Chapter Text
I finished typing up the last character sheet, hit “print”, and leaned back in my chair in satisfaction. This was going to be worth it. It had taken ages to stat up the characters, write out their back stories, and sketch out the events and encounters of the campaign… and setting it all in a completely different franchise to boot? Oh but it was going to be totally worth it. This was going to be a totally epic Villains and Vigilantes campaign.
Oh, I absolutely agree.
I nearly flipped over backwards in my chair. The high, reedy voice had sounded like it was right next to my ear. “Who’s there?” I yelled, trying to spin around. The chair didn’t cooperate.
A fan! This time the voice was in my other ear. I looked around frantically, my hand edging toward the crowbar I kept next to my computer desk. The voice sounded way too... cheery for my comfort. No need to be concerned, I’m not going to do you any harm. Not myself anyway.
Ah. That was comforting. I took a practice swing through the empty air around me with my chunk of good ol’ Detroit steel.
...Strike one. Did I mention the voice sounded kind of smarmy?
Oh enough of that, let’s sit down someplace more comfortable and hash this out.
And boom, I wasn’t in my apartment any more. I… wasn’t anywhere. I was floating in a featureless gray void. I couldn’t see anything. I couldn’t feel anything. I struggled; I couldn’t MOVE anything! Oh crap. A single phrase popped into my head.
R.O.B. I was in the clutches of an actual R.O.B. Oh crap oh crap oh crap. I would have started hyperventilating, but I didn’t seem to have lungs anymore.
Ding ding ding! You guessed the secret word. Sorry, no duck this time. I heard the sound of papers being ruffled through. Hmm. Oh my, yes. This IS creative. A fascinating premise, fascinating. A new Sinister Six-- except none of the new members are actually part of Spider-Man’s rogue’s gallery? Oh, I see; they’re all mistaken for those villains because of their powers… and the goal is to get them to all find each other and band up together to defend themselves.
Though some of the backstories are a bit contrived… convoluted, even... still. Intriguing! Unseen hands clapped. Oh, this looks like it will be great fun!
Of course this is no fun without players. Six sheets of paper fluttered out of nowhere and floated before me. Now choose.
My nonexistent heart froze in my nonexistent throat. I was right. Random Omnipotent Being. A bored one. He wanted to play a game, and I was one of the gamepieces. I would pick one of the six characters I’d written up, he’d transform me, dump me in the Marvel Universe and then sit back with a bucket of cosmic popcorn and watch while I fought for my life. Oh man, I’d better pick good.
...I couldn’t pick! I was frozen in terror.
My “host” apparently mistook my panic for something else. Oh of course, how silly of me. Fingers snapped and I could feel my body again, though I still couldn’t move. More importantly I could speak. I immediately began babbling.
“How can I possibly choose?” I said. “It’s a campaign for six people there’s no way I can and besides I’m always the game master and I never--”
Mmmmm, can’t decide, eh? They are all such fun choices. And you’re right, it DOES need more players-- AHA! I know. The voice chuckled. I’ll choose for you. And I know just how to get enough players, too.
“Who?”
That’s the fun part, the R.O.B. cackled. One of the things you have to do to win is-- figure out who is who. Toodles!
“What does that mean?” I got no answer. I felt myself starting to slide, then to fall. The featureless gray turned to a tunnel, I felt myself falling faster and faster--
I landed. I would say I landed hard but to be fair the trash bags cushioned my fall. I made one almighty crash, though. I lay there on my back, spreadeagled, in my new Hefty-bag bed and stared up at the sky, stunned.
After a few minutes I managed to catch my breath. I realized two things: I was staring up at the night sky from an alleyway someplace; two, my landing pad really reeked. I pushed myself to my feet, coughing-- my back and torso felt oddly stiff. Of course I’d just fallen out of a pocket dimension and landed in a back alley from a great height but...
And suddenly my field of vision shattered. Everything was up/down/backward/sideways, moving around all at once. I staggered, reached out my arms, all of them, to steady myself. I recounted. I was steadying myself with far more arms than I’d started out with…
Realization wasn’t dawning yet but light was on the horizon. With a mental effort of will I forced four of the five competing views to the corners of my field of vision. It was surprisingly easy once I had the knack of it; the four extra fields of view seemed to fade into my peripheral. I internally counted my appendages. Two arms, widespread as I tried to steady myself. Two legs, likewise. A tentacle clinging to a fire escape, two more braced against the pavement--
Doc Ock. The R.O.B. had turned me into Doctor Octopus.
I resisted the urge to hyperventilate and stood up. I curled the robotic tentacles around me-- again, it was incredibly easy. The robot “arms”, they felt like I’d been born with them. They had a sense of touch, proprioception, the whole bit. The look was similar to the ones from the Sam Raimi Spiderman movie; solidly built, but highly articulate-- and with quite a number of widgets built into the three-fingered claws. I knew, I could feel them like I could feel my fingertips.
I cast around for a second looking for a window or a puddle to see my reflection. Then I facepalmed and turned the end of my tentacles to look at myself.
It was about what I’d expected. I was a young man, early twenties at best, thankfully not fat or stocky like Otto Octavius. Kind of tall and thin, actually, with a thin angular face under the messy mop top. Brown hair, squarish goggles (safety first, kids!) and a heavy-looking leather trenchcoat over denim pants and workboots. The octopus arms came out from clever flaps hidden in the cut of the coat. The look was predictable, I’d written it after all.
Then an awful sinking feeling hit my gut. I pulled open my trenchcoat and shirt; As I expected, my torso from just over my sternum to just under my belt was covered in segmented plate. Right over my heart was a VERY familiar glowing blue-white circle.
An arc reactor. At least I didn’t have to worry about recharging…
I felt around my back under the coat. Yes, the slim, streamlined pod the tentacles came out of was there, and anywhere I could feel underneath it seemed merged surgically with my flesh. In fact there were a few segments up the back of my neck and above my tailbone that felt like metallic protusions of my spine…
My “Doc Ock 2.0” had a backstory of course. He was the son of an investigator for some low-ranking government office, in charge of examining and if necessary demolishing the leftover gadgets and devices supervillains left behind. He’d been trying to talk his son (me, ostensibly) into signing up, and brought him along on an expedition. It was to take apart a secret lair Doc Ock had up in the Alaskan tundra, of all places. They’d screwed up, and the self destruct had gone off, killing the rest of the team trapping them underground and dropping a few tons of concrete on Junior’s back.
It turned out Doc Ock was a real believer in self-improvement, and had a super-advanced new model of his robotic arms system stashed here to surgically install in himself sometime in the future. Dear old Dad had managed to drag Junior out of the debris and to Doc Ock’s robotic surgical suite, which activated and informed him in no uncertain terms that Junior’s back was broken beyond repair and without a “prosthetic” to replace his shattered spine, he’d die.
And, since the only thing that fit the bill was Doc Ock’s shiny new upgrade…
So, thanks to my own appetite for dramatic backstories and some R.O.B.s sense of whimsy, I was standing here in the middle of God-Knows-What-City in the Marvel Universe with most of my spinal column replaced by a set of deadly robotic tentacle arms.
Cutting a profile that would probably make every hero, vigilante, or street cop shoot first and ask questions later. Never mind that I was younger, thinner, and probably taller and better-looking than Otto “but green spandex is so slimming” Octavius. People in Marvel didn’t exactly show a lot of deep thought before acting.
Oh yay. I always wanted my face professionally flattened by Spider-Man.
I retracted the arms into my metallic back-hump (thank God, they fit. Oh bonus, the four extra viewpoints irised out.) and considered my options. Who could I go to for help? Maybe the Fantastic Four? I had no idea where Avenger’s Mansion was, but that skyscraper with the big honkin’ 4 on top would be hard to miss… This would take careful planning and a cautious approach.
So naturally I heard gunshots from the mouth of the alley.
Me being NOT the dummy, I decided that guns meant both cops AND robbers, and I should probably not be near either. Unfortunately the alley was a dead end into a brick wall the other way, and I was nowhere near confident enough to try scaling the walls with my new arms. Maybe I could sneak out of the end of the alley and scuttle off while everyone was distracted.
Worth a try. I hitched up my trenchcoat and tried to nonchalantly-- okay okay, I skulked out of the alleyway in a half crouch with my collar up, looking in every direction and looking as guilty as if I’d just knifed someone.
