Characters in this story are property of Archie Comics Publications.  No money is being made from this story, no infringement is intended.

“Thomas and Kimberly, I now pronounce you man and wife.”

The words seemed to hang in the air for a very long time, subjectively.  Thomas Troy and Kim Brand looked at each other across the span of a very few inches and wondered if this was really true.  If, after all this time together and apart, the sight of him in a wedding tux and her in a white gown was only a dream from which the two of them might wake, or a daydream passed in a dull moment at a law office or on a movie set.

The spell was broken, or at least altered, when he said, “You may kiss the bride.”  Seems so sexist, Kim thought, despite herself.  Why doesn’t he tell me I can kiss the groom?  Oh, well...

At any rate, she felt the touch of Tom Troy’s lips on hers a second later, and was very glad to know that it wasn’t a dream.

When the two of them broke the kiss, they separated just far enough, holding each other’s hands, and looked into each other’s eyes again.  Both knew what the other was thinking: is it, after all, only illusion?  We’ve waited so long...

They bent to kiss each other again, not even conscious of the many people in the church about them, nor the minister smiling as they went for the second go-round.  But the prelate saw them hesitate, just once, as their fingers caressed each other’s hands.  He assumed it was because they had touched their wedding rings for the first time, and were startled by the unfamiliarity of them.

He was wrong.

Tom and Kim had touched the other kind of ring they always wore, and it brought home to them the thing they had most in common, but could not reveal to the vast majority of people in the crowd.  The ones who really mattered, though, knew the import of the rings.

They were marked with the symbol of a fly.

The reception came off without interruption from villains, unless one counted the overpriced caterers as such.  Thomas Troy was one of the most famed lawyers in town, though he’d been disbarred for a short time a year back.  Kim Brand, an actress who started in TV, moved on to sci-fi and horror flicks, and was now working her way into quality roles, was high enough on the social blip scale for an Entertainment Tonight crew to film her throwing her garter.  Neither the press, nor friends, nor relatives, though, was allowed into the room where the Troys had a private reception with less than a dozen others.

Kip Burland was there, looking ill-at-ease in a tux.  So was John Dickering, who had recently regrown his mustache; Kim thought he still looked dashing, remembered how he had briefly tried to romance her, once upon a time, and steered her thoughts back to Thomas.  Bill Higgins, his father Joe, and family friend Lance Strong sat together and compared notes.  Prof. John Raymond fiddled with a piece of cake and chatted with Ralph Hardy, a zoologist who wore the only white tux in the bunch.   Dickering’s brother Bob sat with his wife Thelma and looked deep in thought, only tending to the conversation about him perfunctorily.  John Sterling smiled, drank hot tea with lemon, and had been among the first of the group to congratulate Tom and Kim.

Outside of Thel Dickering, there were no other women besides Kim in the room.  That was understandable.

In other identities, most of those present were members of the Mighty Crusaders.

The Crusaders were a team of super-heroes banded together, ironically enough, by one of their foes, the Spider, as part of a failed plan against Thomas.  Several of them had met one another before the team was formed.  Thus, they had been well-prepared to work together in a joint effort, even though it took a long time before they had to admit that the best name for the team, the Mighty Crusaders, was the one the Spider had chosen.

“So,” said Ralph, standing before the Troys, “what the hey does Turan have to say about all this?  Or have you heard from him lately?”

“Oh, he showed up about a week ago,” said Kim.  “You know how he always does.  Popped in out of a dimension warp.”

Tom Troy, still holding her slender hand, added, “He said our union was, quote, blessed, unquote, and wished us many strong larva.  Those were the words he used.”  Kim was turning red, averting her face, and cracking up.  “Just can’t get a better imprimatur than that, these days.”

“Oh, Lord, don’t tell that story for a long time, Tom,” gasped Kim.  “I just can’t, I just...”  She held onto his arm and kept laughing, burying her forehead in his shoulder.

“Jeez, Kim, I’m glad I didn’t tell it before the wedding.”

“Hey, it’ll be better than what’ll happen to me if I get Jill to say yes,” grinned Ralph. “Can you imagine her with a proud litter of cubs?”

Kim threw back her head and howled, sloshing her drink on Tom’s tux.  Tom grabbed the hanky out of his jacket and tried to swab it down, then laughed alongside her.

