Post by redsycorax on Jan 5, 2023 3:43:17 GMT
On Earth-55, the world of the Freedom Brigade, there has been a recent and sudden influx of supervillains. But where are they coming from and how did they get there?
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PROLOGUE:
On eldritch, flyblown Earth-RC, dominated by the Dark Lord of the Seths and tyrannised over by sinister mechanised poultry, a squat avian cyborg form clucked menacingly. No, really it did. All right, perhaps you'd have to be another chicken, a certain mad scientist, an invertebrate or grain particle to actually feel menaced, but still, on that existential level, that was intentional. In front of it stood a sinister figure dressed in billowing black robes whose face was invisible. At length, the avian cyborg's indecipherable [due to a Babel Fish translator shortage-Author] crazed monologue ended and the figure turned and doffed its cowl. It had enlarged spectacles, buck teeth, and wore a pocket protractor, pen and tie. He cackled inanely, then raised his hand and pointed. A holographic (upside down) image of Earth-55 appeared before him and then focused on a chartreuse hole in space out of which spilled an escalating number of loosely categorised near-orbital spaceships on a one way trip to an apocalypse!
EARTH-55: FREEDOM BRIGADE HEADQUARTERS:
22,300 miles above the Earth, the Freedom Brigade satellite orbited, its members worried at the sudden influx of ridiculous supervillains onto their world.
Mermaid cleared her throat: "Members of the Freedom Brigade, we face the greatest threat to our existence ever imagined."
Her husband Mr Might raised an eyebrow: "But we've already been cancelled, twice. And whenever our probability gets wiped out, there's an almighty cosmic burp and we're back again."
"It's not another baldist incursion again, is it? Because that trope has been overused already and it's getting seriously old." Lightpower objected.
"Not before it claimed Jabez, my husband, the former Patriot, now forever metamorphosed into the hair hating Captain Alopecia!" Lady Liberty sobbed, providing a lacklustre continuity reference.
"Dana, I take it you're referring to the sudden influx of supervillains that no-one has heard of, or should ever have heard of, given their frankly ridiculous provenance." Bat Woman contributed.
"Thank you, Vicky. Yes, here are just a cross section of them. The Horrible Hand! ... Okay, that's awkward, there should be several others. Ah, here they are. Neutrino Man, Mr Might's foe, powered by extremely small subatomic particles and the subject of the movie Mr Might: The Fight for Poseurs; Yolk Fu, an immense communist Chinese egg which speaks English very badly; Blue Snow Person, a gender neutral villain just for the Mighty HermAphrodite to take on; Amoeba Person, a giant unicellular organism; Other Spider Man, a web slinging criminal who dresses completely in a black outfit and has two horns on his head and has never worked for Marvellous Comics, just to make that clear."
"Wait a minute," said Captain Swift, "all of them sound suspiciously like lame parodies of particularly awful Earth-One, Two or S supervillain concepts. Just because they were too embarrassing for their original Earths, they get dumped here? What a nerve the multiverse has!"
"Be that as it may, Billy, the threat here is real. With all of those low concept baddies here, our ratings on the Heisenberg Alternate Probability Index are plummeting. We can't take much more of this. My friends, the Dork is Rising!!!"
"Grammar, please. Surely you mean the Dorks Are Rising!" Princess Power objected.
"Let's split up, run off in an expository frame and take on the menaces individually!" Mr Might thundered.
"I thought we were supposed to be a team?" Green Trashcan interjected.
"Oh, yes, I forgot. And let's find locations to fight this Legion of Drone in. I'll face Neutrino Man on the Moon!"
"I'll tackle Yolk Fu in Tibet!" Lady Liberty replied.
"I'll deal with Blue Snow Person in Acapulco!" The Mighty HermAphrodite volunteered.
"Why?"
"He/she/they will have a liquidity problem but that's not important right now."
"I'll use my smell o ring to asphyxiate Amoeba Person!"
"And unfortunately, that leaves me to fight Other Spider Man outside a convenient insecticide factory with giant Billfingeresque props!" Bat Woman concluded.
