REPOST: RAC Challenge! #9
Arthur Spitzer
arspitzer at earthlink.net
Tue Sep 29 15:28:58 PDT 2015
REPOST: RAC Challenge! #9
Chapter by Marc "Notthebeastmaster" Singer who wrote a
number of stories for RACC mostly under the OMEGA imprint.
He also finished up the Savior of Net cascade.. (and did
a very nice job of that..)
From: franke at ucs.indiana.edu (Jerry L Franke)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.comics.creative
Subject: REPOST: RAC Challenge! Ch. 9
Date: 10 Nov 1995 04:39:34 GMT
Continuing the retrospective...
===========================================================================
RAC CHALLENGE
Chapter 9: A Farewell to Arms (and a few legs)
by Marc "The Jazz" Singer
title, and my snappy new nickname, by Kirk "Bierce, comma" Ambrose
________________________________________________________________
Brussels, Belgium...
"His name is Horst Bock-Pilsner Malevo and he's the maddest scientist
alive. Now he possesses the means to conquestor the world." Malevo
slipped a tiny round object, not unlike a superball, into a small
opening in a strange, twisted device. And, much to the horror of the
onlooking Paragon the Ultimate Man and Tito and Tina the Ultimate
Twins, the ball fit the opening perfectly. Doctor Malevo rose into
the air, crackling with energy. "His name is Horst Bock-Pilsner
Malevo," he cried, "and now he's going to kick some Ultimate Ass!"
"Galloping Snails!" cried Paragon, the Ultimate Man. "Doctor Malevo
now possesses the Ultimate Marble and the Jas Rswert! And he's so
drunk on power, he's referring to himself in the third person!" Then
Paragon realized the power of the combined devices washing over him
as well. "No," he gasped, "he's also making me give... running
commentary and plot summaries... this makes me wish I'd never...
taken Tito and Tina to Brussels to use the Ultimate Library to learn
about the mysterious Ultimate Menace... especially since Tito might
have gotten brain damage from Tina constantly whacking him on the
head... now no doubt I'll black out from the pain and fall to the
grou--" Paragon blacked out from the pain and fell to the ground.
Tina the Ultimate Twinette looked around. Paragon was down, all the
Belchans--er, Flems--er, good citizens of Brussels had fled in
terror, and Tito was drooling from his apparent brain damage. That
would teach her to smack her own brother in the head with Ultimate
Strength. Now it was up to her to stop Malevo.
Then Tina saw Mary Lu Retina: the Ultimate Woman, a psychotic
super-villainess, and through a rather Dickensian coincidence, Tito
and Tina's mom. "Mom will save us," Tina said, "just like the time
our third-grade gym teacher flunked us, and mom ripped off his arms
and bludgeoned him to death with them."
Tina paused. When she looked at it that way, it was kind of dumb that
they hadn't realized their mom was the Ultimate Woman a lot earlier.
Tina ran to where her mom was lying unconscious on the ground, but
before she could get there, Mary Lu suddenly became encased in a
sticky yellow mass. Tina scooped a little onto her finger, and licked
it. "Egg salad... with extra toluene! That's Malevo's special
recipe!" She looked up at the flying Malevo. "How did you do that?"
"His name is Horst Bock-Pilsner Malevo, and with the Jas Rswert and
the Ultimate Marble, now possesses any superpower he can imagine!
He'd long planned to... oh, shoot, he's doing it again." Malevo
flicked a small switch on the Jas Rswert from Third Person to First.
"Ah, that's much better. Now, where was he--I?"
"Possessing any superpower you can imagine," Tina yelled. She was
furiously scooping the egg salad off Mary Lu before Malevo also
realized he'd left the Jas Rswert idling on Villain's Lecture.
"Thank you, my dear. For that, I shall only kill you 'fairly
painfully.' As I was saying, the unique combination of Marble and
Rswert allows me to remove all carbon from my body. And, as I once
told that idiot Paragon, carbon is the one substance that keeps
humans from having superpowers!" [* RACChallenge #2--ed.] Malevo
pointed to his left, at the floating editor's caption he'd summoned
to show just how powerful he was. "And now, with these powers, I
shall--what the hell, did Paragon leave this thing on Lecture? No
wonder the bastard's so longwinded..." Malevo switched off the
lecture mode as well. And he looked at Tina with murder in his eyes.
________________________________________________________________
Some Spooky Asteroid...
"You see?" said the Pen-Ultimate Man to the two evil figures at his
side. "Malevo and the others are too busy fighting amongst
themselves. And with our proper entrance established, the Ultimate
Collective will be helpless to prevent us from arriving on Earth."
