SG: Rad #97 (4/4): Pants"

(continued from part three, preceding...)

***

Esteban and Rumiko landed on the lawn outside Shadebeam and
Slithis's house, and were surprised to see they were not the only ones
around. Two three-foot-tall, two-foot-wide people in what appeared to
be sleeveless red vinyl tank tops and shorts stood on the porch. One
was smoking a cigarette. The other was going through what appeared to
be either a set of dance steps or an elaborate dramatization of a need
to find a port-a-potty. The two watched their landing with no
apparent change of emotion.
"They showed up around the time we got here," Esteban said.
"Remember that big machine with the drill thing on one end? Looked
like it came straight up from underground? It did."
They reminded Rumi of one of the beings she had seen with Erasmus
Fancy in her vision: the squat and scowling scientist-type humanoid
who had pressed the button that had formed the picture her vision was
based on. Akane had called them---
"Burrolans," Rumi whispered. "Those are Burrolans, right?"
Esteban cocked his head at Rumi. "Um, yeah. You met them
before?"
"No," she replied. "You?"
"Sure," said Esteban. Coco swooped in and settled on his
shoulders. "There were a few at last year's... hey, Urbla, that you?"
The Burrolan who had been practicing a dance stopped and grinned.
Rumi could not say that the face that smiled at her was handsome by
her standards--aside from the general meatiness of the face, the
wideness of the mouth, and the flatness of the nose, there was the
uni-ness of the brow to consider--but it seemed friendly enough.
Urbla shuffled forward a couple steps and waved.
"Right on, Esteban," he said, his voice crackling as if he had
been smoking all of his life, which as far as Rumi knew was possible.
"Got twice as many of us here this year. All the elders'd split their
jumpsuits if they found out. Where's Lemon?"
"He's, um, off somewhere," said Esteban. "Miss Moroboshi wanted
to see us."
"Oh, yeah, go on in," said Urbla. "Koshi and Squappala were just
in there sayin' hi. We'd go in, but, to be honest, we don't like her
hellbeast. Too... yappy."
Esteban nodded, agreeing without agreeing. "Right... say, this
is Rumiko Moroboshi. She's Shade... I mean, Miss Moroboshi's niece."
"An honor, Rumiko," said Urbla. The other Burrolan put out her
cigarette and shuffled forward. "This is my girlfriend, Stemlo. Say
hello, Stemlo."
"Hello, Stemlo," said Stemlo.
Urbla scowled. "Lemon has been attempting to teach her surface-
world humor. Either it is not going well or it is; I'm not sure what
I would consider more unfortunate." He shrugged, which on his barrel-
like body seemed more of a jiggle. "A bunch of us are joining the
Hottentottians, the humans, and Polinski in their desert party
tonight. You going to join us this time?"
"Not old enough yet," said Esteban. Urbla shrugged at this.
Stemlo resumed smoking her cigarette. "We'd better go in."
Urbla nodded, then went back to practicing his dance moves. Rumi
followed Esteban through the door and into the living room. Shadebeam
Moroboshi was on the couch near the fireplace, waving her hands as she
talked. The Burrolans, Koshi and Squappala, were listening as they
drank from brown bottles.
"...so then, well, I just had to have some feta cheese, right?"
Shadebeam said. "I mean, after everything I smoked, I had big-time
munchies. I had to have cheese, and it had to be feta. I can't
remember why now, but... well, anyway, I was with William and Thelma,
you've met them, the Dalan ambassadors to the Ottsamaddawidu
Confederation, right? Well, Thelma had these cheeses she'd gotten in
trading stuff earlier that day, and said one of them was a feta. Only
it turned out it was this cheese laced with a temporary body-
modification spell."
One of the Burrolans started laughing at this point, which caused
liquid to come out of his or her nose.
"I mean," Shadebeam continued, "feta cheese, futa cheese, what's
the difference in a vowel, right?" The other Burrolan started
chortling now. Shadebeam held her hands up, palms flat, about two
feet apart. "This much!" she exclaimed, to the evident and messy
delight of the Burrolans. "Man, that was a good year." She looked up
and saw Rumi, Esteban, and Coco. "Oh, hey, guys, come on in, I was
just about to send out for you. Sorry, Kosh, Squap, I got some
spellwork to do..."
"Of course," said one of the Burrolans. "We'll see you tonight?"
"Hopefully," Shadebeam replied. "Slithis for sure." The
Burrolans nodded to Rumi and Esteban as they waddled past and out the
door. Shadebeam got up and headed for a corner of the room by the
door, which Rumi remembered earlier as being a sort of dining area,
but which was now empty save for a large, chalky circle containing
several unfamiliar symbols. "Sorry about that," she said. "Prepping
the translocation spell didn't take as long as I thought, but then the
Burrolans dropped in. Not the best time, but I've been trying to get
more of them to come around for years."
"They gonna let us see their city?" Esteban asked.
"Maybe," said Shadebeam. "No promises. Their elders don't even
know they come up here to party with surface-dwellers yet, though
Squap says they've gotten suspicious. Not sure how they'd take us
coming down there. Which is saying something, because no one bats an
eye when Mike Polinski uses their underground highways to get from
northern Alaska down to here and back every year."
Rumi wondered how Mike got from the surface to these 'underground
highways' and back. She tried to recall if any of her briefings on
Earth life had mentioned subterranean cultures, and decided they had
not. Shadebeam anticipated her question before she could ask it.
"According to them," Shadebeam said, "there's dozens of
civilizations below the surface of the Earth, and they either hate our
guts, think they're too superior to muck about with us, or are just
scared of us and have giant monsters on standby for if we wreck their
caves with a-bomb testing or something. They've got this shared mondo
super-tech that keeps us from detecting their cities and underground
highways. But it's pretty much the Burrolans who maintain the
highways, see, and they do as they please. They help Mike out, and
they'll generally help any of the underground civs with their
maintenance needs for a price. They're also the ones who fixed up the
Ancient Ones's underground shaft system back in the nineties, so that
the Allies... well, you won't find the Burrolans in the official
histories. Tale for another time. Let's get translocating!"
Esteban settled to the floor. Rumi expected to hear creaks and
groans from the wood flooring, but heard surprisingly little. She
remembered that nectarisite was supposed to be very light for all its
considerable strength.
"Where's Slithis and Roog?" Rumi asked.
"Sent 'em out the back door when Kosh and Squap came in," said
Shadebeam, as she dipped her fingertips into a whitish powder that
turned orange as it clung to her skin. "Slithis could'a stayed, but
Roog tends to think magic-time is play time, and that's not a good
thing for a yappy shoggeranian to think in the middle of a
translocation spell. This spell is for three, and I didn't want him
to barge into the circle and become one instead of me."
"You're going, too?"
"Can't just send you kids blind into a possibly dangerous
situation," Shadebeam said, as she blew on her fingertips, turning the
orange stuff back to white. "If you were Lemon, well... nah, I guess
not. Anyway, if it weren't for what... um... you said the Green Lady
told you in the vision, I wouldn't be taking you along. Esteban,
here, I sort of have to, 'cause he's the connection. They've got his
brother, which is our best way of fixing on the location of where he
and Cendra and Eivandt and Glum are being held."
"But, The Programmer---"
"Will probably be there," Shadebeam interrupted. "Can't imagine
the Green Lady would put you onto his track if she didn't know you'd
run into him at a vital point. The stupid wannabe zombies sound kind
of like his work, anyway. You guys ready? Esteban?"
Esteban let out a breath Rumi had not realized he had been
holding. For a second, he had his panicked look from before. But it
passed, replaced by determination, or a good facsimile thereof.
"Ready!" he declared.
Coco, who had been playing with Esteban's hair, telepathically
said *we few... we happy few!* He then leapt off of Esteban's
shoulders, twisted in midair, and flew into the left thigh of Los
Pantalones. Rumi was momentarily startled to see the metal ripple and
eddy like liquid as the bonobo disappeared beneath its surface. It
soon returned to an apparent solid state.
"You... um... don't feel him moving around in there, do you?"
Rumi asked.
Esteban thought about it, and shook his head. "Don't feel much
of anything, really. Not specific to my legs, I mean, like a feeling
my legs are inside something. It feels like Los Pantalones *are* my
legs. I think Coco de-forms when he's in there, and he runs like a
program."
"Like an AI."
Esteban shrugged. "I guess. Never thought about it that way.
An AI, in convenient monkey form."
"You ready, Rumi?" Shadebeam asked, as she stepped inside the
chalk circle in the corner.
"Ready," said Rumi. She and Esteban walked into the circle.
"Anything we need to do?"
"Just keep all of you inside the circle until the ride has come
to a complete stop," said Shadebeam. "And count your fingers and toes
once we've translocated."
"Have you ever lost---"
"Gained, actually," said Shadebeam. "And not on my hands or
feet. Now *that* was a good year... anyway. No chit-chat while I
cast the spell."
Rumi tried to relax, as Shadebeam closed her eyes and reeled off
a series of unfamiliar words. She glanced over at Esteban, who saw
her look and gave her a weak smile. She started to smile back, before
a movement caught her eye.
A lot happened in the following few seconds. Everything in her
sight grew impossibly bright. The front door opened, and Lemon
charged in, a book in his hand. He shouted something, but it was
impossible to hear over the rush of silence. Behind Lemon was
Slithis, trying to catch him. Roog was at Slithis's heels, spinning,
jumping, and slavering. Lemon crossed the circle---
A flash. Then, darkness.
Rumi wondered if she had passed out. Then, overhead fluorescents
came on.
She was no longer in Shadebeam's house. Around her were racks
filled with metallic bits and pieces, tools for doing things with said
bits and pieces, and several small lockers. In the corner was a large
metal cart holding parts of a couple primitive Earth computers and a
couple LCD monitors.
Neither Esteban nor Shadebeam were in the room. Nor, for that
matter, were Lemon, Slithis, Roog, Esteban's brother, or anyone else.
Had the translocation spell gone wrong?
Rumi slumped against the rack in the center of the small room.
If she was in enemy territory, she did not just want to call out,
but....
*Coco?* she thought. *Are you out there? Anyone?*
Nothing.
"Crap," Rumi muttered. "Okay." She took a deep breath, trying
to assert control the way she had been taught. "Okay. No panic.
Panic is the enemy of the mind. Panic is the mind-killer. Panic is
the ants in the pants. Panic is the monkey in the wre... wait, that
can't be right. Rrgh!" She took another deep breath. "Okay. No
panic. Maybe we're just a bit separated. Maybe I'm the only one who
went anywhere. Maybe I can still do this. Find my mom and Cendra and
Miguel. Stop the pretend zombies."
She paused, thinking about this, then shook her head with
frustration.
"Right," she grumbled, "next I'll be thinking I can just sit here
and all of a sudden, in through the door, will just burst--"
All of a sudden, in through the door, a man just burst. Though
his white dress shirt was torn, his black tie was in tatters, his
black dress slacks were filled with monkey-shaped lumps, and his eyes
were bulging out in ways they only ought to on the surface of Mars,
she recognized him. The man in the picture. The one that Akane, as
'Miranda Satori,' had told her dad and her Uncle Manny to find.
"--The Programmer!" she exclaimed.
"I've got demon monkeys in my pants!" he yelled. One of his legs
slid out from under him, and he crashed into a corner rack filled with
assorted small items. "Demon monkeys! In my pants!"
He regained his feet, and, still bug-eyed, started trying to
unbuckle his belt. Rumi, whose teachers had also instructed her on
what to do when an unwelcome someone insisted on showing why his pants
were bulging, gave him a psychokinetic blast. Right in the demon
monkeys.
The Programmer slumped to the ground, still bug-eyed. All at
once, the monkey-shaped lumps in his pants vanished, and two demon
monkeys appeared next to him, looking dazed. They shook it off,
looked up at her, looked at the door, and disappeared.
"I named," said The Programmer, his voice a wheeze, "the kind
one... Trevor...."
If The Programmer had any more revelations of this nature to
make, he passed out before he could do so.
"Crap," said Rumi, as she regarded The Programmer's passed-out
form. "What am I going to do *now?*"