As the others left, The Eye was perplexed: "I'm worried about the others."
"Why, Eye?"
"Because that was a fairly awful object lesson in individualism caused by parodying authors unfamiliar with the concept of superhero teams which invariably mean that the heroes get walloped or tricked by the villains in question? I fear it's a sign of the degradation of probability in our already bargain basement universe. Can we withstand much more of this, or is the Author trying to kill us off yet again?"
TIBET:
As Lady Liberty swooped down to face the enormous egg-shaped mustachioed Yolk Fu, he frowned:
"You American imperialist strangely crowned intruder! Be off! The glorious People's Republic of China With Tibet Included has no need of your intrusion!"
"Why are you speaking perfect English now?"
"English? We're conversing in fluent Cantonese. What do you think this is, a Robert Kanigher script?"
"What are your ominous ovular obsessions for the western world, you egg-shaped evildoer?"
"Please stop with the kitsch dialogue, too. Or I'll ensnare you with my prehensile facial hair!"
"You do realise my tiara is razor-edged, don't you?"
"And you do realise I'm a hard-boiled grim and gritty character these days?"
"Oh, this is a ridiculous situation. I'll just set my tiara on repeated slice and dice and have at you, shall I?"
"Awppp! You blood-stained running hyena of American imperialism, you!"
"I've got better things to do than converse bilingually with a giant talking egg, thank you very much."
ACAPULCO:
The Mighty HermAphrodite touched down in Mexico, determined to best the imperious Blue Snow Person:
"Byrna Brilliantine! Stop that incongruous allotropic snow storm right now."
"Excuse me, HermAphrodite. I'm allowed to do what I like with my fiendish sole gimmick involving hypercompressed water molecules and solid water/snow. So there! Scientific accuracy! And incidentally, it's Byrne. I'm non-binary now."
"All right then, Byrne Brilliantine. You may have gotten away with that on other Earths with frankly weird plot lines back in the Golden Age but this is modernity."
"Yes, which is why I have a more rigorous scientific background for my abilities, gender fluidity and other attributes. Which, frankly, are a lot more convincing than yours are. I mean, come on! Magical ring, fusion of two teenagers named (snicker) Toni Gay and Butch Dykeman, special powers far beyond the scope of any mortal gender fluid person? Puh-lease!"
"Look, who died and appointed you literary critic, Byrne? And this isn't a particularly original 'monstrous threat' plotline. It's obviously filched from Kurt Vonnegut's ice nine apocalyptic plot device in Cat's Cradle. And that didn't end well."
"You're just upset because this is a relatively sophisticated plot device and you were expecting a kitsch character dressed up as a snow person, admit it."
"You don't know what you're playing with, you fool! The Author keeps trying to kill us with any excuse and your abilities provide a perfect pretext for it. Added to which, this is supposed to be a parodiverse and your plot device isn't funny enough."
"Oh, all right. Punch me out. This universe is too embarassing for a character of my calibre anyway."
And so, with the connivance of the arrogant and irritated supervillain who thinks they're too good for this narrative, the Mighty HermAphrodite laid Blue Snow Person flat.
"There had to be an easier way than all that contrived dialogue..." Toni and Butch muttered as they witnessed the denouement.
MOON-55:
Earth-55's Moon has some weird quirks. It's heavily overpopulated with lunar colonists and the remains of others who didn't count on the lack of atmosphere there. One couldn't move for ducking low flying moon shuttles, stepping on early exploratory landing sites, and encountering incongruous aliens in badly designed monster suits. Mr Might did his best to ignore these minor impediments and soared toward the sneering figure of the garishly clad Neutrino Man. Wait a minute, Mr Might thought, Neutrino Man? But neutrinos are amongst the smallest known sub-atomic particles, react minimally with surrounding matter, and are an exceedingly weak subatomic force:
"Face me, Mister Might, and stop consulting Wookiepedia offpage!"
"How can you speak in the vacuum of space?"