"You'd better be right, Reeves," said the human-sized figure,
grabbing the Pen-Ultimate Man's neck with a cold metallic arm. "I
have a score to settle, and I'm not letting anything stop me. Least
of all the Collective."
"Not to worry," Reeves choked in a high-pitched rasp. "Those Ultimate
Morons have provided us with the perfect 'back door' to Earth. Soon
it will be ours for the conquering."
"Conquesting," said Spurgo, the giant third figure whose mere
presence filled the asteroid with evil, not to mention the smell of
trout. "Spurgo likes his allies to say conquesting.'"
"Whatever you say, big guy. With all of the superheroes down for the
count, Earth will be a conquesting smorgasbord."
The mystery man's metal fingers tightened around Reeves's neck. His
free hand pointed to the screen of the small Watchman they were all
gathered around (a clumsy proposition in and of itself, because
Spurgo's toenails alone could have been said to be the size of large
Dobermans, if Dobermans were giant toenail-shaped creatures about
twenty feet tall). "All of the superheroes?" the mystery man cried.
"Then who are they?"
________________________________________________________________
Brussels, Someplace Marginally Less Spooky...
Malevo looked at Tina with murder in his eyes, and his twisted brain
thought of the thirteen most despicable super-powers imaginable
ripping her to shreds... all that remained was the act...
"Hold it right there, Malevo!" A green blur rocketed up from the
streets below and careened into him. Malevo hit the ground hard, only
remembering at the last minute to give himself invulnerability. He
climbed out of the crater, and saw that Tina was now protected by six
small children in green uniforms.
"Back off, Malevo," the tallest child said, in French-accented
English. "If you try anything else in this city, you'll have to
answer to... The Brussels Sprouts!"
Malevo was too stunned to say or do anything. But before the Brussels
Sprouts could leap into action, a muscle-bound man in a silvery
costume swept out of the clouds and dive-bombed the six children.
Before the children could run, the flying man swept his hands
forward. Each hand carried a large silvery disk with a square pattern
on the inside, and the man clapped them together like cymbals,
trapping the Brussels Sprouts in between. "You nevair should 'ave let
your guard down, my petites sprouts," he cried, "for now you are at
the mercy of your arch-enemie... le Belgian Waffle! Nyah-ha-ha!"
Malevo staggered around in a circle. All over Brussels, costumed
combatants were springing out of the woodwork and beating the snot
out of each other. Afraid he knew what was going on, Malevo looked
down at his Ultimate Device....
________________________________________________________________
A Few Feet Away, A Place Of Equal Spookiness...
"Before I fell unconscious," Mary Lu coughed, after Tina had scooped
the egg salad off her face, "I set the Ultimate Marble from 'stream'
to 'spray.' The carbon removal should have a much wider field of
effect now..."
Tina gasped. "Then you mean..."
"Everyone in Brussels has super powers, and we're trapped right in
the middle of it."
"Again?" Tina moaned.
"There's no time for complaining... get me out of this salad!"
Tina wasn't sure if that was such a good idea. After all, Mary Lu was
a homicidal maniac who could probably kill every single one of the
superpowered Belgians. But, on the minus side, she didn't let Tina
and Tito stay up as late as Paragon did.
Then again, Paragon wasn't much help right now. He was still reeling
from Malevo's whammy, giving expository dialogue even in his sleep.
"Tina must be debating whether to free Mary Lu, whom we recently
learned is her mom and my former sex kitten... meanwhile, I'm still
unconscious, yet giving dialogue... now I'm giving dialogue on my
dialogue... Drat! I'm caught in a loop... Drat! I'm..."
Tina realized the only way to get Paragon out of this jam was to
start doing something else he could narrate. So she pulled Mary Lu
out of the egg salad, and said, "We've got to get the Ultimate Device
away from Malevo. Maybe that can undo the damage."
"Or re-do some old damage," Mary Lu said, looking at Malevo's arms,
which had the nerve to still be attached to his torso. They were kind
of tantalizing, actually. Mary Lu charged across the street and
grabbed the [* RACChallenge #2--ed.] caption, which had fallen to the
ground after the Sprouts' attack on Malevo. (The Sprouts themselves
were currently being covered in syrup and butter by the Belgian
Waffle, who was licking his lips.) Pulling the * out of the caption,
Mary Lu hurled it at Malevo like a shuriken.
