LNH: Hungry, Hungry Sabertooths! #2pi: "18.84955592154... Plus a Sudden Jolt of Motivation Means Big Trouble For the Looniverse!"

Drew Nilium pwerdna at gmail.com
Wed Oct 21 21:09:58 PDT 2020


HUNGRY, HUNGRY SABERTOOTHS!
#6pi: "18.84955592154... Plus a Sudden Jolt of Motivation Means Big Trouble For
the Looniverse!"
A tale of narrative progression, by Drew Nilium

====

The moment Masterplan Lad's Plot Device broke, a wave of narrative energy
rolled both forwards and backwards in time, out across the Omnilooniverse,
breaking upon the surface of the narrative "present"...

====

Anti-Christ Lad sat on the manager's chair in the abandoned Hot Topic and
seethed.

That one of his underlings was a traitor didn't worry him. He thrived on
betrayal, and the feelings of doubt and fear it bred. But that they would try
to take his spineless nothing of a past self, and threaten him with it? That
was unforgivable.

He sat up with sudden decisiveness. None of this would change his plans. The
Crime Empress was waiting for him to make the first move - not knowing he'd
already made it. But in order to snap the trap shut on her, he would have to
respond to her provocation. All right.

"Polybag Person. Ready the EastJet. We're heading to Net.ropolis..."

====

Enthusiasm of the Finishless jerked their head up in the air. "Gotta go!" They
ran thru the wall and vanished.

"Awwwwww, okay." Kid Enthusiastic stepped back from the marathon floor-to-
ceiling Jenga game they'd been playing. Man, but that was so fun! They'd
recorded the podcast, watched the giant monster battle, interviewed the post-
battle Ven-Dorr as he was being locked up by the LNH, edited and posted the
podcast, made a toothpick sculpture of UltraKiwi, solved the mystery of the
Mary Celeste, finally figured out what happened at the end of President Evil,
saved the local drive-in theater, and...

and...

...hmmmm... had he... actually *slept* since Enthusiasm got here?

Kid Enthusiastic managed to make it four steps, and flopped asleep, half-in and
half-out of his racecar bed.

====

The light flicked on in Multi-Tasking Man's lab, and UltraKiwi Wondersock
walked in.

The soda plan had yielded excellent results, but he'd been seen in association
with the results. His next plan had to be subtler if he was going to wear
UltraKiwi out before he struck. But his host had many strange and useful
inventions, and one of them might just fit the bill...

Hmmmmm. On a large worktable in the middle of the room, there was a six-inch
robot, purple and pink with orange gems all over its body. Fascinating...

UltraKiwi Wondersock accessed his host's memories. Hmmmm... a powerful ability
to see the future, but his host had put much energy into fixing it and had not
been able to complete the process. Not useful.

UltraKiwi Wondersock turned away, but somewhere deep inside him, a presence
slowly awakened...

====

Aaaaaaaaargh! The plot had started already, and Merissa wasn't part of it!!
She'd been taking a stress nap when the last giant monster battle happened!
AAAAARGH!

She kicked the wall with her cool stompy boot. Ugh! And even if she went out
there, how was she gonna participate in the cool fighting?? She'd tried to get
the Ultra-Mega-BIGGUN to turn into a giant robot, but despite it being
incredibly multifunctional, it refused to grow past the size that would fit in
the panel with her. And if she was running around on the ground shooting at the
giant monster, she'd look like a dork!

Okay, okay, this was fixable. Where did the people with giant robots in anime
get them? A lot of them were military, but hell to the no. Some of them were
secret government projects, but that was almost as bad. Where did you get a
giant robot if you weren't trying to be fake realistic (which was against the
point of giant robots *anyway* in her opinion)!?

Wait, that's right. A lot of these people had super-scientist parents who were
robot builder people, and who decided to just give their kids robots. That was
cool, she'd be okay with that...

...but she didn't really *have* parents.

Merissa sighed and flopped on her bed. Like, who would the parents of a living
computer virus even *be*?

...well, actually. Who programmed her? The Vector virus was made by... wReamicus
Maximus, right? Ew. Maybe save him for a last resort. But come to think, it'd
been based on something Irony Man did, right?

