RACCIES/LNH/ACRA: Just Imagine Saxon Brenton Presents the RACCies... Again! #5 (now with added Saxon Brenton and RACCies) (warning: very long)

Adrian James McClure lord_soldeed at yahoo.com
Fri Mar 31 09:27:03 PST 2006


Arthur--That was actually some pretty great stuff.  Bringing in the
Looniversal Answering Machine was especially inspired.  So here's the
next installment, just because...

No one demanded it, but here it is anyway!
Just Imagine Saxon Brenton Presents the RACCies... Again! #5:
"For the Writer who Has Everything"

Note:  This issue has an arguably Acraphobe bit parodying storylines
that DC seems to have no problem including in comics that are aimed at
children.

A FEW MINUTES AGO, IN ANOTHER PLOTLINE...

	Ben--he was Plot-Error Man again, he supposed, at least for now--shook
Pointless Awards Man IV's hand, knowing he'd regret it.  PAM IV's grip
was as hard as a vice, and Plot-Error Man already began to feel
trapped.  Then, there was yet another ZAP!...

	And they were elsewhere.  Plot-Error Man gasped and felt as if he was
about to lose his lunch.  The place they were now couldn't be more
different from the comfortable suburban home they'd just left behind.
It was a gigantic, desolate fortress built of some kind of stone he'd
never seen in an architectural style he couldn't pin down in a color
that didn't fall within the human visual spectrum.  It seemed to be
constantly changing and yet totally dead.  Being in here felt like all
the memories of things he'd lost at once.  "Where are we?" he whispered
meekly.

	"We are outside of time, in the fortress of a version of the Time
Crapper that doesn't exist yet," said PAM IV.  "Don't ask how that's
possible because this issue is already going to be padded enough."

	Plot-Error Man hadn't been able to take in any specific detail of what
he'd seen around him up until now, because it was just too large and
alien, but now something in particular stood out.  It was a towering
crystal wall that stood in the center of the fortress.  In it,
Plot-Error Man could catch flashes of everything that had been or would
be.  "What's that?"

	"That's the timestream," said Pointless Awards Man IV.  "I had to
bring you here since the way your powers work means that you can't
retcon an universe unless you're not part of it yourself.  As soon as
your mind has adjusted to the sensation of being here, you can create
the necessary retcons which would allow 'Just Imagine Saxon Brenton
Presents the RACCies... Again!' to truly begin!"

	Plot-Error Man didn't acknowledge anything that PAM IV said.  He found
himself drawn to the timestream, which glowed faintly as he approached
it.  Transfixed, he touched it lightly, at a point where he saw a
beautiful but mean-looking blonde woman...

	Plot-Error Man drew back abruptly as the timestream began to wobble
slightly.  "No, you idiot!" said PAM IV, pulling him away.  "Don 't
break the timestream!"  There was a small, almost unnoticeable crack
where the woman was...

NOW

	Onboard the flght thingee, the assmebled LNHers gasped as
Never-Seen-Before-and-Never-Going-to-Be-Seen-Again Lad revealed himself
as...

	"Deductive Logic Man?"

	"Elementary, my dear LNHers," said Deductive Logic Man, adjusting his
bowler hat.

	"Why did you just shoot Nudist Man?" said Catalyst Lass.

	"Because that's not actually Nudist Man," said Deductive Logic Man.
"Circe, casts a spell that reveals the true forms of things on him, you
will find that he is..."

	"The Weevil Mastermind in a human-shaped exoskeleton?"

	"And I would have gotten away with it too if it weren't for you damn
kids!" said Bertrand Weevil, crawling out of "Nudist Man's" head.  "How
did you ever figure it out?"

	"Before joining our mission, instead of eating Doritos, which is
Nudist Man's usual favorite snack food, you ate cotton, the food of the
Cotton Boll Weevil or Anthonomus Grandis, to which species The Weevil
Mastermind is known to belong."

	"Did you know that the Boll Weevil has caused a $14 billion loss of
cotton since it arrived from Mexico in 1892?" said Obscure Trivia Lad.
Everyone ignored him.