WHAT IS RUMI GOING TO DO *NOW?*
WILL THE PROGRAMMER RECOVER?
WILL HE REGRET OWNING PANTS LOOSE ENOUGH TO HOUSE TWO DEMON MONKEYS IN
ADDITION TO HIMSELF?
WILL ESTEBAN, ASSUMING HE'S EVEN AROUND NOW, OVERCOME HIS FEAR AND BE
A GOOD SUPERGUY?
WILL LEMON LEARN TO DIAL HIMSELF DOWN ONCE IN A WHILE?
WILL RAD, POWERLESS, BE ABLE TO CONTEND WITH THE WILES OF CAPELLA?
WILL RAD, POWERLESS, BE ABLE TO MAINTAIN HIS TAN EFFECTIVELY?
WILL THE NEXT EPISODE BE EVEN LONGER THAN THIS ONE?

There are no answers to these questions.

--
Copyright (c) 2009 by Gary W. Olson. All Rights Reserved.
--
Gary W. Olson
swede at novitious dot com
Superguy LiveJournal: http://community.livejournal.com/superguy_list/
Superguy Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=47273370926

SG: Rad #97 (3/4): in my

(continued from part two, preceding...)

***

Rumiko and Lemon walked along a broad path that Rumi remembered
as leading back to the highway, and eventually Shadebeam and Slithis's
house. People were still at work on setting up the entertainments and
gathering areas for the upcoming Burning M00se festival, but they
seemed fewer and farther between than before. Esteban floated along
with them, sometimes checking readouts from the monitor she had seen
him and Coco installing earlier into Los Pantalones, more often
playing some sort of game with Coco, who was apparently trying to do a
mid-air dance timed with Esteban's hand movements. Lemon's role
appeared to be to try to distract Coco with waved hands and jumping.
Rumi watched, the problems that had resulted in her being way out here
in the desert seeming far away.
On remembering this, they immediately seemed much closer. She
must have made a face, she realized, as Coco noticed, and immediately
swooped closer.
*You okay, Rumi?* he thought at her. His voice in her head had
the sound of a spaced-out boy, though his words seemed sober enough.
He gave her another hug, then did a pirouette.
"I'm okay," Rumi replied. "Just... I was forgetting for a bit.
I don't want to do that."
"You can hear him?" Lemon asked. Rumi nodded. "She can hear
you?" Lemon asked, this time looking at Coco. Coco grinned. "Why
can't *I* hear you?"
"Lem," Esteban started, "you know---"
"Bioelectric charge," Lemon interrupted. "That was it, right?
When she charged you up, she formed this connection to Los Pantalones,
and through them to Coco. Damn!" He spun around, then laughed.
"The answer was here all along!" He stopped, then peered at Rumi.
"But how did you generate enough current?"
"It was more like it took the charge from me," said Rumi. "And I
don't know how much current... it took me by surprise. I can't even
generate current, usually. He told you my dad's Rad, right?"
"Yeah," said Esteban. "His tan is totally wicked. How come you
don't have one like his?"
"I did when I was born," Rumi replied, thrown by how quickly
Esteban's train of thought switched tracks. "But by the time I
reached ten, it faded. Docs said it was a long-term side-effect of
the work they had to do so I could be born in the first place. The
psychokinetic abilities I inherited from my dad... they didn't play so
well with the bioelectricity on my mom's side. One side had to be
kinda suppressed, and it ended up being the bioelectricity. I still
generate electricity... it's not like they took those organs out...
but that power gets absorbed by the psychokinetics. Usually."
"But it was crazy, right?" Lemon asked. "Hottentottians don't
generate much current. I mean, more than humans, sure, but still
under a couple hundred milliamps even when flying. And the zaps don't
kill, even though they hurt like a mofo and tingle for days... and can
be kinda fun. But Los Pantalones needed more than a couple hundred
milliamps, right? I mean, that's what we figured---"
"Right," said Rumi, to forestall another ramble. She assumed he
knew what he knew about Hottentottians from talking with those working
on and attending the festivals, but refrained from correcting Lemon on
several misconceptions. One among these corrections was that a great
deal of current was required for flight. In fact, the 'tactile
telekinesis' that almost every Hottentottian possessed that gave them
flight capabilities required no more current than was used by any
flight-capable superguy on Earth, who did not have the organs the
Hottentottians had that produced bioelectric fuel. A more germane
correction would have been that fully adult Hottentottians *could*
generate more current, if they made a concerted and willful push to do
so. If they wanted to generate enough current to kill.
If Los Pantalones had forced her to generate such a current,
bypassing her genetic twists that otherwise would cause the current to
dissipate, then it was not such a mystery that she had lost
consciousness when it happened. Possibly, it was a lucky thing she
had not been more badly damaged.
"Not sure what happened," she said, aware that they were still
waiting for her to say something. "Must have been... one of those
things." She shook her head, which did little to clear it. "Look,
Esteban, you and I have to get back to Shade's house. After I told
her what was going on, she said she could teleport us to where your
brother was taken. My mom, my uncle, and Cendra are probably there
too."
Esteban's eyes widened, and his armored lower half slid about in
the air as if he was about to wipe out. He recovered, holding out his
arms as if they factored in to his balancing act. He had, long ago
that afternoon, told her that the pants worked by tapping into his
mind and becoming an extension of it, which Rumi took to mean using
his nervous system to transmit data and receive commands. It appeared
that the interface was even more intimate than that.
"She's sending us?" he asked, sounding incredulous.
"I told her about... the stuff that happened," said Rumi.
"Including the dream."
"Dream?" Lemon asked. His eyes flicked from her to Esteban and
back.
Rumi did not feel like going into details, and there were some
details--such as the fact that her aunt, Akane Moroboshi, had
apparently projected herself into the dream from wherever she now
lived--that she could not reveal. But she wanted to tell Esteban as
much as she could. His situation was hers.
The version she revealed left out Akane's identity--Rumi referred
to her as 'the Green Lady,' as that was how she had appeared in
Esteban's dreams--and the entirety of the second half of the dream,
which had been personal to Akane and to Rumi, and would have meant
nothing to Esteban. But she did tell about being suspended above the
jungles of Central America in 1899, and seeing a bronze-gold airship
called the _Subtler Than Light,_ commanded by an 'evolved bonobo' who
looked human and was named Capella. She told him about a floating
bronze-gold bubble occupied by a gorilla-sized bonobo named Erasmus
Fancy and four others, and Los Pantalones, being flown by a boy in his
late teens.
"My grandfather," said Esteban. "James Cartier."
"No... way!" Lemon exclaimed. He gaped at Esteban. "Dude!
That's so crazy! He was in my dream that one time, too! In one of
the Cities of Gold! You remember, I told you the Green Lady said---"
"You know her, too?" Rumi asked.
"She's been in three of my dreams," said Lemon. "All stuff that
had either happened or was going to happen. The Green Lady said
that's just how it happens when she shows up."
Rumi nodded. Akane had said something similar to her.
Coco, who had been enjoying being cradled in Rumi's arms, looked
at Esteban, and immediately floated over to him. Esteban had a look
close to panic, for no reason that Rumi could see. Lemon, however,
seemed to know more about it, and placed a hand on Esteban's shoulder.
"Hey, Este," he said. "We talked about this, remember? You can
do this."
"But I've only got half a suit," said Esteban. "What good is
only half a suit? It didn't save my great-grandfather. I mean... I
don't think it did. He never went back to the East Coast. How can I
think I can...?"
"Can what?" asked Rumi.
"Be a superguy," Lemon replied, still looking at Esteban. "Ever
since he and the armor... I mean, ever since he got the armor... he's
wanted to be one. Dreamed of it, even."
Rumi did not ask if it was one of the 'significant' dreams that
accompanied a visit from the Green Lady. It was significant, all
right, but not in that sense.
"Something will happen," said Esteban. "I don't know everything
about why the armor does what it does. You remember what happened the
first time I tried to fly, right?"
"Dude, that was crazy, sure," said Lemon, "but I totally pulled
you out of that dumpster before anyone saw. And you've gotten so much
better at it now. I mean, look at you! You're totally in control and
stuff. You'll be awesome!"
Rumi watched Esteban's face as Lemon spoke, and saw the tension
pass. It was clearly not the first time Lemon had had to give Esteban
a pep talk. She thought about her initial impression of Esteban,
about how he was a boy who spent far too much time in his room instead
of being out with friends, and how different he seemed when he was
around the one who was clearly his best friend. Had she been the one
trying to give Esteban some confidence, Rumi thought, she would not
have had such an effect.
"Okay," said Esteban, exhaling the last of his panic. "Okay."
He waited a few seconds, then threw in a third 'okay' for good
measure.
"Besides," said Lemon, indicating Rumi with a vague hand gesture,
"you're going to be with the girl of your dreams, right? No worries!"
"What?" Rumi asked.
"What?" Esteban asked, though the look he gave Rumi was not one
that suggested he had no idea of what Lemon was talking about.
Rumi thought fast. Aunt Akane had visited Esteban in several
dreams, more than one of which included Rumi. Akane had said that one
of them was the kind of dream where Esteban out to at least know who
she (meaning Rumi) was. Which could have indicated a variety of
activities, but was probably not along the lines of playing Parcheesi.
Lemon turned from Esteban to her. "Nothing. I shouldn't have
said anything. You just met, right? Crazy talk. Just crazy. Don't
mind me, I babble. Ask them." He waved at Esteban and Coco, the
latter of whom nodded. "Still, I'm in L.A. when school's in. Dad has
custody of me and sis then."
"And you're telling me this..."
"Hey," he said, spreading his hands, "if you're not the girl of
his dreams, maybe I can be the boy of yours."
She should have been angry at what she said, or the wink he threw
in, but his smile was such that the emotion was never more than a
thought. Aunt Shadebeam was right, it was a smile that would lead no
place good, and for a moment, it was a place Rumi found appealing.
Only, she told herself, for a moment.
"Lemon, lay off," said Esteban. "We've got to get to Shade's."
Rumi wondered at the tone of Esteban's words. It sounded like
jealousy, but she had only met Esteban that day. Not that time
mattered--she had been smitten with Aran the day on Planet California
she met him, and was trying to resist it with Lemon. But she had
never thought she was the kind of girl someone would fall for like
that, and it felt strangely good to realize she could be.
Still, if Esteban's dream was at all prophetic... well, she liked
him well enough, as a friend. And he was on the average side of
handsome. So... not impossible, but not likely, either. Best, she
thought, to not assume she knew what Esteban's dream had shown.
"Right," said Rumi. "Shade's. Let's go."
Esteban was still looking at Lemon, and seemed to want to say
something else. But he just nodded, then floated next to her as she
walked. Their path took them through a narrow passage partially
occupied by a group of mages trying to both keep a large sphinx statue
animated and teach it the rules of volleyball. Rumi squeezed around;
Esteban and Coco floated over.
"I'll see you later!" Lemon called to them. "I'll just be over
there! Doing... doing that thing that's fun! And..." She missed his
last words, and did not turn back for clarification. Esteban and Coco
floated down to her side.
"I'm sorry about that," said Esteban. "He's kind of... who he
is. I mean---"
"I get what you mean," Rumi interrupted. Then she saw his
expression, similar to what it had been earlier when Shadebeam had
scolded him for using a stolen teleport-spell-laced bead to bring her
here, and checked what she had been about to continue with. She took
a breath, then gave him a smile. "He's fun to be around, you gotta
give him that."
"I just wish he could, you know, dial down," Esteban replied.
"Not all the time, I mean, just... once in a while." He took a
breath, let it out. Rumi tried not to giggle when she saw Coco mimic
the action. Esteban saw, grinned, and swatted at Coco, who stuck out
his tongue and flew a few feet away.
*He is right about one thing,* thought Coco.
"He... I know," Esteban said. He sighed. "I do good when I'm
not thinking about it. Like when I... um...."
"Like when you caught me when I was unconscious and falling,"
said Rumi. "Thank you for that."
"You're... welcome," said Esteban. "I think, ever since I bonded
with Los Pantalones and read great-grandfather's journal, I knew I
wanted to follow in his footsteps. Or contrails... doesn't that make
more sense? I mean, if he flies most of the time, he's not leaving
footsteps...."
"It works," Rumi replied. "Come on. Aunt Shadebeam's waiting."
She rose from the ground, employing her psychokinetics to fly
alongside Esteban and Coco.
"I don't know who won the race between you and him earlier," she
said, "but I bet I can get to Shade's house first!"
"You're on!" Lemon replied, a grin breaking over his features.
"I... hey, Coco! No head starts!"
The bonobo ignored them, flying between floating work-mages
carrying what looked like an enormous tentacle with a sock puppet at
one end. Rumi and Esteban took off after him, laughing as they flew.

