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This message Premiere #34: Forgotten Corners 1 was posted by And now the first of two issues that draw all the strands together and add a few more, from... aw, like you haven't guessed! on Tuesday, October 1, 2002 at 05:14.
Premiere #34: Forgotten Corners 1
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Who's Who in the Technoverse
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Who's Who in the Parodyverse
It wasn’t so much that Chronic wanted to help the Lair Legion in their battle against the Thermonuclear Man who was marching out of the Gothametropolis Badlands to threaten the city proper. It was more that he was fed up of the nuclear-powered villain proclaiming his unstoppability every three minutes as he took the best that Donar, CrazySugarFreakBoy!, Hatman, Trickshot, Exile, NTU-150, and dull thud threw at him. “Man, your dialogue is completely boring!” the Satanic guitar-wielder complained. “So you have the power of the atom bomb. I’ve got the backbeat of the underworld. Listen!”
The chords screamed over the battlefield, liquefying the very ground around Thermonuclear Man. CSFB! rolled and pulled Hatman from ground zero just in time, knowing that the Nuclear Technician’s facemask would not protect the pro-tem leader of the Lair Legion from the sonic barrage. Donar winced as his ears started bleeding but he hardly cared about this latest hurt since he was already seared and scarred from his three hours contest with the enemy.
The sound reached right into Thermonuclear Man’s mind, shredding his thoughts, making him blind, stupid, weak. He reacted by instinct, reaching out luminous green hands to loose a stream of charged particles that would melt a battleship at Chronic. And suddenly the musician realized that he was about to die. And that his guitar was gloating about it.
Then Exile was between him and Thermonuclear Man and the energy manipulator was somehow absorbing the blast and redirecting it away into cables attached to NTU-150. The armored Legionnaire was using the power to hurl more sonic pulses of his own, and the atomic villain was staggering.
“Keep it up, man. It’s working!” dull thud urged Chronic. With a weird revelation Chronic realized that this must be what teamwork felt like.
Angry and hurt and confused by this sudden turn of events, Thermonuclear Man exploded.
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Mad Wendy woke from a troubled sleep in a place she didn’t know in a world that wasn’t hers. The dolls hospital was dark and strange, with hundreds of broken toys staring down at her from the shelves with dead glassy eyes. Before she could decide what to do the ghostly yellow nervous systems slid silently through the walls of the shop and lunged at her.
“No!” Mad Wendy cried, brining to bear psionic abilities that could reshape reality. The fever dreams around her exploded like popped balloons, but the ones rising from the floor beneath her seared through her body, wracking it with sickness, collapsing her like a house of cards.
Yellow Fever himself ghosted through the door. “Did you think we wouldn’t find you in the end, my dear?” he asked the fallen telepath. “Or be ready for your tricks?”
Mad Wendy screamed in her fever. Her eyes glowed. There was an actinic flash. And then the Sorceress tumbled beside her on the marble floor.
“I admit that’s a good one,” Yellow Fever admitted, staring at the thin pale witch who tried to stagger to her feet and fight. “But your protector looks more dead than alive, and I’m happy to take her the rest of the way.”
The fever dreams closed in on Whitney Darkness. Technopolis wanted the most dangerous psionic on the planet alive, but they had no use for a supernatural adept that was still breathing.
And Whitney vanished. Then Mad Wendy vanished too, leaving a baffled circle of floating fever phantoms circling nothing.
Three miles away under cover of a ruined barn in Thomasville, Virginia, De Brown Streak gently laid the two women he’d carried off on the soft straw and tried to figure out how rescuing Sorceress for Xander the Improbable meant that DBS owed the sorcerer supreme a favor.
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Pegasus laid in the rubble under the collapsed Technopolitan recycling plant unable to move because of the severed spinal column that was legacy of her battle with Premiere. Her mission on behalf of the mysterious cosmic consortium called the Constellation who granted her the energy powers she used was not going well.
Penny was in her half-winged-horse half-human shape, and she was buried under half a ton of wreckage. But she didn’t need to move to generate cosmic blasts, and the longer she spent forming them the more powerful they were.
This one vaporized the debris atop her all the way to the surface. She was feeling pretty peeved.
Once freed, Pegasus painfully shifted her shape to her winged human form. It was a sign of the seriousness of her injuries that some of the nerve damage was still present even in a different shape. She could stand and move, but it hurt a lot.
“Ouch,” she allowed herself to say. Then she scurried off into the tunnels. She still had a mission to perform.
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spiffy’s symbiotic fern hurled aside the rubble of the partly-collapsed Lair Mansion operations room so Mark Hopkins could scramble from the debris. Dreamripper, Moodswing, Rimshooter, Detonator, Dimensionweaver, Flashfry, and Quake were waiting for him. “Ouch!” winced spiffy, in anticipation of how much this was going to hurt.
Messenger was down. Lisette, Amy Racecar, Flapjack, even HALLIE were out of the fight. Xanadelle was nowhere to be seen, presumably under the rubble. It was down to spiffy.
The ferns that had burrowed under the floor rose up around the science villains and sent them tumbling. For a glorious moment as Moodswing was hurled into Flashfry’s plasma discharge and Dreamripper was throttled into unconsciousness it looked like the ferned phenomenon might win. Then Moodswing turned his hope into abject despair and Mark Hopkins crumpled to the ground in sobbing surrender.
