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Bring On The Bad Guys: The Return Of CrazySugarFreakBoy's! Arch-Foe Into Regular Continuity, And A Prelude To The Coming Of The One Who Will Soon Be Known As CrazySugarFreakBoy's! Greatest Enemy Ever ... Friday, 13-Aug-1999 20:51:00
The countdown begins. Belle Reve Penitentiary, Louisiana, the prison which houses almost every super-powered criminal on Earth in the DC Universe. Six hours ago. The explosion was felt as far away as Metropolis and Gotham. The entire facility was plunged into chaos, as a full-scale riot ensued among the inmates. Even worse, the only superhero team on hand at that moment to contain the escaping costumed psychotics was the Goofball Gauntlet, a newly re-christened band of former stupidly-powered supervillains who were making their current debut as less-than-effective but well-intentioned semiheroes, led by the Lair Legionnaire who wasn’t called CrazySugarFreakBoy! for nothing. Aside from field leader CrazySugarFreakBoy! himself, the roster’s on-call roll call included Kite Knight, Roller Rocket, Spectrum Spectre, Armored Amphibian, Jujitsu Juggler, Clockwork Craftsman, Petroleum Prankster, Tubby Tachyon, Vertigo Vision, and Flying Furball, as well as deputy leaders Doctor Phobia and Action Figure, who charged into combat on their anti-gravity engine equipped, British-model, bi-level, Spice World-style Battle Bus, to calm the raging maelstrom. It was just as the tide seemed to turn in favor of the Goofball Gauntlet, what with the overdue arrival of the acknowledged major player superhero teams such as the Justice Society and League of America, the previously Teen Titans, and even the up-and-coming sidekick group known as Young Justice, that Doctor Phobia summoned CrazySugarFreakBoy! and Action Figure away from the main event, and back to the armored Battle Bus, for an emergency inner council of team leaders type meeting. CrazySugarFreakBoy!: "Did you see that? Belle Reve was built to withstand any possible assault or escape attempt, from even the most major-ranking bad-ass bad guys, and it was leveled – as in, to the ground. Not even a tag team wrestling match between Bane and Doomsday could put a dent in those walls, but whatever hit that building came down harder and hotter than a nuclear strike. I mean, what in the hell happened here?" Doctor Phobia: "Let me put it this way. Do you remember that five-person cell of the Thunder Monkey-Worshipping Brotherhood of Ass-Raping Student Loan Collection Agency Ninjas that you apprehended in Star City a few weeks ago? Even you commented on how quickly you’d been able to capture them. Well, the short explanation is that the Ass-Raping Ninjas happened here." Action Figure: "You gotta be kiddin’ me. Those Ass-Raping Ninjas are a joke. Dream hadn’t even been a superhero for a full day yet when he first threw down with those punk sons of bitches, and he told me himself that they were easier to take out than the Parademons of Apokolips. I mean, I ain’t entirely sure what that means on the superhero enemy scale, but it still sounds pretty weak." Doctor Phobia: "Admittedly, the Ass-Raping Ninjas have lost much of the unflinching discipline and brilliant formidability which had earned them their fearsome reputation in their native Asia ages ago, before Commodore Perry helped to open up the Orient to the overwhelming influx of cultural diversity from the West, but it appears as though someone has stepped in to whip their ranks into shape again. The evidence exists in the rubble that lies below us. Far from sloppy, their strike was flawless in its precision." Action Figure: "Yeah, I was kinda wonderin’ exactly how they managed to pull that one off, what with everything Dream said about how this place is supposed to be so invulnerable and all." Doctor Phobia: "Simple. All five members of the cell were equipped with surgically implanted miniature nuclear-level explosive devices, camouflaged by so much organic wetware as to be effectively undetectable even by the most intensive of X-rays or potential metahuman gene scans … such a presence of highly advanced machinery in and of itself indicates an unsuspected amount of outside funding and deep inroads into the legitimate technology industry. Then, at an appointed time of day and place on the prison grounds, that tiny band of Ass-Raping Ninjas managed to punch, kick, stab, shoot, kill, and sodomize their way through at least twenty professionally trained guards and nearly five times a greater number of their fellow inmates – most of whom, by the way, possess a lethal array of super-powers, which the completely human Ass-Raping Ninjas do not – before they reached the weakest structural point of the prison’s construction, and simultaneously detonated the gamma-powered atomic charges in their own chests, blowing away both themselves and every last brick laid at the foundation of that