John Dickering shook his head.  After all this time, both of them being afraid to marry, and all it took was a short separation to convince them that they really only wanted each other.  And to think that he’d once come back to this planet to try and make Kim his wife.

Of course, that was after he’d seen his first wife, an alien, killed by a robot and come back to find out his brother, Bob, had married his old girlfriend Thelma.  That was because Bob had thought John was dead, and he would have been, had he not been kidnapped and patched up by his wife’s alien race.

For all of those in this room, life was complicated.

John sat down beside his brother and sister-in-law.  “So what’s boiling, Bob?  Besides the usual?”

Bob Dickering looked at him.  “Is there ever any ‘usual’ for us, John?”

The elder Dickering shook his head.  “Not since the Forties, I don’t think.  But you’re looking like you had a Big Think or two to unburden yourself of.  So what is it?”

Thelma said, “Bob’s been keeping it a secret from even me, John.  Maybe you can help.”

Bob looked at his brother, sharply.  “It ought to be obvious.  Don’t you remember, John?  Don’t you remember when I turned into a bad guy?”

Thel’s hand tensed on Bob’s arm.  John simply nodded.  “Sure, I remember it.  None of us could understand why you did it.  Especially why you turned on me, your own brother, and tried to kill me.  Then you came out of it, and, with our recommendation, you got put on probation and turned into a super-hero again.  Did quite well with it, too.”  John looked closely at Bob.  “You’re trying to figure it out again, aren’t you?”

“Yeah.”  Bob sighed.  “And I still can’t.  It was like...like I didn’t even recognize you, almost.  Of course, you had that NBC Peacock hat on, and a new mustache–“

“Hey, let’s not insult costumes here!” grinned John, drawing back his hand as if to smack him.

“–but I recognized you.  At least, part of me did.  But it was like...when I...when I met the Wizard, it was as though the sane part of me was buried under a burlap bag.  Somehow, he got to the monster side of me, John.  He made me your enemy, hell, the enemy of all the Crusaders, for about a year there.”

“And then you got better,” said Thelma.  She was conscious of the fact that all the party seemed to be listening in on their conversation, now.

Tom Troy, having mopped up most of the wine, put in, “Yeah, you were the Wizard’s partner for a long time.  Then you went sane, and he dropped out.  I could never figure that, Bob.  None of us could.”

“None of that really makes sense,” said Joe Higgins, authoritatively. “I worked with the Wizard back in the Forties.  He was a fine, upstanding American.   We collaborated on several cases, and our boys, Dusty and Roy, were a regular team.  Then this guy who calls himself the Wizard turns up–I’ll take your word for it, I was still in iron then–and doesn’t even look like the guy I knew, and he turns into a super-villain.”  Joe considered the Michelob in his hand, then looked up.  “Or maybe he always was.”

Kim Brand said, “You know, you’ve got a point, Joe.  Neither Tom nor I were around to work with the Wizard in the Big One, like you.  But it never made sense that a guy as heroic as the old Wizard–who came from a whole line of American Wizards, or so I’ve heard–-would go bad simply because he saw us bring in a lot of recovered loot.”

Joe, Bill’s son, put his hands behind his head.  “But you remember what happened when it looked like Wiz and Bob, here, were going to blitz all of us, and all those Crusader wannabes, at the same time.  Two of the other magic guys made a time-warp and brought the old Wizard and Roy to the present.  And the old Wiz, the one who was trying to kill us, hid his face in his hands and said he couldn’t bear to look into his own eyes.”

“Anybody can say those things, Bill,” said Kip Burland.  “It doesn’t mean he really was the old Wizard.  He could have been trying to throw us off.  And, come to think of it, he did.”

Thelma said, “Wizards, spells...Bob, it doesn’t take an Einstein to know what must have come over you.  That guy put you under some kind of spell.  He made you into a criminal.”

“That’s it,” said Bob.  “That has to be it.  Strange that it took us this long to figure it out.”

“Not if he had us under some kind of spell as well,” said Tom.  “But this all leads up to another obvious question: Why?”

“No answer,” said John Dickering.  “All we know is that, after one last fight with Bill here, the Wiz dropped out of sight and hasn’t been seen since.”

Lancelot Strong spoke.  “I wasn’t involved in the Crusaders up until recently.  I never met either of the Wizards, if we’re talking two, and not one, here.”

Ralph Hardy nodded.  “I only met him that one time, but from what I’ve heard tonight, it seems a safer hypothesis that we’re talking about two Wizards.  The original, and an impostor.”