	"Hey, didn't you die in issue 2?" said Master Blaster.  "Um, wait, how
do I know that?  Never mind.  Why did you try to sabotage our mission?"

	"I wanted to ruin Nudist Man's life and reputation.  He was one of the
Saviors of the Net, who were responsible for the death of Captain
Killfile!  Because I was her mother!"

	"No, I was her mother!" shouted Catalyst Lass and Circe in unison.
Then they looked at each other strangely.  "Never mind," said Catalyst
Lass.  "How is that possible?  Aren't you an insect?"

	"A male insect?" added Obscure Trivia Lad.

	"Well..." said the Weevil Mastermind.  "It's a long story..."  But he
didn't get a chance to tell it because at that moment, the
flight.thingee landed next to the House of Bertrand Weevil.

	"So what should we do with the Weevil Mastermind?" said Catalyst Lass.
 "Should we call the police to arrest him first?"

	"No!  No!  Wait!" said the Weevil Mastermind.  "That's actually my
mansion!  You'll need my help to get in there because it's my mansion
and I planted several death-traps there!"

	They walked up to the door of the mansion.  "Remember," said Deductive
Logic Man to the others, "the Weevil Mastermind said that there are
death traps here, and there may be other enemies as well.  We have to
be subtle."

	Master Blaster pulled out an enormous gun and shot smoking hole in the
door.  "I said subtle!" said Deductive Logic Man.

	"What does that mean again?" said Master Blaster.  "Oh, yeah, right.
Sorry."

	The Legionnaires stealthily crept into the mansion.  "This thing is
hideous," whispered Circe as she saw the decor.  "Is Bertrand Weevil
blind?"

	"Actually," said Deductive Logic Man, "the pattern of color use is
consistent with someone who has orange/red colorblindness...  Wait."
He put his finger to his mouth.  "There's another net.ahuman in this
building."

	"How can you tell?" said the Weevil Mastermind nervously.

	"Well," said Deductive Logic Man, "because the movement of shadows
indicates the presence of a net.ahuman with powers over darkness.  But
mainly because of the explosions in the kitchen.  Are there any death
traps in this area?"

	"Um, well, no.  There aren't any death traps in this house.  I was
kind of using the truth creatively...  Wait, explosions?  My house is
going to burn down!  Help, help!"  But everyone ignored him and
cautiously walked into the kitchen...

***

	The battle between the Looniversal Answering Machine was a battle for
the ages, one of the most memorable fights in LNH history.  But
unfortunately this issue was already getting long enough, so suffice to
say that the Looniversal Answering Machine found that even her great
strength and cold tactical brilliance was of only so much use against
Gren.del's unstoppable primal fury.  So she opened a dimensional hole
and teleported herself back to the Net.gative Zone within the depths of
alt.comics.lnh, where here only company was the distant echoes of the
wheedling of spammers and the incomprehensible gibbering of trolls.
There she would lick her wounds and one day take her revenge.

	"You have done well, my Son," said Gren.del's Mother, when the
Legionnaires suddenly walked into the room.  Gren.del tensed like a cat
and prepared to spring when his mother,  "Gren.del, no.  The time for
blood has not come upon us yet."

	"Who's that?" said Master Blaster.  "She looks kind of hot.  Kind of
like a goth Angelina Jolie.  Apart from the claws, anyway, but..."

	"My name is not important," said Gren.del's Mother.  "What is
important is the name of my daughter, Brunhilde, who you know as
Captain Killfile.  Nudist Man was one of those who slew her, and you
serve the same thane as he, so you must die..."

	"No, I'm Captain Killfile's mother!" shouted Catalyst Lass, Circe, and
Bertrand Weevil in unison.

	"...Never mind," said Gren.del's mother.  "The point is, I cannot kill
you yet because a greater evil has arisen that threatens us both.  He
calls himself Pointless Awards Man IV, though his true name I do not
know.  I do know that he is planning something that threatens all that
is, and..."

	"Wait," said Deductive Logic Man.  "Did you say your son is Gren.del?
The Gren.del of legend?"

	"Yes."

	"Then why don't either of you speak in alliterative verse?"

	"Because our author is too lazy.  Now as I was saying..."