building." CrazySugarFreakBoy!: "Wow. That’s it. They wanted to get caught. That was why it was so easy. I kept thinking how even agents of A.I.M. or Hydra would have offered me a harder challenge, but I was working off of the wrong supervillain archetype. They weren’t just Stormtroopers who couldn’t shoot straight. They were the Suicide Squad members on their last mission. They wanted to get caught. They wanted to die. They even wanted the prison breakout to happen. They chose to use Gamma bombs for the same reason that Bruce Banner was working on inventing a Gamma weapon before he was caught in its radioactive blast and became the Incredible Hulk. It vaporizes all buildings and weapons and man-made structures and devices, but it also leaves all organic life intact; or at least that was the goal, anyway, before Thunderbolt Ross and all the rest found out about the unfortunate side-effect of turning big and green and mean and having your pants go purple. It looks like the people who are supplying science stuff to the Ass-Raping Ninjas managed to get the formula down right, though; a weapon of destruction that won’t kill." Action Figure: "But that doesn’t make any sense. After all, why would the Ass-Raping Ninjas be willing to off themselves, just to start up some prison riot that’s just gonna get stomped out by the resident superhero community anyway? Seems like an awful waste of time and effort to me." Doctor Phobia: "That’s right. But it’s our time and effort that they’re wasting. Because we’re all busy in this region of the country, fighting the brush fire war of putting out a super-criminal insurrection attempt, our attentions are unfocused and easily distracted away from wherever it is that the Ass-Raping Ninjas, and most probably their new mentors and employers as well, are putting their plans into motion. This entire turn of events is imbued with the intricate orchestration of a moderately skilled puppet master, cautious enough to take the proper care to hide behind the scenes, and patient enough to wait quietly for precisely the right moment to pull each of our strings so as to elicit the desired reaction." CrazySugarFreakBoy!: "Okay, so what are we waiting for? These guys don’t need us here anymore. You said it yourself, and it’s especially true now that even the splinter superhero groups have shown up at the scene, from the Grant Morrison-revamped Global Guardians to the Bob Layton-reunited Living Assault Weapons, with the Forgotten Heroes lineup including Animal Man, Resurrection Man, and The Ray thrown in for good measure. We need to send the Goofball Gauntlet alarm signal to our teammates to book back to the Battle Bus, so that we can set out in search of the Ass-Raping Ninjas’ secret headquarters … or, you know, at least do some sort of Dark Knight detective work." Doctor Phobia: "Not to challenge your authority as chairman, Captain America, but before you get carried away on your proactive trip, might I suggest another course of action? You’ll recall I mentioned my hypothesis that our enemy seeks to use the strategy of distraction against us, by causing so much trouble that we can’t concentrate enough to keep an eye out for otherwise suspicious signs. If I’m correct in my theory, then the very first path that the Ass-Raping Ninjas, as well as those powers controlling them, would expect us to opt for would be that of devoting ourselves to the end of locating them and interfering with their plans. By going down the road of retribution at the exclusion of all the others, we run the risk of casting aside important clues, such as the information which I gleaned from a scan of the Battle Bus internet information resources. According to the assorted news clippings which I’ve collected online, a familiar face has reappeared on the Seattle scene formerly patrolled and protected by Green Arrow and Black Canary – an area which I understand has since become your base of operations, Dream. Apparently, a teenaged girl with luminescent pink skin is bouncing around the Emerald City, clad in a stretchy spandex-like costume whose raspberry red corresponds to the shade of her short bobbed hair, and whose plum purple hues match that of her wide almond-shaped eyes, instigating all kinds of harmful havoc and playing particularly dangerous pranks upon random passerby, and perhaps the most significant detail of all, she’s been tagging certain zones with her own distinctive graffiti signature … that of a round, red and purple, smiley face logo. Remind you of a certain arch-nemesis you haven’t had to deal with for a while?" CrazySugarFreakBoy!: "It can’t be her. I mean, she’s gone. As in, disappeared. The whole entire timeline she came from just kind of winked out of reality after the Hooded Hood’s first attempt at retroactively revising the continuity of the universe. How can an alternate history character like PsychoAcidPervGirl! even exist