It knocked the Ultimate Device out of his hands. Mary Lu grabbed the
razor-sharp d from the caption and put her hand through the loop at
the bottom, wielding it like a cutlass. Screaming in triumph, she
leapt at Malevo. Brandishing the d and eyeing his unsevered limbs,
Mary Lu said, "It looks like this'll be a farewell to arms... and a
few legs."
Malevo gasped and pointed behind Mary Lu. "This is no time for
amputation, woman, particularly mine! We have to stop this terrible
new menace!"
Mary Lu smirked. "I'm not afraid of anything that Brussels could
throw at me. Unless Aaron Levitz was in the radius of your carbon
removal and now has awesome super powers."
"It's worse than that, woman! It's-- it's--"
A shadow loomed over Mary, who finally turned around. She saw the
grinning figure behind her. And she screamed, "It's... you! And...
they're still letting you teach gym?!?!?!?"
* To be continued in RACChallenge! #10! But first...
________________________________________________________________
Dain Bramage
The backup story, not at all spooky until the end.
It was all because his dad, Dirk Darringer aka Paragon the Ultimate
Man, liked the Jackson 5.
Tito could still think. He didn't look like he could think, because
he was sitting in the middle of Brussels drooling--and not because
his sister Tina had been smacking him on the head, but because of a
much more sinister factor. Ultimately, because Dirk liked the Jackson
5. And he'd named his son after his favorite Jackson.
Tito tried to warn somebody, anybody, of the impending danger, but
all that came out was a little giggle. Tito cursed the day he'd come
to Brussels--wait, that was today. Well, he cursed it anyway. Dirk
had taken him and Tina to the Ultimate Library to find out exactly
who this mysterious "Ultimate Menace" the Collective feared so much
was. Unfortunately, they only found grim prophecies... one book with
a prophecy so grim that Tito had been afraid to share it with the
others. And now he couldn't warn them before it was too late.
It was in the Titonomicon of Abdul Al'Bhubles, the sorcerer who had
been driven mad by his own work and turned himself into a chimp.
Bhubles wrote that the Ultimate Menace would break through to Earth
three times, each time heralded by a man named Tito. Once in
Yugoslavia in the 1940s, to start a chain of events that would
culminate in brutal ethnic cleansing, not to mention the most hideous
car ever seen on the planet. Once in America in the 1970s, which
explained the puzzling success of "ABC" and other Jackson hits. And
once in Belgium in the 1990s, to take over the world and torment
innocent souls by making them drive around in Yugos with radios that
only played "ABC" and other Jackson hits. It would be a hell on
Earth.
Tito had tried to leave Brussels as soon as possible, but then a
strange paralysis set in and it was too late. His sister thought it
was brain damage, but that was only because he'd laughed at the
overused joke of reversing the letters to form "Dain Bramage." Hey,
you'd laugh too, if you knew that the Ultimate Menace was coming to
Earth with his buddies Spurgo the Conquestor and the traitorous
Pen-Ultimate Man, and they were using your body as the gateway...
you'd laugh, because you'd know that the people of Earth wouldn't
have anything to laugh about once they got here... you'd laugh as
Tito is laughing, because otherwise it would be a really depressing
way to end this chapter... um, this chapter of his life, yeah, that's
it...
________________________________________________________________
Will Brussels be overrun by superheroes? Will Tito bring the villains
to Earth? Will Mary Lu have to face her children's old gym teacher
with only a lower-case letter for defense? Will the Belgian Waffle
really eat the Brussels Sprouts? Will Paragon ever wake up from his
trance? Come to think of it, is this really a blurb for next issue or
is it just Paragon babbling?
These questions and more may very well be ignored in:
* Next issue: Chapter 10: I Got Those Tampa Bay Buccaneers Blues by
Mark Rosendorf
________________________________________________________________
Well, that was fun! Let me know what you thought, because those
bullies over in Omega rarely let me flex my humor writing! I'd like
to thank Henry "Longest, Tallest, and" Broaddus for starting this
enterprise, and all the previous writers for continuing it.
Especially Kirk "Nectar and" Ambrose for providing a beautiful
set-up, and Daniel "Chief Justice Earl" Warren for creating the
carbon-removal plot point, which I'm sure he never thought he'd see
again. And good luck to Mark "Dozin'" Rosendorf, who inherits a far
more convoluted plot than any human deserves. It's been a ball!
Marc
============================================================================
--
Jerry L. Franke franke at cs.indiana.edu
Computer Science Dept. Indiana University
formerly from Florida State University http://www.cs.fsu.edu/~franke
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