Yikes. Sirens. Yikes. Squad car, with a cop crouched behind it, not ten feet from me. A little further, a FLIPPED squad car. Which also seemed slightly on fire. And right across the street, a bank with the front doors ripped off. A couple of cops were down, and a number of guys dressed in tacky looking spandex onesies were hustling out the front door with bags of cash in hand.
I must have made noise as I stepped out of the alley because the cop crouched behind the car whipped his service pistol around and leveled it on me. “FREEZE!”
“Whoa!” I threw my hands up. Unfortunately on pure reflex my robot tentacles came out as well. They loomed up around me like giant steel cobras, ready to strike.
The cop fired three times, dead to my center of mass. The bullets spanged off the steel plating; I barely felt it. “HEY!”
“Holy shit!” He proceeded to butt-walk backwards down the length of his car faster than I’d ever seen anyone scoot, grabbing for his shoulder-walkie-talkie. “Unknown metahuman, we got a second Villain on sight--”
“Wait wait wait, this is a misunderstanding--” I backed the other way, unfortunately stepping out where all the underoo-wearing bank robbers could see me.
“Shit, it’s a hero!” One of them shouted.
Oh wow, zero for two, guys.
Then the guy who had to be their leader stepped out of the bank. I say he had to be the leader because I’d hate to tell him otherwise. He was at least two heads taller than the others and a mass of muscles. He was carrying a cast iron safe under one arm like it was a box of groceries. He swore when he clapped eyes on me. “Take what you got and go,” he yelled at the others. “This is what you hired me for, after all!” (Ah. Hired muscle. I felt so much better.) Then the guy heaved the safe at me like it was a softball.
Several things happened very fast.
Something in my hindbrain must have said “skeet” because claw #2 opened and a red beam lanced out, slicing right across the middle of the safe. Oh cool, I had pew pew lasers? I managed to think. In the next nth of a second I realized the shiny beam hadn’t stopped the safe, which was still hurtling straight for my head. I threw my arms up. Arms two and four braced against the street for impact, arms one and three rose up, claws spread--- and caught the safe, bowing slightly under the impact.
I admit it. I laughed like a loon... that had been COOL. I stopped laughing when the melted seam finally gave way and the safe split open, spilling cash and coins on my head. Ow, dammit. Rolled coins HURT.
That apparently set Hired Muscle aback. He actually backed up a step.
The next moment there was an earsplitting shriek. A column of rippling air roared down the street and slammed into Hired Muscle’s chest, lifting him off his feet and throwing him back into the bank he and his buddies had just robbed. His partners had tried to flee, only to get caught in the periphery. They went down clutching their ears, and judging from how they hit the dirt bonelessly, unconscious already.
I wasn’t doing much better. The blast of earsplitting noise had left me disoriented. I darn near dropped the halves of the safe on my own head. I staggered a bit, clutching my throbbing ears.
Down the road came a motorcycle, a Harley it looked like. On the back were a blonde woman in a bustier, black leather jacket and fishnet stockings. Sitting behind her was a goateed man in what looked like renfaire getup, with a bow and quiver strung over his shoulder…
Wait. Black Canary and Green Arrow? But those were DC characters!
Just then I noticed the sign on the bank. Star City Banking. Star City; Green Arrow’s hangout in the comics, at least.
I facepalmed. The idiot R.O.B. had dropped me in the wrong superhero universe! Wait, this was good. They were DC. Doc Ock was Marvel. Totally different world. They wouldn’t automatically assume I was a villain just because of how I looked--
Black Canary pulled up and parked. They both leapt off the bike, Green Arrow whipped out his bow and took aim at me. “Check out Musclebound, I’ll keep Handsy here covered!” He said. The blonde raced inside.
--No, they’d just assume that because I was standing here covered in stolen money with a safe I’d cracked like an egg clutched in my hot little tentacles. “Listen, I can explain,” I said, putting my (human) hands on my head.
“Yes you will, to the cops,” he said glowering at me.
I carefully set down the halves of the safe. “Look, I wasn’t robbing the bank,” I said. “Just ask this cop here--” I looked for the panicking patrolman from before. “….whoooo apparently just fainted from all the excitement,” I said in a weary monotone. Somewhere an R.O.B. was laughing his bastard ass off. “Seriously, if you would just give me a minute to explain...”
Green Arrow just narrowed his eyes at me. He looked more menacing than any man dressed like an extra from Men in Tights deserved to.
Black Canary reappeared, dusting her hands off. “Muscle boy’s taken care of,” she said. “Knocked cold, cuffed and waiting for the cops. So what about this one?”
“Oh, he’s a talky one,” Green Arrow said dryly.
I growled to myself. I was starting to remember just how much of an ass Green Arrow was in the comics. I considered my options. I probably couldn’t escape, I was too raw to win at a super-fight. Any minute now the cops would show and I would be swept off into the system, far away from anyone who could help me or who I could persuade to listen to me. I had an idea how to get these two’s attention but there was a chance Green Arrow would take it wrong and shoot me with a taser arrow or a knockout arrow or maybe even just a plain old regular stabby arrow.
So it broke down to:
A. Try and fight or run, get my ass beat into the pavement.
B. Go into the system and spend the rest of my life trying to persuade the NPCs that I wasn’t crazy, no sir, I really am from another dimension where everything here is a comic book!
C. Use my super secret persuade-the-capes plan, make Green Arrow or Black Canary angry, and get curbstomped.
D. Use my super secret persuate-the-capes plan, and actually win them over.
Let’s go very carefully and try for D. I looked at Green Arrow. “Have you asked her yet?” I said, nodding at Black Canary.
I got some satisfaction seeing the look wiped off his face. “What?” He looked surprised, then glared and drew back on his bow a little further.
“You got the ring already, didn’t you,” I said. “Probably got it on you, right?” He twitched ever so slightly. Bullseye. Score one for cold reading skills.
“Ollie? You... got something to tell me?” Black Canary said tentatively.
Now to go two for two. “I think you got something to tell HIM,” I said. “Should a woman in your condition really be running around trading bitchslaps with supervillains?”
THAT got a reaction. “Ollie” actually lowered his bow and gawked at Black Canary, who was looking rather flustered (ding ding ding!) He snapped out of it quick enough. His arrow leveled with my forehead in a blink. “He’s trying to distract us--!”
“Uh, Ollie...” Black Canary said faintly. “No he isn’t...”
Well, now I know what Robin Hood looks like if he were poleaxed. “Gubbuh?”
“All right,” Black Canary said. It was apparently her turn to glare menacingly. “How do you know this--?”
“I’m from an alternate dimension,” I summed up. “It gets really complicated beyond that, but where I come from you guys are comic book characters.”
“Oh now that’s--”
“Martians. Giant robots. Talking gorillas,” I snapped. I could see red and blue flashing about a quarter mile away. “You’re in no place to talk about unbelievable.”
“If so, why didn’t you just open with our secret identities?” Black Canary said. She seemed sincerely curious.
“The walls have ears,” I said. “Besides, heroes get their secret identities revealed all the time; I had to go for something a little more personal.” Sirens whooped. “Well? Make the call. Believe me now and find out how weird things are about to get, or ignore me and spend days trying to fish me back out of the system when I get ‘conveniently misplaced’ on my way to Stryker’s Island.”
Red and blue squad lights flickered closer. Green Arrow lowered his bow and reached for an earbud. “Watchtower, three to Zeta Tube up on my mark.”
“THANK you,” I said, lowering all my arms and pulling the mechanical ones in. As the lights of the Watchtower transporters surrounded us, I heard one last sentence from Canary.
“What was that about a ring---?”
I woke up on a rooftop. It was night, overcast, with clouds scudding across a waning moon. I groaned and got to my hands and knees, my claws scratching on the gritty tar roof--
Claws. I held up my hand. Claws, on green, slightly furry fingers. Oh crap, he really HAD turned me into one of my revamped Sinister Six!
I looked around. There were a few panes of glass scattered on the roof, probably for repairs to the skylights. I crept over to one and tilted it so I could see my reflection.
Yup. The Green Goblin, or at least my version of him, stared back. I’d gone for a more feral version of the goblin look: Large, yellow, cat slit pupils. Cat-like, triangular nose at the end of a slightly protruding muzzle. Large, mobile triangular ears that swept back and forth. Sharp canines. And of course, fine, green fur.