“Who just happens to have as much magical power as the original,” Kip pointed out.

Lance continued, “But if there was any spell-casting laid over you, I’d have missed it.  So would Joe, here, since he was still in a metallic state at the time.  I will observe a few facts, though.  One: you only mentioned him in passing, when I was a member of the group.  Two: you never seem to have been interested in investigating him, to find out where he’d gone.”

“Well, lots of times we don’t bother with that,” admitted Bill Higgins.  “We whack ‘em when they show up, but if they drop out of sight, they’re out of mind.”

“So if the Wizard has no interest in you finding him, you don’t find him,” Lance pointed out.  “And you haven’t found him for, what?”

Slowly, Thomas Troy said, “About ten years.  At least.”

After a pause, Lance said, “And what’s he been doing in that time?”

Bob Dickering spoke, in a tone full of barely repressed anger.  “We don’t know.  But if we’re able to ask the questions at this time...I think we’d better find out.”

Kim Brand looked at them, then back at Tom, apprehensively.  The lawyer said, “We wish you the best of luck.  And if you need us, call.”

“Understood, Tom,” said John Dickering, putting a hand on his shoulder.  “But the both of you have just gotten married.  We’ll try to tackle this without the Fly and Fly Girl.”

Thomas Troy had been a boy the first time he became a super-hero.  Considering everything that had happened to him beforehand, it was some kind of compensation.

To begin with, Thomas was an orphan. He had never known his parents, knew of no living relatives.  All that he had been able to turn up for certain about his origins was that somebody found an abandoned baby crying in a deserted car one night, and they got him to the hospital in time to care for him and save his life.  From there he went to an orphanage, where he stayed for the next seven years.

Tommy Troy (for such was the name his guardians had given him) knew no other environiment but that of orphaned boys and girls and their teachers and administration staff at the Westwood Orphanage For Boys.  Thankfully, Tommy had a top-notch brain, and pulled down good grades in school.  But how could he miss parents, when he never knew what a parent was?  Still, he had heard what mothers and fathers were like from the kids who remembered theirs.  After hearing a few tales of their lives, he decided he was just as lief good without them.

But Aaron Creacher was a poor substitute for anyone’s parent.  He skimped on food for the kids to keep his gambling habit nourished.  When he lost at Marco McCoy’s tables, he had a habit of beating the nearest boy for any infraction he could think of.  As the months went on, the beatings became more frequent.

A board inspection would, in the future, result in Aaron Creacher’s dismissal from office and his being jailed on several counts of child abuse, misappropriation of funds, and the like.  But that was still to come the night Tommy Troy heard Billy, a kid in the next bed, crying.

Tommy had asked Billy why he was crying.  Billy angrily denied that he was crying; only babies cry, he said.  But he did admit that he was hungry, very hungry.

The others were up by then, and somebody else put in that Mr. Creacher had beaten Billy for not scrubbing the hallway fast enough.  They all admitted to hunger.  Even Tommy, who had thus far evaded Creacher’s cane.  The boys looked around, then looked at Tommy, who seemed to be the only one who they thought might have a plan

“Mister Creacher is in charge of the orphanage,” Tommy said, slowly.  “And you know how he is.  He wouldn’t listen.”

Then he stood a little taller, and said, “But at least we can try.”

They told him not to do it, that they were supposed to be asleep, that he would only get punished himself for it.  “I’ve missed all the beatings so far,” Tommy allowed.  “Maybe it’s time for me to see what they’re like.”

So he got dressed and, with a host of boys watching, treaded out the door and down the hall to Mr. Creacher’s office.

The door was closed, but not locked.  Tommy heard three voices beyond it, saw three shadows on the opaqued glass of the door.  One voice was Aaron Creacher’s.  It was tinged with fear and supplication.  “I can’t steal anymore out of the orphanage funds,” it said.  “The kids are half-starved now.”

The next voice was a far harsher one, a voice Tommy had never heard before: “Who cares?  Let ‘em starve!  I run a gambling house, not a charity bazaar.”

Then he heard the cracking sound of fist hitting flesh, and the groans and screams of a man in pain.  Despite himself, Tommy threw open the door.

A man whom he would later learn to be Marco McCoy was punching Aaron Creacher in the face.  He had already bloodied Creacher’s nose and mouth.  The superintendent was on his knees, and McCoy, who towered half a foot taller than his prey, was smiling.  The other plug-ugly, McCoy’s man Blaster, was also nursing a grin...until he saw the boy at the door.