"Look, will you engage in combat against me or not?"
"Uh, and why do you smell of strawberry, chocolate and vanilla?"
"Fool! Haven't you heard of the three flavours of neutrino?!"
"Look, who wrote this crap?! Your whole conceptual design is absolutely low note."
"Who cares about scientific accuracy?! I will zap you with my neutrino vision." But, because Neutrino Man's abilities were neutrino based, the neutrinos passed harmlessly through Mr Might.
"No, I won't fight you, Neutrino Man. Primarily because your laser canon has just fallen to pieces and you're so physiologically fragile, you'd shatter into tiny pieces."
And with that resolved, Mr Might turned and soared back toward Earth, musing on the miniscule plot development and poor quality character design as Neutrino Man took his shirt off and scowled after him.
EARTH ORBIT:
"Amoeba Person! Surrender at once!"
"You don't frighten me, Trashcan. For one thing, as a giant micro-organism I don't have any nostrils, so I'm not vulnerable to your cheap derivative Green Lanternesque smell o ring."
"That's why I picked up these handy dandy aerosols. Let me recite their names to you- metronidzole, secnidazole, tinidazole, paromomycin, iodoquinol, chloroquine and nitozoxanide."
"You fiend! Those are amebacides!"
"Incidentally, I've made sure I've been vaccinated against amebiasis, balantidium coli, blastocystis, dientamoeba fragilis, giardiasis and trypanosomias."
"How dare you! What sort of evil megaprotozoa do you think I am! I'm not the sort of giant micro-organism that hangs around in such cheap, unsanitary places. Why, I've got a good mind to perambulate off on a huff and sue you for defamation!"
"Except you have to be a person to sue for defamation and you're just an enormous germ."
"Right, that does it! I'm off to have a Turing Test and establish my sapience and personhood. You'll rue the day you mocked me, Green Trashcan!"
As Amoeba Person pulsated angrily away to seek scientific and legal aid in his ploy, Green Trashcan grinned to himself and wondered if the others were getting on just as nicely.
SLOTHAM CITY:
Bat Woman and her brigade of trusty Bat Girls screeched to a halt as the Masked Madam took a good look at the Other Spider Man and burst into laughter:
"I can't believe it! Are you supposed to be a former Captain Marvel villain, because frankly, your outfit makes mine look like haute couture."
"I trussed up Billy Batson before he could speak the magic word. How long do you think you can stand against me, you Uncaped Curvaceous Crimefighter?!"
"Oh, is that a loose thread? Can I unpick it, Bat Woman?"
"If you wouldn't mind, Bat Girl 199."
"Awp! Cease and desist! This is a wholesome family-oriented section of the multiverse and if that continues, I...awp!"
"Well? You really need a better supervillain tailor or designer, Spido, dear. That plot device was so tacky. Right, it's off to prison with you."
"You won't take me, Bat Woman! I am the mighty Other Spider Man, not the Marvellous version but with all of his abilities, just from Earth-S in the fifties! What do you have that could possibly affect me?"
"Okay, this is getting protracted and there's a quite obvious answer. If you have arachnoid abilities, then logically you must have vulnerability to acaricidal chemicals, so eat permethrin, sucker!"
And thus fell the Other Spider Man.
EPILOGUE:
On the sinister, dark-clouded Earth-RC, the Dark Lord of the Seths intoned: "Dork Thunder! You have failed in your task to subdue the Freedom Brigade of the United States using particularly hackneyed cast off Golden Age supervillains from other Earths. What do you have to say for yourself?"
"The Freedom Brigade will not escape me, master!!! I shall know how to deal with that problem next time. It's just that those supervillains were going for bargain basement rates and I was on a deadline and so..."
"Enough excuses! My patience grows thin! Earth-55 is a vital commodity in the multiversal Seth Wars I am engaged in and I will not tolerate further failure!" And with that, the Dark Lord of the Seths furiously strode away, leaving Dork Thunder to stew silently behind him at the scolding. Damn these ridiculously convoluted multiversal saga rip-offs anyway!