My hands had black claws instead of nails, and pads on the fingers and palms. My legs were digitigrade and the talons on my feet made the claws on my fingers look positively modest. I even had a dewclaw, for gripping when I landed. I had a long prehensile tail with a tuft at the end.
And-- I stretched, and dark green, webbed membranes unfolded from under my tattered cloak. Oh yes, cool-ass bat wings.
My version of the Green Goblin had nothing to do with the original besides a vague similarity and a name. He wasn’t the product of Science Gone Stupid. His backstory was that he had stumbled across a tribe of small, winged, goblin-like creatures living in the caverns and tunnels below his city. He had helped them out in a time of need and in gratitude they had “adopted” him, making him their tribe’s champion/chieftain/sage-- and transforming him into this. They made him a living repository of their lore and knowledge; what they learned, he learned; what he knew, they would know. In return they had each granted him a portion of their strength and power. The little ones had potent abilities and tricks, but his were at least an order of magnitude more powerful…it kind of made him big man on campus.
That and the fact he was nearly three times bigger than their next-largest tribesman.
I patted myself down. Tattered old cloak, tunic, breeches and a rope belt. Diddly squat else. I did just have to go and pick “Starting disadvantage: poverty” for this guy. I sighed and shook my head. A-hole R.O.B. could have at least given me some trail rations, or tokens for the bus or something…
Where was I? I stood up and looked out over the city. Dang, but it was a dismal looking place. All dark and smoggy and sooty and goth-y. The downtown district was pretty far off too; even lit up for all it was worth it was a kind of morale-draining sight. What city in Marvel looked like this---
Oh jeez I hoped this wasn’t Latveria.
I heard voices. That’s right, there was light coming up through the skylights. Someone was home. I went invisible (oh yes I MINMAXED this little green mother, you better believe it!) and crept over to the nearest skylight and looked inside. Maybe I could tell if this was Latveria or not… I dunno, maybe if they were wearing leiderhosen--
I nearly swallowed my tongue. There were no leiderhosen. This was not Latveria. This was Gotham. How, pray tell, did you know this?
Easy. It’s hard to imagine the Joker hanging out in a warehouse anywhere else. The stupid cosmic clod had dropped me in the wrong comic ‘verse!
They were all gathered around a card table. The Clown was standing there, ghoulish grin and manic eyes and all, lecturing his few men about some plan or other. He’d stop and giggle every now and then before resuming. I’m telling you, it’s way more disturbing in person, believe me.
Misunderstood hero wannabe or not, I was NOT ready to deal with that kind of crazy-evil. I had pretty much decided to give my wings a test and fly just about any place else, when I heard him shout for… “Harley! Come on now, bring our guest over so she can hear about our plans! They’re all about HER after all.” He cackled again.
There was a scraping sound and here came Harley. She had a bloody mallet over one shoulder and was dragging someone tied to a chair with her free hand. (Side note: she looked like a total slag. Even worse than in that terrible Suicide Squad. She looked like a crossbreed between a crappy mime, heroin chic and a meth whore. Sorry to disappoint the fanboys but what did you expect? She’s crazy, and she hangs with a sadist who gets his giggles throwing chemicals in people’s faces. He probably had tested half his recipes for Smilex on her personally.) She spun the chair around and set it upright next to the table.
It was a girl. Maybe twelve. She was bound and gagged in painfully tight ropes. She was wearing what had been fairly decent, expensive clothes; she’d been roughly handled though and was looking bedraggled. I saw bruises. Her face was streaked with dried tears and her eyes were hopeless.
The Joker walked around the table and began talking in a low voice, his chap-lipped grin an inch from the girl’s ear. I couldn’t make out what he was saying but it had the girl shaking in terror. He pulled out a knife and flicked it open. I didn’t have to hear clearly to know what he said.
“Want to know where I got these scars?”
Oh screw you too, R.O.B.
Glowing green ooze materialized in my hands. The metal frame of the skylight melted like butter. It landed on the card table, flattening it with a smash.
I was right behind it. I had a glowing orange globbet in each hand. I landed in a crouch, flared my wings and hissed.
“It’s the bat!” The two goons pulled their guns. I gave the girl as gentle a kick I could with the ball of my foot, shoving her backwards out of the line of fire and into the shadows.
“You wish,” I told the goon who’d shrieked, and pelted him in the face with my goblin bomb. He went down screaming, his head wreathed in flames. The second goon managed to duck, but his shot went wild and he ran for it, screaming about the Bat. I heard a thump and he stopped yelling.
It... was a nasty move, I know it. But I wasn’t the Batman. I wasn’t a boy scout. I couldn't take these monsters down with a couple of vulcan nerve pinches and a comic-book style karate chop to the neck. To save that little girl's life I was going to take these guys down hard, and if it cost them their lives, well that was their problem and I’d cope with it. Even the most innocent version of the Joker in canon was a murderer and a psycho, and anyone who worked for him was the kind of mad-dog crazy that you didn’t give a second chance.
A bloody mallet head whistled past my eartips. Speaking of which… Here came Harley Quinn, darling of fanboys everywhere. Her lips were pulled back from her meth-rotted teeth in a snarl and she was swinging that mallet like it was a whiffle bat. I ducked two, three swings--
Bullets spacked into the floorboards around our feet. Joker was in play. He had pulled a revolver from under his purple zoot suit jacket and was spraying bullets everywhere, heedless of whether they hit me, Harley, or his men. A couple thumped into the burning one writhing on the floor and he went still.
I wasn’t good enough to deal with both of them at once... so I took out the nearest first. I jumped Harley, clinging to the chest of her jacket with the claws on my feet. She shrieked; we struggled for the mallet. I slashed her across the face with my claws and blood flew. Her scream was horrific. I spat a cloud of mist in her face….Knockout gas, from a special salivary gland. I hoped it was strong enough.
It was. She slumped to the floor bonelessly. I let go of her and dropped to all fours, scuttling sideways and looking around, frantically trying to get my bearings. The girl was lying on her side, still bound to the chair, trying to scoot herself away.
Then the lights flickered, and went out. I could hear a faint ruckus coming from elsewhere in the warehouse; Joker’s men were stirring their stumps. In over my head and sinking fast, oh yay. The joker came sauntering out of the shadows, into the bit of floor illuminated by the open skylights. I hissed at him, but it might as well have been for practice. He giggled like a child in a candy store.
“Oh, the Bat has a new PLAYmate,” he giggled. “How ever so FUN!” He drew a bead on me, his eyes burning with madness. “Let’s see if you’re as immortal as his little pet birdie!”
It was then I noticed that the commotion elsewhere had gotten… quiet. Something dark loomed out of the shadows. The girl was suddenly yanked back into the dark by unseen hands. She let out one muffled scream and then went still. The Joker seemed to immediately forget me (hurray ADHD) and began scanning the room, the overlong barrel of his gun sweeping back and forth. “Oh ho ho, so Batsy finally decides to show his pointy eared face,” he chuckled.
A little voice spoke in my ear: You have night vision, dummy… I resisted the urge to slap myself and squinted hard, trying to refocus my eyes. The shadows suddenly faded away, dead black turning into pale twilight… An enormous figure, cowled and caped, stood right behind the Joker. I saw him just a split second before the Joker heard him.
“JOKER.” The Bat’s voice was like Darth Vader took lessons from a gravel truck. Joker spun around.
I had NEVER seen someone literally tumble across a room from being PUNCHED before. He piled up against a stack of crates and sprawled there. “Stay down, Joker,” Batman advised him. Then he turned his attention to me. Yikes. “Who are YOU?”
“Carmen Sandiego. Guess where I am,” I snarked. “Where’s the girl?”
“Safe,” he said. I didn’t bother telling him I could see her in the dark, still tied to the chair. “I want some answers.”
“It’s nice to want things.” I was starting to remember why I was more a fan of Marvel than of DC. In Marvel, it was the world that was screwed up. In DC, it was the heroes. “Mind telling me where YOU were while giggles over there was about to give a little girl a Glasgow Grin?”
“I had someone in place.”
“Robin? Which one? The one who won’t speak to you, or the one who ended up eating a tire iron?”
The eyes on the mask narrowed (how do they do that?). “You have my thanks for intervening. But I don’t appreciate your bloodthirsty methods.”
