Post by redsycorax on Oct 17, 2018 2:04:32 GMT
"You! You have to die! You're the symbol of everything I became, you scum!!! I was pure, innocent and virtuous! I didn't deserve to wake up dressed as a transvestite, being strangely aroused by a dominatrix. You didn't have to take those photographs!! I didn't have to know I was really the mutated, cloned progeny of an illicit liaison between an elite Soviet dwarf army regiment and renegade Valkyries. There was nothing wrong with me! I didn't need those multiple personalities, the insatiable masochism, or the revelation about my delusional fake existence!"
"Who on Earth was that?" Lady Liberty asked.
"I'm afraid that was Raddled Rabbit, formerly Hoopy the Marvellous Bunny. A "grim and gritty" narratophage infected him and that is the sad result. They won't have him on Earth-26 because he's got space myxamitosis, hence the unsightly lumps over him." Mr Might sighed sadly.
"We need to do something about him. That sort of desperation amongst metabeings never ends well. He might turn evil or corrupted, and inadvertantly tap into a cosmic power source, which always seem to happen on the other alternate Earths. Either that or he'll run amok. Incidentally, what happened to Molly, his sidekick, who always dressed as a female baby for some reason?"
"She was taken away by the Ph'hud, an alien hunter species from Earth-HB's universe. You... don't want to know what happened next, but it involved a meat pie."
"Oh, no. How awful. No wonder Raddled Rabbit's so warped and twisted. That's a dark story arc, even by 'grim and gritty' standards. One problem, though... wasn't she his sole supporting cast?"
"Yes, and with her out of the way, his narrative existence could be hopelessly corrupted."
Any further angsty observations about the depressing downward spiral of Raddled Rabbit's pointless existential situation were put to one side when Captain Swift contacted them from the Off-Centre City Police Department: "There's a problem ahead, folks. We seem to be facing an interuniversal insertion event, which means we're about to be pulled into some other Earth's bewildering interneccine quarrels with only tangential significance to us."
'Uh, Billy? You're a police scientist. How come you're so conversant in astrophysics?"
"Well, physics does form one aspect of my training curriculum, but enough pedantic continuity. I'll be there soon. Green Trashcan, can you plan a convenient awful smell to repell our boarders?"
"As soon as I see whether they actually have olfactory senses, my smelloring will select something they consider highly offensive to their nostrils or equivalent smell sensor organ."
'Isn't Mel an asset to the Freedom Brigade, Cliff?"
"Yes, Dana, and it's lucky the Guides of the Cosmos on Ooo-Err gave all the Green Trashcan Corps assisted antigravity, space survival and defensive force screen capabilities, otherwise we'd have to waste still more time on pointless expository dialogue elsewhere in this context."
"Right, now that that's over with, Billy, do we have any idea who these interlopers are?"
"Uh oh. There are five of them."
"Not...!!!"
"Yes, Dana. It's our offspring, back home for a visit and they're going to nag us incessantly. Bat Woman, Lightswitch and Green Trashcan don't know how lucky they are not to have truculent, resentful metahuman adult children."
And so, Mr Might, Mermaid, Captain Swift, Lady Liberty, Bowman and Princess Power all assembled on the site of their initial mountain headquarters, awaiting the arrival of the former Inferior Five, now known as the Superior Five. Their progeny sported new uniforms and new heroic titles, which suggested that someone had had a public relations makeover. Lagomorph (formerly Dumb Bunny) started the harangue:
"Hello, Freedom Brigade. Wow, you finally have new recruits."
"Don't look at me, kids. I quit this outfit when Green Canary inadvertantly made an anti-editorial comment and got crushed by a falling piano."
"That's all very well, pops, but the fact still remains that you Freedom Brigaders wrecked our lives here. You took over metahuman heroics on Earths 12 and 55 and forced us off."
"Yes, and look at you now, Myron! No more self-defeating heroic designations and you tackle major magnitude events on Earth 9415." Lady Liberty exclaimed.
"And it's not our fault that audience perceptions of humour have shifted away from situation comedy to sophisticated existential fare. I mean, Athina, given the significance of modern feminism as a social movement, how long could you have continued to maintain the title 'Dumb Bunny?' Lagomorph is far more dignified." Princess Power exclaimed.
