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This was the three-part story arc that served as an interlude between installments of the Hooded Hood's first epic ... it takes place in continuity right after CrazySugarFreakBoy! has his first encounter with PschoAcidPervGirl! (then known also as PsychoAcidRaverGrrl!) and the Hooded Hood has just blackmailed Meggan Foxxx out of the cosmic awareness that was her birthright, as the Celestial Madonna of the Parodyverse. It makes a bit more sense if you have Ian's corresponding story posts in front of you *hint hint* :) Friday, 17-Sep-1999 12:02:03
Part One Only the sheer, impenetrable strength of Dreamcatcher Foxglove's own awe-inspiring level of idiocy was keeping him standing upright. The pain itself should have caused his knees to buckle by now, but he was far too dense to feel it; the concussions and fractures he'd accumulated in his most recent session of combat, within such a short space of time, would have made it impossible for anyone else to move, at least temporarily, but he kept right on walking and talking ... not because he had superhuman endurance, because he really didn't - aside from his suit absorbing a few of the less heavy blows, he was just as injured as any human being would be at this point - but because he literally didn't know how to do anything else. One could argue that the only reason the costumed hero who called himself CrazySugarFreakBoy! was still alive, after suffering this and many other beatings almost as severe within the brief span of his fledgling career, was that he was too stupid to learn when to die, much less how. Even now, as his mother wrapped her arms around him and squeezed him tight, inadvertently inflicting more damage than assistance by adding the pressure of close contact to a body that was already breaking down, he effortlessly supported himself on his own two feet, simply because the shock and trauma were actually (ironically enough) helping to hold him together. It was only when he tried to collect his thoughts that his legs gave away, which wasn't surprising, considering that the rational, logical, linear thought processes which most people take for granted had always been physically painful for him, occasionally inducing unendurable migraine headaches and, in rare periods of extreme stress, even setting off uncontrollable epileptic seizures, so when added to the wear and tear he'd experienced recently, just the act of trying to remember five minutes ago was enough to throw off his concentration. As Meggan Foxxx tried to catch him as he fell by bundling her adult son up in her arms, as she had done when he was a wee infant barely born into the world, she wiped away the luminous blood that started spilling from his mouth, and ran her fingers through his short bob of hair, stroking his forehead and cheek as she struggled to blink away her impulse to cry. "Mom? I'm not so sure I'm feeling well. Can I stay home from school today?" She burst into laughter and sobs all at once, tears streaming own her face as she choked back involuntary giggles. "Sure, baby, you bet. I'll make you a nice hot bowl of chicken noodle soup, with crackers crumbled up into the broth just the way you like, and a glass of warm jello water on the side, and you can watch all the Star Blazers and Voltron and Inspector Gadget cartoons you want." Dream's soft smile was a faded ghost of an old-time photographic image, as his fatigued and overtaxed consciousness barely lit up his usually alert and wide eyes, causing them to adopt an unnerving glaze. "Will you read to me from The Hobbit again, before I take my afternoon nap on the couch?" Meg bit the inside of her mouth until it bled to stop herself from showing any signs of sorrow to her boy, even as her normally smoky, brassy siren's voice quavered and her lower lip trembled slightly, nodding until she was confident that she could speak without totally losing it in front of him. "Do you want Captain Carrot to hug on, until we can get you to your small boy's bed?" Dream flashed a sleepy grin, and limply gestured towards his utility backpack. "She's in the main compartment, nestled in between the packets of Lik-M-Aid Fun Dip and Pixie Stix, right next to the Justice League Hardcover Archives, Volumes One Through Four." Meg fetched her kid's transitional object, his raggedy cloth bunny doll he'd held on to dating back to his earliest days of childhood, and he sighed with oblivious contentment as he squished its fat, cotton-stuffed body to his face, rubbing the soothingly gentle fabric against his skin even she he burrowed into the warmth of his mother's cushioned embrace, finding a plane of peace which his mom desperately wished she could join him in sharing. "No, don't dare you go away. You stay right here with me, baby," she whispered commandingly in his ear, kissing his forehead and idly playing with his bouncy locks of hair as the flashing red lights of the ambulances blurred her vision, her cradling her only son, him cuddling on his favorite toy, the three of them forming an absurd-looking protective cocoon against the ugliness of the outside world. As they were loaded into the paramedics' rig, Meg was still stunned at the savage inhumanity of the attack, and at the vicious glee that this new character, this PsychoAcid ... RaverGirl, or some equally senseless trash for a made-up nickname, had derived from brutally wounding