The lights flickered back on. Robin at work? And congratulations Bats, you have summoned forth the Comic Fanboy Pedant. “Yeah, and nobody in Gotham appreciates yours, Catch and Release Man,” I sneered. “This freak over here--” I pointed. “Uh oh.” The Joker was gone.
There was a loud Phteew! And a flag with the words “BANG BANG” on it sprouted from Batman’s shoulder. Joker had shot him with the bang-bang flag from his custom made gun. Batman snarled and staggered back, grabbing for something on his belt-- Anti-Smilex, if I had a guess.
“Look out!” the girl screamed. Out of the piles of abandoned crates came the Joker. He was shrieking with laughter and waving a crowbar over his head, his eyes fixed on nothing but me.
There was one thing I had lifted from the original Green Goblin, or rather one of the original Goblin heirs… from the aborted, would be heroic Green Goblin story line. In my version, the lesser goblins used a high-pitched shrieking laugh with strange resonances to frighten people away from their lairs. In me though, it became a version of a weapon used by the briefly heroic Green Goblin, Phil Urich: his Lunatic Laugh.
I drew in a deep breath and Laughed.
A shrill, high-pitched laugh filled the warehouse, reverberating and echoing itself over and over in a climbing resonance. Everything in a cone directly in front of me felt its full effect. Dust filtered down from the rafters. Windows cracked. Lightbulbs exploded.
The Joker was caught full-on with it. He stopped dead in his tracks, dropping his crowbar and clutching at his head. He thrashed and screamed, writhing where he stood. He sank to his knees, screaming for it to stop. I saw blood leak between his fingers from his ears.
I didn’t stop until he toppled over on his side. I stopped and let the echoes of the sound die away. The Joker was lying curled up in a fetal position, weeping softly. “Holy shit,” I heard someone say. I looked around; ah, Nightwing was here. And over there was Robin, Boy Wonder number whatever.
“Better wrap ‘em up,” I said in a rasp. That Laugh was murder on the throat. Weapon of Last Resort, hell of a Disadvantage to buy. “I’d rather not have to do that again.” Nightwing moved to tie up the Clown Prince of Crime (who was busy soiling himself) and his pet bimbo.
Robin for his part was untying the girl from the chair. The moment the ropes parted she scrambled for her feet and ran sobbing… to me. She threw her arms around my neck. “Thank you, thank you,” she sobbed. What could I do? I held her and patted her back and tried to make soothing noises.
“Don’t worry, he won’t hurt anybody ever again,” I said. I looked over her shoulder and gave Batman a LOOK. He was busy bandaging his shoulder and injecting himself with some antitoxin or other. “WILL HE?” I said pointedly, giving him my biggest smile with all my pointy little teeth.
He gave me a look right back that could have been carved on Rushmore. “Let’s get the Mayor’s daughter back home,” he said. “Then we’ll talk.”
It was a half hour later when the shakes set in. It made it hard to clean the blood off my claws.
Whaddya know, he had a version of the Batmobile with more than two seats. A bat-sedan? I hummed to myself as we rode… presumably to the Batcave. “What is that song you keep humming?” Robin asked finally. (Nightwing had a motorcycle, and someplace else to be.)
Not an hour after that mayhem and I was all perky and full of energy. (Disadvantage: Manic personality. That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.) I smirked and jerked a thumb at the tall, dark and broody driver. “His theme song. Or one of them anyway.”
“Really?” the kid chuckled. “It have any words?”
“Yeah. Duna nana nana nana duna nana nana nana BATMAAAAAAAN,” I sang. “Batmaaaan, Batmaaaan, batmaaaaan….” Robin laughed so hard he snorted.
“Seriously?”
“Seriously! Duna nana nana nana duna nana nana nana BATMAAAAAAAN… sing along, you know the words!”
Robin laughed. Batman ground his teeth. “Stop singing that.”
“Can’t! Riding in the batmobile! it’s MANDATORY! BATMAAAAAN, Batmaaaaaan, bat--”
“Don’t make me use the knockout gas.”
“I’ll be good.” I sat back.
We rode in silence--- well as much silence as you get in a sedan with a turbine mounted on it-- for a few minutes. “So okay, what’s your story?” Robin asked.
Here it was. “Are you two ready for an absolutely incredible story?” I said.
I explained. Alternate universe, roleplaying game, Random Omnipotent Bastard, the whole thing. “That’s...” Robin protested.
“Ridiculous? You trade slaps with a man made out of mud. Okay, tell me when these names start sounding familiar. Bruce Wayne. Dick Grayson. Jason Todd… “ I’ll give him points. He didn’t even flinch when I got to “Talia Ghul.” But then I said “Bat Mite” and Batman swerved-- he SWERVED-- before he gained control. “Where did you hear that name?”
“Your comic,” I answered. “Also pretty much every version of your cartoon show, your tv show-- not any of the six movies though--” I sobered a bit. “Maybe you and Supes better sit down and talk. Your little problem and HIS little problem… the one spelled M,X,Y….. are probably related.”
Damned if he didn’t swerve again.
“I can think of multiple ways you could have obtained that information...” he started. Robin was starting to look a little nervous.
“Occam’s razor,” I said bluntly. “I’m a hairy green mutant wearing the latest in hobo fashion. How likely is it that I had access to the resources for that level of espionage?” Irony. The guy was so paranoid he could think of a thousand ways someone like me could get that info OTHER than the one I told him. Time to play dirty.
“Wanna hear a joke? Two madmen escape from the insane asylum. They come to a river in the dead of night, and they have no idea how to cross. One of them says “I got it! I have a flashlight. I’ll turn it on and shine the beam across to the shore. Then you can walk across to the other side! And the second goes ‘Do you think I’m crazy?….”
“….You’ll turn the flashlight off when I’m only halfway,” Batman muttered. He sounded haunted.
“Great joke to share with someone while standing in the rain, ain’t it?” I murmured. “I’m sorry I gave you crap about the Joker. It’s not your fault-- not entirely anyway. Gotham’s cursed. I mean, literally. The ground it sits on, centuries ago. As long as there’s a Gotham, there’ll be a Joker to torment it.”
“You’re kidding,” Robin said.
“Haven’t you wondered how the Joker keeps surviving? Forget Batman here letting him survive, he’s literally got millions of people-- many of them rich, powerful and ruthless-- who hate him. A hired gun should have popped him like a zit ages ago. Or a grieving family member stuck a shiv in him in prison. Or just some cop going ‘shoot first ask later.’ Or a couple of wardens having an ‘oops’ and sending him on a tumble down the stairs.”
“So what’s the explanation?” Robin said. He didn’t sound like he really wanted to know.
I shivered a little, my wings fluttering. “According to the most recent round of writers in the comics, he HAS died,” I said. “Multiple times. Then some slob-- a failed, desperate comedian, a low ranking gangster who was a little twitchy in the head already, a soldier with PTSD, or some kid raised in an abusive home by a psychopath… falls victim to the curse and becomes the new Joker. Hell, last I heard there were THREE different people running around wearing the Joker’s face right now...”
“You’re telling us--” Robin’s voice cracked. “You’re telling us the Joker isn’t just a psycho criminal; he’s Pennywise from Stephen King??”
Nobody said anything for a minute. “It… fills in a lot of gaps,” Batman said. “I’ve seen too many things to discount it entirely.”
I nodded. “Talk to one of your mystics. Dr. Fate. Jason Blood. Or maybe Constantine, if you can get him. They might be able to break the curse. They might not. You never know.”
“I think we will be sitting down for a long talk with one of them soon,” Batman said. “But right now we have more immediate problems.”
“More immediate than finding out that the JOKER might be some sort of unkillable curse- ghost- demon thing,” Robin said, deadpan.
“Our new friend here has just informed us that he’s from another reality,” Batman said. “And that some cosmic entity dropped him here in Gotham as part of some childish game with God knows what consequences for the world. Imagine if he decides that the Joker would make a fun play-toy.” Robin wasn’t the only one to shudder. “So yes, more immediate. We’ll be taking the Zeta tube straight to the Watchtower the moment we return.”
My 2.0 version of the Lizard had a closer tie to his “source” villain than most of the others. He was supposed to be Dr. Curt Connors’ teenage son.
Yes. The one that the Lizard canonically ate.
