GREEN ARROW:
Conner unplugs the wire the windup-bots left behind by using his needle nosed pliers arrow.
He give the fire marshal a pat on the back. With his hand. He resists the impulse to use up his backpatting arrow.
He then follows as best he may the wire toward its source.
He calls Monkey King and Shade on the convenient miniature ear radio and tells them where he is and what he is doing, and asks their status.
The wire leads through a pair of walls and a basement, to a fantastically elaborate arching city of wheels, hanging globes, swooping cables and ornate balconies, mostly contained within a YMCA basketball court but extending into the street on three sides.
Many, many robots toil therein, building prefabricated towers to slot into newly-prepared ground paved by other robots. They are slowly erasing Opal City to build Mechanopolis, or whatever it's called.
Some of them are patrolling for trouble. At the sounds of rumbling battle to the south, they mount their windup helicopter steeds and soar off to combat.
MONKEY KING:
He and Starman are attacked by a fresh wave of robotic soldiers!
"Who ARE these guys, Monkey?" says Starman. "Watch your eyes!"
Starman triggers his Cosmic Rod and a sunburst of brilliance fries one of the little flying saucers.
"I really hope these are, y'know, robots. Or I'm going down in little brass history as Jack the Destroyer ..."
THE SHADE:
Lurks in the darkness! Who knows where? The SHADE knows!
Sunday, May 21, 2017
Blushes In Paradise
Swift blinks and, when she figures out what was said, blushes so fast that its over before anyone sees it.
SWIFT: "Does this gorilla know where the other animals are?"
HAWKGIRL: "I don't think so. That was he was sent for. But I'll double-check... and maybe he's got some other lead."
She scans the gorilla with the gun again. Gently.
The gorilla, yclept Valendar, knows that wise King Solovar of the City (which we call Gorilla City) has this idea that giraffes are the future, and when they failed to appear on their yearly migration, he sent several of his Jungle Rangers to see what had happened to them. He also tried to call his good friend the Flash, but there has not been any answer for years.
SWIFT: "Does this gorilla know where the other animals are?"
HAWKGIRL: "I don't think so. That was he was sent for. But I'll double-check... and maybe he's got some other lead."
She scans the gorilla with the gun again. Gently.
The gorilla, yclept Valendar, knows that wise King Solovar of the City (which we call Gorilla City) has this idea that giraffes are the future, and when they failed to appear on their yearly migration, he sent several of his Jungle Rangers to see what had happened to them. He also tried to call his good friend the Flash, but there has not been any answer for years.
Wednesday, May 17, 2017
Flourishment in Paradise?
SWIFT:
Swift, having a free few minutes on her hands, will take a quick run around Africa, just to make sure the animals aren't, you know, gathered around the corner or something.
No, there aren't any animals hidden away somewhere.
There is a robbery going on in Nairobi, though. Taking away their guns is one thing, but Swift has trouble moving the bulky robbers to the police station. Fortunately, the nearby airport has a luggage dolly they're not using this second!
SWIFT: A brilliant use of a luggage dolly! (I put them back of course.)
Then I head back to give Hawkgirl my report (No hidden animals) and ask her what she found out.
HAWKGIRL: "Wow. Hey. The scanner shows that the gorilla is scouting for King Solovar. He's intelligent and is scouting. He's supposed to report back why all the animals are acting strangely, but he's caught up in the paradise of it all. But someone's controlling him. Someone with a weird speech pattern. Jack thinks it's probably Bizarro. He wants the animals to, ah, flourish and multiply because when he tries to make animals from scratch it doesn't turn out so well. All this loveliness is supposed to encourage that."
She clears her throat as her blush subsides.
"Bizarro is supposed to be pretty easy to trick, and that's how he is usually defeated."
Monday, May 15, 2017
Puzzlement In Paradise
Swift and a crisply safari-suited Hawkgirl zoom into central Africa, where the elephants have been vanishing. Superspeed reading of every newspaper on the way (the one major advantage newspaper has over TV/radio/Internet is that you can't absorb those media at x1000 speed like you can with print. And the paper doesn't even ignite until around x4510 speed!) shows that rhinos, monkeys, zebras, and flamingos have also been vanishing. And another section of the newspapers, never correlated until someone read ALL the papers RIGHT NOW, shows a baffling absence of pigeons, rats and even insects in the city of Kigali.
Hawkgirl's portable absorbascon can read the surface thoughts of every African for clues, although that level of broad monitoring tends to leave the user a little addled for a while. But it's a possibility.