She pulled out her phone and looked up Legion of Net.Heroes Volume 2 #50,
kicking her legs against the wall as she read.

When she was done, she put the phone against her chest. Jeez. That was harsh.
But... it was okay, because Captain LNH was back around now.

So, okay. Captain LNH was clearly her mom... oh, and so was the original Vector,
the one who got cured apparently. And Irony Man and wReamicus Maximus were her
granddads.

Well heck, Irony Man's suit was basically a tiny giant robot anyway! She bet
he'd be happy to make her one. Let's see, he wasn't part of the LNH anymore,
but she could still look up his phone number...

====

The Crime Empress looked at her gold pocketwatch and smiled. Well.

It had been just about twenty-four hours since she'd made her proclamation. She
wondered if Anti-Christ Lad was still fuming, waiting for her to make an attack.
Well, let him wait. She already knew every move he could make.

She returned her hands to Lucky Chain Letter Lucy's head, raking them gently
over her scalp. The girl was taking care of some Trans-Pacific Plunderbund
paperwork; the Empress had made quiet deals with the leaders of a number of the
other teams without any of them knowing about the others, allowing her to pull
the strings, slowly, methodically, extending her control. "Make sure that dear
boy in the Tokyo police force gets a little bonus this week, yes?"

Lucy shivered. "Y-- hhhhhh-- yes, Empress."

"There's a good girl." Mmmmmm. God, power was delicious. The Vectors had been
born to be wReamicus Maximus's pawns, but she was a better mastermind than he'd
ever been. But your children were *supposed* to surpass you, yes?

"Empress, there's..." Lucy drew in a shuddering breath. The Empress lifted her
nails, so her favorite could at least speak. "There's a message from Agent E."

"Excellent." Lucy handed up the tablet, and the Empress took it.

The tablet was displaying a grid of zeroes and ones in a complex pattern, and
as the Empress watched, individual numbers disappeared, one by one. Agent E's
communications were not especially easy to comprehend - the Empress suspected
that they *couldn't* be - but her keen viral mind picked out the pattern being
broadcast thru the missing data. "The East Coast Brotherhood is on the move.
Wonderful."

"Should we send a force to intercept them?" said Lucy, sitting up straight and
taking a sip of water to cool down her flushed cheeks.

"Not yet. Tell Captain Coredump to get the sheep in position, and the asterisk.
gate ready for use. In about, oh, an hour or so, send them to these
coordinates." She passed the tablet back.

Lucy peered at the coordinates. "This is... not *quite* inside the LNHQ."

"No. But it's close enough that our false brothers will believe us to be acting
in haste, just as they want us to." She sits back and smiles. "Soon there will
be the one, true Brotherhood, ruling over the underworld, across the Loonited
States and the world."

And Lucy sent the message, and kept her mouth shut, betraying no sign of
knowing about the third player in this game...

====

Chaos Theory perched on a superstring within the greater structure of Hypertext
Time. They took the threats of narrative in hand and frowned.

When the Living Moderator had approved the restructuring of the Looniversal
narrative, the toxic cosmic magic of Neme.sys had been shunted into a bubble
timeline, labeled Earth-Combover. While it theoretically contained a duplicate
of the entire Looniverse and all its inhabitants, only those beings who needed
to narratively interact with its drama would truly experience it; and once it
naturally collapsed, the timelines of its inhabitants would merge with those of
the mainline Looniverse, minimizing the damage.

But something was wrong. Earth-Combover had been sealed under layers and layers
of Hypertext Time, in the Deepest Omnilooniverse. Yet somehow, some kind of
Drama was leaking thru from Looniverse-A!

If this went on, the collapse might be postponed; it might even stabilize into
a long-term divergent timeline, trapping those versions of the Loonivearth's
people in that world. Worst of all would be if it somehow overwrote the
restructured timeline, but that could only happen with the power of some kind
of cosmic being capable of merging different timelines into one, so it wasn't a
big concern.

Still, something was very Odd here, and worse, potentially personally annoying
for Chaos Theory. So they leapt thru the layers of reality, looking for its
source, and letting the narrative energy of a disrupted future flow thru them
and past...

====

Drew "this turned out longer than expected" Nilium


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