In my take, the Lizard grievously mauled the boy, but Connors managed to regain control at the last second. To save his dying boy he injected him with his newest experimental version of the Lizard serum… a broader spectrum mutagen that would give the recipient access to the genome of the entire class reptilia. Doctor Connors had hoped the more generalized DNA would mean the recipient would avoid the metamorphic effect. Instead, it gave the recipient the ability to, well, do anything that a reptile can-- any reptile, of nearly any species. Even changing his form to facilitate it.
His son retains his intelligence and sanity, fortunately. Unfortunately he cannot turn human, merely from one anthropoid reptile form to another...
It was a good powerset with lots of versatility, that would require some hard thinking by the player to use to its full potential. That’s a positive. I was currently sporting it. Also good. Downsides? Apparently arriving in a state of hysterical panic through an extradimensional portal at high velocity had instinctively triggered me to take on a rather--- dangerous looking form. All inch-thick scales and talons and teeth--- I currently looked something like a velociraptor after a lifetime course of steroids and bad life advice.
Bigger downside? I had apparently landed in the middle of some sort of late night lawn party with all sorts of fancy-dressed and important people attending. Said important people had clapped eyes on me and were now screaming, running, knocking over tables and chairs and screaming for security.
Security was coming. And they were holding guns. I waved my talons frantically and tried to yell that this was a mistake, but all that came out was a sound like Godzilla singing falsetto. Fortunately, before we all found out how bulletproof my scaly hide wasn’t, a crimson streak appeared out of nowhere and swept me away.
I spent a second screaming in terror as the world whizzed past, then I realized who it was that had shoulder-checked me in the gut and was now carrying me across their shoulder. It was the Flash. Oh good grief-- that bastard R.O.B. had dumped me in the wrong comic universe…
We stopped (thank God) after just a few seconds. My scaly butt hit the floor inside an enormous cage. I realized that we were at the zoo. The Flash was already outside the bars, locking me in. “That’ll take care of you for the moment,” he said with a cheerful grin. “At least till STAR labs comes and picks you up.” He rubbed his chin. “Where the devil did you come from, anyway?”
I squawked, croaked, gargled, and finally changed my vocal chords into something useful. “WAIT!” I said. Thank the Almighty my voice worked again. “Please, let me explain myself!”
He jumped, then gave me a longsuffering look. “I mighta known,” he said. “Especiallyafter the gorilla. Okay, fella, talk. What’s your story? Long lost city of dinosaur people?”
I sighed in relief and sat back on my tail. “It’s an even weirder tale than that, Mr Allen...”
…
When I finished, he gave me an unamused look. “C’mon. I’m not the smartest guy in the Justice League but--”
“What was it you told Green Lantern?” I said blithely. “You both have a Martian on speed dial. I think I deserve at least the benefit of the doubt.”
He blinked. “I’m pretty sure I didn’t tell anyone that,” he muttered.
I grinned. He blanched a little. “How about this one? When the magnet villain guy said “Hey Lex, are you gonna wash your hands,” you said---”
“No. Because I’m EVIL,” we both said together. We both snickered. “Okay, wow, now I know I didn’t tell anyone about that...”
“Or how Lex’s squeeze, the sorceress, told you that you were SO ATTENTIVE and--”
“Whoa, hey hey hey, the walls have ears, kay? I believe you, I believe you.” He rubbed his head sheepishly. “So. Cosmic being playing games with people as the pieces? Sounds like Justice League stuff to me. Come with me, I’ll get you to the Watchtower--” he paused. “Ah, might have to smuggle you out of here, you’re kind of seriously scary looking, no offense.”
“Oh jeez, how bad is it?” Almost before I’d finished, he’d zipped off and returned with a full length mirror. “… I won’t ask. Wow, yikes. No wonder people panicked. I look like Barney the Dinosaur sold his soul to Heavy Metal.” I shook my head. “Gimme a minute, okay?” I closed my eyes and concentrated.
“What’re you… whoa, cool.” It must’ve been interesting to watch the change. I was too busy to appreciate it. I wanted to be something more pleasant looking, less alarming. Pull in the claws, ease up on the teeth… I could feel my pebbled skin losing its toughness, my scimitar-like claws shrinking. The spikes and horns retreated. My skull streamlined, my eyes got larger and more friendly. My body and tail slimmed, my fingers and toes got more spatulate and webbed, with thick clinging pads on the finger and toetips. Friendly, harmless, cute, little…
Gecko.
I opened my eyes and looked at my reflection. There. Perfect. A five-foot-six gecko. “Could I possibly speak with you about saving up to thirty percent on your auto insurance?” I said, folding my fingers together and looking innocent.
The Flash snorted. “That’s definitely a lot better,” he said. “The surfer dude look works for you, by the way.”
I looked down. My entire outfit consisted of a rather baggy tank top and cutoff jeans. “Well, hard to find clothes for a shapeshifter I guess,” I said.
“Come on,” he said, unlocking the cage. “Let’s get you to the Watchtower.”
I don’t handle heights well. I don’t handle being DROPPED from them very well, anyway.
Suddenly finding myself tumbling from a star-filled night sky towards a brightly lit city far below? I don’t handle that well at all.
“AAAAAH!” I screamed, immediately regretting it. “Wow the inside of this helmet is loud-- Okay, thinkthinkthink, cape flapping behind me, big bubbly helmet, he made me MYSTERIO! Aaaand my version of Mysterio can fly, right? HOW CAN I FLY, I CAN’T REMEMBER!!”
My take on a “new Mysterio” was this: Mysterio (a la Spider-Man ‘Far from Home’) left all his worldly possessions, mostly consisting of a few trunks full of his research, to his estranged nephew. His nephew it seemed was a Mutant with the power to create illusions of light and sound-- visible, measurable, photographable… essentially holograms with sound effects. But still… intangible. However, before he’d died, Mysterio had been working on “hard light” technology. And he’d figured out-- God only knows why-- how to incorporate his nephew’s power with it.
Using the technology in his dead uncle’s super-suit, Mysterio 2.0 not only could make his illusions more realistic and lifelike than ever before, he could make them solid.
Among the other things incorporated into the suit was a way for Mysterio to fly. Only in my panic I couldn’t remember the notes--
Fortunately Stark-quality suit AI’s don’t panic. “Activating ‘mystic cloud’ hover mode,” a calm feminine voice said. Numbers and graphs flowed across the HUD lining the inside of my bubble helmet, and a holographic cloud… a hologram made to look like a cloud, literally… formed underneath me. I landed in it, face down.
“Ohhh, thank you magic floaty cloud,” I mumbled. “You are so soft and comfortable, you are a good friend mister magic floaty cloud...”
After my heart rate returned to normal, I stood up on my little floaty platform and looked around. Man I’d fallen a long way. I was floating slightly lower than the tops of the skyscrapers. Noone seemed to have noticed me yet. Oh wait, look, there were a few gawkers at the windows of one of the buildings I floated past. Funny, this city didn’t look like New York. It looked-- more, somehow. Taller. More futuristic. Even at night the city seemed to gleam. Of course the traffic down below was a honking, snarled mess like any city, but that was probably due to the giant monkey that…
Okay, hold up, come again?
I looked again. Yup. Giant… giant chimpanzee. Looked about... thirty feet tall? It was standing in an intersection, hooting and waving its arms and shaking its head-- all the honking and screaming was probably agitating it. Crap, I hoped Spider-man or the Avengers showed up soon or--
Crap. Cheetah just picked up a taxicab and chucked it off down the street like a baseball! I did the only thing I could think of. “Activate hard light projectors NOW!” I shouted, holding out my hands.
“Compliance,” the AI said. My fingertips lit up. I poured my power down my arms and out through the hard-light projectors in my fingertips. I didn’t have time to get creative: I formed a copy of my own hand out of hard light and caught the tumbling cab, just before it and its passengers smashed against a building. Breathing a sigh of relief I lowered the car to a clear spot-- half on the street, half on the sidewalk. I was in no position to be picky.
“Hard light power down thirty percent,” my AI announced. “Capacitors recharging.” One of the meters on my helmet HUD dropped dramatically. Crap; one of the drawbacks I’d written in for more character points was Limited Power Reserve. The projectors that let me turn my intangible light and sound forms into solid ones were monster power hogs. While the zero point energy chip would replenish the capacitors, it did so very slowly. If I drained them completely I’d have nothing buy my own illusions--- assuming I survived the plummet when my holographic cloud vanished, that is.
