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Post By Visionary, posting from work as his home connection is dead Thu Aug 03, 2006 at 09:10:56 am EDT |
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Original Prankstar | |
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 Bob Jansen checked the clock over the door for the fifth time that hour and moaned inwardly. This day was never going to end. “Next…” he called out in a profoundly bored voice, waving to the line of insipid bank customers weaving through the velvet ropes. An elderly lady at the front clutched her purse and approached his teller window. “Welcome to Parodiopolis Savings and Loan…” Bob drawled, mentally adding …you old bat. “How may we help you today?” “I’d like to purchase some savings bonds for my grandson’s birthday” she informed him, rooting around in her purse to produce a checkbook. “He’ll be fourteen next week.” “All right ma’am” Bob replied with as much appeal as he could muster. “Nothing a teenager enjoys more than money he can’t spend” he added under his breath as he grabbed the forms from under his station. He stole a quick check on the clock again. Twenty more minutes until four. Then home to shower and get dressed, and then off to pick up Janet Delvecchio for their date… purportedly the easiest girl in the loan department on the third floor… at least once you got a few drinks in her. He was going to get “approved” tonight, if what he heard about her was true (and if Mr. Jack Daniels had any say in the matter.) And man, did he need it... Even that mime on the street outside, with her chalk-white face pressed against the windows of the bank front, was looking pretty damn hot to him. Of course, the green, yellow and black outfit hugging her every curve didn’t hurt. “I’d hit that” he nodded. Hell, with that body, she even made the ridiculously oversized handgun she drew from her purse look sexy… “Aw crap” Bob noted just before the window exploded inward and the robbery began. “Nifty, ain’t it?” Mary Prankster observed cheerfully as she flipped the last of the security guards over her shoulder, embedding him in the pink putty that had expanded from within a plastic egg to coat the windows. The men hung suspended upside down within the substance, arms and legs akimbo, forming an effective human shield over the windows. “I was originally going to go with a party-string-in-a-can motif, but that was already taken. This stuff ain’t half bad though! Plus… bonus! If we press your heads against the comics page, the funnies will transfer onto your faces!” “Please…” Ernest Putnum, the bank manager pleaded from his place on the floor, trussed up in a large metal coil. (She had already loudly threatened to roll him down stairs, “alone or in pairs”, if anybody started giving her trouble). His toupee hung half peeled off of his head, and he was coated in nervous sweat. “I can’t open the vault… you tripped the alarm…” She tried smoothing his hair back onto his head, but it just rolled down again. “Have you tried super-glue, Ernie? I have some in my bag here… You know, for medicinal purposes.” “Why are you doing this?” “Ah! I’m glad you asked!” she beamed, bouncing up on top of the kiosk which held the deposit slips and striking a heroic pose, marred only slightly by having Ernest’s hairpiece in hand. “I’m doing this for two words… free will!” The hostages all stared at her in silence. “Who’s Will?” Belinda finally asked from her teller station. Mary gave her a pained look as she snatched up the woman’s nameplate. “They really let you handle the money, ‘Lindy?” she asked, then waved the question off with both arms. “Nevermind… Let me tell you about this Will guy instead. When the headmistress of your boarding school tells you to wear your shirt tucked into your uniform, Will is the guy who whispers to you to secretly sew cashews into the lining of her skirts, and then release the squirrels! When a cop tickets you for showing up 30 seconds late to feed the frickin’meter, Will casually suggests you lead a multi-state high-speed pursuit in a stolen police cruiser with a naked officer handcuffed spread-eagle to the roof. And when old, fat Warden Ordway makes you take down the suspiciously large Rita Hayworth poster in your cell, Will is the guy who convinces you to hack her computer and forward her secret boudoir photographs to Hatman with the message “thinking of you”.” She sniffed in satisfaction. “Will is my kinda people.” “So… it’s not for the money?” the manager asked hopefully. “Oh no… it’s