"That's not the point, mother. We could have adapted to those new realities on our Earth of origin. Earth-55 is supposed to be the Superior Five's core Earth. Instead of which, we have the Freedom Brigade, yet another cheap JLA ripoff, as if the multiverse doesn't have enough of those."
"Athina!"
"Yeah, now we know how the Teen Titans and the offspring of Silver Age heroes feel, always being denied the opportunity to step up and succeed them after some cheap and unconvincing resurrection event occurs. At least the Justice Society has the decency to step to one side when it comes to their children. But the Freedom Brigade? I mean, you've been around for the last fifty years. How much longer can these timeline re-edits and rejuvenation serums last?" Cognisant (aka Merryman) complained.
"That's not true! We are not a carbon copy Justice League! Half of our membership is male, we have two gay men onboard, and Black Vulcan is an African-American AI."
[Yeah, Dana, but both your teams is white. An' we all remember what happened to Samurai, Apache Chief and El Dorado, don't we?]
"See?" Cognisant said in response to Black Vulcan's intervention.
"At least we had Native American, Central American and Japanese character, Myron. Where are yours? Oh, that's right. You don't have any." Lady Liberty said triumphantly.
"Yeah, but yours were killed off after only three episodes."
"Don't have any, and never have. In this day and age?" Captain Swift persisted.
[Wonderful. Tokenism versis complete invisibility. What an inspirin' choice!] Black Vulcan sagely remarked.
"I hate to point this out, but there's a luridly dressed transvestite hooker rabbit running toward us." Lightswitch interjected from the FBUS satellite.
"Ah. Raddled Rabbit. I wondered where he'd gotten to. I'm not sure I like that black outfit of his, the white eyes and the copious amounts of energy he's emitting." Mr Might said.
"Will you, Superior Five, join us in expunging this threat?" Princess Power asked.
"No, Dad. we just turned up to harangue you. Unless you agree to top billing, the Superior Five are boycotting the Freedom Brigade series and persuading other universes to do so."
For indeed, Raddled Rabbit had stumbled into the Pool of Acheronea, the mystic river in which ran the elixir of the Olympian Gods, ambrosia. Thus empowered, but still in lumps and disfigured from the space myxamitosis, he rose from the ground to combat the oncoming Freedom Brigade, somewhat distracted by the nag session that their kvetching offspring had just exposed them to. Moreover, he had an unexpected visitor within his cerebellum: Molly?
-No, Hoopy, call me Lapina Le Fake, for such I am. I have secretly been a member of a troupe of devil-worshipping eldritch rabbit witches all the time back on Earth-R before we were inconveniently snuffed out by that damned Crisis.
-Do you want me to maim, slash and kill the Freedom Brigade?
-Satan will take great delight in their mangled forms, Hoopy. And now you have the power to do it!
Resultantly, there was a dreadful parody of a certain animated rabbit movie theme based on a Richard Adams novel:
Is it a sordid nightmare
Floating out like a corpse on the out tide
Following a trail of blood downhill?
Or is it insanity?
There's poison gas along the horizon,
A radioactive afterglow in the sky.
And nobody seems to know .
Why I want to scream!
Oh, is it a nightmare?
Flame vision,
Burning intensely.
Flame vision,
How can you incinerate that much?
How can the power that blazed so mightly
Suddenly turn even hotter ?
Flame vision?
Is it a menacing spectral hand
Reaching out from the dark,
Waiting to cause death and carnage obscene?
Or is it a nightmare?
Radioactive fire and heat has destroyed all the trees,
A deafening sound in the air.
And nobody even knows why you're insane.
And how did you start,
Ohhhh, becoming this dark?
Flame vision,
Burning like lasers.
Flame vision,
How can it maim and kill?
How can the light that incinerated so many
Suddenly pulsate even more brightly?
Flame vision!
Flame vision
Burning countless bodies
Flame vision,
How can this death toll be sustained?
How can the light that incinerated vast numbers
Suddenly pulsate even more brightly?
