Tales of the Parodyverse

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killer shrike
Wed Feb 18, 2004 at 11:46:22 pm EST
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A couple of reposts
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The next Mr. Epitome story features Artemis, who hasn't been seen in a while. So I figured I would repost her two appearances so people can have an inkling on who the character is. The new story should be out Friday.




It was midnight several time zones away as Martin Sesno and a kid he was selling to ran for their lives. Their drug buy had been interrupted when the package Martin gave to the grimy, acne-scarred teen was shot out of his hand.

The bag lay punctured on the ground behind them, hit by the long translucent shaft of an arrow designed to be all but invisible to the naked eye. A figure strode past the site of the interrupted drug bust, wrenching the arrow from the ground and nocking it again.

The second shot tore through Martin’s too-heavy-for-summer Starter’s jacket, sending him spinning. He got a brief look at his attacker, tall and slender, before he was able to round the corner of the darkened alleyway onto a deserted side street.

“Ooof!” the buyer tripped and ran into him, almost knocking him to the ground. Martin pushed the smaller kid down hoping he would serve as a distraction for whatever mental case was after them.

The archer took the corner with smooth precision, lifting her bow high and firing another arrow. It zipped through the air, a streak of black against the night sky, and arced downward. The trajectory brought the shaft down through Martin’s left Timberland just as he planted to take another corner. The arrow pinned his foot to the ground. His leg buckled and down he went, screaming in agony.

From his prone position he got a better look at his attacker. It was a woman, close to six feet tall, carrying a black recurve bow in her right hand. She wore a sleeveless black tee shirt, black carpenter jeans, and high top running shoes. A grey blindfold completely covered her eyes, tied under a black short-brimmed baseball cap. She also had on the traditional grey armguards, wrist guards, and shooting gloves of a competitive archer. She cast another arrow at Martin as he went for his gun, shattering its barrel and leaving him at her mercy. Then she went to work on the kid.

He had gotten up swinging, but the woman feinted to avoid his charge. She then kicked at the back of his knee, which forced him to the ground. Martin watched in horror as the archer grabbed the top of the boy’s head and with a flourish drew a short curved blade and slashed it across his neck. The geyser of blood was visible from ten yards away. The archer left her first victim and, knife in hand, walked towards Martin Sesno. He began begging.

“Please, please don’t kill me. I have money. Take it, please.”

The dark-haired woman didn’t say a word as she pulled the missile from his foot. She wiped the blood from the broadhead on his teal Paradopolis Turkeys jacket before replacing it in her back quiver.

“I’ve got his-” he nodded towards the dead boy’s figure, “five hundred, and I can get more. Please, I have a kid.”

Finally she spoke, “What a shame it is some poor child has you for a father figure. Give me the money.”

Martin complied, handing over the cash with trembling, bloodied fingers.

“I’m going to let you live, Martin Sesno. But our business tonight is not concluded. I require sources in Mr. Velvet’s organization, even ones as insignificant as you.”

“I know lots of stuff about Crushed Velvet,” he offered hopefully, seeing a chance for survival.

“Tell no one of our encounter, Sesno. I have other contacts in this city, and if I learn you’ve violated my trust you are a dead man. Now leave.”

He awkwardly rose. The girl, for that’s all she was, despite her size and demeanor, sheathed the knife, “Run,” she advised.

Martin Sesno ran as fast as his broken foot would allow.

Artemis watched him hobble off before turning her attention back to the limp figure she had left on the ground thirty feet away. She walked over to the body and knelt beside it.

“How’s that for hardcore?” she asked the corpse.

Jerry Luckbridge, third year drama major at the University of Paradopolis, opened his eyes, “Your kick hurt,” he replied.

“Sorry. Guess I’m not as good an actor as you, Jer.”

Jerry wiped the stage blood from his face and pulled the blood pack and pump used to simulate his slit throat from under his sweatshirt, “We need to get out of here before someone sees us. You got another target lined up?”

Charlotte Ouk took off her cap and teased her short glossy hair, “Yeah. There’s a pawnbroker who supposedly holds cash for Velvet’s dealers. Tuesday night I want us to pay him a visit and add him to the infrastructure.”

Artemis gave the shorter man a peck on the cheek and nocked an arrow. When cast it released an opaque cord no thicker than fishing line. The arrow struck home somewhere above their field of vision before powerful micro-winches in the arrow’s shaft reeled in the line with enough force to pull the 140 pound teenager skyward. She gave her partner a wave.

“I’ll call you,” she said happily, before disappearing over a tenement’s roof and out of sight.


3(2) Short Stories about Mr. Epitome


Story Three: The Long Shot Kid


Charlotte Ouk is dreaming again. In her dream, she was five, and was listening to the armored man degrade her family.

“Parasites,” Doc Toxic spat, “You are all nothing but diseased parasites.”

Charlotte didn’t understand the man eleven years ago; she had been a recent, and illegal, immigrant to this country, and knew only her native Cambodian. But after years of obsessively researching the insane chemist and his plots, she knew that’s what he was saying as he stood menacingly before the terrified masses of Third World refugees. There were Cambodians, Laotians, Chinese, Koreans, even a few Central Americans and Mexicans. Toxic and his men had rounded them up, taken them from their hovels and sweatshops and, in Charlotte’s family’s case, straight off the boat.

Doc Toxic’s pale, emaciated visage looked skull-like from behind his plexi-glass helmet, “But we’ll soon be rid of you. And others like you.”

The mercenaries who served the former government scientist began jamming hypodermic needles into the bare arms and legs of their prisoners. Before they injected Charlotte the young girl made a decision she would not give them the satisfaction of seeing her cry.

“This virus kills in 24 hours. Enough time for you to spread it to your fellow aliens back in their hidey-holes. Just like roaches,” Doc Toxic exalted.

The hazmat suited soldiers of the Plague Tyrant began loading the confused and oblivious people into a pair of semis. Charlotte, her parents, and her two older brothers were near the end of the line, so she got to see the roof of the abandoned bus garage tear open and the red, white, and blue figure of Mr. Epitome drop down to save them.

Except he didn’t. He captured Toxic and his men, of course; there was never any doubt that would happen. But he and the finest minds of the Center for Disease Control were unable to prevent the mutant smallpox strain from killing almost all of those infected.

Only Charlotte survived, and she nearly succumbed as well. Those tense, feverish moments in the makeshift trauma ward outside of Oakland play through her mind. She recalls the Exemplary Man himself injecting her with the vaccine, just in time.

“I’m sorry,” she thinks she heard him say, “I failed you. Just like I will again.”

That’s when Artemis wakes up. Briefly the archer is unsure of her surroundings. Then she remembers and curses.

“Bet Messenger never falls asleep on stakeouts,” she hisses.

Artemis peers through her blindfold enmeshed with low-light and infrared fiber-optic enhancements. Her target, a runner for Paradopolis’s drug lord Crushed Velvet, is still at home. The vigilante waits for him to leave and head to one of Velvet’s stash houses to make a pick up. It had taken her a while to get this far up the organization’s ladder, and tonight’s work could lead her to names on paper: property owners who might be squeezed for additional information to build a case against the criminal.

The apartment’s light goes out. A slim man in a hooded sweatshirt comes out the building’s front door and walks briskly away. From her position on an adjacent rooftop Artemis casts a swing-line arrow to a nearby edifice and prepares to follow him.

She adjusts her cap and smiles. It will be a righteous bust. Dad will be so proud.




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