anymore, much less be alive, in a Post-Crisis On Infinite Comic Book Covers Parodyverse?" Doctor Phobia: "There are two traditional means by which those divergent elements that separate the parallel universes of hypertime may be permitted access to flow into one other’s continuity streams. The first is commonly referred to as a scorched earth retcon, in which all previously documented history is erased from the page and rewritten from the origin point onward, and only a character whose conscious awareness was displaced in the space-time continuum at the moment of such a retroactive revision has any hope of retaining his memories of his or her history as it existed before this dramatic reordering of events. The second method of crossing the gulf between the streams is much more subtle, for it involves taking advantage of the already acknowledged history, and expanding upon its undisclosed details without contradicting what has been revealed to the readers beforehand, rather than simply wiping it out and starting entirely from scratch. Now, given the fact that we haven’t found ourselves suddenly shifted across into the 'What If?' world which had spawned PsychoAcidPervGirl!, in which CrazySugarFreakBoy! had been transformed into a dark monster driven by his failure to save the lives of his teammates, we must assume that the first avenue for introducing her character into our reality did not occur. However, Dream, the contradictions and gaps in the story arcs concerning your past – most of which are incomplete to begin with – are perhaps sufficiently large enough to allow for the possibility of PsychoAcidPervGirl’s! presence in this plane. She was your twin sister in an alternate line of continuity in hypertime, so tell me; do you have any siblings that you know of in this particular reality?" CrazySugarFreakBoy!: "Nope. Always been an only child. No brothers or sisters, either older or younger. You know, it – it’s actually pretty weird, because I remember that Mom and Dad did try for another kid, back when I was still just a little boy myself, but … Mom had a miscarriage, I guess. It’s all jumbled up in my head, ‘cause it seems like one day, she was telling me how I was going to have a brand new baby sister to look after, and then the very next day, her tummy wasn’t big and round anymore, and she was crying, and she and Dad were holding on to each other as hard as they could, like something outside of them that I couldn’t see was trying to tear them apart. I tried kissing Mom’s tears away from her cheeks, just like she would do for me whenever I scraped my knee or hit my head or got any other sort of owwie, but I got the idea that it just made ever feel even more sad, because she grabbed ahold of me and hugged me so tight that it almost hurt, and told me that she would never ever ever leave me. I could tell that she wanted that to comfort me, but the way she said it scared me more. Um, does that help any?" Doctor Phobia: "*A-hem* Oh, yes, I believe it’s relatively safe to say that brief little tidbit illuminates quite a lot about your possible connection to this universe’s PsychoAcidPervGirl! counterpart. Ms. Foxxx, I do realize that this subject is bound to be somewhat painful for you to discuss, especially in front of your son, but given the percentage of uncertain variables that he admits to in his own recollection of these events, not to mention the dire importance of determining the true nature of his relationship to this dangerous adversary before he’s forced to find a way to defeat her, I would ask you for an honest and unabridged account of your memories on this subject matter." Action Figure: "Can the sensitive therapist sh*t, pal. Look, I get that you’re walkin’ on your tiptoes – or stumps, or whatever the hell you call those knobs at the ends of your stubby lil’ elephant legs – to avoid bringin’ up the ugly stuff for my emotional benefit, and hey, for what it’s worth, I do appreciate the effort, but I hate bein’ talked at like I’m some sorta goddamned Faberge egg so fragile that it’ll fracture at the slightest touch of pressure. Understand this; I don’t break that f*ckin’ easy, okay? I’m a tough girl … Christ, I tie my own shoes an’ everything. Don’t you dare condescend to me, ever. Got it?" Doctor Phobia: "Certainly. Forgive me if I seemed at all patronizing. However, I must point out that you still haven’t addressed my question. The answer, if you please?" Action Figure: "Nothing much to tell, besides what Dream already said, except – okay, please bear in mind, I ain’t none too proud of it now, but by the time I was done with my days at high school and college, I’d put down probably way more than my fair share of … certain mind and mood-altering chemicals which weren’t necessarily legal, as well as all kindsa different families of alcohol, so even though I’d eased off most of my booze and drug consumption before I even got knocked