Flame vision
"Oh great, an Earth-3 version of Watership Down with violent lyrics." Captain Swift remarked as they raced to intercept the Bunny of Belligerence.
"Does anyone else think it's weird that we're encountering a "grim and gritty" version of a Golden Age cute children's rabbit character?" Lightswitch asked, riding his Lightcycle.
"Okay, I've dialed my smelloring up to internal MacDonalds hamburger production process on full. Let's see how long he lasts against that." Green Trashcan said, as his weapon smogged forth, chanelling a directed odour stream at the oncoming larcenous lagomorph.
"Take that, you renegade rabbit wretch!!!" Mr Might said, as he landed a powerhouse punch on the insane Hoopy's face.
"Not so fast, Mr Might! Do you see what I have here in my hand? Your one weakness, foccacia bread!"
-Hoopy, my bunny honey. Turn your flame vision on full strength and utterly destroy him!
-I can't, Lapina. He's invulnerable to anything about twenty five recorded 'one weaknesses.'
Mermaid overheard the telepathic conversation: "In addition to becoming insanely evil with his power overload and sense of grievance, Hoopy is demonically possessed by a satanistic witch. Oh. It's his former sweetheart, Molly Wiggletail! She was a devil worshipper all along!"
"Well, that's convenient. If we have any exorcism equipment around, we can deal with them that way." Princess Power noted.
"Awommm?" queried Liberty Cat, Lady Liberty's animal sidekick.
"Of course! Libby here is a registered Episcocat priest on Earth-26! Quickly, darling, use the time-honoured mystic rites that you're ordained to handle!" From nowhere, a bell, book and candle materialised and Libby intoned a Cat-echism in a series of resonant miaous. Resultantly, Hoopy screamed, burst into unholy blue and green flame and plummeted down to earth like a fiery fallen angel, exploding into bloody bunny bits when he impacted on the ground.
"There had to be a better way." Bat Woman said as they gazed on the ravaged rabbit's remains.
"Sometimes, even the best of us falls afoul of the straight and narrow. Apart from Lightswitch and Captain Swift, in their case it's the gay and narrow. I think I'd prefer to remember Hoopy the Marvellous Bunny the way he was before he was corrupted, demonically possessed and driven insane by a disfiguring rabbit disease."
And surely, that's not too much to ask? Actually, yes, it probably is.
THE END
"Who on Earth was that?" Lady Liberty asked.
"I'm afraid that was Raddled Rabbit, formerly Hoopy the Marvellous Bunny. A "grim and gritty" narratophage infected him and that is the sad result. They won't have him on Earth-26 because he's got space myxamitosis, hence the unsightly lumps over him." Mr Might sighed sadly.
"We need to do something about him. That sort of desperation amongst metabeings never ends well. He might turn evil or corrupted, and inadvertantly tap into a cosmic power source, which always seem to happen on the other alternate Earths. Either that or he'll run amok. Incidentally, what happened to Molly, his sidekick, who always dressed as a female baby for some reason?"
"She was taken away by the Ph'hud, an alien hunter species from Earth-HB's universe. You... don't want to know what happened next, but it involved a meat pie."
"Oh, no. How awful. No wonder Raddled Rabbit's so warped and twisted. That's a dark story arc, even by 'grim and gritty' standards. One problem, though... wasn't she his sole supporting cast?"
"Yes, and with her out of the way, his narrative existence could be hopelessly corrupted."
Any further angsty observations about the depressing downward spiral of Raddled Rabbit's pointless existential situation were put to one side when Captain Swift contacted them from the Off-Centre City Police Department: "There's a problem ahead, folks. We seem to be facing an interuniversal insertion event, which means we're about to be pulled into some other Earth's bewildering interneccine quarrels with only tangential significance to us."
'Uh, Billy? You're a police scientist. How come you're so conversant in astrophysics?"
"Well, physics does form one aspect of my training curriculum, but enough pedantic continuity. I'll be there soon. Green Trashcan, can you plan a convenient awful smell to repell our boarders?"
"As soon as I see whether they actually have olfactory senses, my smelloring will select something they consider highly offensive to their nostrils or equivalent smell sensor organ."
