Aragão's references
 

I) Books and novels:
ASIMOV, Isaac
"Fantastic Voyage" novel & screenplay

CHESTERTON, G. K.
"The Man Who Was Thursday"

DOSTOIEVSKI, Fiodor
"Crime and Punishment"

KING, Stephen
"The Mist"
 

MATHESON, Richard
"The Incredible Shrinking Man"

SCOTT, Sir Walter
"Ivanhoe"
______________________
II) Movies, plays and TV shows
 

ALLEN, Irwin
1 - "Land of Giants" screenplay & TV show
       Land of the Giants, 20th Century Fox Television, 1968
2 - "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea" screenplay & TV show
        Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, 20th Century Fox Television, 1964
 

KILPATRICK, Tom
"Dr Cyclops" screenplay and movie
Dr. Cyclops, Paramount Studios, 1940

"Dr Shrinker" in "The Krofft Supershow", screenplay & TV show
The Krofft Supershow, ABC, 1976-1978
 
 

1 - "Honey, I shrunk the kids"
       Honey, I Shrunk The Kids, Walt Disney Pictures, 1989
2 - "Honey, I blew up the Kid"
        Honey, I Blew Up the Kid,  Walt Disney Pictures, 1992
3 - " Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves"
       Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves, Walt Disney Pictures, 1997
 

"Fantastic Voyage" screenplay & cartoons
Fantastic Voyage, 20th Century Fox, 1966
Fantastic Voyage, Filmation, TV-Series: 1968-1970

"Friday, the 13th" screenplay & movie
Friday the 13th, Paramount Pictures 1980
 

"Rasputin" screenplay & movie
Rasputin, HBO Entertainment, 1996
 

WILLIAMS, Tennessee
"A Streetcar Named Desire" script
A Streetcar Named Desire, Warner Brothers, 1951
______________________
III) Comics
 

CLAREMONT, Chris
"The New X-Men" comic script (Giant size #1)
 

LEE, Stan, & KIRBY, Jack
"Dr Druid" comic script (1)
 

LEE, Stan, & STERANKO, Jim (1)
"Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD" comic script

WOLFMAN, Marv, & PEREZ, George
"Crisis on Infinite Earths" comic script (1/12)

© 2001 Octavio Aragão and Carlos Martinho