	But just then, Very-Disturbed-Scary-Creature Man rushed into the
building, followed by a horde of enraged women with handbags.  He
ducked into the shadows of the kitchen as the women charged into the
room, screaming, "You killed my daughter!"

	"Now now," said Catalyst Lass, standing unmoved with her arms crossed.
 "Can't we work this out whatever this is nonviolently."

	"Well..." said the old woman.

	"Maybe instead of killing us you all could wrestle with Catalyst Lass
and Circe in jello?" said Master Blaster.  "Except the old fat one."
Circe snapped her fingers and Master Blaster found he couldn't talk.
"All right," said the old woman.  "He--"  Then, Bertrand Weevil--who,
you must keep in mind was still inside his Nudist Man disguise--charged
into the room, running around in circles.  The woman then were filled
with such a jolt of anger that Catalyst Lass lost her hold on them, and
they set upon him as one.  So Bertrand Weevil was killed.  Yes, again.
Sucks to be him.

	"Wait, wait," said Catalyst Lass, futilely trying to get through to
them, but they wouldn't listen.  "You must be in league with him!" said
a woman in front of the crowd.  The horde of women bore down on the
Legionnaires and their allies, pinned them to the floor, and started
beating them before they could react.  Meanwhile, Very Disturbed
Scary-Creature Man had fallen through a hole in the floor that had been
caused by one of the explosions earlier.  He pressed a button on a
device on his boot--never mind how he got it.

	The Legionnaires were struggling with all their might, but couldn't
escape from being clubbed by the angry women who thought they were Dr.
Killfile's mother.  But then, there was a flash of light, and Retcon
Lad fell into the room.  Retcon Lad stood up, wobbling on his feet, and
then the women knocked him over and started clubbing him as well.  "You
killed Captain Killfile!  You killed my daughter!" they all screamed.
Retcon Lad could see a subtle flickering around him.  He realized that
somehow a time paradox had emerged where all these women were the
mother of Captain Killfile at once, and if he didn't do something the
timestream would collapse under the weight of all these people trying
to occupy the same temporal space.  He could feel his powers still
active, though they were faint, and he started hurling retcons at them.
 Gren.del's Mother was now the mother of the Captain Killfile from the
alternate-future Saviors of the Net, the ones from _Ultimate
Mercenary_, the old lady was the mother of the golden-age Captain
Killfile, the blonde who was kind of cute and who he probalby would
have liked to get to know better if she wasn't trying to kill him was
her clone, the one next to her was her counterpart from an alternate
future, Catalyst Lass and Circe had both been the mother of Captain
Killfile in alternate timelines that had now beeen erased... and so on
and so forth.

	He'd now started a domino effect where each retcon was progressively
easier.  But even before he'd been infected, causing these many retcons
at once would have put an enormous strain on him, let alone now.  And
it wasn't just a strain on him.  While the damage to the universe as a
whole was being minimized, reality in this particular place was being
worn thin by all the retcons happening at once.  He could feel the
universe beginning to give away under his feet.  And since he was
causing retcons so quickly that they didn't immediately affect the
memories of the poeple he was retconning, it wasn't making the horde of
angry women any less angry.  Things were looking pretty desparate...

	Just then, a cloud of screeching flying rubber creatures summoned by
the device on Very Disturbed Scary Creature Man's boot burst through
the windows and started flapping above the women's heads.  Panicking,
they hurried out of house--just as the pressure on reality became too
great and the House of Bertrand Weevil, together with Gren.del and his
mother, Very Disturbed Scary Creature Man, and all the Legionnaires
fell out of the Looniverse...

***

	Plot-Error Man watched, awed and horrified, as the small crack he'd
caused slowly expanded in size, though a few branches of it were
healing.  "Is there anything I can do to stop it?" he whispered.

	"As soon as you cause the retcons I brought you here to cause, that
damage will be automatically repaired."

	"OK," said Plot-Error Man.  "Wait a minute.  If we're outside of time,
why are we experiencing time here?"

	PAM IV sighed.  "We are outside the timestream of the universe as a
whole, but still inside our personal timestreams.  However, the longer
we spend in here the more those timestreams will erode.  So we have to
act quickly."

