LNH: Classic LNH Adventures #72: Birth Of A Villain Part Twelve

[Drew Perron]

On 8/5/2018 4:28 PM, Arthur Spitzer wrote:
> In this weeks reposting of stuff you can find in the eyrie archive
> https://archives.eyrie.org/racc/lnh/
> we have the twelvth section of a Birth Of A Villain.
> 
> And joining the Birth of a Villain cascade for the first time
> with #31 is Lalo Martins.  Have things gotten so weird that this
> cascade is attracting -- The Weirdness Magnet?

:D

> And with #32 Martin Phipps also joins the cascade and tries to
> convince us that Dr. Stomper still looks like some young guy in his
> twenties in 1999.  But since 1999 was almost twenty years ago,
> maybe that makes sense?  Oh, no!  Comic book time!

Ohshi--

> And yes, I couldn't resist the crime of dragging my own
> character into the plot.

That's what these are for, right?

> Uh, an awful lot. I'm starting to get confused already, which
> means of course this is the best point to join in.

There ya go. :D

> He turns off the computers, lays down in a chair and says a
> silent goodbye to the house and all the material things he once
> found important - well, mostly comic books, but still.
> 
> He drank the last cup of consecrated coke and whispered to
> nothingness, "I'm ready."

ooooooh ahhhhhh :o This scene has powerful energies which were never really 
followed up on

> "I don't really care for cartoon porn. Do you realize you would
> shock much more if you showed your nasty acts to some religious
> people? Do you know some?"
> 
> "relIgious. cHurch. me reMMEmbers A CHurch."
> 
> "Wouldn't they be a lot more shocked than the military folks
> out there? I mean, military are rumored to read quite nasty
> things when they're alone."
> 
> "sHock. chuRch. shoW thEm sometHing nastY."
> 
> "My girl."

This is pretty smart, TBH.

> That the Church of the Fourth Wall was behind all the Melissa
> clones was all the information he could gather. Now he was on
> his own, but he hoped he could use the Church's equipment to
> break the Wall into whatever world Minority Miss and New Look
> Lass were being held prisoner and then... whatever.

That's also a good tie-in - Minority Miss and New Look Lass are on the other 
side of the Fourth Wall, so you use the Church to get to them. The only problem 
is, I don't think this chapter ever explains that Minority Miss and New Look 
Lass are on the other side of the Fourth Wall. o3o

> A Melissa clone floated in front of him. "Kneel before
> Magnetissa, queen of mutants."

Heeheehee.


> "Funny, she doesn't smell like a burned person at all."
> 
> He went on and removed her helmet, which had turned a lovely
> tone of orange. The dead head below was pretty barbecued all
> right, but didn't look organic - or natural - at all. Not a
> robot in the usual sense either, but most definitely synthetic.

Note: This is the most information we ever got on how Vector as a "living virus" 
actually works, before Jeanne and I started writing Merissa a lot.

> "Go figure." The boy walked away, lazily cleaning up the inside
> of the helmet and wearing it. Yes, that was the missing piece.
> Goes just right with his chosen name.

...I didn't understand until now that it was a Weirdness Magnet/Magneto 
reference. X3 I should add that to the wiki!


> "I am. They're not. And I never heard of you either. What with
> the orange helmet?"
> 
> "Orange is good for the mood.

Hell yeah~

> Google-13 lit another cigarette and pointed a gun at Father
> Brown.

Are they both in his mouth!?

> "No way. I'm out of here. I will use this dimensional jump
> device, or whatever it's called, to find a safe place to
> recover and get my church together again."

Sure, works for me!

> "Well, spham sooks", said the green man, turning around and
> leaving the building while a black hole that just appeared out
> of nothing sucked Father Brown out of existence and then
> disappeared. "And blessed be St. Doomas."

*So* much plot progression.

> "I don't know about you, but I think there are already enough
> people taking care of this whole Melissa thing. I'm planning to
> use this device to cross the wall and find New Look Lass and
> Minority Miss."

Okay, that alludes to it.

> Weirdness Magnet stared with horror at the mirror. His had
> turned gray, and his eyes looked out from the bottom of a black
> pit. He wore a hideous green, black and yellow costume, with
> boots up to his thighs and white, loose sleeves. On top of it
> all, an obnoxious green cape (not even the same tone of green
> as the rest!) with a hood. This was uglier than he could
> handle, by all means.

So this is based on Pariah from Crisis on Infinite Earths? For some reason o3o

> "I am Weirdness Magnet! The Looniverse is at great danger, and
> I need your help! I come to predict doom, hexen and quake!"

Heeheehee. Okay that's a great '90s joke

> Coward Lad was quick to find out the direction the noise came
> from.
> 
> "Someone set up us the bomb!"
> 
> Stomper hurried to the bomb; indeed; Twaeila just kicked the
> detonator. "We get signal!"

THE ANCIENT MEMES

> "Well, actually I came here to show my Dolliffier Field, which
> turns people into dolls. It's actually a sophisticated stasis
> field, and if we can trap the bomb into one it won't explode
> until we reverse the effect."