'Isn't Mel an asset to the Freedom Brigade, Cliff?"
"Yes, Dana, and it's lucky the Guides of the Cosmos on Ooo-Err gave all the Green Trashcan Corps assisted antigravity, space survival and defensive force screen capabilities, otherwise we'd have to waste still more time on pointless expository dialogue elsewhere in this context."
"Right, now that that's over with, Billy, do we have any idea who these interlopers are?"
"Uh oh. There are five of them."
"Not...!!!"
"Yes, Dana. It's our offspring, back home for a visit and they're going to nag us incessantly. Bat Woman, Lightswitch and Green Trashcan don't know how lucky they are not to have truculent, resentful metahuman adult children."
And so, Mr Might, Mermaid, Captain Swift, Lady Liberty, Bowman and Princess Power all assembled on the site of their initial mountain headquarters, awaiting the arrival of the former Inferior Five, now known as the Superior Five. Their progeny sported new uniforms and new heroic titles, which suggested that someone had had a public relations makeover. Lagomorph (formerly Dumb Bunny) started the harangue:
"Hello, Freedom Brigade. Wow, you finally have new recruits."
"Don't look at me, kids. I quit this outfit when Green Canary inadvertantly made an anti-editorial comment and got crushed by a falling piano."
"That's all very well, pops, but the fact still remains that you Freedom Brigaders wrecked our lives here. You took over metahuman heroics on Earths 12 and 55 and forced us off."
"Yes, and look at you now, Myron! No more self-defeating heroic designations and you tackle major magnitude events on Earth 9415." Lady Liberty exclaimed.
"And it's not our fault that audience perceptions of humour have shifted away from situation comedy to sophisticated existential fare. I mean, Athina, given the significance of modern feminism as a social movement, how long could you have continued to maintain the title 'Dumb Bunny?' Lagomorph is far more dignified." Princess Power exclaimed.
"That's not the point, mother. We could have adapted to those new realities on our Earth of origin. Earth-55 is supposed to be the Superior Five's core Earth. Instead of which, we have the Freedom Brigade, yet another cheap JLA ripoff, as if the multiverse doesn't have enough of those."
"Athina!"
"Yeah, now we know how the Teen Titans and the offspring of Silver Age heroes feel, always being denied the opportunity to step up and succeed them after some cheap and unconvincing resurrection event occurs. At least the Justice Society has the decency to step to one side when it comes to their children. But the Freedom Brigade? I mean, you've been around for the last fifty years. How much longer can these timeline re-edits and rejuvenation serums last?" Cognisant (aka Merryman) complained.
"That's not true! We are not a carbon copy Justice League! Half of our membership is male, we have two gay men onboard, and Black Vulcan is an African-American AI."
[Yeah, Dana, but both your teams is white. An' we all remember what happened to Samurai, Apache Chief and El Dorado, don't we?]
"See?" Cognisant said in response to Black Vulcan's intervention.
"At least we had Native American, Central American and Japanese character, Myron. Where are yours? Oh, that's right. You don't have any." Lady Liberty said triumphantly.
"Yeah, but yours were killed off after only three episodes."
"Don't have any, and never have. In this day and age?" Captain Swift persisted.
[Wonderful. Tokenism versis complete invisibility. What an inspirin' choice!] Black Vulcan sagely remarked.
"I hate to point this out, but there's a luridly dressed transvestite hooker rabbit running toward us." Lightswitch interjected from the FBUS satellite.
"Ah. Raddled Rabbit. I wondered where he'd gotten to. I'm not sure I like that black outfit of his, the white eyes and the copious amounts of energy he's emitting." Mr Might said.
"Will you, Superior Five, join us in expunging this threat?" Princess Power asked.
"No, Dad. we just turned up to harangue you. Unless you agree to top billing, the Superior Five are boycotting the Freedom Brigade series and persuading other universes to do so."
For indeed, Raddled Rabbit had stumbled into the Pool of Acheronea, the mystic river in which ran the elixir of the Olympian Gods, ambrosia. Thus empowered, but still in lumps and disfigured from the space myxamitosis, he rose from the ground to combat the oncoming Freedom Brigade, somewhat distracted by the nag session that their kvetching offspring had just exposed them to. Moreover, he had an unexpected visitor within his cerebellum: Molly?