	"OK," said Plot-Error Man.  He rubbed his head.  "I can't take in any
of this.  I need some coffee."

	PAM IV clenched his teeth.  "All right, all right, fine.  But then
will you cause the retcons?"  He waved his hand and a steaming hot cup
of black coffee appeared in his hand, just the way Plot-Error Man liked
it.  Plot-Error Man took the coffee and sipped it, but he couldn't take
his eyes off the shifting timestream.  Taken aback by something he saw,
he slipped and the cup fell out of his hand, the coffee hitting the
crystal wall.

	"Argh!  You idiot!  You spilled coffee on the timestream!"

***

	"Shortly after the LNH was founded," explained Dr. Stomper, "Dr.
Killfile raped Sister State-The-Obvious.  Occultism Kid then tried to
force him to become good, but ended up accidentally lobotomizing him.
Then when you found out about it, we wiped your mind.  And now she was
just killed by aLliterative Lass."

	"Wow, magical mindwiping!" said Comics Snob Boy.  "This is such a
touching examination of the very real consequences of rape."

	"You bastards," said Ultimate Ninja.  "I'm going to have to activate
the iMac project, my secret LNH-killing protocol!."

	"Wait," said wReamhack "why do you have a secret LNH-killing
protocol?"

	"Um, I have no idea now that I think about it.  I guess I thought it
would come in useful someday."

	"Wouldn't it be a problem if they fell into enemy hands?"

	"No!  They wouldn't!  I'm too good for that!"

	Then a message flashed on the LNH computer screen.  "No you're not.
Ha-ha!"  A bunch of civilians in net.ropolis then turned into robots
and started killing people.  "I did it!" said Sarcastic Lad.  "I'm evil
even though it doesn't fit the way I've been characterized before, so
we can have more drama and angst!"  And then he shot Master Blaster in
the head.

***

	"There is a disturbance in the Dorf sector and the Dorf are about to
go to war with the Shi'tar," said Eight of Nine.

	"Who?" said Sing-Along Lass.

	"The Shi'tar were an alien species appeared in an issue of Tom
RUssell's Journey into Irrelevancy," said Eight of Nine.

	"Oh, them," said Sing-Along Lass.  "OK."

	"Shall we then gird ourselves and engage in a titanic battle the like
of which the universe has never seen before?" said Kid Kirby.

	"No," said Eight of Nine.  "We're going to sit around and do nothing
for six issues until Sing-Along Lass is pointlessly killed and her
essence merges with Vel to make it look like this story was actually
significant."

***

	A horde of net.villains as large as the Legion of Net.Heroes itself,
led by Manga Man and Dr. Killfile started blasting its way through
Net.ropolis.  "We are the all-new, all-different Brotherhood of Evil
Net.Villains!" shouted Dr. Killfile.  "We are unstoppable!  And we get
the only crossover tie-in miniseries that doesn't suck!"

***

	"Hurry before it's too late!" said All-Knowing Whiner Last-Chance
Destiny Woman.  "The Racc.tre is almost upon us!"

	"I'm trying," said Occultism Kid, "but I can't hold off her power!"

	"Kawaai!" said the Racc.tre, whose essence was now guided by the
spirit of the original Manga Girl, as she turned the oncoming soldiers
into pink fluffy bunnies.

***

	"My God," said Plot-Error Man, "that's the most horrifying thing I've
ever seen!"

	"We must act now!" said PAM IV, who was actually rather overacting
now.  He placed his hands on Plot-Error Man's head.  Plot-Error Man
felt his power expanding, encompassing, to his horror, not just the
timestream but Real Life itself...

ZAP!

***

	Adrian James McClure woke up.   He'd just had a horrible nightmare
where he was an overworked single college student with no time for a
social life who had an unconquerable case of writer's block and was
desparately trying to finish a fairly mediocre cascade issue.  But all
his nervousness and fear slipped away once he felt his wife sleeping
next to him.  Still, he couldn't blame himself for having felt nervous.
 Today was the day, after all.