up with Dream, it still caused complications somethin’ fierce during my pregnancy. Jesus, I almost thought I’d lost him at least once or twice ‘fore those nine months were finally up, and even the remotest chance that my beautiful baby would be gone before he got a chance to come into this world scared me to the depths of my soul. It’s the reason you’ll never again see me slug down shots of Tequila like I did at that age. Unfortunately, the damage had been irreparably done by the time me and Louis decided to press our luck and try for another success at parenting, and this time my youthful years of substance abuse had caught up to me – the ultrasound said we were going to have a daughter, but … we didn’t." Doctor Phobia: "Thank you for sharing, madam. *Hmph* Suffice it to say, I think we’ve found the divergence point between our own established continuity of history and that of the parallel timestream which PsychoAcidPervGirl! had inhabited. I will admit, it remains a mystery to me how her character managed to accomplish the feat of straddling two dimensions without a proper conduit to connect her original reality to that of our native universe, but I’m already developing a handful of potentially valid explanations. Dream, you’ve racked up the highest scores of anyone else in your dance-card of prior confrontations with this girl, whomever she might be, so therefore, although I am loath to ship any soldier off into a risk-filled scenario without the proper armament of knowledge required to protect him or herself, I fear that behind that doorway lies the last avenue left to us, if we wish to learn anything about this mirror image stranger whose ties to you are so disturbingly intimate. You’re an adult, so I encourage you to follow whatever council you will. I’m merely tendering my suggestions for your benefit." CrazySugarFreakBoy!: "Hey, never had any problems with accepting advice. Besides, it makes sense. Seattle’s an automatic home court advantage for me anyhow. One request, though; while I’m embarking on my solo sightseeing investigation into appearances of my evil twin doppleganger along the University District, I want you to gather up the rest of the gang and pursue whatever leads you can pick up related to any and all Ass-Raping Ninja activity. If you’re right about them wanting us to follow their trail, they might actually get more paranoid if we don’t. Oh, and until I come back, my mom’s in charge of the team – no objections, Mom. I don’t care how often you argue to the contrary … you know how to do this job. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t have been nearly as good a mom as you are." Action Figure: "*Sigh* If you say so, hon’. Promise you’ll come back to me in one piece, though, okay baby?" CrazySugarFreakBoy!: "You bet. See you guys soon!" With that, CrazySugarFreakBoy! leaped out of the Battle Bus, which was incidentally still hovering in mid-air over the smoldering ashes that remained of Belle Reve Penitentiary, and whipped his yo-yo out to wrap ‘round the wing of a neighboring quinjet being piloted by a certain shield-slinging, stars-and-stripes wearing Avenger, as he landed at ground-level on his tiptoes by swinging himself quickly and casually down to earth in classic Spider-Man acrobatic fashion, all while Doctor Phobia and Action Figure watched him with parental concern from the open bus doorway, far above in the sky. Doctor Phobia: "Alright, Ms. Foxxx, now that your son is safely out of earshot, why don’t we drop the false fronts, and you tell me the real reason that your relationship with his father fell apart?" Action Figure: "Excuse me? Exactly what in the hell are you insinuating by that remark, you inhuman bastard? I don’t see how the intimacies of my romantic life are any goddamned concern of yours … " Doctor Phobia: "It’s very simple. You can either continue lying – to me, to your child, and to yourself – and the eventual end result of that course of action will be that whatever nightmare you fear most, which you’re seeking to prevent from coming about by staying silent, will be brought to life precisely because you have elected to conceal the truth. Or, you can admit to me those shameful secrets which I’ve already begun to suspect anyway, and we can work together towards the common goal of constructing a viable solution to this predicament. You see this situation as terribly complex and untenable, whereas I believe that the facts of the matter are indeed quite straight-forward. If you do not reveal to me that which you seek to keep hidden, your son will die. You have already lost one child, and I sense that your guilt has convinced you that this tragedy was your fault, due to your own admissions of self-centered and short-sighted negligence. Without any concrete evidence so far to sway me to either side, I myself refuse to pass judgement upon the accuracy, or possible lack thereof, in