8FOLD/HCC: Journey Into #21 (HCC51)

[Andrew Perron]

On 2/11/2015 8:01 PM, Saxon Brenton wrote:
<snip>
>       The diabolical Professor Longitude was flying for the simple
> pleasure of it.

Woo! <3

>       But right now, he was looping through the sky for the sheer giddy
> joy of having successfully pulled off his latest scheme.  Ha!  Take that
> Doctor Longitude!

What a nerd. XD

>       No, wait.  The point that four colour heroes should damn well be
> recovering from their latest setback and be setting about to overcome
> their villainous nemeses.  Doctor Longitude should be grateful that he
> had merely been left unconscious on the floor of an abandoned warehouse,
> with his mind swapped into someone else's body.

Ahhhh. In the original story I thought he'd been mind-wiped, not swapped. o.o 
I must say I do prefer this.

> Or maybe the
> diabolical Professor had had sex with a reverse gender copy of himself,
> and by use of a probability manipulator the genetic information passed
> on within the gametes of both partners had produced offspring identical
> to that of his male parent!
>       (Professor Longitude was pretty sure he would have noticed a
> contrivance like that, however.  Ninety percent sure, anyway.)

OF COURSE

> As was often the case when he went into creative ferment, he wasn't
> quite sure what he was working on.

Oooooh, fascinating.

> However roughly 27 hours later when
> it was finished he had a large scanner type device, all Kirbytech lines
> and crackling energy, and consisting of a platform where he could stand
> upright, plus a control panel and many involuted detection arrays.  It
> was a temporal scanner, meant to reveal the history of the thing being
> probed.

AWESOME. :D You do some of the best weird-tech.

> Then an idea came to him, and he checked to see
> whether the results would be the same if Doctor Longitude were some
> innocent victim who had had the black cape's genetic profile overlaid
> onto him, transforming him into a duplicate of the diabolical Professor
> and setting him on a path of revenge.  But, no, that made no difference
> either.  Okay then, whatever, clones it was.

Heeheehee. This is great in and of itself and also as a reference to 
Spider-Man's clone convolutions.

> However it did mean that he was currently
> using a body that probably had deep programming.  He thought about the
> coincidence that during his own random flight earlier he had just
> happened to be drifting in that direction.  With the sceptical mental
> equivalent of a red circle drawn around a particularly pertinent fact
> written on a notepad he made a mental note to take steps and remove
> any subconscious commands.

Hmmm, yes - I had half-suspected that that would be the upshot of this story.

>       Simon Throckmorton.  The original, Silver Age Professor Longitude.
>       He was alive.

DUN DUN DUNNNNN!

>       Onscreen the Silver Age Professor Longitude continued, "I will
> plan a campaign against him.  You will supply the mad science technology
> to counter his inventions.  Together we will harass him - and then when
> he at his weakest, I will destroy him."
>       And for a second - just for a second - the diabolical Professor
> found himself wishing he had just flat out killed Doctor Longitude when
> he had held the young man in his power back at the warehouse base.  It
> was incredibly wasteful to dispose of a heroic opponent like that, but...
> He felt angry.  Not even, "Pitiful insects, I shall crush you!" angry,
> with all the appropriate social niceties of declaring war on them and
> composing a proper villainous rant.  Rather, "You don't even understand
> what I'm on about, and frankly you're in my way.  Just f*ck off and die."

Awwwwwwww. Poor Professor L. (...what?)

>       This episode originally focused on Doctor Longitude as he regained
> consciousness and went to get help, but I rewrote the start something
> like four or five times.  Now, with time running out on HCC51 I've
> decided to can that aspect for the time being and shift the focus onto
> the diabolical Professor Longitude.

Ahhhh, that makes sense.

>       The exuberance of the diabolical Professor makes him easy to write
> for.  This scene took about 3 hours or so to write, starting at about
> 1 o'clock in the morning on the 12th of February.  By comparison I'm
> beginning to wonder if I'll ever be able to get its counterpart scene
> with Doctor Longitude into a fit condition to post.  :-/

I know that feeling. x.x Sometimes you just build up so much of a hump, trying 
to get it *right*... In theory, the thing to do is just write down the wrong 
thing and move on, but I'm so bad at that.

Andrew "NO .SIG MAN" "Juan" Perron, blargle