I wasn’t equipped for a long, drawn out fight with a giant chimpanzee. I was going to have to be smart about this.
“Gertie--” (yeah, that was the A.I.’s name, I remembered it finally) “-- switch to efficiency mode. “
“Efficiency mode engaged.” All the hardlight tech switched off, save for the ones sustaining my little flying cloud. Even that shrank to a fraction of its size.
“Gimme a field of pure white noise, once city block in diameter, centered on the chimp.”
“Compliance.” I poured out more power; white noise, the kind you hear from the ocean on a sandy beach or rain pouring down, filled the area around the chimp. He seemed to calm down as the white noise drowned out the shrill car horns and shouting people.
“Now let’s see… Gertie, gimme a banana. No, a bunch of bananas.” A rotating 3d image of a bunch of bananas appeared on my HUD. I flicked my fingers in midair, enlarging it, then enlarging it again. I poured my power into my gauntlets again, where much humbler systems than the hardlight ones beamed it out to float over Bonzo’s head. The chimp was immediately entranced, reaching up to grab the holographic fruit. I floated it out of his reach, trying to lure him down the street and away from any people. I began casting illusions of walls, fences, and traffic guidance arrows as I went to separate the fleeing masses from the monkey and to direct everyone (hopefully) someplace safe. Had I seen an empty lot anywhere during my plummet?…
I didn’t have much time to speculate. I heard a whooshing noise and suddenly there was an all-too-familiar figure in red and blue hovering in front of me. “Excuse me,” Superman said sternly, his arms crossed. “Are you controlling this giant chimp?”
Superman?? Crap, that R.O.B. jackass dropped me in the wrong universe! “Why,” I quipped over my suit speaker. “Does it look like I know what I’m doing?” I moved the banana-gram a little faster; the chimp was keeping pace well enough. I winced as he stepped on a parked car. “I really hope you have someplace to put this thing, because he’s going to be real upset when he finds out those bananas are an illusion.”
Superman actually grinned at my joke. “Just follow this street a couple more blocks,” he said. “I’ve managed to set up something that should keep him in place for a while.”
I did as he said. We came to a construction site. The basement had apparently already been dug out, and someone had filled it with a pile of bananas, apples, oranges and other fruit ten feet high. I floated the hologram out over the pile and made room. The chimpanzee eagerly dropped down in the pit and went after the fruit piled there. The moment the ape was down in the pit, Superman began constructing a makeshift cage out of steel I-beams, welding it together with his heat vision. Relieved that things were back in capable hands, I settled on a nearby roof and watched the show. In a few minutes the chimp was safely caged, fed, and content.
Once he was finished, Superman (okay, fanboy freakout time now. AEEEEK! REAL LIFE SUPERMAN!) flew over and landed next to me. “That should do it,” he said. “Good work. And you are?” He held out his hand.
I shook it (AEEEEK! REAL LIFE HANDSHAKE FROM REAL LIFE SUPERMAN! Shuddup, I don’t care if you’re a complete Marvel junkie or an Indie comic fanatic, this was SUPERMAN! Exclamation point intentional and mandatory!) and took off my fishbowl helmet. (The guy has X-ray vision, what would it matter?) “That’s… really complicated,” I said. “I guess my cape name is “Mysterio” for now?”
“I’ve heard worse,” he said, amused. “Quick thinking by the way. Most new, ah, ‘capes’ tend to go in swinging and think things over later.”
I scratched my head. Hmm. Short burr cut. “I don’t have much choice but to be clever,” I said with chagrin. I held out a hand and created a quick illusion of butterflies. I threw in a little tweeting bird for good measure. “My powers are about 99 percent illusion anyway. That one vehicle catch nearly tapped my batteries.” He waved his hand through them, obviously impressed at their realism.
“Solid Light Capacitors back to 80% and rising.”
“Yes, thank you Gertie.” I saw the question in his eyes. “Suit A.I. Non-sapient, just really advanced…. I, ah, didn’t build it.”
“So what brings you to Metropolis?” he said.
I sighed. “Cosmic shenanigans. Along the lines of-- er--” I looked around. “Something like M, X, Y...”
He held up a hand to stop me. He actually looked around himself. Worried, paranoid Superman, not a comforting sight. “Okay, now you have my full attention. I think we’d better go discuss this someplace else?”
“The Watchtower?” I said hopefully. “Is there a Zeta tube nearby?”
He started then stared at me suspiciously. “I’d ask how you knew about that but--”
“Yeah. It has to do with how I ended up here.” I created another flying cloud and lifted off the roof. “Lead the way, I’ll explain...”
I was lightning. I was energy. I streaked through a corridor full of bends and twists and forks and turns at blinding, breathtaking speeds, effortless…
Till I met something going the other way.
We collided with a terrific bang. The corridor-dimension exploded around us in a shower of sparks, and I found myself lying on my back in the middle of a city street.
I sat up, groaning, aching in my everything. To quote Twain, I put one hand to my hand, another to my stomach, and found I was short several hands necessary. I looked at my arms and noticed that my clothes had changed considerably. I was now wearing a seamless black full-body suit, decorated with airbrushed white lightning bolts. gloves, boots-- I felt my face and head again, yup full mask, some sort of black one way lenses over the eyes--
Okay, the R.O.B. had turned me into Electro. Or my variation on him. Mine varied in one simple and stupid way. He was an electrical engineering student who’d gained electrical and electromagnetic powers, albeit heavy on the “electro” and light on the “magnetic.” He didn’t want to be associated with that terrorist MAGNETO, so like a brilliant shmuck he’d made his debut announcing himself as ELECTRO… Completely forgetting that there was an older, established electricity-powered VILLAIN by that name…
That didn’t go over too well.
Now, here I was, wearing a villain’s name on a suspected villain’s body, and-- I looked around. I was in the middle of a city who knew where. Judging by how torn up the immediate environment was-- shattered windows, busted concrete, downed power lines-- there’d been a ruckus going on when I arrived. It was night, but it was brightly lit as any city would be… I could see a harbor, out in the middle was an island with… an enormous letter T standing on it?
Titans tower? I was in Jump City??
I heard another groan and looked back over. There was a woman sitting up a few yards away. She was wearing a long-sleeved leotard with a lightning bolt cutout going clear down to her navel. Her skin was pale white, her short-cropped hair was pale electric blue… Ah crap. Livewire. Another electricity based villain from DC comics. That clinched it; the R.O.B. dropped me in the wrong stupid universe.
I looked around. The two of us were sitting in a snake’s nest of downed power lines. It looked like we’d both been in our “living electricity” forms, traveling through the city’s power grid, when we’d run headlong into each other. Somewhere, surely, a physicist was tearing his hair out and weeping in despair. I kipped to my feet and got ready for trouble. Livewire wasn’t a stable individual at the best of times.
She saw me and promptly threw her hands out to her sides, sparks crackling around them. “Who the @$^ are you?” she snarled.
“Electro,”I said. There wasn’t much point quibbling about names.
“Never heard of ya,” she sneered. “Stay out of my way, and there’ll be no trouble.”
I threw a quick glance around. In addition to the damage in the immediate vicinity, I could see fires in the distance and heard sirens. Somehow I doubted her assertion. She was a ruthless villain, probably a killer, mentally unstable and way more experienced than I was-- which wasn’t hard, considering I’d had these powers legitimately for all of five minutes.
But if I pulled a Peter Parker, stepped back and let her go by… I could think of a dozen ways that would turn out badly for me, each one more likely than the last.
“Sorry, I don’t think I can,” I said. I poked around in my brain, searching for the “on” switch. Lightning trickled from my fingers.
“Your funeral, pal,” she smirked. Ball lightning swelled in her hands.
Before either of us could move a lightning bolt struck the pavement between us, the thunder knocking us back. It transformed into a tall, powerfully built black man, dressed in buccaneer boots, black pants and a leather jacket with two lightning bolts framing his shirtless chest. Black Lightning, from the Justice League. Thank God.
“Hold it right there, you two,” he said, arms crossed. “This little party is OVER, Livewire. You and your partner here are going to jail. Your little blackmail scheme to hold the city’s power grid hostage just failed--”
Oh, crap. “Seriously?” I asked, facepalming. Hurray, Heroes Meet and Fight. Let's hear it for dead horse tropes.