***

Rad blinked, and tried without success to open his eyes. Small
hands were over his lids, keeping them shut. A weight on his back
told him the hands belonged to a monkey, likely of the demon-looking
variety. He was sitting on a flat surface, and his body hurt far less
than he would have expected from the unchecked plunge he last
remembered being on.
But being kept blind by a monkey would not do. He tried to blast
it back... and nothing happened. He tried to bring up his
psychokinetic shielding... and nothing happened.
"What's going on here?" he asked. At least, that's what the
voice that came from his mouth asked. Rad was quite sure he had meant
to say 'like, whoah, what's, like, going on here, like, y'know?'
A cacophony of monkey noises around him revealed that the monkey
on his back was far from the only one in the vicinity. The two hands
over his eyes disappeared, along with the weight on his back. He
opened his eyes, and saw he was on the deck of the _Subtler Than
Light,_ surrounded by demon monkeys. Some held cutlasses. Others
held daggers. Still others held overlarge but unmistakably gunlike
objects, not aimed at him but close at hand.
"Ok, which one of you is head monkey?" Rad asked. Again, he
compared what came out of his mouth from what he intended to say
("Like, okay, dudes, which one of you is, like, head monkey dude,
y'know?"). At once, he became alarmed. Something had happened that
had not only robbed him of his psychokinetic abilities, but had also
affected his brain, causing him to drop key words out of his speech.
"Take me to your leader," he said, hoping the monkeys would be
able to understand despite all the missing words.
The monkeys did seem to understand, for they made gestures
indicating that he should stand. He did. Next, they made gestures
indicating he should 'walk this way.' Before he could reply with a
hypothetical statement indicating what else he could do if he could
walk that way, they added the gesture to not make that sort of
statement. Rad withheld the statement. They walked.
Before ducking his head to enter a turret, Rad looked back at
the bulky shape of the _Vander Harkness._ Its movements were quiet
again, or perhaps they only seemed that way as he was inside the
shielding the _Subtler Than Light_ possessed. A fire raged unchecked
at one of the _Vander Harkness's_ corners. But the _Subtler Than
Light_ was not pressing its advantage. Not yet, at least.
If the deck of the _Subtler Than Light_ resembled, at least in
superficiality, an enormous version of a nineteenth-century warship
deck, its interior was sleek, rococo-styled, and submarine-like. Not
a cramped Earth submarine, to be sure--this was more along the
extravagant stylings of '20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,' only with lots
of rococo ornamentation larded onto the walls and door frames.
Moreover, it seemed the occupants liked their botany, as there were
leafy plants and ferns and even the occasional potted palm tree to be
seen. They passed other monkeys, who regarded him with a small amount
of curiosity before returning to their work.
"Rad," a voice crackled in his head. "...sssst...ssou there?
Ansss... ssway!"
"I'm here," he said. The demon monkey leading him gave him a
strange look, but did not stop. "My powers went away. And I suffered
some kind of brain damage, which is affecting my speech. I hope you
can understand me."
"...sssink this is the frequen... hello? Rad?"
"Still here," Rad replied. He and his captors had reached a
ladder, and Rad obeyed when the demon monkey indicated he should climb
down it. "Did you hear what I said before?"
"Yes," the voice answered, with a bit more clarity. He
recognized it as Elizabeth Tirkoff's. The onetime Healer was on board
the _Vander Harkness,_ and had apparently suspended her efforts to
telepathically locate the underground base now that Mighty Guy and
himself had opened up the way to it. "I can understand you fine,
possibly for the first time in my life. Did they fire something at
you that made your powers go away?"
"I don't think so," said Rad. He reached the bottom of the
ladder, another extravagant corridor that, in addition to fearsome
armed demon monkeys, also had a fruit bar and chocolate fondue
fountain. "It happened when I flew directly over their vessel. I
weakened and fell. I think the monkeys must've teleported up, caught
me, and teleported me down, otherwise I'd be in rougher shape."
"What are they doing with you?" Dr. Gigawatt's voice broke in.
"Are they interrogating you? You must resist their attempts to get
information out of you! Bhossi and Cla'rabhelle are rushing their
adjustments to our shields, but we need time! Do not let them torture
you!"
"Mmph?" asked Rad. He finished his chocolate-coated strawberry
and repeated. "What?"
"I said---"
"I'm okay," Rad interrupted. "I think I'm being taken to see
their leader."
The door at the far end of the corridor opened. The lead demon
monkey wiped the chocolate from his (the demon monkey's) mouth and
gestured that he should enter. He did, noting that none of the
monkeys followed him.
What he had expected to be a control room of some sort was, for
the most part, empty. Even the bronze-gold walls, which curved all
around, were free of ornamentation. An oval window--or possibly a
viewscreen made to look like a window--showed Dodger Stadium, and the
battle taking place in the parking lot. The stadium must have had a
backup generator, Rad thought, as its lights were still on, though the
surrounding area had gone dark due to the loss of the nearby power
station. They were too high up and too far away for Rad to pick out
details of the battle.
Rad walked to the opening, and found it was indeed a window. The
glass was thick, and somehow metallic to the touch. He guessed it was
actually nectarisite, the same metal that formed everything else on
the ship. Two buttons and a lever on a ball bearing were at the lower
edge of the window. When he pressed one button, the scene below
seemed to magnify. The lever oriented the picture, though the 'glass'
did not tilt or otherwise move.
In this manner, he was able to zoom in on the battle taking place
in the lot. Demon monkeys appeared and disappeared too fast to
follow. Pseudo-zombies and pseudo-ninjas fought them, displaying
surprising speed and strength, though it was often wasted on their
quicker and cannier foes, particularly when the zombies and ninjas
stopped to raise their hands and wave them about for no discernable
reason. Rad guessed a local radio station was playing a song telling
listeners to throw their hands in the air like they did not care.
His friends were on the ground now, doing their best to suppress
the battle and keep casualties on all sides to a minimum. Even Guido
was showing uncharacteristic restraint, using one of the lightest
grenade launchers Rad had ever seen him wield. Mighty Guy sailed by,
still hampered by monkeys who had discovered his ticklish zones. He
was lost to sight, but the implosion of a nearby warehouse revealed
where he had landed.
They were holding their own, but little more. Though HotFlash
and MeltDown were still in good fighting shape, Confusion,
Criticalman, and Guido had not been in the field in quite a while, and
it showed. At the moment, everything was chaos, but Rad had the sense
that the demon monkeys were gaining the upper hand, and they soon
would have the perimeter around the elevator shaft secured.
And then what? The monkeys could not get down the shaft
directly, else they would have done so already. So they were keeping
it open... so the _Subtler Than Light_ could do something.
"Hey, guys..." he started, hoping to get Dr. Gigawatt's thoughts
on the matter. He heard the door hiss behind him, turned... and
immediately clenched his teeth to keep his jaw from dropping.
"Hello, Mister Former Emperor Rad Moroboshi," said the woman
before him, her voice silken soft--not quite catlike, but close
enough. "I should say 'thank you for dropping in,' but that's rather
gauche, don't you think?"
Though about a foot shorter than he, she projected stature as she
walked toward him. Though she wore a black uniform that was clearly
military in nature--an impression back up by the insignia over her
left breast: three starbursts with a circle around the center burst--
it did nothing to lessen her voluptuous curves, or the appealing ways
they shifted as she moved. Her gold hair was shoulder-length and
braided in the back, and her eyes seemed a bit large for the rest of
her face. Her lips were lush, red, and at the moment curled up at the
edges. Were it not for the short, gold fur covering her face and
neck, she could have passed as human. Her perfume reached him, an
exotic scent he could not immediately identify, save that he liked it.
"Hi," he said, mildly relieved that his voice, though still
dropping important words such as 'like' and 'babe,' did not tremble.
"My name's Joe Moroboshi. 'Rad' is what everyone calls me."
She smiled. Though he saw no gaps, her teeth seemed sharp.
"Rad, then" she said. She stopped about a foot-and-a-half from
where he stood, then crossed her arms. "Just what should I do with
you, then?"
"Rad," Chalandra's voice crackled in his head. "Do not trust a
single thing she says. If that's who we think it issssqqrrkkkk...."
All at once, his head was quiet. He frowned.
"I had you brought here so we could be alone," she said. "People
listening in through your implant is not 'alone.' So, I cut them
off." She held no control, so Rad did not see how she had
accomplished this. "Now... Rad..."
Before he could stop her, she grabbed the collar of his t-shirt
and pulled him forward, so that he was bending down to the level of
her face. He felt strange, off-balance, defenseless... and oddly
exhilarated.
"...why do you act in defense of the wanted fugitive Erasmus
Fancy?" she asked. "He is no more a friend to your world than he is
to ours. You should be *glad* we have come to take him away!"
Rad remembered what Cla'rabhelle had said before about Erasmus
Fancy being considered an arch-criminal mastermind by the Hidden
Empire. But he knew little more about him besides that. So it was
time to stall.
"You never told me your name," he said, wishing she would let him
regain his balance.
"My name is Capella," she replied. "I'd ask if you were happy to
see me, but..." She paused, inhaled, then smiled her sharp smile.
"...I guess I don't need to."
Then she kissed him, and the world melted away.

