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Post by lawrenceliberty on Sept 6, 2020 16:55:44 GMT
Nice chapter! I hope the Spider survives this story. He could team up with some other old villains- imagine if a retirement home contained two or three former villains. They talk over old times and decide to pool their talents for one more crime,
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Post by johnreiter902 on Sept 7, 2020 2:08:04 GMT
This is really holding my interest. I love it.
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Post by dans on Sept 7, 2020 15:11:45 GMT
Carol (Sunbeam) Clews and Dan Dare / New Life, Old Foe
Carol Cuts Loose!
Carol felt as if she were in a popcorn popper as the stream of machine gun bullets battered her yellow aura. During some cautions live fire testing with Dan, her aura had effortlessly turned his pistol bullets, but this battering was different. Physically, her whole body stung as if she had just been hit by a dozen paintballs, and worse, she could feel the impacts in her mind, throbbing painfully like her pulse when she'd just awakened with a particularly vicious hangover. ('Not that I have hangovers very often!' she wants us readers to know...)
'Maybe Jim was right!' flashed through her mind. A month ago, when she'd stopped in Fawcett City to visit her friends the Barrs on her way back from battling the Black Pharoah in Egypt, Jim Barr had pondered the source of her powers. "I wonder if you draw your powers from the Sun?" he'd muttered, but before they could follow up, the phone rang and he'd gotten lost in the details of a new police investigation. They'd never got around to finishing the discussion.
'I've never used my powers at night before! I wish one of us really DID call the police in case they let me down! I had better take out as many of these guys as I can before they fail!'
Yellow tendrils reached out from Carol's aura and grew into giant hands, which grabbed Bushrat and Dapper, and drew them together, then sprouted smaller hands which grabbed their heads and slammed them together, hard. Carol winced at the loud 'Crack', then dismissed the tendrils with a sigh of relief, and was pleased when the two bad guys collapsed bonelessly to the floor. 'I hope you guys aren't too badly hurt, but hey - you DID kidnap me!'
She saw movement from the corner of her eye, and turned to see the Spider flying at Dan, a flash of yellow washing over her partner, and a second later, three shots from Dan's pistol impacted her chest.
'He's shooting to kill! And it HURT!' she thought in horror. 'I can't believe that cocky jerk let the Spider's hypnotic eye catch him! The damn fool probably thought that just because he was immune the last time we fought the Spider, he'd still be immune!'
Having to fight Dan made her troubles even worse, especially if her powers were fading. She noted Undertow descending from the ceiling on his nylon line, much more slowly than the Spider had. When he landed, a yellow scissors snipped his line high up, and whirled it around him in a cocoon, then sucker punched him in the side of the head, then dropped his body into the pile with the Rat and Dapper. A yellow sphere formed around the three of them and pushed out through the front door of the gym.
'You guys stay there!' Carol commanded them, even though she was sure they couldn't hear her. 'I promise I'll get back to you later - if I live!' She turned her attention back to Dan, now racing towards her with murder on his face, and the Spider Sinister, who was crouching in preparation for another gigantic leap, this one in her direction.
Ralphie's recent shocks - the Cap'n breaking free of the Spider's control, having the machine gun blasted from his hands by a single shot from Dan's pistol, and seeing his men casually disposed of by Sunbeam's gleaming yellow energy constructs, finally broke him free of the Spider's hypnosis. He instantly decided he wanted to be anywhere but here! He whirled, seeking desperately for a way to escape; when he saw the locker room door Dan had left open, he bolted, moving faster than he'd ever run in his life. He was out of the building within seconds, and he kept on running. Maybe he'll show up in some future story, but he just ran right out of this one!
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Post by DocQuantum on Sept 7, 2020 20:26:05 GMT
I like that you're putting some thought into how Sunbeam's powers work. That bit about the bullets bouncing off the aura force-field but feeling every one of them is pretty cool.
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Post by dans on Sept 8, 2020 2:01:27 GMT
I always wondered why every force field also seemed to come with built-in shock absorbers... this might be a skill Carol has to learn yet!
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Post by dans on Sept 12, 2020 14:16:50 GMT
Carol (Sunbeam) Clews and Dan Dare / New Life, Old Foe
Telegram for Dan and Carol
'I don't want to fight Dan!' Carol was thinking, fast. 'He's the strongest man I've ever met, outside of some super heroes, and in almost every case we've ever had, I've seen him hold his own against four or five guys. And I've NEVER seen him miss with his pistol!'
The series of tricks she'd pulled on the kidnappers and against the Spider tonight flashed through her head, and a glowing yellow stick suddenly appeared between Dan's ankles, and he tripped and fell forward and crashed to the gym floor, still sliding headlong in her direction. A thin band of solid light energy snared his ankles together, then two slightly nebulous yellow hands pulled his arms behind his back and another band fastened his wrists together. A yellow bubble, much more pale and more white than the bands or Carol's own aura, formed around his head. She looked around for the Spider, and felt a flash of fear when she couldn't spot him - she'd expected that he would be flying through the air toward her, but he must have jumped in a different direction.
Suddenly a big glob of sticky paste splatted against her aura, and her vision was totally blocked. Her scream of surprise was muffled by the glob, as she leaped straight up and continued to rise for 20 feet. She hung there for a few seconds as she tried frantically to dislodge the goop. It seemed to her that as long as her aura was solid enough to protect her, the goop would probably stick to it, but she thought if she released the aura, the glob might collapse on her head - which would be DISGUSTING! But she couldn't just hang here blind, either.