Both hoods chased Tommy, caught him, drew the attention of the other orphans, and had to fight them all off to take him.  The boys were locked away in their dorm by force.  Tommy Troy was manhandled, fearful but defiant, into Creacher’s office again.  He knew that the next few minutes would decide his fate.  They would most likely determine whether he lived or died.

Creacher persuaded McCoy and Blaster not to harm the youth.  After all, there would be an investigation if he did that.  No, he’d have to be gotten rid of in a different way.  Luckily enough, there was just such a way available.

Thomas Troy was hired out as a worker (read: slave) to what Capital City thought of as their own “queer couple”, in the old, arcane sense of the word, one Ben and Abigail Marsh.  The two lived in a house which was visited by few people other than the mailman and the meter reader, and they lived on an inheritance of some vague kind.  There had been accusations of witchcraft in the town which became Capital City some centuries before, and several accused witches had been hanged.

Both Ben and Abigail Marsh were reputedly descendants of two of those witches.

Aaron Creacher passed over the caretaking of Thomas Troy to the Marshes for a few bucks a week and the promise that he’d work like Adam’s off-ox, if they saw to it he didn’t talk to other people.  They agreed to that.  Tommy didn’t have much to say in the matter.  He took to his chores and prayed on his knees for the boys left in the orphanage.  But after Ben Marsh whacked him upside the head when he caught him on his knees, Tommy made sure he prayed in secret.

Ben Marsh had an upstairs room that was off-limits and always locked.  Well, almost always.  One night Abigail was out, Ben was sleeping off some absinthe, and Tommy, passing by with a rolled-up rug in hand, looked upstairs...

...and saw the door was partially open.

Curiosity won over prudence, but Tommy made sure he got the rug into the right room and spread it down neatly before he snuck upstairs.

The room was the den of a sorceror.

There was a circle with strange signs painted about it, in the middle of the floor.  There were pentagrams and diagrams and ancient tomes and things Tommy didn’t understand but wasn’t sure he really wanted to look at.  There was a crystal ball that looked as though it was the granddaddy of all those used by carnival fortune tellers, but Tommy had a feeling that, if he was brave enough to lay hands on the thing, it would really work.

There were also flies, buzzing around the table which bore a locked book, a hoary candle, and a book of matches.  On impulse–and Tommy could never say from where that impulse had come–he scratched one of the matches into blazing, and lit the candle, which gave off an odd smell.

The smell was odd enough to make Tommy’s head waver. At one point, he caught sight of a spiderweb between the wall and the table, in which were caught several flies.  He couldn’t have told you why, but he reached out, tore the spiderweb loose, and, for some reason, was glad.

At that point, something on the floor caught his sight.

It was a golden ring.  He picked it up, examined it, and found the likeness of an insect carved on its surface.  A bee?

No, he decided.  More like–a fly.
There was nothing left to do but try it on.

Thankfully, for the first few seconds, nothing happened.  Tommy decided that, having seen all he wanted to see (and more besides), the time had come to take off the ring, put out the candle, leave the room, and hope that Ben Marsh wasn’t already stumbling around the house downstairs.

That was the last normal moment of Tommy Troy’s life.

A beam of light stabbed out from the fly-surface of the ring and threw an image on the wall.  Tommy Troy’s jaw dropped.  Could the thing be some kind of miniature projector?  With a slide of a science-fiction movie world behind it, an advanced city of flying cars and oddly-shaped buildings and a man in...

...a man in a green costume and a red hooded cape and long, spindly arms and legs and a helmet with a riser on it and large goggles that made his eyes look insectoid, almost, no, definitely...

...and the man stepped through the flat circle of light and into the three-dimensional world, and smiled at Tommy Troy.

“Fear not, young lad of Earth,” said the stranger.  “I mean you no harm.”

The only thing that kept Tommy from bolting from the room like a track star off the starting blocks was his inability to make his legs do a single damned thing.

“I am Turan, emissary of the Fly People,” said the man, and Tommy wasn’t sure if he heard the voice through his ears or his brain.  “Our world exists on a dimensional plane outside your own.”

“Uh...” said Tommy, approximately.