(continued in part four, following...)

--
Elizabeth Tirkoff appears with permission of Eric A. Burns-White.
--
Copyright (c) 2009 by Gary W. Olson. All Rights Reserved.
--
Gary W. Olson
swede at novitious dot com
Superguy LiveJournal: http://community.livejournal.com/superguy_list/
Superguy Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=47273370926

SG: Rad #97 (2/4): Monkeys

(continued from part two, preceding...)

***

The immense, dusty grey elevator was covered with symbols and
signs. Rumiko Moroboshi stood before the hole where its sliding doors
had been, gazing into its dark interior. Not much light made it to
where she stood--though the artificial lighting outside was powerful,
only a fraction of it made it through openings in the surrounding
wooden pyramid--but it was enough to give the dead machine a
disturbing appearance of life. She stood, left arm outstretched, hand
nearly touching one of the elevator walls. She tried to imagine how
it had once been.
It had once moved underground, through the miles between the
surface and an immense hideout buried at the Earth's core, traversing
a network of passages created by the Ancient Ones to withstand the
immense pressures and heat of the interior. A network that existed--
sometimes used, often not--for millennia before a particular set of
circumstances forced its apparent destruction. A superguy,
Dangerousman, had set off an immense nuclear explosion in that temple
at the Earth's core, sending elevators in the network, or large chunks
of rock, shooting far above the surface. Some, unfortunately, came
back down.
Rumi did not know how devastating this particular impact had
been, but as Malaga, New Mexico, was still around, it had clearly not
been in the league of the infamous 'city-killers' that had wrecked
Montreal and Borneo. That only the doors of the elevator were
destroyed spoke volumes of the engineering superiority of these
'Ancient Ones.'
One touch, Shadebeam Moroboshi had said, had stolen half of her
magic, and infected her with a kind of madness. A being called
Leviam00se had intervened, revealing how an annual ceremony could keep
the madness at bay, though she would never be able to leave the
vicinity of the elevator for more than a couple days without going
mad. Building an immense wooden pyramid with antlers directly over
the elevator, and then burning it down while thousands of people
outside witnessed, was apparently what was needed to accomplish this.
Her hand lingered near the surface of the elevator. She could
feel no energies, felt none of the squamous menace she had expected
from Shadebeam's description, yet she could not convince her hand to
move the remaining inch to touch this artifact, built by a race as
alien to Hottentottians as to humans---
She only had a second to see a hand slap palm-down atop hers
before her palm hit the elevator. Alarm filled her as...
...nothing happened.
Rumi blinked. Nothing continued to happen. The metal beneath
her hand was cool and lacking in any sort of menace. The hand over
her hand was warm, its fair skin showing traces of a recent sunburn.
She turned her head and saw Lemon Rydell grinning back at her.
"Shade told you the story, right?" he asked. "Crazy, huh? She
makes it sound super-dangerous and stuff, but you touch it and nothing
happens! Hi, I'm Lemon."
Rumi slid her hand out from between his hand and the elevator.
"Um, yeah," she said, as his blue eyes glittered and made it hard for
her to string words together into sentence form. "I remember you from
earlier. The... um... the wort." She took a step back, and observed
that, unlike before, he was now clothed, wearing a t-shirt featuring a
cartoon coyote named 'Wile E,' a pair of black cargo shorts cinched
with a metal-studded belt, and formerly-black boots that had been
rendered by the desert into a permanent beige. His hair was still
wet, evidently from having obeyed Shadebeam's order to shower off the
wort his tampering with Slithis's beer brewing had covered him in.
"Hey, Este!" Lemon called, looking over at the crevice in the
structure that Rumi--and he, most likely--had used to get inside. "I
found her!"
"We're not supposed to be in there!" Esteban Veracruz called from
outside, in the kind of raspy voice one uses when one shouts something
one does not want to be heard by too many. "Come out before someone
sees you!"
Lemon snickered as he headed for the opening. Rumi followed him
out. Though the sky overhead was black and star-filled, the ground
around the pyramid was nearly as bright as day, due to all the
portable lights and floating orbs in the vicinity. Hottentottians,
Earthlings, Dalans, and members of assorted other species appeared
hard at work on the wooden pyramid and many other Burning M00se
structures in the vicinity. Only a few of these workers appeared to
take notice as she and Lemon emerged.
Esteban was hovering in Los Pantalones, a few inches off the
ground. He appeared surprisingly graceful as he swooped closer to
them, despite the fact that, in his bronze-gold armored 'battle
pants,' he looked like P.T. Barnum had attempted to fuse the top half
of a hispanic teenage boy with the lower half of a pro wrestler.
Coco, the two-foot-tall metallic bronze-gold bonobo, flitted around in
the air next to Esteban before zipping over to Rumi and giving her a
hug. Rumi, startled, nevertheless managed to pat the surprisingly
light creature on the back a few times before it flew over to Lemon
and repeated the hug.
"Hey, funky monkey," said Lemon, after releasing Coco. "I just
saw you five minutes ago, remember?" Coco shrugged and flew back to
Esteban. He did a few mid-air somersaults, then tousled Esteban's wet
hair, ignoring Esteban's feigned attempts at swatting him away.
"So what happened?" Esteban asked, having seemingly forgotten his
earlier concern that she and Lemon would be caught inside the pyramid.
"Did she touch it?"
"She totally did!" Lemon replied.
"So what happened?"
"Nothing happened," Rumi interjected, "when I touched *the*
*elevator.*" She paused. "Why? What was supposed to happen?"
"Nothing!" Esteban and Lemon exclaimed in unison.
The alarm in their voices was strangely amusing to Rumi, so she
softened her tone. "Has anything happened to anyone else besides
Shadebeam?"
"No one!" Esteban said. He shot a glance at Lemon for
confirmation.
"No one," said Lemon. "I'd know. Just about everybody has to
come try it after they hear the story. Doesn't matter who, what
species, light mage, dark mage, plaid mage, no mage... they get
nothin'."
"So the story's a lie?" Rumi asked.
Lemon shook his head. "One night," he said, lowering his voice a
bit, "my sister and I were playin' in our bedroom, and--this is before
we got that weird movie glass we got now, you seen that? crazy, huh?
anyway--Shade and Slith roll in, only we don't know who they are,
then, they're just this woman and this lizard dude with kaleidoscope
scales. And she's thrashin' around in his arms as he knocks on our
door askin' for help. I mean, dude. There may be just five houses
here, but three of 'em, that would'a gotten you a shotgun in your face
or somethin.' At least, back then. But they came to our house--she
must've told him my mom does magic, not really a mage, but she does
some doctorin' around here with it, when she's not trippin'--and she
got Shade back into her right mind. I saw it all from the bedroom
doorway. Shade was thrashin' and twistin' and her teeth were all
sharp and she was sayin' this really nasty stuff, like you don't wanna
hear, only it was kinda funny, especially the stuff with the cheese
grater and---"
"MIS-ter Rydell," a stiff and authoritative voice interrupted.
The three looked up at a Hottentottian engineer who had approached
during Lemon's ramble. He was an older man, with thinning black-and-
grey hair, a well kept van dyke-styled beard, and a leathery brown
face with an expression that made him look as if he had just swallowed
a frog. A hallucinogenic frog, Rumi guessed, upon seeing how the
conical horns on his upper brow were changing colors.
Lemon did not seem alarmed by the older man's approach. "Chief
Engineer Mysanga," he said. "Dude! You're partying early, huh?"
"This," said Mysanga, "is... for the work. *Everything...* is
for the work. Opportune orange!"
Rumi noticed another engineer, this one younger and blonder, at
Mysanga's side, holding a compu-tab that displayed schematics of some
sort. She was dressed as the chief was, in a leopard-print toga, and
though her face appeared completely serious, her horns were changing
colors as well. Mysanga said to her, "little fluffy waffles fling the
zeppelin toastward." The younger engineer nodded and adjusted the
schematics.
"I hope you're going to fracture local space-time again," said
Lemon.
"What?" Rumi asked.
"Last year," said Esteban, "my first year here, these guys
decided to hook up the autobuffet machine to the temporal flux
generators they brought over from their world. Totally fractured
space and time throughout the whole Burning M00se festival. There
was, like, three of me running around, four of him..." He pointed at
Lemon. "...and it made the festival seem like it lasted for ten days,
though it only really went the usual five."
"The Radians were all panicky and stuff," said Lemon, "and they
eventually got it worked out, but we were like, whoo-hoo! school's out
for-ever, and stuff. Crazy, right?"
"MIS-ter Rydell," Mysanga said. "Weasel hotcakes in my elbow.
We fractured space and time, yes. Unintentionally. Buttercup Europe
the sanguine trout. But we fractured it... with *flavor!*"
"What?" Rumi repeated, though by now she was not sure what she
was questioning.
"Only one off thing about it," Lemon said. "The time loops got
all bacony. And no, I can't explain that one. You kinda had to be
there."
"I interrupt your nostalgic reverie," Mysanga said, voice gaining
strength, "because I observed you and your hoodlum companions exiting
the pyramid, where you are not authorized to be. Ectomorphic
salamander, it is full of stars and cabbage. Shall I report you to
Miss Moroboshi, hmmm? Gerbilesque? Tampering with the structure
again?"
"It only collapsed the one time!" Lemon protested.
Mysanga opened his mouth to harangue Lemon further, when
something thunderous hit the ground nearby. A shadow cut off a good
deal of light, and the next voice shook the ground and those on it,
including Rumi.
"Are you bothering my friend?"
It was a booming voice, a deep voice... and a voice strangely
childlike, as well. Rumi looked up and saw the giant, thirty-foot-
tall man she had earlier seen assisting with the construction of the
antlered pyramid. He wore enormous tan cargo shorts and nothing else,
though as much of the rest of him was extremely hairy, he did not seem
to need to worry about the cold of the desert at night. His beard and
hair were streaked with red, gold, blue, green, purple, and colors in
between. In his right hand, he held an enormous piece of wood, from
which emanated odd, discordant sounds as a breeze passed through.
*That used to be his hockey stick,* Coco thought at her. The
bronze-gold bonobo floated from Esteban's side over to Rumi. *Mages
made it into a didgeridoo for him. He liked the sound.*
"Er, no," said Mysanga, looking up at the giant. "No, Mike.
Ribbet. Just, counseling. Counseling, yes. Through trees like cow
orchestras. How's the left antler coming?" High though Mysanga might
have been, Rumi noted, he could put up a good front, and clearly knew
enough to respect a giant primitive Earthling with a big stick.
"We just finished it," Mike the giant replied. He smiled,
revealing many cracked and missing teeth. "Now we go to the desert to
drink the funny juice and see colors and birds and zambonis."
"Right!" Mysanga agreed. He glanced at his assistant.
"Terranonga, the fish in my rhubarb. Avaunt!" The younger engineer
nodded and adjusted the schematics once more, before filing it away in
her toga. She followed Mysanga as he went to tell the other workers
it was time to knock off for the night.
"Thanks, Mike!" Lemon called up to the giant.
"You're welcome, Lemon, Esteban," Mike replied. "U! A! A!"
"All! The! Way!" Lemon and Esteban cheered back. Mike grinned,
waved his giant didgeridoo, and lumbered away. Rumi watched him go,
wondering what that last part was all about, then remembered
something.
"Hey, he's thirty feet tall," she said, "but I saw him earlier
putting something up on the antlers, and those are up about fifty
feet. How...?"
"He's Mike Polinski," Lemon said. "He's got something called the
'Mighty Joe Young' effect going on. He can be different heights in a
given situation. But he doesn't change heights, see? He just...
*is*... different heights, depending on what he's doing, who sees him,
and their vantage point. Make sense?"
"No," said Rumi, still watching Polinski lumber away.
"Welcome to my world," said Lemon. "Come on, let's walk."