your self-recriminating perceptions. All that I am certain of is that you do not wish to lose your only remaining child." Action Figure: "Fine. You win, you emotionless motherf*cker. Whatever you want to hear." Doctor Phobia: "There was no miscarriage, was there?" Action Figure: "No. No, there wasn’t." Doctor Phobia: "Nor did you yourself choose to terminate the pregnancy." Action Figure: "You know, that surprised me more than anything. I mean, Jesus, here I was the one that was always shouting about women’s reproductive rights during my student activist stage in the Sixties, while Louis was always stressing to me how life was sacred from the moment of conception. And yet, when the doctors told us that my history of alcoholism and drug addiction, along with the difficulty of Dream’s pregnancy, probably meant that this new child I was nurturing inside me would be incurably intellectually deficient, to the point of requiring round-the-clock care her entire life, the first thing Louis told me was since he hadn’t consented to a white man’s marriage with me, he therefore had no right to impose his moral code upon me in the area of childbirth. He cradled me in his strong arms as I sobbed, and said it was my body, and my choice, and that he would support me and stand by my side no matter what, but all the while, it turned out I was going to be the one who just couldn’t stomach the thought of going through with it. What made that damnable choice all the worse was that the doctors had also been gracious enough to inform me that the evidence of mental impairment might not appear until the poor kid was nearly five, by which time I knew I would be too emotionally attached to let my little girl get sent off to some f---ing institution, even if it honestly was in her best interests. So, I carried my baby girl to term, all the while conducting comparison shopping at the assorted adoption agencies for the quality of care that they offered, and I gave her away to her foster family almost as soon as the labor had ended – I couldn’t even bear to hold her as a newborn, because I was sure that if I didn’t, there was no way between heaven and earth that I’d be able to summon the strength to let her go. As for telling Dream, well, that wasn’t even an option. It was hard enough on this four-year-old innocent to handle the concept of a miscarriage, much less … I mean, I would wake up after naps and find him laying on my stomach, his tiny arms stretched out as far as they could reach to hug my huge belly, and when I asked him what he was doing, he smiled sweetly and said that he wanted the new baby to feel loved, and he’d start kissing my bare stomach and talking to his 'little sister.' God, I hated myself for so long over what I’d done, and even though he never said a negative word to me about my choice, I could just see in his eyes that Louis was absolutely heartbroken over it. Yeah, sure, there were a helluva lot of other factors that definitely contributed to the breakdown of the meaningful love we had once shared, but in a sense, it felt as though the loss of our child was the cancer that ate away at our bond, weakening it just enough so that we’d both be vulnerable to the temptation of all the petty arguments and spiteful blame games that ensued later on." Doctor Phobia: "But, in another sense, could it not be said that something good came from this period of despair, since the tragedy of losing your daughter in such a fashion inspired you to derive as much joy as you could from the son you still had, no matter how unbearable the circumstances of your life at the time, even when Louis himself was no longer a part of the picture? After all, you seem to forget, I’ve watched you with Dream; the devoted loyalty of your protective impulses towards him, and the genuine affection of your concern for his welfare, are outstanding even by the highest maternal standards. Considering the hand you were dealt with while trying to raise him safely to adulthood, I’d estimate that you made a brilliantly efficient use of your severely limited resources. Indeed, even an architect of Ios on the planet of Calliston could not have overseen the engineering of a more finely constructed temple." Action Figure: "Yeah, right. That’s me, the picture perfect role-model f*cking mommy, who abandons one infant for fear of getting too emotionally attached to ditch her once she’s tired of caring for her, while jeopardizing the life of her other baby by allowing him to suffer for her own mistakes." Doctor Phobia: "Granted, you have committed undeniable errors in judgement, but not nearly as innumerable a list as you hold yourself accountable for. And after having listened to your brief recounting of the obstacles you’ve somehow overcome, I believe that there have been many crossroads during the course of your life at which there was no correct choice or path. Despite your occasionally