THE END [2.40 PM, JANUARY 7, 2023]
++
PROLOGUE:
On eldritch, flyblown Earth-RC, dominated by the Dark Lord of the Seths and tyrannised over by sinister mechanised poultry, a squat avian cyborg form clucked menacingly. No, really it did. All right, perhaps you'd have to be another chicken, a certain mad scientist, an invertebrate or grain particle to actually feel menaced, but still, on that existential level, that was intentional. In front of it stood a sinister figure dressed in billowing black robes whose face was invisible. At length, the avian cyborg's indecipherable [due to a Babel Fish translator shortage-Author] crazed monologue ended and the figure turned and doffed its cowl. It had enlarged spectacles, buck teeth, and wore a pocket protractor, pen and tie. He cackled inanely, then raised his hand and pointed. A holographic (upside down) image of Earth-55 appeared before him and then focused on a chartreuse hole in space out of which spilled an escalating number of loosely categorised near-orbital spaceships on a one way trip to an apocalypse!
EARTH-55: FREEDOM BRIGADE HEADQUARTERS:
22,300 miles above the Earth, the Freedom Brigade satellite orbited, its members worried at the sudden influx of ridiculous supervillains onto their world.
Mermaid cleared her throat: "Members of the Freedom Brigade, we face the greatest threat to our existence ever imagined."
Her husband Mr Might raised an eyebrow: "But we've already been cancelled, twice. And whenever our probability gets wiped out, there's an almighty cosmic burp and we're back again."
"It's not another baldist incursion again, is it? Because that trope has been overused already and it's getting seriously old." Lightpower objected.
"Not before it claimed Jabez, my husband, the former Patriot, now forever metamorphosed into the hair hating Captain Alopecia!" Lady Liberty sobbed, providing a lacklustre continuity reference.
"Dana, I take it you're referring to the sudden influx of supervillains that no-one has heard of, or should ever have heard of, given their frankly ridiculous provenance." Bat Woman contributed.
"Thank you, Vicky. Yes, here are just a cross section of them. The Horrible Hand! ... Okay, that's awkward, there should be several others. Ah, here they are. Neutrino Man, Mr Might's foe, powered by extremely small subatomic particles and the subject of the movie Mr Might: The Fight for Poseurs; Yolk Fu, an immense communist Chinese egg which speaks English very badly; Blue Snow Person, a gender neutral villain just for the Mighty HermAphrodite to take on; Amoeba Person, a giant unicellular organism; Other Spider Man, a web slinging criminal who dresses completely in a black outfit and has two horns on his head and has never worked for Marvellous Comics, just to make that clear."
"Wait a minute," said Captain Swift, "all of them sound suspiciously like lame parodies of particularly awful Earth-One, Two or S supervillain concepts. Just because they were too embarrassing for their original Earths, they get dumped here? What a nerve the multiverse has!"
"Be that as it may, Billy, the threat here is real. With all of those low concept baddies here, our ratings on the Heisenberg Alternate Probability Index are plummeting. We can't take much more of this. My friends, the Dork is Rising!!!"
"Grammar, please. Surely you mean the Dorks Are Rising!" Princess Power objected.
"Let's split up, run off in an expository frame and take on the menaces individually!" Mr Might thundered.
"I thought we were supposed to be a team?" Green Trashcan interjected.
"Oh, yes, I forgot. And let's find locations to fight this Legion of Drone in. I'll face Neutrino Man on the Moon!"
"I'll tackle Yolk Fu in Tibet!" Lady Liberty replied.
"I'll deal with Blue Snow Person in Acapulco!" The Mighty HermAphrodite volunteered.
"Why?"
"He/she/they will have a liquidity problem but that's not important right now."
"I'll use my smell o ring to asphyxiate Amoeba Person!"
"And unfortunately, that leaves me to fight Other Spider Man outside a convenient insecticide factory with giant Billfingeresque props!" Bat Woman concluded.
As the others left, The Eye was perplexed: "I'm worried about the others."
