Thursday, January 12, 2012

1/8/12 - Poor Richard's Time Bugatti

You know, it figures. After a great night at the Owl Nest, followed by a long run through the Windy City to fight crime alongside the newly minted Owl, I get a call telling me to get my hot gay !@#$ over to D.C. for a surprise subcommittee meeting at !@#$ all in the AM.

Now, by the time I get the message, I'm ready and raring to go, having gotten just about every homicidal impulse out of my system through a judicious amount of !@#$smacking Chicago's criminal element. Unfortunately, in what is most likely deliberate sabotage on their part, I'm hundreds of miles away from Foggy Bottom. And, without anything resembling reliable and fast transportation, the chances of my getting to that meeting on time are rather remote.

(Especially since, just to add insult to injury, Chicago's one hour behind the East Coast. !@#$ daylight savings time.)

What's a guy to do? Call a genius, of course. But since the biggest geniuses I know are down in Antarctica, babysitting a certain problem (and problem person) for yours truly, that leaves only one alternative.

The good news is that the alternative lives in Rockford, Illinois, which isn't too far away if you drive like a mother!@#$ down I90. The bad news is that the alternative is over 300 years old, cranky as !@#$, and as likely to help out as shoot you in the !@#$ just for knocking on his door.

Or offer to suck your !@#$, for that matter. That's just how he is.

Ben Franklin: Founding Father, inventor, genius, politician, diplomat, spymaster, and sex god. Somewhere along the way he added "can't !@#$ die" to the list of achievements, and he's been a massive pain in the !@#$ ever since.

Also a massive help, though. He's as much of a patriot as he ever was. Just a very morally loose one, especially when it comes to certain things that he no longer considers vices. Like sex, and talking too !@#$ much, and talking to !@#$ much about !@#$.

But it's a !@#$ emergency, so what else can I do? Commander a jet and land it on the !@#$ capitol? Not really.

So I borrow a bike from the new Talon and, less than half an hour later, I'm carefully knocking on Ben's massive front door. A weird, brass and glass thingamabob pops out of the knocker and asks me who I am and what I want, and when I poke it in the "eye" and tell him to open the !@#$ up, it's a national emergency, I almost hear him squeal through the door.

He throws it open, and he's grinning like a mother!@#$, nude except for an open, green silk bathrobe printed with the design of a 100 dollar bill. I endure a really long and overly familiar hug, and hope he doesn't want to see the mansnake again. That could lead to something that'll last all day and not get me any closer to D.C, unless his time machine's actually working again, which it usually isn't.

Lucky me, he doesn't want to see my alien love god genitals. But he does want to know what I think of the package on the cutie he brought home from the club last night. Knowing him, if I don't give a real expert assessment, this trip's going !@#$ nowhere, which means I'm doomed to at least an hour's worth of lost time at some end of the poor fellow's anatomy while Ben and I talk shop.

But he says it's for science. He always does. He gives me a button to wear that says YOU DON'T KNOW ME and tells me I get first reacharound.

Half an hour later, we've caught up and used the poor cutie like a swingset. A half hour after that we're all showered up, and about ready to go, and the poor dear still can't believe s/he got hir genitals done in by the Benjamin Franklin. S/he's still babbling about it when s/he walks out the front door for a cab, totally forgetting hir rubber skirt isn't done up in the back.

Of course, I have to ask Ben why s/he didn't recognize his weird unidentified friend in the eyepatch, which strikes me as weird. On the way down to his transport pool he explains he's been working on a further iteration of the No-Suit, which makes invisibility somewhat superfluous. Apparently, the button I was wearing did exactly what it said: the boygirl had no idea who I was so long as I was wearing it.

Okay, fair enough. But why didn't it work on Ben? He just laughs and tips me a wink: "If I told you that, I'd have to kill you, my dear boy."

Yeah, I knew it'd be something like that.

Downstairs, Ben has a layout that would make The Owl jealous. Vehicles from just about every timeframe, all tinkered around with until they do exactly what he needs them to be able to do, which is often what they aren't supposed to do. Cars that go underwater, trains that go through solid mountains, airplanes that skip off into lunar orbit, and things that really don't have a working description, other than "they go." That and "they go really !@#$ fast," which is how Ben usually likes it.

Hence my reason for being here. I've got exactly fifteen minutes before that !@#$ meeting starts at this point, but I know for a fact Ben's got the mother of all timecrashers here, under dust sheets, and when he whips them off (the sheets, not his pants, again) I see he's kept it in good condition.

The last time I saw that electric blue, 1938 Bugatti was in 1973, when we were racing the clock to get a high ranking defector's wife and kids out of Poland before the secret police came crashing down on them. We got from New York City to Warsaw in -34 minutes (yes, you read that right). And, once we'd shot our way out of the compromised safehouse, actually made it home a day before we left.

This meant we had to hide out from our current selves, and arrange to "return" just after we departed. So we got an extra day to catch up, drink, and introduce our new friends to the joy that is American capitalism, freedom, and excess. The excess parts stayed between me, Ben, and the people we bought the services of that evening, though.

(The missus was a married lady and the kids were wayyyyyyyyy too young, as Ben rightly pointed out. Just as well, as I only had eyes for the car and the girlyboy I did on, in, and around it.)

Just one problem: it turned out he hadn't washed the car since then, either. I put my foot down on something questionable, and had enough time to realize it was a reverted colony of my own magic sperm that'd been living on the passenger side wheelwell for the last almost-four decades before Ben jumped in, turned the car on, and rocketed us forwards in space, but backwards in time, towards our nation's Capitol.

Good news? We got there a full day and half ago, which gave me time to shower and disinfect my whole !@#$ foot. Bad news? That pile of goo was living large, and it took us almost that whole day and a half to catch it, beat it into submission, and lock it away so it couldn't harm anything else.

So, we missed our chance to take DC's extensive play party scene by storm, once again, but after the really weird experience we had catching my sentient !@#$, I think I'm sworn off !@#$ for at least a few days. I think I'm going to settle in, catch up on some TV, and drink a lot of tea, instead. Or maybe an appropriate brew or two. 

As for the meeting, it was, by turns, insulting and boring, and got me exactly !@#$all in extra funding for the next year. But if hadn't been there, bad things would have happened. It's the sort of thing you come to expect from Foggy Bottom: no matter who's in power, they all want to make you jump through hoops for their amusement.

Well, I'll see your hoop and raise you a jar of face-eating mutant magic sperm, Mr. Chairman. Jump through that when you open your locker.


(SPYGOD is listening to Flying North (Thomas Dolby) and having a Tavern Spruce Ale)

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