definitely for the money” she assured him. “I mean, Will’s a great guy and all, but he’s a cheap date. And do you have any idea what a tastefully decorated office costs? The fancy-smancy bookcase? The leather couch? What kind of crazy, rare, magical cows must they use to upholster those things anyway?” “Er… what?” “But the larger point is, sure… they may try to tell you that taking Will away and locking him up is all for your own good… That jamming a mind control device into your chest and simply telling you “Hey girlfriend… You so crazy! Quit it” will solve all your problems, making you a well-adjusted member of society ready to eat life up with a spoon… But you know what, Ernie?” Ernie shook his head nervously. She began pacing, waving her finger in the air. “Maybe I don’t wanna eat life up with a spoon! Maybe I wanna jab bite-sized chunks of life with a spork! Maybe I want to make mashed potato volcanoes on my plate, complete with gravy lava flooding the corn village! But do they ever think of that? Is that so wrong?!” She spun on Bob expectantly. “Is it?!” “No?” Bob volunteered. “Darn tootin!” she agreed, throwing an arm around his shoulders. “You can see where I’m coming from, can’t you?” He blinked. “I… um… like to do that with my mashed potatoes too.” “See?” she demanded of the rest of the crowd. “Jerry and I… we can’t be fenced in!” She patted him on the back. “Is it okay if I call you Jerry?” “My name is Bob…” “Good. Only, in this case…” she gestured with her huge revolver to Belinda, who came around and picked up the insane woman’s bag. “…We’re not so much making ‘tater volcanoes as we are coating the bank vault door in military grade Plastique and blowing it to Timbuktu.” She grinned and shrugged. “Same basic idea, though.” “You can’t do that!” the manager cried. “Sure I can, Ernie! It’s really quite easy… you just slap the stuff on the exterior hinges, plug in a few wires and assorted doo-dads from a clock radio, then take cover behind something large and heavy, like a cement mixer or African elephant.” She retrieved some glue from her bag and began applying it to the toupee. “You can learn how to do all sorts of stuff on the internet... I even made the remote controlled joy buzzer I hid on you myself!” She pressed a button on her watch and the manager jumped like a trout in a cooler. “Nifty, isn’t it?” “Where on the internet did you say this was?” a teenager asked intently from behind his mother. “Hey… d’ya hear something?” Mary said, frowning and cocking her head to one side. “Kinda like a hissing…” A series of muffled “thumps” sounded suddenly and the guard stuck to the large plate glass window tried to yell something through the putty covering his mouth. Instead, the entire window pane slowly toppled from its frame to bounce twice, guard and all, before shattering into safety fragments. “Hands where I can see them!” the figure backlit in the open window frame yelled, brandishing a weapon. “Cheese it… it’s the cops!” Mary cried, shoving Bob behind an overturned table. She peeked out to look over the interloper. “Er… so is the no-pants thing some kinda budget cutback at the department?” “This is a citizen’s arrest!” the figure responded, stepping into the bank with twin Colt 1911 semi-automatics drawn. She sported a colorful outfit in red, white, and blue that did indeed show more leg than most boy wonders. Luckily, the college aged girl seemed to have the gams for it. She shook her bobbed hair back from her face. “First you jackbooted thugs think you can trample out our freedoms and have us roll over and say “thank you”… and now that you’re no longer the New World Order’s dogs you think you can run amuck while the rest of us prepare to fight a war?” “Hey!” Mary yelled indignantly, popping her head out. “Given my druthers, I’d run amuck no matter what’s going down.” She sniffed. “And who wears jackboots anyway? Mine have curly-cue toes with bells on them, thank-you-very-much-Ms.