	He got out of bed, but decided not to wake her up just yet.  She'd
need all the rest she could get given what was going to happen later
today.  Adrian was already still worn out after attending the Hugo
Awards, where he'd tied for the award for best novel with Jamie Rosen
for the third year in a row.  He could only imagine how Tom Russell
would feel after having just won the Oscar for best picture for "Star
Wars:  Episode III."  But today they were all going to attend an awards
ceremony bigger than all the others combined:  the RACCies.  Dealing
with the paparazzi alone would be a major headache--not only was the
LNH a multi-million dollar industry, not only would bestselling science
fiction writer Jamie Rosen and legendary rock star Jesse Willey and
famous director Tom Russell be there, but the RACCies would be
presented by none other than Saxon Brenton, head of the newly-created
united world government, which was unfortunately not leaving him quite
as much time to write LNH issues.

	What would win this year?  The competition was always tough, as RACC
writers never suffered from writers block and never left.  It would be
a tough choice between Tom Russell's ending to Net.Heroes on Parade,
which had been almost as good as Scavenger's ending to 501 Blues some
years back, the latest arc in Dvandom's Exarchs, and Scavenger's own
LNH2 series 502 Blues.  Adrian himself would have chosen Arthur
Spitzer's The Very Disturbed Scary Knight Returns.  There were always a
few hardcore literary snobs who voted for Ernest Hemingway, who had
survived as a disembodied cybernetic head attached to the body of a
gorilla and had recently begun writing LNH, but as science fiction and
superhero stories were respected literary genres now, they probably
wouldn't prevail.

	There was one thing that stuck in Adrian's craw, though.
Co-presenting the awards this year would be someone called Pointless
Awards Man IV:  The Voyage Home, after the character who used to
present the fictional RACCies in the earliest days of the LNH.  None of
the other RACC writers seemed to know who he actually was.  Maybe Saxon
knew, as he hadn't had time to speak with anyone about it in the last
few months.  But something about this person just worried him.
Obviously this was some kind of publicity stunt, but if so, why hadn't
he or any of the other RACC writers been told about it?  Still, that
was the only thing that worried him, and it didn't worry him very much.
 Other than that, his life was perfect.

***

	The House of Bertrand Weevil, and everyone who had been in it, fell
back into the Looniverse.  But it was a very different Looniverse from
the one it had left...

Next:  Well, we'll just have to see.

Trust me, I'll never write a cascade issue quite this long ever again.

Credits:
Plot-Error Man and the Time Crapper created by Jef Kolodziej
Pointless Awards Man IV:  The Voyage Home created by Jesse Willey
Captain Killfile and Very-Disturbed-Scary-Creature Man created by
Arthur Spitzer
Never-Seen-Before-And-Never-Going-To-Be-Seen-Again Lad (who will
probably never be mentioned again), Master Blaster, and Eight of Nine
created by Martin Phipps
Deductive Logic Man created by wReam, and developed significantly by K.
Michael Wilcox.  I read some of Aeneas and Ferris before writing this
issue and hope I managed to write him OK.
Nudist Man, the Weevil Mastermind, (sort of) Gren.Del's Mother, and the
Shi'tar created by Tom Russell
Catalyst Lass created by Elisabeth Riba
Circe created by Jamie Rosen
Obscure Trivia Lad created by Brian Perler
Looniversal Answering Machine created by Russ Alberey and introduced as
an actual character by Arthur Spitzer
Gren.Del and (sort of) Gren.del's mother created by me
Retcon Lad created by Saxon Brenton, and presumably used with
permission
Ultimate Ninja, Sister State-The-Obvious, wReamhack and All-Knowing
Whiner Last-Chance Destiny Woman created by wReam
Occultism Kid created by Josh Guerink
aLLiterative Lass created by Charles Fitzgerald
Comics Snob Boy created by Maurice Bayke
Sarcastic Lad created by Gary St. Lawrence
Sing-Along Lass created by Drizzt
Kid Kirby created by Jameel Alkhafiz, cameoed without permission
Vel created by Jesse Willey, namechecked without permission
The Racc.tre created by Matt Rossi
The various writers created by God, or their parents, or random chance
or what have you

I'll never write a cascade issue which references quite this many
characters either.




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