Anyway, the side of a mountain along the Great Rift Valley is now covered with every color in the rainbow, as the normal lush green is supplemented by a cornucopia of flowers and fruits. From here, it looks like someone spilled all the Easter baskets in the world down a green slope.
In fact, right as you watch, red and yellow flowers bloom with incredible speed down the valley of the Zaire, propagating at forty miles an hour! Every inch of soil is bursting into floral, fragrant, radiant flower.
And fleeing, not away from the botanical avalanche, but towards it, is a mixed-species stampede of giraffes, lions, tapir, domestic dogs, and even the odd gorilla.
The very odd gorilla. The one with the shiny gold helmet and the nine-barreled shotgun.
Hawkgirl's portable absorbascon can read the surface thoughts of every African for clues, although that level of broad monitoring tends to leave the user a little addled for a while. But it's a possibility.
Anyway, the side of a mountain along the Great Rift Valley is now covered with every color in the rainbow, as the normal lush green is supplemented by a cornucopia of flowers and fruits. From here, it looks like someone spilled all the Easter baskets in the world down a green slope.
In fact, right as you watch, red and yellow flowers bloom with incredible speed down the valley of the Zaire, propagating at forty miles an hour! Every inch of soil is bursting into floral, fragrant, radiant flower.
And fleeing, not away from the botanical avalanche, but towards it, is a mixed-species stampede of giraffes, lions, tapir, domestic dogs, and even the odd gorilla.
The very odd gorilla. The one with the shiny gold helmet and the nine-barreled shotgun.
"It's soooo...beautiful!" Hawkgirl murmurs. She whistles and gathers a cloud of birds about them.
Then she slings her absorb-o-scope and aims it at the gorilla. What -is- he thinking?
He's thinking, or rather feeling, "Beauty! Paradise! Lush fruity abundance, without thorn or tooth!"
Underneath it, he's thinking, "King Solovar will be angry when I fail to return to Gorilla City with a report on the vanishing giraffes, but he'll come around. This isn't a threat --- it's the opposite! It's every gorilla's dream ..."
And then another thought enters the gorilla's mind, from outside:
"Yes. Yes. Enjoy the fruit and flowers. All this me has made for you, because this is what life craves -- beauty and plenty to eat. All me ask is that you enjoy my bounty, and multiply, making more animal life. Because when me make animal life myself, it turns out wrong. Not so beauty."
That thought is immensely powerful, composed, solid, and forceful. If that being knew Hawkgirl was there, he could impress his message on her mind, too.
But of course, Hawkgirl wouldn't be vulnerable to that! She's a hero.
The birds she summoned flutter around her in a color wheel, blue-red-yellow-blue-red-yellow, tweeting their joy.
Hawkgirl is still enjoying the ravishing beauty all around her. But... this might be a problem, still and all. She suspicions that someone with a great knowledge of supers could recognize the being controlling the happy gorilla. Whom does she know... Ah, Jack!
She tries to bring him up on the comlink.
"Jack? It's Sheila. Quiz time. Who can cause lots of verdant growth, can mind control intelligent gorillas, would like to create life but messes it up when he tries and doesn't understand the parts of speech?"
STARMAN: "Speech? Like Yoda backwards talking, or "me am opposite of you Earth people"?
HAWKGIRL: "The second one"
STARMAN: "Well, 'me am' is pretty much a fingerprint. It's Bizarro! "Me am imperfect duplicate of Superman" was his intro line. Is Bizarro behind this? Why's he stealing candy?"
HAWKGIRL: "Uh-uh. I'm in Africa with Swift. It's amazingly lovely and I wish you were here but I guess you're dealing with candy thieves. Thanks... he seems to be doing some kind of mind control thing on the gorilla. Any ideas on how to stop him?"
STARMAN: "Bizarro doesn't have mind control ... and heaven help anyone he used it on. But okay, a case could be made for Bizarro developing powers that Superman DOESN'T have ... that would be pretty 'imperfect', I guess."
"Thumping him won't do zip. But outwitting is what the Big Guy normally did. It's not supposed to be all that hard."
HAWKGIRL: "We'll have to find him first. Good luck with the candy thieves."
STARMAN: "Yeah, about that ... we seem to have it kinda covered. Do you need backup? I mean, loveliness ... could get outta hand. And Bizarro, really anyone from Superman's enemies list, it pays to have a lot of options."
HAWKGIRL: "Loveliness is getting out of hand," she says dreamily. "Sure, come by if you can." She does manage to give him the coordinates before being swept up in it. Hopefully she can tell Swift what's going on.
Monday, May 1, 2017
Trouble In Paradise
"It's soooo...beautiful!" Hawkgirl murmurs. She whistles and gathers a cloud of birds about them.