Heeheehee

> And then there was a doll in the floor, of an unfortunate DC
> character holding a strange device. A doll perfect in all
> detail. So perfect that one of the police officers who invaded
> the room a few seconds later couldn't resist taking it to his
> teenager son Dennis.
> 
> When this police officer died in a gang war years later, his
> son became very bitter over life and became a crime lord and a
> villain. And he was very successful at that; but one day he
> killed an even bigger overlord intending to take his place, and
> things became a little bit too literal for him, as he found out
> the previous overlord was just the pawn of his cat, and the
> same cat adopted him as the new pawn.
> 
> But nothing is forever, and one day Dennis died.

This is really a magnificent tying-together of the different plot threads.

> "Oh boy", said DeadHead, "I hope there wasn't anything in
> stasis in there."
> 
> As in response, a guy with a gray suit and an orange helmet
> walked out of the locker, holding what looked like a high-tech
> bomb in his hands.

*cackles*

> And indeed, soon she was outside knocking the door of the
> thingee. She seemed a little different, but she was obviously
> the same WBW as always - after all, she bothered to rescue the
> cute white cat Khe Saraq was holding minutes before.

:D

>    "Hold on, Jose," his partner told him, "there's no law in the Philippines
> preventing her from erasing images stored in memory, so we can't hold her."
>    "Oh... kejude!" [1]
>    "All we can do is check to see if she's legally here in the Philippi.net.
> If not, we can deport her back to whereever she came from."
>    "Fair enough," Jose decided.  "Let someone else deal with her!"

I have never understood the joke here. o3o

>    "You know, Doc, you really haven't aged.  I mean, in 1999 you still look
> like a man in his mid-twenties.  I mean, you will."
>    "That's nice to know," Mr. Stomper said, even though he didn't actually
> believe that the foursome of Easily Discovered Man Lite, Mouse, Twaeila
> Brock and Coward Lad had actually come from the future.
>    "But that's how it always is, Lite," Mouse told him.  "You've been Easily
> Discovered Man's sidekick since 1993 and you're still a teenager.  I joined
> the LNH the next year and, although five years have past, I'm still a young
> girl."

I really feel like this is... like, simultaneously making too much out of this 
point and oversimplifying it, if that makes sense? XP Comic Book Time is a known 
thing, and playing around with how it works differently for different characters 
is a joy. Trying to insist that it has to be consistent is super boring.

>    "The point is that I was brought here by my Dad in 1999 to save you guys
> from the Melissa clones and ended up going back with you to 1984 and in all
> this time, for what frankly has seemed like months and months and months,
> I've been patiently going along with you waiting for you guys to come up
> with some scheme to get us back to 1999 or 2001 or whatever the year is
> supposed to be now!  It's about time you guys wrapped this storyline up so I
> can get back to alt.barney.dinosaur.die.die.die!"

This is a fair point tho. X3

>    "Yes," said Lenny the squirel, who had suddenly appeared at her feet,
> "and, besides, even in the real world, scientists have demonstrated that it
> is possible, thanks to quantum uncertainty, to send a message back in time:
> it only remains to be seen if there is any physical law preventing someone
> from receiving a message before it was sent, something which would be no
> less of a causality violation than that described by Mr. Stomper here."
>    "Lenny, you're back!" Mouse said.
>    "I had to come back," Lenny said.  "Nobody would have believed that line
> coming from Lite!"

Heeheehee. :>

>    "Hey, I could have said that!" Lite insisted.
>    "In any case," Mr. Stomper continued, "if you _really_ want to go to the
> year 1999 (or 2001 if you prefer) then there's a way to do it."
<snip>>    Philip was suspicious.  "Who are these people?"
>    "We're not sure.  They appeared out of nowhere in 1984 and rescued a young
> Mr. Stomper from Russian terrorists.  In return, Mr. Stomper arranged for
> them to be placed in stasis in the cryo-lab here at our university.  As luck
> would have it, few people were brave enough to undergo the process."

This is actually a really good solution. :>

>    "NO WAY!  NO WAY!  NO WAY!" screamed Coward Lad.  "You're not putting me
> in that thing!  It looks so, so, so cold!  I don't want to become a human
> popsicle!  I'm too young to die!"
>    "Oh, shut up!" Twaeila Brock said just before hitting him over the head
> with her energy rifle, rendering him unconscious.

And this is a great follow-up. X3

>    "How do we even know they are still alive?"
>    "That was the really good part: they told us that nobody had even heard of
> them back in 1984, whatever that meant, so there wasn't going to be anyone
> to sue if they didn't survive, but we think they did."

Heeheehee

>    "This reminds me of the Star Trek episode which introduced Kahn!"  Philip
> respectfully walked over to where the frozen specimens were kept in stasis
> and started wiping frost from the pod windows.

Okay. X3

> IS IT JUST ME OR WOULDN'T IT JUST BE REALLY COOL IF ALL THE MELISSAS BECAME
> AMOROUS FILIPINAS???

_Martin_

Drew "no" Perron