This set Livewire off. “Partner?” she spat. “Typical. You figure I just HAD to have a BIG STRONG MAN to pull this off--”
Oh yeah. Great. I forgot. She’s not just a psycho and a villain, she’s a frothing-at-the-mouth feminazi.
“I’m a WHAT?”
I said that out loud didn’t I… yup. Black Lightning is giving me an odd look and Livewire was looking, how shall I say it-- Triggered. Lightning arced and sizzled around her and she looked mad enough to bite someone’s throat out.
I have a big mouth. It also has no filter. What I should have said at that point was pretty much anything but what I said:
“You heard me.”
She wound up with a lightning ball. I managed to spit out to Black Lightning “By the way, NOTAVILLAIN--” before she flung it. I held up my hand and sparks coiled around me--
And the ball lightning bounced off of me. It caromed straight towards Black Lightning, who put up a shield made of lightning bolts and ricocheted it back at Livewire, who yelped and slapped it aside into a power pole. The transformer atop it exploded, spraying sparks everywhere. “Yeah, this fight has been going like this all day,” I heard Black Lightning grunt.
“Like charges repel each other,” I snapped at Livewire. “Did they skip that part in your ‘second rate radio personality’ classes?”
That got me a straight up lightning bolt. I tried to rebound it, but it began spraying off in every direction, causing all sorts of damage. Thank God the street was clear of civilians. “I was Number One in the Metropolis Tri-State area!” she shrieked.
“You were an entitled bitch who got everything she did by throwing a temper tantrum,” I shot back, stalking toward her. I’d forgotten completely that she was a real live villain who would kill me if she could, and was straight up venting my spleen about what I considered one of the more obnoxiously written characters in the DC bullpen. Oh yeah, I was in a fit of the full-on Fan Critic Stupids. “You were an idiot STUPID enough to hold an open-air performance in a THUNDERSTORM and refused to get to safety--”
“Whoa, STAND DOWN, you two!” Black Lightning bellowed. Neither of us were listening.
“--And everytime you got curbstomped by your own stupidity you blamed it on ‘the MaaaaAAaan’,” here I made air-quotes with my fingers and waggled my head side to side, sass-style. “And screamed for someone to give the poor widdle girl a cookie and make it all BETTER!”
That did it. She screamed and went full electric, launching herself at me as a giant living lightning bolt.
I was waiting for it. I went full electric too, and the moment she struck I wrapped us both in the most powerful magnetic field I could manage. No, I did NOT know what I was doing, no, I do NOT know how I knew how to do this. I just did. I can only assume I got the full “how to” download along with the new body.
As it was I certainly hadn’t predicted the results. We shot off like.. well.. a streak of lightning, and began ricocheting back and forth through the city streets. I could only guess my field was rebounding us off the electromagnetic fields running through all the wires and lights in the buildings, or off the nonconductive materials like the square miles of glass on the skyscrapers. Either way the result was that we were caroming back and forth off the buildings like a rocket-propelled pinball.
Inside, it was like being trapped in a bag full of angry bobcats. We were both semi-intangible clouds of electrons and force and she was using her superior experience to her full advantage. She using her power, trying to rip the cohesive fields that held me together apart. It hurt like hell-- like being raked with razor talons.
I couldn’t take it anymore. The magnetic bottle broke and we were flung apart. We were both semisolid when we hit the roof of the department store. We punched straight through the roof; I smashed through half a dozen aisles before plowing to a halt in the hardware section.
I sat up groggily just as Black Lightning flashed into existence next to me. There was a big hole in the ceiling, half the lights were out and late night customers were running screaming for the exits. The other end of the store had electricity crackling everywhere and the sounds of things shorting out and exploding. Ah, there she was. “Almost had her,” I grunted.
Black Lightning just looked pissed. He pointed at me. “Sit down, shut up and stay there, idiot,” he snarled. “You’ve done enough damage for tonight.” He streaked off to tackle Livewire.
Well, I deserved that. I was such a moron. “Land in an alternate universe, jump in with both feet like a noob on a MMORPG,” I growled, mentally pummeling myself. “Stop thinking like a comic book fanboy and start thinking like...”
Like my character. This version of Electro was supposed to be an ace college student studying electromagnetism. Here was hoping the “instinctive” knowledge I got on my powers also extended to the book-learning my fictional character did. I looked around, trying to spark an idea. Lots of household electronic components, some giant glass jugs for decorative purposes, miles of copper wiring--
An idea started bubbling up. Holy crap. I did get the full brain download after all. I started grabbing stuff.
When I got over to the fight scene with my arts and crafts project in hand, Black Lightning was having a hard time of it. He was having to play defense, deflecting Livewire’s bolts or drawing them off and absorbing them to keep her from inflicting damage on the building-- or on the few innocent people who hadn’t managed to flee. He was standing there in his flesh and blood form, grimacing in pain as he tried to corral an intangible Livewire with loops of lightning. She cackled as she flew back and forth, an anthropoid lightning bolt blasting Black Lightning’s body with jolts of power (like charges may repel, children, but there’s such a thing as alternating current…)
I lifted my handmade weapon by the handles I’d strapped to it. It was clumsy and cumbersome and probably half duct tape by weight, but it would hold. I hoped. “BLACK LIGHTNING! CLEAR OUT, I’VE GOT HER!”
He gave me a look over his shoulder that was simply redolent with disbelief. “MOVE IT, MAN, I GOT THE BIMBO!”
That got her attention. MAN, if she couldn’t take a little smack talk she was so in the wrong career. “Bimbo??” she said, her voice crackling and hissing like a bad radio station.
“How about Slut, Slag, Skank, Bitch--” I shouted back. “We all know how you got that job on the radio and it wasn’t TALENT!” I pushed it further. “You’re a Feminazi, a poster child for USELESS PEOPLE—an SJW!” I counted it off on one hand. “Let’s see, paper-bag face, ugly ass haircut, braying voice, wide open horse-toothed mouth, poison-dart frog colored hair, all you need is a nose ring and a-- whoa, that did it--”
Because here she came. She shrieked like a Tesla coil, pushed Black Lightning out of the way and came straight at me, intangible lightning hands reaching for me. I grabbed both handles of the wire-wrapped bottle I was holding and poured on the power.
At the last second she paused. “What--” Then she lost cohesion. She began spiraling into the open mouth of the bottle, a streak of lightning swirling down the drain. She shrieked and scrabbled for a handhold, but in vain. With a pop of static electricity she disappeared inside.
I set the bottle down, reached behind my back and grabbed the dollop of rubber cement I’d stuck there. There was a glass cork in the center. I popped the cork in and slathered it with the rubber cement, fixing it in place. “There,” I said. I barely resisted the urge to plop my own butt down on the tiles too. “Let’s never do that again. Whuff.” I leaned against a shelf. “And now Wonder Woman is going to kick my ass for all the misogynistic stuff I said,” I muttered…
Black Lightning walked over, wincing a bit and nursing a few wounds. “Okay, you made up for it, rookie,” he said. “Slick trick. What is that?”
“Magnetic bottle,” I said. I kicked at the extension cord trailing from it. “It’ll hold her for a while. Just needed an extra boost to pull her in.” A pale blue cloud of energy had formed, floating in the middle of the glass jug. As we watched a face took shape, furious and screaming with hate.
He cocked an eyebrow. “Something for the likes of you and me to watch out for,” he noted.
I nodded. “It’s a good thing we met,” I said. “Regardless. I really need to speak to the rest of the Justice League.”
“That’s a pretty tall order, fella,” he said. “Why should I give you the backstage pass?”
“It has to do with alternate realities, and cosmic entities playing silly ass games,” I said. “Let me explain…
It was a beautiful day on the beach. The sun beating down, soaking into every fiber of my body. The tide was coming in, I could feel the slightest bit of sea foam brushing the tips of my toes as I lay there. Still, not interested in moving. After that nightmare about the crazy R.O.B., a nice relaxing day at the beach was just what the doctor ordered.
Couldn’t for the life of me remember where the beach was, though.