a sweetheart of a young man who, as far as Meg could determine, had never subjected this spiteful little slut to even the most miniscule bit of harm, whether on purpose or by accident. And then there were the Hooded Hood's cryptic comments, which continued to boggle her brain, no matter how many different ways she tried to wrap her brain around their enigmatic intended meaning ... as Dream slipped in and out of his last lingering minutes of lucidity, Meg pleaded with him to explain to her exactly who this mysterious, self-proclaimed "cowled crime-czar" was, not to mention provide at least a summary background on why he had such an intense mad-on for her kid, but Dream was already inextricably immersed in the muddled mire of his own idiosyncratic internal reasoning too deeply to translate his store of knowledge on the subject for non-comic book fanboy consumption; all she could coherently drag out of him was that, frighteningly enough, Dream honestly considered the lethal adversary to be "an ultra spiffy, nifty, and neat-o keen playtime friend, like the guys in my Dungeons & Dragons adventure circle." When Meg admitted to being utterly mystified at how Dream could count among his friends a man so malicious that he had quite clearly resolved to kill him, but not before destroying everything that imbued his life with value and meaning first, he merely rolled his eyes condescendingly and smirked in affectionate embarrassment at his hopelessly out-of-it mom's ignorance regarding the rules to which all hero-versus-villain clashes strictly adhered; I mean, of course the Hooded Hood was trying to ice him, for those functions defined his role as a fearsome foe ... otherwise, come on, he wouldn't be recorded with acclaim in the epic annals of legendary and historically significant plotlines as an instantly memorable - or even a halfway worthwhile - arch-enemy, now would he? However, Dream cheerfully reassured Meg that couldn't conceive of taking any of the Hooded Hood's mean-spirited remarks or cruelly-intended schemes personally, for the cowled crime-czar was simply fulfilling the mission requirements of his occupation, just as Dream, in costume as CrazySugarFreakBoy! was only doing his job every time he foiled the evil-doer's dastardly plans. Besides, if she followed Dream's meandering musings correctly, whether or not the Hooded Hood cared to admit it, the poor fellow would probably miss having CrazySugarFreakBoy! around if one of his strategies ever actually succeeded, which might be why, even in those frequent encounters when he manages to score a considerable lead over his opponent near the nihil, he always seems to find some way to screw up the entire scope of his grand master designs within the course of the absolute end seconds on the game clock. As amazed as Meg was to hear her son expressing feelings of almost sympathetic cameraderie for a figure in whose visage she could discern no redeeming qualities whatsoever, the questionable accuracy and validity of the arguments tendered in his defense aside, none of that truly mattered to her, as she watched the emergency medical technicians lift Dream onto a stretcher and wheel him quickly down the hallways of the hospital. All she could concentrate upon was how weak and helpless he appeared on the operating table, as the doctors suddenly swarmed around his frail form and the nurses hurried her out of the double doors and into the waiting room, where she sat and swallowed the helpings of pills that were dispensed to her to help calm her down. She thought, I remember how peachy and perfect he looked when he was a newborn, full of searching stares as his tiny, stubby, precious little fingers reached out, as far as his arms could stretch, to touch the world around him ... oh God, please, don't just let him come to an abrupt end like this, not when he still has so many special things to offer, so much hidden potential he hasn't even realized yet. It wasn't technically a prayer, given that Meg had ceased believing in religion long ago, but more an unspoken petition for mercy, from anyone who would listen and grant her request. And as she dealt with the all-too-likely possibility that her child would die tonight, Meggan Foxxx finally allowed herself to bawl her eyes out. Part Two When Dreamcatcher Foxglove opened his eyes and started into a face that strangely mirrored his own - a face that whose differences in age and racial extraction were readily apparent, and yet, whose features matched those that Dream himself had inherited - it was then that the young Foxglove knew he must still be dreaming. "Oh, wow ... Dad, hi. Of course, you couldn't possibly be here, but I suppose it means they've got me hooked up to some really kick-ass painkillers if I'm imagining that you're here. I don't care if you're not actually here, though. It's still good to see you again." The vision chuckled in a rich, melodically charcoal blackened voice, and offered his son a lopsided, smartassed smirk which bore an uncanny resemblance to his own. "It's good to see you again too, Rabbit Foot. I'd be lying if I said I knew how what kind of person the childhood you would turn out to be when you grew up, but in retrospect, I can honestly tell you that the adult you've become doesn't surprise me one bit. Still the same kid who tied a dishtowel cape 'round his neck and pretended to fly. Oh, that's a good thing, in case you were