-Know-It--Eeep!” Multiple shots were fired, blowing chunks out of the table above her quickly ducking head. “Cheese and crackers, Jerry… I think this gal may be &*$%ing nuts.” “I am not!!!” the gun-toting vigilante snarled. “I’m doing what every civic-minded patriot should… especially after the example set by Mr. Epitome.” She blew a few more holes in the table for good measure. “The liberals in the government have molly-coddled you deviants for far too long, and then went and tried to get us to lay down our arms without a fight… Always looking for peace in the face of aggression… dealing in appeasement since you don’t have the stomach to do what’s necessary. Well, not today! We will not go quietly into the night! We will not vanish without a fight! We're going to live on… We're going to survive! Today we celebrate our Independence Day!” “Cripes, what were you doing in high school? Have you never read a book?” Mary snorted, rooting around in her handbag for something. “As much as Mr. Tight-ass likes to get all quoty-like, at least Epitome would’ve gone with a bewigged founding father or something, not Bill Paxton from some alien invasion flick.” “You do not get to disrespect him!” the would-be heroine cried, unloading another barrage of gunfire. “Er… Flag-butt or Paxton?” “You can call him MISTER Epitome!” the girl cried savagely, shooting another series of holes through the table. The bank patrons who were not pinned down took the opportunity to cover their heads and dash for the street. “And it was Bill PULLMAN!” “Ach… a rabid, drooling fangirl…” Mary rolled her eyes to Bob. “How degrading for her… obsessing over and emulating her little Legion love-toy. She needs to find a hobby… Me, I contribute to many respected scientific journals when not making macaroni pictures of Visionary.” She loaded a boxing glove attachment onto the end of her giant cork gun. “Say, which guy was the “Game over, man… game over!” whiner?” “What?” Bob asked cowering from the intermittent gunfire. “You know… from the Mad About You episode where Paul Reiser was eaten by the alien.” “Er… that wasn’t…” he looked up to her intently listening clown face. “Nevermind. That one’s Bill Paxton.” “Thanks… I always get ‘em mixed up.” She cocked her giant gun and leaned back against the table. “Hey, Liberty Valance!” “What?” the girl replied with irritation. “My name’s not…” Mary leapt, somersaulting through the air and fired, bouncing the boxing glove off the girl’s nose and knocking her clear off her feet. The jester gal landed nimbly, the bells on her shoes jingling. “Who shot ya?” she grinned. “ATTENTION IN THE BANK!” an amplified voice rang out. “THIS IS THE POLICE! THE BUILDING IS SURROUNDED. LAY DOWN YOUR WEAPONS AND COME OUT WITH YOUR HANDS UP.” “HA!” Mary yelled out defiantly. “You’ll never take us alive… Ain’t that right, Jerry?” “GAH!” Bob cried out desperately. “For the love of god, help ummmmmmmmph!” Mary shoved the bank manager’s toupee into Bob’s mouth. “I really think a united front is the better way to go here” she whispered conspiratorially, crouching down next to him behind the table. “Now, what we need is a distraction so we can make our clever getaway. So…” she bounced in happy anticipation. “What’s the plan?” Bob looked at her pitifully, Earnest Putnam’s rug bristling out of his mouth like the world’s worst goatee. “Well, check ‘em again!” Detective Harry Bollocks growled to the sergeant. “I want men going through every ventilation duct, every Xerox machine, and every box of copy paper in this building! Her file sez she’s a contortionist as well as being a complete loon, so just because you can’t squeeze your fat butt into something doesn’t mean she didn’t! I don’t care if it takes you all night… nobody goes home until that crazy broad is found!” “Yessir!” the officer replied, eager to get away from the irate investigator. “Is there a problem, officer?” a woman asked, sauntering up in a conservative, if questionably tailored, power suit. She adjusted her glasses and pushed a rogue strand of light brown hair, escaped from an especially messy bun, back behind her ear. “What is hell is this?” the Detective bellowed at the investigators checking the bank lobby for evidence. “Cripes, do I have to explain what “seal off the building” means? Nobody gets out or in. Why do I have a civilian tromping through my crime scene?” The woman smiled thinly and held out an ID tag. “Mary Pfeffercorn, acting as liason between the police and Herringcarp Asylum while Dr. Valium’s gone all retcon. Er… on vacation.” She cocked her head to the side attentively. “I received a call that you had a mild outbreak of the crazies.” Bollocks snorted. “You could say that. Lord knows how much paperwork this little caper’s gonna take to get sorted out.” He tossed a file folder to her. “Maybe you can help make sense of it. The suspect in question was one of your Fruit Loops.” “Hmmm… Ms. Prankstar. Yes, I’m familiar with her… Snazzy dresser. Love the shoes. Her file seems a little thin…” “She was obedience branded” the detective growled. “All the computer files on her were classified, and