***

As soon as Rad touched down, three demon monkeys appeared and
attempted to take him down. One appeared on his shoulders and covered
his eyes while a second attempted to give him a noogie. The noogie
failed, as the demon monkey's paw could not penetrate Rad's hairspray-
and-mousse-laden hair sufficiently to find his scalp. A third demon
monkey attempted to give Rad a wedgie by yanking his underwear up,
only to discover to its chagrin that he was not wearing any.
"Like, get away, little dudes!" Rad exclaimed, driving his
assailants away with an omnidirectional psychokinetic force pulse.
The monkeys disappeared in mid-air, then reappeared on his back. A
second force pulse blew them away again, and this time they did not
return.
"We are ninjas, yo!" a lone pseudo-ninja yelled in his ear. Rad
ducked as the black-bathrobe-clad middle-aged man swung a katana at
him. Before Rad could think of a way to retaliate that would not
seriously hurt the controlled man, demon monkeys appeared beneath the
man's robe and began mercilessly 'zerberting' him, while also doing
unfortunate things to his nipples. Rad hit them with just enough
force to send them spinning into the crowd of combatants.
HotFlash, nearby, was not being bothered by demon monkeys, as the
monkeys appeared to have enough sense to not appear directly on
someone emitting flames. Unfortunately, the same could not be said
for the pseudo-zombies and pseudo-ninjas, who had apparently been
snapped back into something resembling focus by Mighty Guy's arrival.
They were attacking demon monkeys, HotFlash, or whoever else was
moving about, displaying much greater strength than Rad expected.
HotFlash kept them back with flame blasts, taking care not to blast
too close to her mind-controlled assailants.
"Rad!" he heard Confusion exclaim. "Over here!"
The call, Rad realized, came from an area where the wreckage was
greatest. He took to the air, deflecting throwing stars, hot dogs,
and the occasional enterprising demon monkey as he flew to the source.
As he penetrated the dissipating dust, he saw Mighty Guy, MeltDown,
Guido, Confusion, and Criticalman at the edge of a large impact trail.
The walls of the trail curved in--as impact trail walls are wont to
do--except in one section, where there was a three-sided hole. One of
the sides of said hole was jagged, but the other two were straight and
perpendicular. Guido stood at the edge, waving his hand-held scanner
over the hole, which was just large enough to let an average-size guy
fall through.
"Eight and a half miles," Guido confirmed. "You getting this,
Gigawatt?" He seemed to listen to the air. "Right, I know, I'll tell
him... er... yeah, that too... I... hey, why don't you just tell him?"
Guido listened a bit more, then looked at Rad. "You got some kinda
implanted communications thing in your head, right?"
"Like, yah, dude," said Rad. "Like, what's going on?"
"Can you tune it in to a certain radio frequency?"
A minute later, Rad could hear Dr. Gigawatt's voice inside his
head. Though his inability to reach his house's expert system--which
usually handled his communications needs--was a hindrance, unencrypted
radio was simple enough for even him to tune his implanted system to.
"Right," said Gigawatt. "Rad, my boy. That hole is part of the
elevator shaft that leads directly down to the underground base that
is under control of the Mega-Intelligence Bureau faction led by Dana
Wader. There's no way it's one of their regular underground bases,
since those only go underground two miles at most. This is eight-and-
a-half, which is closer to the outer mantle than the surface. To put
it in contrast, the deepest publicly acknowledged man-made hole, the
Kola Superdeep Borehole, only goes down six-and-a-half miles, and has
a very small diameter, only---"
"Like, dude," Rad interrupted. "Like, crisis here, y'know?"
"Ahem," Gigawatt said. "Yes. Er... it's not one of their
standard underground bases. Likely it was Erasmus Fancy that led them
to it--Bhossi and Cla'rabhelle tell me he is extensively versed in the
geography of Terra Subterrene. Possibly the base once belonged to the
Ultra Collective, or Magnor Bok, or the Deros, or... well, there are a
lot of possibilities."
"How well defended is it?" asked Confusion, who could hear
Gigawatt via his clipped-onto-collar transceiver.
"Depends on who it used to belong to," Gigawatt answered. "I
advise a cautious descent...."
"Rad!" Confusion exclaimed, just before Rad dived into the hole
and used his psychokinetic thrust to further his downward
acceleration.
The elevator shaft was lit by rings of circular lights, one ring
every fifty feet. Thus far, nothing was firing at him. Rad increased
his speed, confident that he would soon arrive at the hidden base so
that he could rescue his wife, daughter, friends, and whoever else
looked in need of a good and vigorous rescuing. Then, he would...
...wonder why the rings of light were flashing past as if they
were heading *away* from him instead of *toward* him.
A second later, he was distracted by having run into and through
the doors to the surface and the rubble that had landed atop them.
His psychokinetic shielding absorbed and blocked the damage, though
the ache in his back and legs felt like it would linger a while.
He regained control in the air, preventing a collision with two
jetpack-wearing Harxxon agents. The agents were being harassed by
demon monkeys, which disappeared upon seeing Rad. A second later, the
monkeys appeared on Rad, only to discover his psychokinetic shields
gave them nothing to hang on to. They disappeared after falling three
feet, and did not reappear anywhere Rad could see.
The agents waved their thanks and returned to their task at hand,
which appeared to still be finding a way into the still-ascending
bronze-gold object from the dimension occupied by the Hidden Empire.
Rad focused his attention on the object, and let out a low whistle.
The two-hundred-yard-long object was now fully horizontal, and
still ascending. Pieces of it were in motion, and as Rad watched, two
smokestack-like towers and several small turrets rose. Portions of
the topside of the vessel were sliding back, revealing what looked,
rather astoundingly, to be a deck that would have looked about right
for a late-nineteenth-century ironclad warship--save that there were
no large visible guns--though the long projection off the bow could
have been a gun. The sliding-back portions also seemed to be sliding
out, forming arcing wings of a sort. More wings grew from the
smokestacks and the turrets. Rad expected to see propellers grow from
those, but they did not.
The _Vander Harkness_ was further up and out, though it had more
than come halfway to confront the bronze-gold ship. The _Vander
Harkness_ matched the new arrival in length, though its bulky H-shape
was considerably less sleek. But it would likely be brute force, not
style, that would win the confrontation, so Rad felt justified in
thinking---
A massive bolt of electrical power erupted from the nose of the
bronze-gold vessel, slamming into the oncoming side of the _Vander
Harkness_ less than a second later. The air was split with the
thunder of its impact, and Rad saw a green glow on the side of the
_Vander Harkness_ accompany a shower of sparks. Neither vessel paused
in its flight, though Rad saw the _Vander Harkness_ start to rotate as
it changed course.
Rad looked down, and saw that the battle raged anew in the
parking lot. His having been ejected from the elevator shaft had
cleared the covering doors and a good part of the debris, revealing a
square hole about twenty feet to a side. Hordes of demon monkeys were
trying to get to the hole, while hordes of radio-chip-controlled
people were trying to keep them back. Neither side seemed to consider
the possibility of the superguys in the middle as allies.
"Hey, dudes," Rad said aloud, hoping that his open channel to the
_Vander Harkness_ would allow them to hear him as well as speak to
him. "I'm seeing some, like, heinous fighting going on below, like,
y'know? What is, like, everyone trying to, like, get to?"
"The monkeys seem to want to secure the perimeter of the elevator
shaft," came China Moroboshi's voice in his head. "They're not trying
to go in--guess they saw you get ejected and know they have to try
something else. Chip-controlled guys are fighting 'em, or our guys,
or each other. Not sure they know what they're doing, really."
"The guys around me," Confusion's voice crackled in, "are loudly
stating they like to 'move it move it.' This does not bode well,
either for the battle or for synchronized dancing."
Rad was about to reply when a massive exclamation hit him with
sonic force.
"Monkeys!" Mighty Guy exclaimed. "No fair! They tickle! Stop!"
Rad stopped tumbling and watched, dumbfounded, as Mighty Guy
hurtled past. Two monkeys were on his back, covering his eyes, while
three others worked on his feet, armpits, and other apparently
sensitive areas. They appeared and disappeared quickly enough to
avoid his arms.
The sky split as another massive electrical blast shot from the
nose of the bronze-gold ship to hit the _Vander Harkness_. This time,
Rad saw no defending green glow. Instead, a small fireball erupted
from the _Vander Harkness's_ side, and all at once the air was filled
with the rumble of the blocky ship's engines. A few seconds later,
the silence returned, as the _Vander Harkness_ re-established its
shields and sound-dampening field, but its vulnerability was apparent.
Just as the glow from the bronze-gold ship's electrical arc
faded, another explosion lit the night sky. This time it came from
the direction of the power plant, which Rad belatedly realized was
where Mighty Guy had been hurtling. MeltDown flew by, one hand
slapped to her forehead.
Rad flew over the bronze-gold ship, wondering if he would see any
vulnerable areas now that it had shifted into what it was now--a
floating metallic airship that combined grace and strength with an
abundance of decorative bric-a-brac and a determination not to worry
about piddling concepts like aerodynamics and taste. On the deck that
had been revealed by the ship's transformation, numerous demon monkeys
moved about. Several stood near the ship's bow, making threatening
monkey noises in the general direction of the _Vander Harkness._
Other demon monkeys issued different kinds of noises, which Rad, on
flying closer, determined to be a spirited, if not skillful, attempt
at singing. He could not make out the lyrics, as he did not speak
demon monkey, but the sound and the rhythm reminded him of a sea
chantey that Chalandra had once sang at a long-ago party on planet
Hottentot. The chantey had involved a woman from Boston, heavy
drinking, a roll in the sheets, a lead pipe, and a parrot, and if what
the monkeys were singing about now were not those things, exactly, Rad
was willing to bet they were not too far off.
"_Vander Harkness_ to Rad," crackled a voice from his implant.
It sounded like Dr. Gigawatt's. "Are you all right?"
"Like, yah," said Rad. "Like, what about you dudes?"
"We took some damage," Gigawatt replied, "but no casualties as of
yet. Bhossi and Cla'rabhelle are retuning the shields. They
appear... shaken."
"They never, like, thought something could, like, break through?"
Rad asked.
"They never expected to face the _Subtler Than Light_", Chalandra
Harkness's voice replied in Gigawatt's stead.
"The... like, what?"
"It's the name of the Hidden Empire's vessel," Chalandra
explained. "Richard Cartier described it over a century ago, near the
end of his next-to-the-next-to-the-last journal. He, his nephew
James, Verne, and the Roburtron were pursuing, on board the
_Albatross._ Why he couldn't have also brought along No-Apples
Hennessey, Puffing Billy, or Molly Quickfingers I don't know, as I'm
sure their abilities would have been useful..."
"I thought it was because Verne was keeping the _Albatross_ a
secret," Manny's voice cut in, "and he didn't trust them to keep it
that way..."
"That is not in the journals," Dr. Gigawatt asserted. "It is
speculation!"
"Like, dudes," Rad said, "can this, like, wait until, like, after
the battle?"
There was silence on the radio frequency for a few seconds.
"Right," said Chalandra. "The _Subtler Than Light_ is the vessel
Cartier described a long time ago. We only have this one description,
though, and the start of an air battle over Poughkeepsie in late 1898.
If Cartier ever learned more, it's in one of his missing volumes, the
next-to-the-last one. Now, the thing that I'm wondering about, that
Bhossi just reminded me of, is that, if this is the same ship, is it
possible---"
Another huge electrical bolt erupted from the bow of the _Subtler
Than Light_ and slammed into the side of the _Vander Harkness_.
Though the fireball created this time was smaller, the air was flooded
again with the sound of the _Vander Harkness's_ engines. This time,
the sound dampening field did not reassert itself.
Rad, who had been flying over the _Subtler Than Light_ at the
time of the last bolt, reflexively fired a psychokinetic blast at the
projection on the bow from which the electrical arc had burst. It
felt surprisingly weak as it left his hand, and he was not surprised
when it only caused its target to slightly shake. It also occurred to
him that, weak or strong, the _Subtler Than Light's_ shielding should
have deflected the shot altogether, as had happened before.
He tried another shot, which was nearly nonexistent. The feel of
the air against his skin changed, growing fuller and cooler, and he
realized his psychokinetic shielding was breaking down. There was
also a wind coming from below that was quite distracting.
"Like, well," he said, "at least, like, I can still, like, fly...
um...."
As he looked down and saw the deck of the _Subtler Than Light_
and its swarm of demon monkeys growing rapidly closer, his mind had
just enough time to think 'oh, like, about that...' before everything
went dark.