wondering." Dream laughed briefly, then bent double from the pain of popping the stitches in his stomach from flexing his muscles. Louis Foxglove held his son back down firmly against the hospital bed, and ordered him to relax and drift off to sleep again, before he began pulling all of the intravenous feeds out of his boy's body. The shrill wail of the EKG monitor's flatline alerted the nearby doctors and nurses, who subsequently stormed into the room demanding to know what the hell this unfamiliar man thought he was doing to their patient, but he managed to fend off their orderlies' attempts at physical restraint with nary more than a few roundhouse kicks aimed at the groin and solar plexus, followed by a series of sucker punches with his free hand, all while his other arm continued to hold his convulsing son down against the bed. It didn't take much longer than half a minute later for Meg herself to come barreling through the swinging double doors, full of protective motherly fury, but when she saw Louis standing there, hovering over her child, the indomitable rage which had fueled the steam in her strides not more than a couple of seconds ago was drained completely out of her, to the point that she almost fell limp to floor in a dead faint. As it was, she barely managed to retain her footing, barely squeaking out the word, "Louis?" "I need you to trust me on this one, Butterfly," he implored her, pressing his flattened palm hard against Dream's chest, aggravating his already bruised and battered ribcage. The shock of seeing her Louis, her Fox, again after all these years, had struck Meg mute, and all was remained capable of doing was shaking her numbly, not knowing what to do or say next. Fortunately, she didn't have to decide, for the irritating screech of the heart monitor gave way to a steady, electronic blip-blip-blip rhythm of beating, as Dream stretched his formerly fragile physique with easy, limber agility, and propped himself up to a leaned-back sitting on his elbows, rubbing his eyes and blinking as though waking from an incredibly restful night. "Whoooo!!!" Dream giggled with glee in an even more happy, hyper, cheerfully cosmically-charged tone than usual. "Too cool! Do it again! Man, I gotta learn me some bad-ass Jedi healing-type mind tricks like that! Except, wait a minute ... that means you're really here, and not just a figment of my fevered hallucinations, doesn't it? Awesome! And I didn't even have to lose my hand or blow up the Death Star again to make you come back to the Light Side of the Force, which is just as well; especially since, the more we can avoid the last half of Return of the Jedi, the better. Damned franchise-ruining little midget Ewok bastards - " Louis tried to suppress his growing amusement at his son's effusive energy, but as soon as the first involuntary guffaw escaped his lips, he couldn't hold back the hearty, booming laughter that followed in rolling out of his throat. Ever since he and Meg had parted ways, she's sent him letters and told him in phone conversations about Dream's perplexingly peculiar personality, but no description, no recounting of characteristics or anecdotes about his bizarre behavior could adequately communicate her maddeningly jumbled feeling about their strange son's atypical temperament. And as Louis listened to Dream's babbling brooks of stream-of-consciousness idea fragments, he at last understood the war of internal emotions that Meg must have gone through, constantly torn between admiring and wanting to admonish her kid for who he was, loving him and becoming frustrated with him for the exact same reason: Dreamcatcher Foxglove was, simply enough, wonderfully, tragically, incurably insane. He was, Louis realized with a start, the chaos of creation personified. Armed with that key fragment of knowledge, a paradigm shift occurred in the elder Foxglove's perspective, as the rest of the puzzle pieces fell into place, all by themselves. He now understood who and what the Hooded Hood and PsychoAcidRaverGirl! truly were, and why they sought his son's destruction; and more importantly, by gaining this awareness of the full meaning of their natures, he had gleaned a possible means of defeating them. All it required was the superior spontaneity, inventiveness and creativity of Dreamcatcher Foxglove, the CrazySugarFreakBoy!, the kid who had actually acquired superpowers from the unlikeliest of means imaginable ... the one a failing experiment in whipping up a formula for edible silly-string. Oh yeah, Louis thought, grinning as he gazed upon his bouncy, bright-eyed boy, whose head was visibly buzzing with ideas that were beyond the ken of any boundaries. This time, in the age-old game of Cowboys Vs. Indians, those pathetic, paleface settlers don't stand a chance against us noble warrior braves. :) Part Three I promised you guys a walloping disclosure in this installment, so here goes. No matter how gradually this takes to build up, trust me when I say, it's well worth the wait. We now join Meggan Foxxx and Louis Foxglove, the long-separated parents of Dreamcatcher Foxglove, a.k.a. CrazySugarFreakBoy!, in mid-discussion. ----- Meg: "Okay, so explain this big revelation to me." Louis: "Well, it's kind of complicated. You grew up Catholic, right?" Meg: "Yeah, but me and the church were already splitsville for a while before you showed up in my life." Louis: "Granted, but you do