Then she slings her absorb-o-scope and aims it at the gorilla. What -is- he thinking?
He's thinking, or rather feeling, "Beauty! Paradise! Lush fruity abundance, without thorn or tooth!"
Underneath it, he's thinking, "King Solovar will be angry when I fail to return to Gorilla City with a report on the vanishing giraffes, but he'll come around. This isn't a threat --- it's the opposite! It's every gorilla's dream ..."
And then another thought enters the gorilla's mind, from outside:
"Yes. Yes. Enjoy the fruit and flowers. All this me has made for you, because this is what life craves -- beauty and plenty to eat. All me ask is that you enjoy my bounty, and multiply, making more animal life. Because when me make animal life myself, it turns out wrong. Not so beauty."
That thought is immensely powerful, composed, solid, and forceful. If that being knew Hawkgirl was there, he could impress his message on her mind, too.
But of course, Hawkgirl wouldn't be vulnerable to that! She's a hero.
The birds she summoned flutter around her in a color wheel, blue-red-yellow-blue-red-yellow, tweeting their joy.
Fire Opal
THE SHADE: Who is piloting the unidentified flying vehicle? Shade wanted to take the Invisible Jet, but that only has one seat.
MONKEY KING: Monkey is flying the Martian saucer. it is amassing that a ancient chines monkey born from a rock knows how to fly a super advanced star ship.
Monkey King groans, his father instilled in him a great fear of fire when he was little.
"So what's the plan, boys? Because I don't want to go into that fire."
GREEN ARROW: GA thinks we should do all three.
He asks Monkey King, "Rush in to follow Starman! Aid him. Avoid striking balconies or bridges.
He asks Shade to get a good overall look at the area before rushing in. "Does this ship have some sort of scanner, or x-ray, or telescope to give us a good view of what is going on before we rush in?
"If not, I will shoot a camera arrow out through the air lock to give us a drone's eye view. Is there a place I can plug in the very long electrical cable trailing after the camera arrow, so we can see the pictures?"
He stares at the two glowing orbs forming the armrests of the pilot's seat of the invisible Martian bio-ship in puzzlement.
"Meanwhile, fly over the spot where the fires are starting. They should be small if they just started. I will rush in to fight the fire. I will keep in touch using a shortwave radio arrow, or I may shoot a flare arrow."
Green Arrow shoots a wirepoon-and-grapnel arrow out of the airlock of a moving spaceship to a convenient balcony or roof ornament of the burning building below, and slides down the wire using his bowstaff as an impromptu pulley.
He will have his parachute arrow ready just in case. And his inflatable trampoline arrow.
Once on the ground, he will shoot at the fires using his four extinguishing foam arrows, four liquid nitrogen arrows, four ice arrows and the one oxygen-destroyer arrow he was saving for a Godzilla attack.
He will use a bullhorn arrow to firmly and calmly order civilians to exit the burning building in an orderly fashion, use his neon emergency exit arrow to point to the emergency exit, and use his fire-ax arrow to break open any locked doors, and his rather large and awkward hook-and-ladder arrow to save anyone trapped in an upper story.
Of course, he cannot be carrying enough ice arrows to put out a really out-of-control house fire. He looks around for a convenient water tower or fire hydrant. Or a wet blanket.
He will call the local fire department on his police-scanner arrow.
After shooting a dozen or a score of arrows in one extended panel of the comic, GA will look at his rattling, half-empty quiver, and wonder why he does not have something like wings, superspeed, or a mutant power. He sighs.
But without any of those things, the fire is well and truly defeated! Enough, at least, that Opal's fire brigade can get a handle on it.
The area of the fire has many exposed wires, cut out of walls and lampposts. Some of the cuts were done clumsily, creating short circuits.
But others were done deftly, by finger-sized brass windup men with one eye and many tendrils, who have connected Opal City's power grid to their own electrical cables, which stretch through wall and crevice back to the section where Starman was calling for help.
Dollars worth of stolen electricity is now coursing into some robot's unknown devices!
One of the robots stops suddenly. Another one runs to him, winds the key in the back of his head, and he comes back awake. They hurry along the wire toward their lair, and don't notice Green Arrow standing right there next to the wire.
THE SHADE observes, through a gap in the rooftops, a whole toy city of brass and aluminum and punctured-metal tinkertoys being worked on by numberless robots. It seems to be pushing the human structures out of the way.
MONKEY KING, if indeed he follows Starman, sees toy robot craft shooting at Starman in pursuit. He's able to deflect most of the shots with his Gravity Rod, but his black leather jacket's astrological designs are burned in several places already.