(continued in part three, following...)

--
Copyright (c) 2009 by Gary W. Olson. All Rights Reserved.
--
Gary W. Olson
swede at novitious dot com
Superguy LiveJournal: http://community.livejournal.com/superguy_list/
Superguy Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=47273370926

SG: Rad #97 (1/4): "Demon

RAD
Episode 97
[ Rad Returns, Part Seven of Ten ]
"Demon Monkeys in my Pants"
by
Gary W. Olson

***

Bantering, The Programmer knew, was not one of his strengths. In
what he liked to think of as his 'glory days' as a villain in the
nineties, he had never bantered with his minions. Minions were for
lording over, not bantering with, and also he could never afford
minions with enough wit to make the bantering less than painful. In
his 'not-so-glorious' days of work for the insurance company Blue
Pound Sign of California, which ranged from the start of the new
millennium until about four hours ago, he had never liked bantering
with co-workers, as he could not lord over them, and they were not
good at bantering, either. But The Programmer did not mind his
bantering weakness, as the less time spent bantering meant more time
was available for drinking coffee and screwing around on the Internet,
two skills at which he excelled.
Now, however, he had cause to wish his bantering skills were not
so atrophied. For one thing, in his current environment--a cramped,
equipment-stuffed control room that was part of a base eight-and-a-
half miles underground--both coffee and Internet were cruelly withheld
from him. For another, he might have been able to produce suitably
scintillating replies to the insults directed at him by the banterers
near his workstation.
"This is a mess," said Tom McCavish-Laffalot. "I've seen better
chip design in a bag of Lay's. And what the hell is up with the
embedded servlets? The code reads like Romper Room on smack!"
The Programmer glared at Tom. This was less than useful, as only
Tom's sandal-covered feet were visible at the moment. The rest of Tom
was beneath a rack of circuitry and wires that had been pulled from
one of the numerous cabinets in the control room. Had Tom and The
Programmer been alone in the room, The Programmer could have used a
handy blunt instrument on Tom's feet to express his irate feelings in
lieu of bantering skills. But he was not.
"Do you see where the broadcast megahertz is being set?" Miguel
Veracruz asked. "Is a hamster on a roulette wheel involved?"
"Hey!" exclaimed The Programmer. "They wanted rotating
frequencies that could be synched up to the control chips, and that's
what I gave them. It's not *my* fault that sometimes those
frequencies end up already being occupied by regular radio broadcasts,
or that those controlled by the chips think the songs they hear are
instructions. What's it to you, anyway?"
Miguel snarled, and The Programmer instinctively backed away. As
Miguel wore only the black swim trunks he had been captured in, The
Programmer observed numerous muscle-oriented reasons to stay out of
his reach. The handcuffs on Miguel's wrists looked fragile, and The
Programmer was not about to rely on the four Mega-Intelligence Bureau
agents in the room to step in if he decided to banter with his fists.
The instant The Programmer backed down, Miguel's snarl was replaced
with a grin.
"Tom and I were kidnapped to clean up your mess, Programmer,"
said Miguel.
"That's *The*--"
Miguel's snarl returned.
"--ehrm, never mind."
A couple of the guard-agents snickered. The Programmer fumed.
He felt sweaty in his white dress shirt, black tie, and black dress
pants, the work clothes he had been abducted in. He wished his
clothing was laced with special circuitry, as it had been 'back in
the day,' as he could have then retaliated by ordering overhead
sprinklers to turn on, or the agents' comm equipment to replace all
their ringtones with Paris Hilton song clips.
"Actually," Miguel continued, "Tom's doing most of the cleaning
up. I'm just fixing the broadcast process and giving their
controllers some voice lessons. You should hear what a sloppy job
they've been doing. Three-quarters of the time they just run these
tapes with pre-recorded 'I'm a ninja' or 'I'm a zombie' stuff."
"So why were you targeted at all?" The Programmer asked.
"You're, what, a part time DJ at a public radio station? Why you and
not an actual radio station technician?"
"They were hypnotized by his buffness," suggested Tom, as he slid
out from under the circuitry. A palm-sized box was in his left hand,
its screen displaying lines of code in a very small font.
"I don't know why I was targeted," Miguel admitted. "There're
dozens of guys who know more about the technical aspects of radio than
me. All I can think of is that--"
"--they like the way he surfs," Tom interrupted. "And his hairy
legs."
Miguel opened his mouth to say something else, looked at Tom, and
seemed to 'get' something, as he closed it and tried to look like he
agreed with Tom.
"Look," The Programmer said, dropping his voice down to where the
guards would not hear, "I'm a prisoner here too, so whatever it is,
you can tell me."
"Nothing to tell," said Miguel. "And what do you mean, you're a
prisoner? I don't see cuffs on your hands!"
"And you aren't being forced to work on account of something like
that," Tom added, gesturing with his cuffed hands at a wall monitor.
Said monitor displayed a wide-angle view of a simple barred hostage
cell. Inside the cell was Eivandt Seconds, the vaguely Belgian
brother of the former President, still in the Hawaiian shirt, shorts,
and sandals he had been captured in. Next to him was a large blue
bird with the face of a brown woman. Outside the cell were two armor-
wearing guards. The bird-woman was singing. Eivandt and the guards
were awkwardly dancing as if they thought the singing was quite funky.
The volume on the monitor was off, and The Programmer reached to
switch it on.
"Don't do that, sir," said one of the guards. "If the sound gets
in here, we'll have to dance, too."
"What's going on?" The Programmer asked.
"That's my girlfriend, Cendra," said Miguel. "She doesn't always
look like that. Looks like she turned into the Bird of Happiness.
She'll turn back after a while."
"Oh," said The Programmer, which is really the only sensible
thing to say to an explanation like that. "Does this... um... happen
a lot?"
Miguel shook his head. "Only seen the Bird twice before. Are we
done here?"
"Should be," said Tom. A guard took the code-reader from Tom's
hands, and Tom and Miguel left the room. Three of the four guards
followed, while the fourth remained.
"Get back to work," the guard ordered.
"Right," said The Programmer. "I just want to check what Tom
did, make sure he wasn't trying sabotage or something." The guard
seemed supremely unconcerned with The Programmer's work plan, so long
as he looked like he was working on something. The Programmer picked
up his own code reader, laid down on the floor, and slid beneath the
wiring and circuitry of the still-open cabinet. He quickly identified
the parts that Tom had rewired and changed around, and reached for one
of the boards.
Nanofilaments shot out from areas shrouded in shadow and pierced
his fingertips. Instantly, the world fell away, and he was back in
C-Space--what he called the vast and featureless bronze-gold expanse
he perceived and thought of as cyberspace. He had been in this place
thousands of times over the last who-knew-how-many years, manipulating
code and data for Dana Wader, only to have his memory of the
experience erased after each visit.
No one would erase his memory this time, The Programmer realized.
He did not know why he had been brought back into C-Space, but he had
the strong sense that Dana had not ordered it. Had this been her
doing, the nanofilaments would have gotten him at his keyboard, as
they had so many times before.
But if not her, then who?
As he watched, the bronze-gold expanse resolved into paths and
places and windows. It was not really like 'regular' cyberspace at
all. 'That' was rigidity and regularity; 'this' was flow and change.
'That' held passengers and structures that could project appearances
and stayed separate; 'this' there was only him, and if he seemed
separate, he felt the possibility that the separation was illusory.