remember the whole trinity deal, the Father, Son and Holy Ghost thing?" Meg: "You kidding? With the raps on the knuckles I got from Sister Margret Ann's ruler, I'm not exactly likely to forget something as simple as that." Louis: "Just checking. See, several of my people's religions have their own versions of the three, except ours are slightly different from yours." Meg: "How so?" Louis: "You white people ... your culture sees everything in terms of twos. Good and evil, black and white, dark and light - all paired off against one another, with little credence or concern given to the areas of infinite possibility in between, which you simply deem gray. Even your expressions of threes are reduced to dualities, into matched sets of equal opposites, by shunting all three of your God's identities into the Heavenly Host, while creating a dark set of three to represent the Devil down below." Meg: "Wait, stop, hold up a minute. What does any of this cross-cultural theology have to do with the matter at hand?" Louis: "Look, believe it or not, I sympathize with your impatience for once. However, you can't simply digest the abbreviated version of this philosophy to understand its relevance to our current situation. It needs to be absorbed fully, if you want to recognize its significance." Meg: "Fair enough. I suppose I've trusted you this far with our son's safety, so it'd probably be kind of petty to yank the rug out from under you now, after everything else we've endured together. I would request that you hurry up and get to the point as quickly as you can, though." Louis: "Trust me, this explanation is as close to the Cliff Notes abridged text as you're going to get. The point is, twos don't apply in the real world. Yes, while order does indeed have an opposing force in chaos, and creation is admittedly defined in large part by the countering balance of destruction, this does not necessarily mean that all chaos equates to destruction, nor is it wholly composed of creation. Rather, chaos is comprised of both creation and destruction, so instead of a pairing, there is a trinity, an ever-turning wheel of balance, between creation, order and destruction, all of which flow into one another." Meg: "Actually, now that you mention it, I do remember you telling me a little bit about this cosmology before, back when we were living together, and you were teaching Dream all those traditions and legends. Didn't these three deities have names, besides creation, order, and destruction?" Louis: "Count on it. The spirits have identities, just as do your Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Among some of the tribes, they're referred to as the Wild, the Weaver, and the Worm. The Wild is the personification of untamed nature, of all the limitless potential for life and birth and new things to come from the earth and grow towards the sun and sky. The Weaver is another term for the fellow my tribe liked to call Grandfather Spider, who shapes the formless, boundless, chaotically swirling, raw dreamstuff of the Wild into coherent patterns, into his orderly patterned, beautifully woven webs. And the Worm is death, corruption and decay, the harbinger of rot and a signal of the breakdown and dissolution that will always eventually overtake the Weaver's webspinning efforts, no matter how diligently he tries to maintain his architecture. For while it's tempting to classify the Worm as evil, as does Christianity by bestowing upon Satan the title 'Lord of the Flies,' even the despair and destruction that it brings is necessary, because this performs the function of breaking down the order into chaos once more, a form of chaos that can be reborn into the Wild, and molded yet again by the Weaver, and on and on, spiraling into infinity." Meg: "It certainly sounds like a perfectly peachy, Lion King-type 'Circle of Life' deal ... except that there's got to be a catch, or else we wouldn't be having this conversation. Is that a fairly accurate assumption to make?" Louis: "You've always been much smarter than you make yourself out to be. Yes, something did happen to shift the balance of power in this previously calibrated equilibrium. Some tales speak of the Worm's obsession with oblivion growing so great that it threatened to swallow the universe whole, causing the Weaver to try and bind it in his webs, while other tellings argue that the Weaver went insane first, becoming blinded by the infinite possibilities that lie within the Wild, and therefore resolving to snare everything in its patterns, until the universe would be frozen in one single static moment in time. Whichever version your prefer, the fact remains; both Grandfather Spider and the Lord of the Flies are aiming to wreck the universe beyond repair, and only the Wild can stop them." Meg: "Dream's enemies - earlier, you said that this entire epiphany revolved around a way to defeat the Hooded Hood and this ... PsychoAcidPervGal!, by gaining a clearer picture of who and what they truly were." Louis: "Let's start with the Hooded Hood. From the details I've been able to piece together, his one goal is to restructure the universe's confusing continuity of multiple parallel alternate streams of reality into a single, orderly, unchanging timeline ... to weave his webs around all of the chaos of existence, until the raw dreamstuff that the universe is based upon is choked of its life. And then there's this