-No, Hoopy, call me Lapina Le Fake, for such I am. I have secretly been a member of a troupe of devil-worshipping eldritch rabbit witches all the time back on Earth-R before we were inconveniently snuffed out by that damned Crisis.
-Do you want me to maim, slash and kill the Freedom Brigade?
-Satan will take great delight in their mangled forms, Hoopy. And now you have the power to do it!
Resultantly, there was a dreadful parody of a certain animated rabbit movie theme based on a Richard Adams novel:
Is it a sordid nightmare
Floating out like a corpse on the out tide
Following a trail of blood downhill?
Or is it insanity?
There's poison gas along the horizon,
A radioactive afterglow in the sky.
And nobody seems to know .
Why I want to scream!
Oh, is it a nightmare?
Flame vision,
Burning intensely.
Flame vision,
How can you incinerate that much?
How can the power that blazed so mightly
Suddenly turn even hotter ?
Flame vision?
Is it a menacing spectral hand
Reaching out from the dark,
Waiting to cause death and carnage obscene?
Or is it a nightmare?
Radioactive fire and heat has destroyed all the trees,
A deafening sound in the air.
And nobody even knows why you're insane.
And how did you start,
Ohhhh, becoming this dark?
Flame vision,
Burning like lasers.
Flame vision,
How can it maim and kill?
How can the light that incinerated so many
Suddenly pulsate even more brightly?
Flame vision!
Flame vision
Burning countless bodies
Flame vision,
How can this death toll be sustained?
How can the light that incinerated vast numbers
Suddenly pulsate even more brightly?
Flame vision
"Oh great, an Earth-3 version of Watership Down with violent lyrics." Captain Swift remarked as they raced to intercept the Bunny of Belligerence.
"Does anyone else think it's weird that we're encountering a "grim and gritty" version of a Golden Age cute children's rabbit character?" Lightswitch asked, riding his Lightcycle.
"Okay, I've dialed my smelloring up to internal MacDonalds hamburger production process on full. Let's see how long he lasts against that." Green Trashcan said, as his weapon smogged forth, chanelling a directed odour stream at the oncoming larcenous lagomorph.
"Take that, you renegade rabbit wretch!!!" Mr Might said, as he landed a powerhouse punch on the insane Hoopy's face.
"Not so fast, Mr Might! Do you see what I have here in my hand? Your one weakness, foccacia bread!"
-Hoopy, my bunny honey. Turn your flame vision on full strength and utterly destroy him!
-I can't, Lapina. He's invulnerable to anything about twenty five recorded 'one weaknesses.'
Mermaid overheard the telepathic conversation: "In addition to becoming insanely evil with his power overload and sense of grievance, Hoopy is demonically possessed by a satanistic witch. Oh. It's his former sweetheart, Molly Wiggletail! She was a devil worshipper all along!"
"Well, that's convenient. If we have any exorcism equipment around, we can deal with them that way." Princess Power noted.
"Awommm?" queried Liberty Cat, Lady Liberty's animal sidekick.
"Of course! Libby here is a registered Episcocat priest on Earth-26! Quickly, darling, use the time-honoured mystic rites that you're ordained to handle!" From nowhere, a bell, book and candle materialised and Libby intoned a Cat-echism in a series of resonant miaous. Resultantly, Hoopy screamed, burst into unholy blue and green flame and plummeted down to earth like a fiery fallen angel, exploding into bloody bunny bits when he impacted on the ground.
"There had to be a better way." Bat Woman said as they gazed on the ravaged rabbit's remains.
"Sometimes, even the best of us falls afoul of the straight and narrow. Apart from Lightswitch and Captain Swift, in their case it's the gay and narrow. I think I'd prefer to remember Hoopy the Marvellous Bunny the way he was before he was corrupted, demonically possessed and driven insane by a disfiguring rabbit disease."
And surely, that's not too much to ask? Actually, yes, it probably is.
THE END