He found a window, or a window found him. There was no boundary
that he could perceive. Nevertheless, he could see a room. It was
large, and he was at the center, looking out in all directions. There
were two ways in and out: sliding double-doors against one grey wall,
or a ladder against another wall that led to a hatch in the ceiling.
Viewscreens and workstations littered the remaining wall space, all of
them showing views of areas within the underground base, or of the
pandemonium on the surface in the Dodger Stadium parking lot. Floor
space was taken up by carts holding spare parts and wires, empty
steel-barred cages, a microwave and a Mr. Coffee machine on a cabinet
countertop in one corner, and a rack filled with beakers and vials
that held oddly-colored fluids.
The double-doors slid open, and Dana Wader entered. No longer an
Empress, but still imperious, she advanced directly to whatever it was
The Programmer was looking out from. The black-and-white suit-and-tie
look was good on her, somehow--it accentuated the severity of her
expression, the evil curve of her unnerving smile. He thought her
natural black hair would have fit the look better than the bottle-
blonde she currently sported, but perhaps she was saying something
with that as well--that working for the M.I.B. was only a way-stop on
her path to recovering her power and her empire.
Behind Dana, a woman chained to a tilted wooden table was wheeled
into the room by two M.I.B. agents. The Programmer recognized Glum,
whom he had last seen in the central hub of the underground base,
being led away by Dana and her driver. Glum's sun dress had been torn
at the side so that her legs could be chained, but otherwise she
appeared unhurt. The look Dana gave her as she turned indicated that
that would soon be rectified.
Following Glum and the guards was Dana's driver, still masked and
mysterious. As the guards wheeled Glum in to the place Dana
indicated, they glanced at the driver, as if they were trying to
figure him out as well. No clues were forthcoming, so they withdrew.
The doors slid shut, and Dana, the driver, and Glum were alone.
Alone, save for The Programmer. Idly, he wondered what Dana
would do to him if she discovered his spying. Had he been able to
perceive his body, he was sure he would have shuddered.
"I will hook her to the pile," said the driver.
"I love it when you say that," replied Dana. She looked as if
she was about to villainously laugh, but she settled for a villainous
smirk.
"What am I even doing here, anyway?" asked Glum. "You have power
sources galore--what do you need my bioelectricity for? And what
is... that?"
She looked directly at what The Programmer was peering from when
asking her last question. Dana looked back down at it--and at him.
"It is all the known nectarisite in this world," said Dana.
"Minus, of course, the portions we have put into our service, and the
tiny amount Harxxon has managed to acquire over the years. And Los
Pantalones, of course, but Erasmus tells me they are a special
situation."
"I have told you not to use my name!" the driver exclaimed.
Dana was unfazed. "You *said* that after tonight you would no
longer need to hide your identity. Right?"
The driver glowered, or at least adopted a posture that suggested
glowering. Then he nodded, and reached for his mask. It came off in
one piece, and The Programmer glimpsed something bronze-gold on the
inside. Something with a forest of tiny filaments that could only
have hooked directly into the driver's face.
The face of Erasmus Fancy was that of... The Programmer wanted to
think it was a gorilla's face, but it was different from anything he
had seen on the Discovery channel. The nose was not so flared, the
jawbone not so wide. Grey-streaked black fur seemed to radiate from
his grim-set mouth, down past his jawline and up and over his head,
neat and closely-trimmed. His right eye had a brown pupil, and his
left was a solid ball of bronze-gold. The Programmer did not need to
see the jagged scar on his left cheek to know the bronze-gold eye was
not original equipment.
Erasmus Fancy did not seem evil. He was determined, and grim,
and tired... but not evil.
"Ooh," said Dana, "hook her up by her earlobes! Then her eyes'll
get all sparkly!"
The Programmer considered the possibility that Dana being in the
room skewed his perspective on the appearance of 'evil.' Erasmus
showed no sign he had heard Dana, though, and picked up the end of two
wires that The Programmer realized were attached on the other end to
the place he looked out from. The pile of nectarisite that had been
the source of certain wires, certain filaments, certain radio-based
control chips, and at least one boss-looking false eye.
"To answer your question," said Erasmus. His voice was deep, its
rumble filling the room as he considered the bound Glum. "The
nectarisite responds to bioelectric power better than conventionally-
generated power in general... and it responds better to Hottentottian
bioelectric power in particular. Why that should be..." He made a
shrugging motion with his large shoulders. "...only the Reptiloids
knew. We can give it energy from any of our sources, true. But it
only... I'm sorry, but the only way I can put it is that it
*tolerates* these other sources, and reluctantly accepts their power.
But it *desires* bioelectricity."
"What do the Reptiloids have to do with it?" Glum asked. From
his vantage, The Programmer could see her struggling with her bonds.
They must have been somehow damping her bioelecticity, he realized,
else Dana and Erasmus would have been crispy critters, gauging solely
by the ferocity The Programmer saw in her eyes. "They're a peaceful
race, and have been in our Empire-slash-Confederation since---"
"Ask them why they buried the seven engines in the Earth," said
Erasmus, as he attached clips, also made of nectarisite, to the wires.
"Ask them why they opened this world to the notice of the Hidden
Empire."
"Well, sure," Glum replied. "Just unchain me, and I'll zip right
off and comm them." This proposal was not greeted with any detectable
approval from either Erasmus or Dana.
"So how are you going to get her to give up the power?" Dana
asked. "And are you sure it won't have any adverse effects on our
army? The M.I.B. has a vested interest in the outcome."
"You care nothing for the M.I.B," Erasmus said, without
noticeable recrimination. "They are a means to an end for you,
nothing more. Much as they believe you are a means to an end for
them."
"I love it when you talk Machiavellian," said Dana, breaking out
into a sharp-edged grin. "It's like you're Gorilla Grodd and Barry
White, all in one!"
Erasmus did not reply to this, though his face took on a brief
sour look. He finished attaching a clip to the second wire, then held
up both wires and considered Glum. Glum's return look was defiant and
angry.
"Earlobes," said Erasmus, at last.
Dana's grin grew sharper, resembling a curved white blade with
red edges. It was directed at Glum. Erasmus stood at the end of
Glum's table, so that he could simultaneously attach both clips to
Glum's earlobes. The clips clamped down---
--and The Programmer's perceptions went white, bright, and
crackly. Abruptly, he found himself back in his body, watching
bronze-gold filaments retract into the shadows. His heart was
pounding. His breathing was shallow. Had anyone else been around,
they would have thought he was very happy to see them.
Slowly, he slid out from under the cabinet, sat up...
...and realized he was being watched by no fewer than six demon
monkeys.
"Erk," he said.
The monkeys looked like the same ones he had briefly seen hiding
in a bus in the underground base's central hub. Black-furred, with
small horns on their foreheads. Way-grim in expression. This time,
they were *definitely* giving him the way-grim demon monkey eye. One
stretched its arms and cracked its knuckles. If they thought he was
very happy to see them, it did not appear to move them much.
"Um," said The Programmer, as he looked around for the guard that
had been in the room. He saw the guard on the floor, either passed
out or dead, his gun nowhere in evidence. "I denounce 'Lancelot Link'
and all it stands for?"
The demon monkeys gave him slow grins that did not give The
Programmer cause to grin back.