"Why, Eye?"
"Because that was a fairly awful object lesson in individualism caused by parodying authors unfamiliar with the concept of superhero teams which invariably mean that the heroes get walloped or tricked by the villains in question? I fear it's a sign of the degradation of probability in our already bargain basement universe. Can we withstand much more of this, or is the Author trying to kill us off yet again?"
TIBET:
As Lady Liberty swooped down to face the enormous egg-shaped mustachioed Yolk Fu, he frowned:
"You American imperialist strangely crowned intruder! Be off! The glorious People's Republic of China With Tibet Included has no need of your intrusion!"
"Why are you speaking perfect English now?"
"English? We're conversing in fluent Cantonese. What do you think this is, a Robert Kanigher script?"
"What are your ominous ovular obsessions for the western world, you egg-shaped evildoer?"
"Please stop with the kitsch dialogue, too. Or I'll ensnare you with my prehensile facial hair!"
"You do realise my tiara is razor-edged, don't you?"
"And you do realise I'm a hard-boiled grim and gritty character these days?"
"Oh, this is a ridiculous situation. I'll just set my tiara on repeated slice and dice and have at you, shall I?"
"Awppp! You blood-stained running hyena of American imperialism, you!"
"I've got better things to do than converse bilingually with a giant talking egg, thank you very much."
ACAPULCO:
The Mighty HermAphrodite touched down in Mexico, determined to best the imperious Blue Snow Person:
"Byrna Brilliantine! Stop that incongruous allotropic snow storm right now."
"Excuse me, HermAphrodite. I'm allowed to do what I like with my fiendish sole gimmick involving hypercompressed water molecules and solid water/snow. So there! Scientific accuracy! And incidentally, it's Byrne. I'm non-binary now."
"All right then, Byrne Brilliantine. You may have gotten away with that on other Earths with frankly weird plot lines back in the Golden Age but this is modernity."
"Yes, which is why I have a more rigorous scientific background for my abilities, gender fluidity and other attributes. Which, frankly, are a lot more convincing than yours are. I mean, come on! Magical ring, fusion of two teenagers named (snicker) Toni Gay and Butch Dykeman, special powers far beyond the scope of any mortal gender fluid person? Puh-lease!"
"Look, who died and appointed you literary critic, Byrne? And this isn't a particularly original 'monstrous threat' plotline. It's obviously filched from Kurt Vonnegut's ice nine apocalyptic plot device in Cat's Cradle. And that didn't end well."
"You're just upset because this is a relatively sophisticated plot device and you were expecting a kitsch character dressed up as a snow person, admit it."
"You don't know what you're playing with, you fool! The Author keeps trying to kill us with any excuse and your abilities provide a perfect pretext for it. Added to which, this is supposed to be a parodiverse and your plot device isn't funny enough."
"Oh, all right. Punch me out. This universe is too embarassing for a character of my calibre anyway."
And so, with the connivance of the arrogant and irritated supervillain who thinks they're too good for this narrative, the Mighty HermAphrodite laid Blue Snow Person flat.
"There had to be an easier way than all that contrived dialogue..." Toni and Butch muttered as they witnessed the denouement.
MOON-55:
Earth-55's Moon has some weird quirks. It's heavily overpopulated with lunar colonists and the remains of others who didn't count on the lack of atmosphere there. One couldn't move for ducking low flying moon shuttles, stepping on early exploratory landing sites, and encountering incongruous aliens in badly designed monster suits. Mr Might did his best to ignore these minor impediments and soared toward the sneering figure of the garishly clad Neutrino Man. Wait a minute, Mr Might thought, Neutrino Man? But neutrinos are amongst the smallest known sub-atomic particles, react minimally with surrounding matter, and are an exceedingly weak subatomic force:
"Face me, Mister Might, and stop consulting Wookiepedia offpage!"
"How can you speak in the vacuum of space?"
"Look, will you engage in combat against me or not?"
"Uh, and why do you smell of strawberry, chocolate and vanilla?"