Turan began to tell his young host of his race’s history, how they had once been magicians of a sort, able to do the most amazing things by focusing their will.  But, he lamented, there were evil men among his people, even as there were on Earth.  (Tommy seconded the last part of that opinion, at least.)  There had been a war of wizards, good versus evil magic, and in the end, a conflagration that touched every one of Turan’s race.  Many died.  Many escaped to the dimension Turan now called home.

Many were transformed into another form of life, an insect form.

They became flies.

This, Tommy decided, was absurd.  Surely something in the candle had addled his mind, or perhaps he’d gone to sleep without knowing it and was dreaming something out of an afternoon’s screening at the Bijou.  But Turan was still going on, proclaiming that the misfortune his people had suffered had turned them into cosmic busybodies, setting them against evildoing on their own and other worlds.  One of the artifacts they had left behind them were rings, like the one Tommy Troy had found.  Until one who was suitable came upon them, the rings would not be activated.

And Turan was saying that Tommy had been found suitable.

To him would be given all the powers of the insect kingdom...the great, proportionate strength of the ant...winged flight, the ability to walk up the side of a building or hang upside-down by his feet from a room’s ceiling...the light- and heat-radiating power of the firefly...sight or perception in all directions...that, and many more powers besides.

“All these powers will be yours, as long as you are deserving,” said Turan.  “You have only to rub the magic ring and you will be projected into our dimension.  You will assume the identity of the Fly!”

“I–I rub the ring?” Tommy had stammered.

“Even so,” said Turan.

There was nothing left to do, then, but rub it.

And, with that, another person stood in Tommy Troy’s place, with Tommy Troy’s mind, but little else in common.

The new person was an adult.  A most powerful adult.  One who wore a strange costume of dark green, skin-tight shirt and pants, yellow hood with goggles, yellow gloves, trunks, boots, and belt, at the side of which a strange gun hung which was not designed for firing bullets.  From his shoulders sprang two translucent but strangely powerful wings.

“I’m bigger,” said Tommy, who knew nothing else to say at the moment.  “Stronger...another person.”

“Yes,” said Turan.  “The Fly.  Yeoman in the service of justice.”

With that, the wizard from the Fly World vanished.

The Fly stood there, feeling the strangeness and yet comfort in his new body, knowing, and not knowing how he knew, just what he could do, and just how to do it.

Knowing, moreover, the purpose to which he must put his new powers.

Justice?

It would first be visited on the heads of those whom he knew deserving of it.

Opening a window, and not caring a whit whether Ben Marsh was awake or not, the Fly leaped into the open air, and flew.

He flew to the orphanage, entered covertly, found the location of Marco McCoy and his gang, went there, and faced a trio of hardened, armed men.

The threesome didn’t stand a chance.

When the police came, in response to an anonymous call, they found the battered and bruised McCoy and his two gunsels bound together by a strange, steely strand, almost a silken rope.  Evidence of McCoy’s crimes was in clear sight, scattered on a desk.  They finally got McCoy in condition to answer questions, and when they asked him who had done the number on him, he managed to mumble, “The Fly.  He called himself the Fly.”

That was how it all began.

Zambini the Miracle Man knew, vaguely, what was coming.  In his heyday, during World War II, he’d fought many practitioners of the Craft, agents of the Axis or just plain followers of the left-hand path.  He’d been lucky, skillful, and strong enough to win his battles.

But that was years before.

Now, he found himself hanging head downward, above a symbol which no one under Zambini’s level of tutelage could understand.  He knew what it signified.  It didn’t reassure him.

He had met, once before, the one who had trapped him today.  At the outset of their meeting this time, his foe had paralyzed his larynx with a spell Zambini had not yet encountered.  Unable to utter a single magical syllable, the wizard-warrior was subdued easily.

Now the man who had bound him was coming nearer, with two objects in his hand.  One was an athame, the other was a silver cup.  The cup had strange workings on its surface.

The man had a long, white beard and was dressed in a costume which, though odd, was familiar enough to Zambini.  He smiled with his mouth, not with his eyes, and said, “Nothing personal, really.  It’s just something that has to be done.”

Then he did something to Zambini’s throat with one of the things he carried and caught what came out of it with the other.  Following that, he drank from the cup.  He went back for seconds, and thirds.

The last thing Zambini saw, with his failing vision, was part of his internal redness spilling into the cup.

That which missed the cup struck the symbol beneath him and sent up individual, terrible steams and hissings.

And the last thing he heard was the Wizard’s laugh.

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