then conveniently went missing altogether when the conspiracy hit the fan and subpoenas and indictments started flyin’ about.” “Shame. As I recall, they were fascinating reading… such plot twists! Of course, now Herringcarp doesn’t even have this much.” She leaned forward and whispered. “An unfortunate incident in the records room. I told Fernando that hotplate was a fire hazard, but the man does so love his soup.” “Yeah” Bullocks noted with complete disinterest. “Look toots, as long as they dragged you out here you may as well tell me what you make of all this…” He led her through a doorway into the manager’s office. “So after 20 minutes with no word from the inside, we storm the bank, only to find this one…” he jabbed a thumb at the sulking blonde girl with a welt between her eyes, wrapped in a blanket, “…trussed up naked as a jay bird, aside from the unloaded twin Colts and the gunbelt, that is. Then this one… Bob Jansen, alias Jerry” he pointed to the bare-legged, handcuffed bank employee wearing a completely undersized and inappropriate patriotic costume with a hairpiece glued over his mouth, “…was mumbling Don’t shoot while waving and jumping up and down in a pair of shiny red panties.” “Sounds distracting” Ms. Pfeffercorn noted clinically. “Hey, how did the suspect get into the vault?” she asked intently, nodding towards the open metal door. “She didn’t. Couldn’t have, really… The security locks set as soon as she broke the front window getting into the place. And the “plastique” that she threatened to use on the door turned out to be Play Dough.” He shook his head at all the nonsense. “Her file suggests she was after the Heartzfeld diamond… gotta thing for yellow diamonds apparently… but the crazy ditz just wasn’t playing with a full deck.” He gave a nod to the vault. “The chrome-dome manager’s just back there authenticating the rock to make sure no funny business went on.” “Oh, I assure you… there’s nothing funny about this business” the clinical psychologist reasoned while she played with the dials on her wristwatch. “The average person just isn’t wired to deal with the stresses that a violent incident like this can cause. Gives them the shaking heebie-jeebies. Why, the range of psychological fallout one might expect can run the full gambit from bedwetting to full-blown post traumatic stress disorder to voting Republican. It’s frankly amazing that nobody’s even feinted so far.” There was the sound of a man saying something like “Gzzzzzzurk!” from within the vault, followed by a muffled thud. “Hey… Did you hear something?” Ms Pfeffercorn asked mildly. “Good thing you were here to handle things, Miss” the young officer said as he carried the psychologist’s bag out to her waiting car for her. “Do you reckon he’ll be all right?” “Oh, certainly… he just had a nasty shock, is all. Er… from something he saw in the vault, no doubt. Once I cleared all the people out of there and gave him some room to breathe, he started coming around. He’ll be his normal sweaty self in no time, though he might want to invest in some rubber sheets.” She opened the trunk to allow the officer to place her bag inside, then quickly slammed it closed. “Well, I really should be making my get away. Um, by which I mean… go home.” “What about the suspects?” “Those two? Oh, they’re harmless. After some body cavity searches and delousing, you can have your Detective Bollocks send ‘em on over to Herringcarp if he likes… I’m sure the night staff will sort ‘em out. A vigilante fetishist and a transvestite bank teller are pretty tame compared to what they normally see each night.” She opened her car door to get in, but then stopped and turned around. “Oh, and one more thing. I just remembered from that Prankstar woman’s file that she often escaped through the sewers…” “The sewers?” “Oh yes. Crazy people love the sewers. Be sure to tell Bollocks that. He’ll probably personally want to scour them pretty thoroughly. No matter how disgusting and foul the passage, he should check them out. ‘Cause crazy people wouldn’t hesitate to crawl into a sewage pipe. Because they’re, you know… crazy.” “Right… okay… You’re the expert. I’ll be sure to tell him that, ma’am.” He held out his hand. “Thanks again for all your help.” “No problemo” she smiled, shaking hands. “I’m looking forward to running across you all at more crime scenes… puts a little excitement into my new practice!” She patted him on the check then jumped behind the wheel. “Toodles!” |
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