irrational lapses of logic, you are to be commended for your efforts. Also, while we’re on the topic, I must apologize for the deliberate brusqueness of my methods. With Dream, our current test is one of crisis and response." Action Figure: "Hey, I was the tough bitch who acted like she could take it, and got all annoyed when you tried to be nice and polite, remember? Although in retrospect, considering the heap of unsolicited and undeserved compliments which you so generously threw my way just now, I suppose that I was perhaps slightly unfair in referring to you as, um, an inhuman bastard, and, ah – oh, f*ck, what was the other one … ?" Doctor Phobia>: "An 'emotionless motherf*cker,' I believe was your specific phrase. I doubt I’ll ever comprehend the human logic behind turning such odd sexual concepts into verbal obscenities." Action Figure: "*Pause* I’m eventually going to have to tell Dream … aren’t I? I mean, you know, about everything. There’s just – sh*t, there’s really no other choice, is there?" Doctor Phobia: "I don’t see any way around it, no." Action Figure: "He’s in serious trouble right now, isn’t he?" Doctor Phobia: "More than you know. This next stretch coming up is fated to be an especially dangerous time in his life." Action Figure: "Christ, how could it be any worse?" Doctor Phobia: "For one thing, I don’t think PsychoAcidPervGirl! is acting alone. Especially if she truly is the offspring of this universe alone, I can’t conceive of how she could possibly be accomplishing the feats that have been ascribed to her in the online media reports, and yet still be operating independently of anything but the most powerful and influential of organizations. Like the Ass-Raping Ninjas’ newfound easy access to their next-generation hardware, there’s no feasible means by which she could have acquired the tools which she employs on a regular basis in the commission of her crimes. Plus, the date of her sudden debutante debut coincides far too closely with the Ass-Raping Ninjas’ kamikaze assault here at Belle Reve; Occam’s Razor dictates that such an obvious display of concerted coordination between two otherwise unrelated terrorist attacks on nearly opposite ends of the continental United States indicates the presence of an unseen influence remotely controlling both sets of forces. The most frightening trait of this PsychoAcidPervGirl!, however, is her possession of a personally customized SillySuit … aside from its darker color scheme and smaller size, to fit the more proportionally petite teenaged girl who’s wearing it, it’s virtually identical to the one created by Dream." Action Figure: "Okay, I guess I’m not getting what the big deal is about that specific aspect of her character as a supervillain. From what I recall, the last PsychoAcidPervGirl! owned a SillySuit too, so why shouldn’t this one?" Doctor Phobia: "Just follow my supporting arguments to their logical conclusion. The Pre-Crisis PsychoAcidPervGirl! from the parallel timeline had acquired a SillySuit, yes – but purely because Dream’s counterpart in that alternate reality had invented one for her as well, out of his original and only batch of Impossibilityium, the empiric element which both universes’ versions of Dream whipped up almost entirely by accident, in experiments whose randomly ideal alchemical conditions neither Dream was ever able to duplicate afterwards. You see, there is no known means of reproducing even the smallest sample of Impossibilityium, given the fact that its mere existence contradicts every previously documented law of science and physics; after all, it’s utterly unreasonable to expect one to replicate a substance that was never supposed to be able to come into being in the first place. But here’s the really perplexing piece of the puzzle: If the SillySuit used by the PsychoAcidPervGirl! from another world was part of that initial batch of Impossibilityium that had been whipped up by the Dream of that history’s continuity line, then where did the PsychoAcidPervGirl! who is native to our dimensional plane of existence obtain her own SillySuit?" Neither one said anything for a few seconds after that. Within minutes, the Battle Bus had swooped down low enough to scoop up their remaining teammates in the Goofball Gauntlet, who were soon soaring along on their way towards the last reported location of the Ass-Raping Ninjas, their anti-gravity engines humming from the urgent speed of their quest, as every member of the crew felt overwhelmed by the sense that a terrible storm was brewing just over the horizon. In truth, their immediate future would prove to be far worse than they ever could have imagined. CrazySugarFreakBoy! promises you that this chapter will contain surprises so astounding that you never, ever would have expected them ... |
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Copyright © Looksmart, Ltd., 1997-1999
All rights reserved.