“Kill him,” Dimensionweaver commanded. “Kill all of them. No prisoners to escape this time. Wipe them out.”
There was an unpleasant bubbling sound from all around them. Thick white foam oozed from the foundations of the damaged building, rising to knee then thigh too quickly for them to react.
“What the crap…?” demanded Detonator before the viscous slime had passed his chest and filled his mouth.
“I’ll have you know I take my hygiene very seriously,” bubbled the Manga Shoggoth. “And also my video watching. I was quite happy to sit out the rest of your sordid little human war like I usually do. Then your boss interfered with my TV monitor signal. In the middle of Tenchi’s embarrassing bit. I take that personally.”
Dimensionweaver desperately teleported the science villains away. The Manga Shoggoth growled and resumed a more humanoid form.
“You saved us!” spiffy gasped, recovering from the overdose of emotion.
“Oh yes,” the Manga Shoggoth noticed for the first time. “It appears that I have.”
___________________________________
The Science Police were having trouble getting past the rioting in the streets of Technopolis. The reordered science heroes and the released science villains were using lethal force to scatter the people who had escaped from their habi-domes when the power went down a couple of hours ago. Order was being restored, but the temporary chaos made it hard to track the escaping Probability Dancer who had caused it.
That was why Dr Zalas had authorized the use of the Tech Pack. The heavy weapons hunting drones were rarely used inside the bounds of Technopolis because they combined the best sensory apparatus known to science with enough armament to level a mountain and no discretion or regard for property or civilians whatsoever. But Zalas was hurt and angry and the Red Watchman was demanding results. What was a few hundred more casualties?
Dancer was getting exhausted. She was in a city the size of Hawaii where every walkway and corridor was monitored. She could twist probabilities best by moving and by now every muscle in her legs, arms, and back was screaming for rest. But rest would kill her.
She dodged down into one of the darkened and closed public art forums. The gallery was filled with sterile, perfect images and symmetrical sculptures. Even the art was orderly and predictable in Technopolis. She was so tired she didn’t notice the science villain on the mezzanine floor until they were almost on top of each other.
“Another one,” she hissed, dropping into a cat-stance and ready to swing a soft-pumped tow into his throat.
“Hey, hold it!” the science villain called, taking a nervous step backwards and raising his hands in front of him. “We’re not all killer psychos like Count Armageddon, you know!”
“I’d like to believe that,” Dancer admitted, “but so far the evidence is against me.”
“No, really,” her adversary promised. He was a youngish looking man with a worried expression above his sophisticated tech body-harness. “Look, some of us just like the challenge of rebelling against a conformist society, right? Look.” He gestured to the holoportrait of Woman Instructing Her Progeny On Basic String Theory. The picture had been reprogrammed so that woman now appeared to be blowing a party squeaker.
“Heh,” grinned Dancer. “Nice one.”
“Well, it’s okay,” the science villain admitted. “But really I need to leave a rhyming clue about my next outrage to tweak the noses of the science heroes and drive Steel Enforcer or Clockwork Soldier or Premiere nuts trying to figure me. Nobody gets hurt, but some people get made to think.”
“So you’re, what, a science anarchist?”
“They turned my obedience chip off, sent me out to hassle perfectly innocent people, and expected me to conform like a good little sociopath?” objected the villain. “Nuh-uh. I just scrambled my obedience chip frequency, reprogrammed the central database to forget I exist, introduced a random security sleeper program so I could pass round Technopolis unnoticed, and got on with my groove.”
“Nice,” admitted Dancer. “I just blew up the main power grid. You make reprogramming the Technopolis central computer sound so easy.”
“Oh no,” admitted the science villain. “It’s a work of genius. I’ve done it five or six times now, but then again I am Hacker Nine.”
“Nice to meet you, Hacker Nine,” Sarah Shepherdson grinned. “I have a rebellion against conformist society that I’d like you to consider…”
___________________________________
Exile burned. dull thud raced forward so that Cressida could transmute the fire that enveloped the overloaded energy-shifter into D&D products (flame into game), but even then it was clear that Rick Foreman was out of the fight. In absorbing a full scale nuclear discharge the rebel Legionnaire had gone well beyond the safe limits of his powers.
Thermonuclear Man reformed, puzzled about what had happened. CrazySugarFreakBoy! tangled his unbreakable yo-yo cord around the villains feet and hurled the other end to Donar. “Do it, big guy!”
The thunder hemigod heaved, spilling Thermonuclear Man to the ground. Trickshot placed a screamer arrow into the science villain’s left nostril with pinpoint accuracy. Hatman came in with his bowler hat on and sent the enemy tumbling away again. NTU-150 doused the area with the last of his rad-absorbent foam. Chronic smacked T-Man from behind with a riff from Born to be Wild.
Thermonuclear Man dug his fingers into the seared soil and sent out energies that shattered the surface for a half mile around, spilling the heroes and disrupting their attacks. He felt that people had forgotten how powerful he was.
“Now,” he promised, “Everyone dies.”
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- Premiere #34: Forgotten Corners 1 - And now the first of two issues that draw all the strands together and add a few more, from... aw, like you haven't guessed! - 05:14 on October 1, 2002
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