***

As the electrical arc projected by the rising bronze-gold
monstrosity before him vanished, Rad contemplated angles of attack,
how much force to apply, and which direction to fly once his first
strafing run was complete. This took about three seconds. The
remainder of the eighteen seconds it took for him to fly at high-speed
toward his target was occupied with what pose to strike while flying
in battle. Both arms forward? One arm forward, one back? Both arms
back, so that it looked like he thought he could destroy the target by
ramming it with his face?
Such were the tactical thoughts Rad had as he, Key Clark, and
Yury Mitsuke flew--thoughts that were the reason he was famed
throughout Earth and major portions of the galaxy for his tan, his
laid-back coolness, his heroism, his parties, and *not* his tactics.
It was just as he made the decision to go with the one arm forward
pose, and was contemplating the merits of fist-versus-open-flat-hand,
that something happened to interrupt his thoughts.
Key and Yury...
"MeltDown and, like, HotFlash, narrator dude."
What?
"We're, like, supposed to, like, use code names and, like, stuff,
when in battle, like, y'know?"
But that was a CalForce rule, and CalForce no longer exists, and
I thought we weren't going to do this anymore.
"Like, do what, dude?"
Talk to one another.
"Why not, narrator dude?"
Because it's an old joke. Hackneyed. We did it all the time
back in the day, and it was only sporadically funny then.
"Like, dude, I have no idea why you're talking about, like, knees
and spores, y'know? It's just, like, CalForce may no longer, like,
exist, but they, like, still goes by their code names in, like, saving
people and, like, stuff..."
You have a point.
"Actually, I decided, like, to go with the, like, fist pose,
dude."
(pause)
(deep breath, here we go...)
MeltDown and HotFlash were nearly at the rising bronze-gold
object. Bright flame streaked from HotFlash's shapely, red-leather-
clad form, while the air was distorted but clear behind MeltDown's
shapely, skimpy-shiny-short-shorts-and-tank-top-clad form. Rad had no
idea if his ultra-tan, blue-jean-cutoff-shorts-clad form trailed
anything behind him--he had never thought to look, especially when
MeltDown and HotFlash were around to be observed--and at the moment
did not care. The time to attack had arrived.
The women suddenly veered away--MeltDown to the left, HotFlash to
the right. Rad was puzzled about why they veered, especially as it
looked as if they had not even strafed their target with force blasts
or flaming plasma blasts. A moment later, Rad discovered the reason
for this--he struck something invisible in mid-air, something that
pushed him away from the rising object and into the night sky.
Though Rad was not the highest stepper in the Rockette-line of
intellect, he had encountered his fair share of force fields in his
day, and quickly recognized this as one. As he hurtled away from his
target, he realized that it had been specifically angled to not
receive him head on, but instead to form a curve that would use his
own momentum against him. He regained control of his flight and
looked at the rising object.
It was bronze-gold, nearly a hundred and eighty yards tall, and
still rising from the nectarisite lake that had formed on the playing
field at Dodger Stadium. Its thickest point--where it had been about
as wide as the field, nearly buckling the fences--had passed, and its
lower half was tapering off. As he watched, it rose twenty more
yards, until the lower half tapered to a point which then parted from
the nectarisite lake.
"Ugly sucker, ain't it?" asked HotFlash. She and MeltDown had
recovered and flown to him while his attention had been on the object.
Its surface was covered with hideous rococo ornamentation, including
enormous curly-cues, c-scrolls, asymmetrical wave-like decorations,
and the like. Despite the overwhelming sense of tackiness that Rad
got from it, he could see the sleekness underneath. Several parts
looked folded over others, and Rad had the feeling he was not seeing
its intended shape. The lights from Dodger Stadium, as well as the
surrounding parking lot, streets, and neighboring buildings, gave its
underside a wicked glow that the pale moonlight and starlight could
not match.
"Should we go after it again?" MeltDown asked. "It deflected me
without straining. I tried peppering it with some blasts, but no
dice."
"Like, let's go down, and, like, check in with Confusion, like,
y'know?" Rad asked, using Manny Seconds's CalForce-era code name.
"His team has, like, been here longer, like, than us, so maybe, like,
they've totally got some, like, info."
"Might as well," HotFlash replied. The three flew down toward
the parking lot outside Dodger Stadium. There they were greeted by
chaos, Confusion, pseudo-ninjas, pseudo-zombies, and monkeys, though
not in that order.
"Whoa, little dude!" Rad exclaimed as he touched down next to
one of Harxxon's dark red helicopters, narrowly missing a black-furred
monkey that he could have sworn had not been there a moment ago. The
monkey looked up at him, and Rad saw it had little horns on its head,
and a collar with a flashy bronze-gold metal disc. The primate
screamed something not very clear at him, added a hand signal that
clarified things somewhat, then disappeared. Rad blinked.
"Dude," he said. "Did I just, like, see that?"
"You did," said Confusion, as he swung out from beneath the
helicopter, where he had been crouching. "Dr. Gigawatt says Bhossi
and Cla'rabhelle have identified them as demon monkeys. Mercenaries,
by and large, though they do a lot of work for the Hidden Empire,
which, not-too-coincidentally, is where that big ugly is coming from.
Think your basic howler monkeys, only with horns, sentience, the
ability to teleport up to a hundred feet line-of-sight, and a tendency
to take their work seriously."
"And what is that work?" MeltDown enquired, as she and HotFlash
landed. Six more demon monkeys scampered by, two flickering out of
sight in what looked like a co-ordinated move.
"Looks like they're headed for those busses," said HotFlash.
"Hi, Manny."
"Hi yourself," Confusion replied, not taking his eyes off the
busses. Rad gathered they were very important busses, else Confusion
would never have chosen to look at them over HotFlash and MeltDown.
"They're searching for something. Probably the same thing as us: the
entrance to the M.I.B.'s underground base. You think that'd be easy
to find, but it's not. Guido and Templar've been working on it."
"Are, like, the monkey dudes, like, giving you problems?"
"Surprisingly, no," said Confusion. "They're too busy looking as
well. We ran into some resistance from the wannabe ninjas and zombies
that Dana's had mind-slaved to her broadcast chips, but they gave up
on that as well and are just kind of milling around."
Rad saw a few of them, milling around just as Confusion
described. They appeared to be in no worse shape than they had been
when he had last seen them in Templar's studio, though now they seemed
to be doing nothing in particular. They were not even declaring they
were ninjas. Rad wondered if their controllers were taking smoke
breaks.
"There's Ba... um, Guido," said Confusion, indicating the seven-
foot-tall black-trenchcoat-wearing anthropomorphic donkey that had
emerged from between two busses. On one arm was a massive gun that
would have made a pro wrestler tip over, on the other was a hand-held
box connected to an oversized screen. Next to him was Criticalman,
aka Templar Maccabee, who held one thumb at the ready to guard against
attack, and whose other hand held a mustard-laden hot dog.
"Where did you get *that?*" HotFlash asked, ignoring the striding
howler monkeys as she walked over to Guido and Criticalman.
Criticalman scowled as she approached, then gestured with his hot-dog-
holding hand toward the carts that were on the sidewalk just outside
the stadium walls.
"I know it's been a while, dear," he said, with icicle-laden
emphasis on the word 'dear.' "But you do remember how enterprising
our fellow Angelinos can be, right?"
Rad observed that one stand was selling hot dogs, while a second
stand appeared devoted to ice cream of various kinds, and a third
merchant vended beer from a keg and assorted pops from pressurized
canisters in the back of an open Econoline van. Pseudo-ninjas,
pseudo-zombies, demon monkeys, and people who had just shown up to
watch the fight were in line, money in hand.
"I haven't been able to find the entrance to this underground
base," said Guido, who had foresworn use of his CalForce-era code-name
'Badass' altogether, and thus was exempt from the code-names-in-battle
rule. He nodded at his hand-held scanner. "Neither has Marta--she's
in one of the 'copters up there, running scans on the lot when she's
not giving covering fire to our agents. Wherever the entrance is,
they've got some super-tech keeping it under wraps."
Rad looked up. The massive bronze-gold object was still
ascending, and also appeared to be tilting in mid-air, going from
vertical to horizontal now that it was clear of Dodger Stadium. Rad
guessed it to be at eleven hundred feet up and climbing. Harxxon
field agents wearing jetpacks and flight suits circled it, no doubt
describing all they saw to Chalandra Harkness's team on the _Vander
Harkness_. Harxxon jets streaked by, gunfire and missile fire
splashing harmlessly against the object's force field. Farther away,
he could see the H-shape of the _Vander Harkness,_ descending from its
cruising altitude. Before long, the two massive battleships would
meet.
"Where's Kent?" MeltDown asked.
Guido, Templar, and Confusion winced, and started looking around
for things to hide under.
"What?" she added.
"There he is!" HotFlash exclaimed.
All Rad saw was a rapidly approaching purple, gold, and blue blur
on the horizon. The Harxxon jets peeled away. The jet-pack-wearing
Harxxon agents flew away in all directions except where it looked like
the blur was heading--somewhere on a path that might have included the
bronze-gold object, but was vague enough that it could have also
included Dodger Stadium, a nearby power plant, and most of the
surrounding area.
MeltDown blasted into the air, leaving a small crater in the
pavement where she had been standing. She was gone in a moment,
moving as fast as he had ever seen her fly. He took to the air to
assist her, as HotFlash did the same.
Before he could get halfway to where the blur was heading, the
air shook with the impact of a tremendous nuclear force blast. The
blur's course abruptly changed, so that it was now heading straight
for the rising bronze-gold object.
Then, a second before it would have struck, the blur arced down
toward the grouping of busses in the Dodger Stadium parking lot.
"Hey, no fair!" he heard MeltDown exclaim. "I figured the angle
correctly and everything!"
Rad started to reply, but his words were lost in the roar and
rumble of the blur's collision with the parking lot surface. Busses,
helicopters, and asphalt went flying, and a tremendous cloud of dust
rose up.
Moments later, one familiar voice could be heard, even over the
rumble of pieces of things hitting the ground.
"Hey!" Mighty Guy exclaimed. "Did you know there was already a
hole in the ground when I got here?"
"Well," said HotFlash, hovering next to Rad. "Guess that solves
the mystery of where they hid their underground elevator. Shall we?"
She gestured to the parking lot.
Rad, HotFlash, and MeltDown flew down, into the erupting melee.

(continued in part two, following...)

--
Copyright (c) 2009 by Gary W. Olson. All Rights Reserved.
--
Gary W. Olson
swede at novitious dot com
Superguy LiveJournal: http://community.livejournal.com/superguy_list/
Superguy Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=47273370926