Father's Day Gifts (Contest Dupe)

Father's Day Gifts (Contest Dupe)

Father's Day Gifts

(A Story of Chocolate)

Prologue:

A stormy night, late December 1944, an Island off the coast of Scotland

Professor Trevor Bruttenholm was not a big man, nor did he look to most eyes like a natural leader of men. He was a very quiet man, a fervent Catholic who usually armed himself against his foes with relics and rosaries rather than the weapons employed by the military types he often ended up leading.

One of his hardest jobs was convincing hard-nosed military commanders that their guns and maneuvers were at times useless in the face of the kinds of things he usually dealt with.

However, there are times when knowledge of the paranormal and military knowledge must be employed together and his real genius was in recognizing this. Even though he himself would never wield a gun, he recognized when it was necessary to employ people who did.

In its first real field operation, Professor Broom, as his name is correctly pronounced, and his fledgling Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense, managed to shut down the operations of a small group of Nazi occultists.

These Nazis were attempting, with the help of a Russian man that Broom had always insisted was Grigory Efimovich Rasputin, to conjure from 'beyond' some mighty weapon to help them win the war.

Broom and his small group of soldiers closed down the portal as quickly as they could while bullets, blades, and grenades added to the chaos that the Nazi's occult machine had created.

However, Broom knew that the portal had been open just a little too long. One could not open such a portal as these Nazis had done, no matter how briefly, and have nothing happen.

What these Nazis had ended up conjuring was something that Broom did not expect. He did not think they did either. Exactly what Rasputin had in mind was a different story all together.

That evening may, indeed, have been Rasputin's greatest triumph as he had always claimed. Maybe what came forth that night was exactly what he intended. If so, that triumph eventually became Rasputin's greatest defeat and instead became Trevor Bruttenholm's greatest triumph even though he did not live to see it.

The weapons employed by the young professor in this other great battle that took place on that same night in 1944 were weapons that he ended up employing for many nights, days, and years to come. These weapons had very little to do with either the guns or relics that had been employed that night and everything to do with love—and chocolate.

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Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense,
Newark, New Jersey, June 19, 2005

Hellboy walked into the late Professor Trevor Bruttenholm's office.

At almost seven feet tall, Hellboy looked like someone who could defeat almost anything that he came up against. With his bright red skin, tail, sawed-off horns, and a huge right hand that looked to be made of solid stone,

Hellboy looked just like the very creatures he was supposed to protect society from. He was somewhat over sixty years old and in recent decades began to be known in certain circles as The World's Greatest Paranormal Investigator.

These circles, however, were somewhat circumscribed. Hellboy was one of the FBI's biggest top secrets, especially if you counted his sheer size. The official line of the FBI was that Hellboy, and the Bureau that he called home, didn't exist. Most people only knew of him from badly focused pictures in tabloids like The National Inquirer.

He was also one of New York City's most pervasive urban myths and there was a comic book that came out in the mid-1990s based on a veritable mish-mash of fact and pure fantasy.

If Hellboy had really done everything that some believed him capable of, he would have had the powers and abilities of at least twenty different fictional superheroes. Hellboy's greatest asset was his sheer strength and he usually beat the crap out of whatever monster the FBI pointed their greatest weapon at.

There was a large desk in the office that Hellboy had just walked into and he sat down in the chair behind it. Even though this chair was actually quite large, it creaked under his weight as he dropped into it.

Trevor Broom had been the founder and first director of the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense, or the BPRD as most of the agents who worked there called it. Broom had also been chief researcher and, until a second bout with cancer in his eighties, the longest-serving investigator of this clandestine wing of the FBI.