Starman stops, shouting in an alien language. Is he, perhaps, some alien duplicate Starman?
Then he switches to English.
"J'onn! I didn't even think to expect YOU'D be around, but I'm far from complaining about it! Here, let me put out all the flames ..."
He twists the Gravity Rod, repelling all burning materials. The small sparks go out, and this also makes the toy brass ships' heat-beams useless.
"Whoa! Should have thought of THAT before," he says. "Well, how about it, small fry? You still want to mix it up with not just the latest in a long line of Starmen, but the Martian Freaking Manhunter as well?"
They don't. The spaceships withdraw to their fantastic, elaborate city.
MONKEY KING: Monkey is flying the Martian saucer. it is amassing that a ancient chines monkey born from a rock knows how to fly a super advanced star ship.
Monkey King groans, his father instilled in him a great fear of fire when he was little.
"So what's the plan, boys? Because I don't want to go into that fire."
GREEN ARROW: GA thinks we should do all three.
He asks Monkey King, "Rush in to follow Starman! Aid him. Avoid striking balconies or bridges.
He asks Shade to get a good overall look at the area before rushing in. "Does this ship have some sort of scanner, or x-ray, or telescope to give us a good view of what is going on before we rush in?
"If not, I will shoot a camera arrow out through the air lock to give us a drone's eye view. Is there a place I can plug in the very long electrical cable trailing after the camera arrow, so we can see the pictures?"
He stares at the two glowing orbs forming the armrests of the pilot's seat of the invisible Martian bio-ship in puzzlement.
"Meanwhile, fly over the spot where the fires are starting. They should be small if they just started. I will rush in to fight the fire. I will keep in touch using a shortwave radio arrow, or I may shoot a flare arrow."
Green Arrow shoots a wirepoon-and-grapnel arrow out of the airlock of a moving spaceship to a convenient balcony or roof ornament of the burning building below, and slides down the wire using his bowstaff as an impromptu pulley.
He will have his parachute arrow ready just in case. And his inflatable trampoline arrow.
Once on the ground, he will shoot at the fires using his four extinguishing foam arrows, four liquid nitrogen arrows, four ice arrows and the one oxygen-destroyer arrow he was saving for a Godzilla attack.
He will use a bullhorn arrow to firmly and calmly order civilians to exit the burning building in an orderly fashion, use his neon emergency exit arrow to point to the emergency exit, and use his fire-ax arrow to break open any locked doors, and his rather large and awkward hook-and-ladder arrow to save anyone trapped in an upper story.
Of course, he cannot be carrying enough ice arrows to put out a really out-of-control house fire. He looks around for a convenient water tower or fire hydrant. Or a wet blanket.
He will call the local fire department on his police-scanner arrow.
After shooting a dozen or a score of arrows in one extended panel of the comic, GA will look at his rattling, half-empty quiver, and wonder why he does not have something like wings, superspeed, or a mutant power. He sighs.
But without any of those things, the fire is well and truly defeated! Enough, at least, that Opal's fire brigade can get a handle on it.
The area of the fire has many exposed wires, cut out of walls and lampposts. Some of the cuts were done clumsily, creating short circuits.
But others were done deftly, by finger-sized brass windup men with one eye and many tendrils, who have connected Opal City's power grid to their own electrical cables, which stretch through wall and crevice back to the section where Starman was calling for help.
Dollars worth of stolen electricity is now coursing into some robot's unknown devices!
One of the robots stops suddenly. Another one runs to him, winds the key in the back of his head, and he comes back awake. They hurry along the wire toward their lair, and don't notice Green Arrow standing right there next to the wire.
THE SHADE observes, through a gap in the rooftops, a whole toy city of brass and aluminum and punctured-metal tinkertoys being worked on by numberless robots. It seems to be pushing the human structures out of the way.
MONKEY KING, if indeed he follows Starman, sees toy robot craft shooting at Starman in pursuit. He's able to deflect most of the shots with his Gravity Rod, but his black leather jacket's astrological designs are burned in several places already.
Starman stops, shouting in an alien language. Is he, perhaps, some alien duplicate Starman?
Then he switches to English.
"J'onn! I didn't even think to expect YOU'D be around, but I'm far from complaining about it! Here, let me put out all the flames ..."
He twists the Gravity Rod, repelling all burning materials. The small sparks go out, and this also makes the toy brass ships' heat-beams useless.
"Whoa! Should have thought of THAT before," he says. "Well, how about it, small fry? You still want to mix it up with not just the latest in a long line of Starmen, but the Martian Freaking Manhunter as well?"
They don't. The spaceships withdraw to their fantastic, elaborate city.
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