The beach was fairly vacant, just a couple of families enjoying a rare work-free weekday. There were kids running back and forth out of the water, shrieking with glee as the foam caught them, or trotting about with buckets and pails, set on creating a sand sculpture masterpiece while their parents lay in the sun, trying to tan. I could feel the thud of their tiny feet on the beach as they ran.
One little fellow had an ambitious project going; he’d already heaped a pile of sand higher than his own head and was struggling to make towers with his bucket. No, here, kid, let me show you. I forced the mound of sand up into walls, then towers; I added crenellations and flying buttresses and arches, compressing the sand into little brick shapes and patterns… no, needs more sand-- I dragged more sand over, who cared, there was tons of it everywhere, and heaped the walls wider and higher. I made little windows in the tall thin towers and added pointy roofs, just like Cinderella’s castle, see? For extra flash I formed a dragon, no a sea monster, a long scaly one that wound in and out around the bottom of the castle’s many towers…
The little guy had dropped his bucket and run off yelling. It took me a moment to realize that I’d probably freaked him out; the “sand castle” was now fifteen feet high and had a wider footprint than a family beach house. I guess I’d overdone it. I compressed the sand just shy of sandstone-- hey, I wanted this masterpiece to last a little while-- and slowly extracted myself from its mass.
My new form must have really made me slow in the head. It was only after I’d formed a new, golem-like body a few yards off and was admiring my work that I realized I’d become the Sandman.
Dangit. The R.O.B. wasn’t a dream.
In the comics, the Sandman died… or appeared to, at least a couple of times. My version of the Sandman was a laid back surfer bum who stumbled across a beach where some of the ‘deceased’ Sandman’s body had washed up. Exposure to that and to some illegally-buried radioactive waste in that hidden cove granted him Sandman’s powers.
I of course minmaxed the hell out of him. My new Sandman had far fewer of the weaknesses that the old one did. His consciousness was spread throughout his entire mass, rather than being “concentrated in a single grain.” So long as even one or two grains of his original mass remained, he could reform-- after a lot of time and a lot of success rolls, mind. He could supplement and replace lost mass with ordinary sand, eventually transmogrifying it into more of “himself.” And (for nearly ALL of his Disability Points) water was no longer a weakness for him.
After all, what kind of beach bum would be afraid of the water?
I looked around. Okay, people were kind of freaking out. There was a crowd gathering around where my gigantic sand castle stood. Everyone was keeping about twenty feet back. People were holding their children back from running up to look at the “magic sand palace.”
A few people were pointing at me, too. Okay, this could be a good first impression or a bad one. Slowly, carefully, I waved. People gasped. One ninny screamed. Oh save me, save me, the big lumpy sand-man waved at me! Cripes. Great, how long till SHIELD showed up and tried to stuff me in a glass bottle?
Suddenly the crowd’s attention was turned out to sea. I turned my lumpy head and looked; striding out of the waves was a man. He had blonde hair and a beard, and was dressed in orange-gold scale mail, and was wielding a trident in one hand…
Aquaman? I facepalmed, spraying a little sand. The R.O.B. had dropped me in the DC Universe instead of the Marvel one!
The crowds backed up, giving a large clear space around myself and the Sea King. His feet hit dry land and he planted the butt of his trident in the beach. I found myself really really hoping I was getting the Noble Sea King from the comics and not the oceangoing dimwit from the movies...“I thought something odd was going on ashore here,” he said to me. “Who are you, and do you come in peace?”
I opened my mouth to speak. All that came out was a spray of sand and a sound like a belch. I heard several children giggle. Drat, I needed to be more human. Feeling foolish, I facepalmed again and held up one finger. With an effort I began--- compressing myself. Pulling myself down into myself, reforming, transforming…
There was an odd wrench through my whole body. I looked down at myself. Human again! – Then I double-checked; yup, swim trunks and flip flops. Thank goodness. “Uhh, hel—cough-- hello, Aquaman,” I said. “And yes, I come in peace.” I turned to the crowd. “Sorry, I was sunbathing here, didn’t mean to freak anybody out,” I called. I waved to the epic sandcastle. “Hope you enjoyed the show.”
Aquaman seemed to relax a little. “Welcome to Happy Harbor, then,” he said. “I’m King Arthur Curry, of Atlantis. Everyone calls me Aquaman though. And you are…?”
I ran a hand through my hair, brushing a few grains out. “Uh, that’s a trifle complicated,” I said. “I’m lucky to meet you; I really need to speak to the Justice League. The, uh, whole Justice League.”
He crossed his arms. “It has to be a pretty big deal to ask for that,” he said.
“It is. I mean, it could be a real cosmic crisis. It--” I was cut off when screams broke out in the water. Both our heads whipped around; three triangular fins were cutting through the water towards a cluster of swimmers. “Sharks!” I blurted.
Aquaman impressed the hell out of me. Before I’d even finished the word, he’d turned and sprinted for the water, hitting the waves in a leaping dive.
But I got to the water first.
In a blink I was back in my sand form and burrowing through the beach towards the water faster than a man could run. I exploded out of the sand underneath the waves. Almost immediately the water began diluting my body.
I couldn’t have cared less. Unlike the original Sandman, I wasn’t vulnerable to the water. I could retain my coherence and control even when I was thinned down to little more than a muddy cloud underwater. If anything I was faster this way. I turned into an amoeba of water and sand; a serpent writhing through the water at lightning speed.
Aquaman had cut off two of them and was holding out his hand, apparently he was using that aqua-telepathy thing of his to control them and drive them away. The third, a scarred old white, apparently had a stronger will: he had broken off and was going for one of the nearer beach bunnies, no matter what Aquaman shouted.
He was seconds from chomping down on the girl’s leg when I rammed my mass into his mouth and down his throat. Oh, he did not like that. He began thrashing in the water--- I suppose sharks don’t exactly have a mechanism for spitting things back out-- and snapping wildly in every direction. That tore it. He was still a danger to everyone in the water, he wasn’t listening to Aquaman… Aquaman might be pissed at me but the people came first. I burst out of his gills and belly, rupturing them.
I swam away, filtering the blood and muck out of my sand. The other two sharks caught the scent of blood and instantly turned around and went for their still dying friend. They began devouring him while he was still alive. Best buds to the end, eh? But it gave everyone in the water plenty of time to get to shore safely.
When I slumped up out of the waves, my body solidifying out of the wet sand, Aquaman was walking out beside me. I looked at him. “I’m sorry--” I started to say. He waved it off.
“That isn’t the first time I’ve seen a sea creature go rogue,” he said grimly. “If you hadn’t killed him, I would have had to. The people come first.” He gave me a grin. “You certainly have a hero’s guts-- even if they are made out of grit.”
“So what was this crisis you were speaking of?”
The main meeting room of the Watchtower was looking unusually crowded today. Batman and Superman both had called for a meeting of all the chair members, only to find out that four of the others were about to ask for the same thing.
When they assembled and began discussing what had brought them together, the news grew more alarming. Several new metahumans, six in total, from places all over the North American continent, had approached League members with warning that an unknown cosmic entity with powers comparable to or perhaps even greater than Batmite or Mxyzptlyk was meddling with the multiverse.
The general consensus was “Crap. Again?”
Points were discussed, plans were considered, arguments were tossed back and forth. “I think that we’ve wrung all we can out of this debate,” Wonder Woman finally said. “Let us see these new metahumans and speak to them, and see what facts we can glean from what they say.”
“Agreed,” Superman said. He hit the intercom. “Send them in.”
“It will take a moment”, Batman said. “We kept them isolated from one another till now to keep them from muddling details, or--”
“Or from collaborating on what they’d say?” Flash finished for him. “We do know the routine, Bats.” Batman grunted but said nothing.
One by one, the new metahumans walked in through the sliding doors. The League members were quick to note, with growing concern, that each new arrival seemed to be met with surprise from the others. Surprise, shock, recognition… and confusion.
“Well, they certainly are a motley crew,” Wonder Woman said, faintly amused. “Welcome to the Watchtower, all of you.” They all nodded nervously, still shooting confused looks at one another.
“Let’s start with the beginning,” Superman said. “May we ask your names?”
“My real name is… Micheal… Jones...”
There was a drawn out silence as all six young men realized that they had spoken at the same time. They stared at one another.
“But that’s my--”
“No, it’s MY name--”
“But it’s my name too...”
Another drawn out silence was followed by yet another six-part chorus:
“Ohhhhhh CRAAAP.”