"Fool! Haven't you heard of the three flavours of neutrino?!"
"Look, who wrote this crap?! Your whole conceptual design is absolutely low note."
"Who cares about scientific accuracy?! I will zap you with my neutrino vision." But, because Neutrino Man's abilities were neutrino based, the neutrinos passed harmlessly through Mr Might.
"No, I won't fight you, Neutrino Man. Primarily because your laser canon has just fallen to pieces and you're so physiologically fragile, you'd shatter into tiny pieces."
And with that resolved, Mr Might turned and soared back toward Earth, musing on the miniscule plot development and poor quality character design as Neutrino Man took his shirt off and scowled after him.
EARTH ORBIT:
"Amoeba Person! Surrender at once!"
"You don't frighten me, Trashcan. For one thing, as a giant micro-organism I don't have any nostrils, so I'm not vulnerable to your cheap derivative Green Lanternesque smell o ring."
"That's why I picked up these handy dandy aerosols. Let me recite their names to you- metronidzole, secnidazole, tinidazole, paromomycin, iodoquinol, chloroquine and nitozoxanide."
"You fiend! Those are amebacides!"
"Incidentally, I've made sure I've been vaccinated against amebiasis, balantidium coli, blastocystis, dientamoeba fragilis, giardiasis and trypanosomias."
"How dare you! What sort of evil megaprotozoa do you think I am! I'm not the sort of giant micro-organism that hangs around in such cheap, unsanitary places. Why, I've got a good mind to perambulate off on a huff and sue you for defamation!"
"Except you have to be a person to sue for defamation and you're just an enormous germ."
"Right, that does it! I'm off to have a Turing Test and establish my sapience and personhood. You'll rue the day you mocked me, Green Trashcan!"
As Amoeba Person pulsated angrily away to seek scientific and legal aid in his ploy, Green Trashcan grinned to himself and wondered if the others were getting on just as nicely.
SLOTHAM CITY:
Bat Woman and her brigade of trusty Bat Girls screeched to a halt as the Masked Madam took a good look at the Other Spider Man and burst into laughter:
"I can't believe it! Are you supposed to be a former Captain Marvel villain, because frankly, your outfit makes mine look like haute couture."
"I trussed up Billy Batson before he could speak the magic word. How long do you think you can stand against me, you Uncaped Curvaceous Crimefighter?!"
"Oh, is that a loose thread? Can I unpick it, Bat Woman?"
"If you wouldn't mind, Bat Girl 199."
"Awp! Cease and desist! This is a wholesome family-oriented section of the multiverse and if that continues, I...awp!"
"Well? You really need a better supervillain tailor or designer, Spido, dear. That plot device was so tacky. Right, it's off to prison with you."
"You won't take me, Bat Woman! I am the mighty Other Spider Man, not the Marvellous version but with all of his abilities, just from Earth-S in the fifties! What do you have that could possibly affect me?"
"Okay, this is getting protracted and there's a quite obvious answer. If you have arachnoid abilities, then logically you must have vulnerability to acaricidal chemicals, so eat permethrin, sucker!"
And thus fell the Other Spider Man.
EPILOGUE:
On the sinister, dark-clouded Earth-RC, the Dark Lord of the Seths intoned: "Dork Thunder! You have failed in your task to subdue the Freedom Brigade of the United States using particularly hackneyed cast off Golden Age supervillains from other Earths. What do you have to say for yourself?"
"The Freedom Brigade will not escape me, master!!! I shall know how to deal with that problem next time. It's just that those supervillains were going for bargain basement rates and I was on a deadline and so..."
"Enough excuses! My patience grows thin! Earth-55 is a vital commodity in the multiversal Seth Wars I am engaged in and I will not tolerate further failure!" And with that, the Dark Lord of the Seths furiously strode away, leaving Dork Thunder to stew silently behind him at the scolding. Damn these ridiculously convoluted multiversal saga rip-offs anyway!
THE END [2.40 PM, JANUARY 7, 2023]