A second aura appeared, a spherical shell about 8 feet in diameter enclosing the glowing yellow figure of Sunbeam. And just in time; just as it appeared, something big smacked into it. The sphere shattered, and an instant later the was a 'thump' and some harsh, amplified swearing from the ground below, while the aura closely enclosing Carol morphed in shape - it peeled upward and wrapped around the glob and for just an instant, Sunbeam was exposed as a blonde woman in a yellow miniskirt, wearing a cape and a yellow domino mask. An aura similar to the original snapped back into place, but it was less bright - and Carol realized she was straining to stay aloft. Her power was weakening; she thought she might be exhausted in only a few minutes!
A yellow tendril carried the glob of goop to the scrabbling figure on the floor and smooshed it over the Spider's hood. Carol laughed! "I believe this belongs to YOU!"
The top pair of extra arms reached up and tore off the spider head helmet, exposing the head of a bald older man. The other pair of extra limbs twitched, instantly launching the giant spider with the human head into the air at high speed. Carol strained to rise another 10 feet and the spider passed under her, touched the wall, and launched himself again, faster than she could react. Two of the extra arms wrapped around her waist from behind, the other two around her neck.
"Damn you, you yellow monster, my revenge had nothing to do with you. But you will pay for interfering," he snarled . His voice was still harsh, but it sounded more like a whine than a threat without the amplifier in his helmet. He violently twisted her head sideways, trying to break her neck; her aura resisted but it hurt! She ordered the aura to expand it, trying to weaken his grip, pitting her will and her new power against his mechanical strength. Her mental straining didn't seem to be having any effect; her middle was starting to hurt as he gradually began to crush her.
He began pounding on the aura around her head with his human arms. Even with her shield weakening, this didn't hurt her, but it was distracting her concentration. "Reverse!" she shouted to help her concentration, and commanded her power to drive her backward as fast and hard as she could. She was less than 20' from the wall, so she couldn't accelerate too much, but in an instant the Spider was driven into the wall behind them with a dull crunching noise, his own body and costume greatly cushioning her impact. His grip weakened, and her field expanded and he slipped loose, and fell, close to the wall. A sticky web line shot from his abdomen to the wall and, arrested his fall about 6' off the floor, hanging head down.
By now Carol had drifted to the floor as well, her flying power seemingly almost exhausted. The Spider Sinister was still somewhat disoriented, so she put all her remaining strength into a punch to the side of his jaw. He collapsed into a heap on the floor, and Carol was barely able to maintain her balance and remain standing rather than collapsing into a heap of her own. She turned to her partner and was horrified to see that her restraints had vanished and he was starting to push up to his hands and knees. Moving as quickly as possible, she picked up his pistol from where he'd dropped it when she'd restrained him, then backed away to where she could cover both Dan and the Spider.
"I sure hope you're back to being yourself, Hankshaw," she grimly addressed her partner. "I'd hate to have to wing you with your own gun. I'm so tired, I might end up hitting something vital!"
"Can't... have that... can we... doll?" he replied very slowly, his voice weak and sounding pained. Then, more strongly, "Opps, sorry, I mean 'partner'! Don't shoot, OK?" She didn't, and he weakly pushed himself into a seated position, his legs splayed in front of him in her direction, holding his hands out where she could see them. "Aren't the cops here yet?"
The main door to the gym burst open, and a half dozen police, with pistols drawn, swarmed through, shouting warnings to everyone inside to drop their guns and put their hands on their heads. It took a while to get things sorted out, but an hour later, Dan and Carol finally had a chance to talk again.
"Just like old times, eh, partner?" he asked her with a chuckle. "You weren't worried, were you? You know I always bring the law in at the end of a case!" (He almost always did, see the Dare/Clews stories in Whiz comics...) "They were a little late this time because they don't know me well, yet... but they will!"
"Not quite like old times, Hankshaw, so far," she disagreed with a chuckle of her own. "So far, no mysterious telegram to you in care of the Chief of Police, ordering us to our next job." She was about to say more when another cop raced in to the old gym, shouting.
"Are Dan Dare and Carol Clews still here? I've got an urgent telegram for Dan Dare and Carol Clews!"
"Crap!" Carol used worse language than that, salty language she'd learned from their South Seas adventurer friend Lance O'Casey. "Here we go again!"
Dan nodded in agreement. "Isn't it nice that things are getting back to normal?"
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Post by DocQuantum on Sept 18, 2020 16:30:05 GMT
Good chapter. I like the camaraderie between these two.
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Post by lawrenceliberty on Sept 18, 2020 22:48:05 GMT
I agree that their banter makes them special. I enjoyed your exploration of their world in more depth and with more thought than I'd put into them. Good job mentioning other stories too.
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Post by dans on Sept 19, 2020 1:56:17 GMT
Thanks for the character setup, Lib - I enjoy using these two. And thanks to everyone from reading and posting feedback!
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Post by arcademan on Oct 12, 2020 2:42:29 GMT
Enjoying the story quite a bit. Keep up the excellent work, Dans
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Post by dans on Oct 12, 2020 17:17:14 GMT
Thank you. Glad you liked it. I enjoy working with Carol and Dan.
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