PsychoAcidPervGirl!, whose methods and mental state are just as random as Dream's, except that instead of bringing about joy and peace and the excitement of childhood discovery and imagination along for the ride, her vicious brand of chaos brings about only bloody bodies, ruined realms, and shattered souls, tearing down everything in her wake without worrying about building it back up; after all, why should any corruptor care for the corpses she feeds upon? As for Dream - " Meg: "No. Goddamn you, you are not going to tell me what I think you are, because I refuse to accept what it means." Louis: "One is the Weaver, the inheritor of Grandfather Spider's fanatical desire to bring about order. The other is the Worm, the misbegotten progeny of the flies and maggots who hasten decay, because all she was ever capable of learning how to do was destroy. And the last is the Wild, the defender of all that was and will be again, the embodiment of not only the path less traveled, but of every path in those woods, including the ones that never had the opportunity to exist in the first place. Dream is the last one, the one destined to put things right. He always has been." Meg: "Oh, really? Look, maybe you don't have as much of an emotional investment in this, since you did sort of abandon the both of us back when Dream was just a little kid, but not only did I give birth to him, but I also had the sole responsibility of raising him, and loving him, and protecting him from all the hurt and ugliness the world had to offer, all while you were God knows where. And NOW, you have the f--king audacity to tell me I have to sacrifice my baby, to some bulls--t war of the Gods, in order for the universe to survive!? You go to Hell!" Louis: "He doesn't have to die! Don't you see? That's what I was getting to all along! Now that we know who and what the Hooded Hood and PsychoAcidPervGirl! are, it means that we can figure out their strengths and weaknesses, and use that understanding against them, as surely as any weapon!" Meg: "But how is Dream supposed to beat them both? Won't they just team up and gang up on him?" Louis: "Hey, if I were them, it's the strategy I'd employ, except that even if they do, it won't matter. See, one of the secrets behind the trinity is that not all three members are necessarily equal in their levels of power, for in reality, creation far outweighs order or destruction on that scale. While the chaos of creation can contain errant elements of order and remain chaotic, order cannot contain chaos without itself breaking down into chaos; likewise, whereas creation originally began without anything else having been destroyed beforehand, destruction could never have come into existence without something having been created first. And that's why the Wild is more powerful, and why its defender will win; by definition, the Wild is creation, and creation includes everything, even order and destruction. Neither one of the other two can boast such an accomplishment." Meg: "Oh, come on, enough with the Zen of warfare ... on a down-to-earth scale, how can Dream manage to beat two opponents who - and believe me, you have no idea how much it pains me to say this - could pretty much clean his clock without even breaking a sweat?" Louis: "You want practical answers? Fine. I can switch to math professor mode; it's not all that long ago that I was studying to be an electrical engineer at MIT, back when we first met. Consider. Both the Hooded Hood and this other character, the girl in the Reverse CrazySugarFreakBoy! costume, are consummate professionals at what they do. Not only do they have just about every damned battle strategy ever devised right at their fingertips, but they can counter just about any attack plan their enemies could manage to devise, because they're both smart enough never to underestimate their opponents, because they always assume that their adversaries are at least as good as they are, smart as they are - " Meg: "Remind me again, was this meant to comfort me? Because if so, it's really not working." Louis: "You're not listening! Dream's enemies expect him to be just as strategic, just as smart, just as good as they are, so that they can easily defeat him even if he's at his best ... but what they don't seem to realize is, Dream ISN'T a strategist, and he ISN'T even close to being as good as they are. They're expecting a smart, capable, responsible, rational, sane superhero? Well, then guess what? They've already screwed themselves, because what they're actually getting is the most wonderfully scatterbrained arch-rival ever. They WANTED the strength of Superman and the smarts of Batman; they're GETTING Dreamcatcher Foxglove, the CrazySugarFreakBoy." Meg stared mutely at Louis for half a second before a shocked grin spread across her face. If what Louis said was true, and she had never trusted his words more in her life, it meant that all Dream had to do to win was be more insane than his enemies. The unshed tears that had been gathering beneath her eyelids finally spilled out, not from crying, but from her laughter, as she and Louis broke out into infectious giggles, which built into howls of delight. The bad guys were toast. The still-reposting CrazySugarFreakBoy!, who's somewhat amused by the slight differences between his characters as they appeared then, and the way they act now ... |
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