7/5/11 - SPYGODMAIL - Go BANG

IT'S SPYGOD SCOUT MAIL TIME!

Today's mail comes to us from Super Scout Penworth G. Zhang of Santa Rosa, California

Dear SPYGOD:
My dad was in Spygod Scouts, too, and told me that, once, you told him that the secret to having an adventure was to, and I'm quoting him here, "sit on your ass and expect nothing to happen, at which point everything will." 
Did you actually say that to my father? Or is he just bull!@#$ing me again?
Example: Last week he told me he invented stormchasing. Boy did I feel dumb when I tried to get him to come into my Meteorology 101 class to talk to my professor about his no-doubt epic experiences! It turns out...


Blah blah blah. Get to the point, son.

Okay, here's the scoop. Half the things SPYGOD says come out of my mouth but might as well come out of my ass, instead. The other half are deadly serious.

I pay my Agents a lot of money to be able to tell the difference with the lightning speed needed to avoid international, and sometimes cosmic disaster. You, fortunately, don't have to worry about that just yet.

You have the luxury of being able to nod and smile while I baffle you all with bull!@#$ thinly disguised as brilliance, insight, or at least a good campfire yarn. And since you're in the Super Scouts, those campfires aren't as hard to soak with good beer, cheap whiskey, and the weird substances you learned how to make during your Chemisty Action Badge.

And when SPYGOD grades your !@#$, I am likely to say all kinds of crazy things.

So yes, it's probably likely I told your dad all kinds of things when he was in Spygod Scouts. If he was in Spygod Scouts to begin with. It sounds like, from your clipped example, he likes to make !@#$ up as part of his perceived parental duties. And he wouldn't be half wrong, there.

But, yes, he is absolutely right, even if he is lying his head off. The trick to having an adventure is to be engaged in other plans at the time, and have one just drop into your arms like a nude, skydiving Katooey with a bomb strapped to his junk and a note informing yours truly "You have one minute to decide: disarm or disappear?"

So I bet you can guess how SPYGOD spent this afternoon.

The story is this: after spending the night drinking my favorite Vietnamese immigrant under his own table, after spending far too long clawing the sides of my chair at SuperCrapJunketParadeThing, I came back home to The B.U.I.L.D.I.N.G. to sleep it off. My plan was to spend the day with my darling cat, Margarita, take my car out for a spin to get some fresh and proper Thai from Bangkok Eight, and have some proper ladyboys up for a good time. Then I could return to the Ice Palace in good conscience, having committed what I consider a full convalescence after my trying ordeal in West Papua.

(On a related note, I think Metalmaid needs a tune-up. Everything in the penthouse seems fine and she's been performing her duties as programmed, but her responsometers seemed a bit... off. It was like she was trying not to say something when I talked to her. She has been a little jittery around me since the night I humped the television, though.)

When I woke up, maybe at 11 in the am, I was alerted that my good friends in the Neo York sanitation department had left another flaming bag of dog!@#$ and eviction notices on my front doorstoop, again. So I threw on my camouflage PJs, put my Captain Cody helmet on, took the elevator down, and pissed on the offending sack of crap, like normal.

Then I hear a gagged scream. Suddenly there's a stark naked Thai ladyboy falling towards me, wearing a blackbomb around his delicate little package. I do the obvious thing and leap up to catch him, at which point I read the note, and see the fear in his eyes.

And yes, the blackbomb is timing down from the moment it made contact with me. 60. 59. 58...

Blackbombs are nasty. They put them on people and key their activation to getting into contact with others, or a specific person. Half the time the other people have no idea they're carrying them because they've been made to look like something they normally have on them, like jewelry or even clothes. It's only when they run into the trigger person do they reveal themselves for what they are, and they secrete nasty, instant molecular glue that makes pulling them off without severely damaging the carrier a tricky thing indeed.

And the poor guy's got it on his balls.

What can I do? If I run, he's dead, and half the block is gone. If I rip it off he's probably dead or maimed, and I still can't get it away before half of another block is gone.

And if I disarm it we're all okay, but disarming these things are a real !@#$ bitch without some really expensive and big damn equipment. None of which I have on hand at the moment, or even in the B.U.I.L.D.I.N.G., quite frankly.

So I grab the poor SOB and start running for the river. It's the only thing I can think to do. Jump in the river and try and drown the explosion. If I run like mad, jumping over every obstacle in my path, I might just make it.  

Just.

!@#$ him and !@#$ me. It's us versus however many people live and work on my block, and that's a lot of people. So I run like mad, counting down in my head all the while, jumping over taxis, over traffic, into traffic, through gaggles of pedestrians...

And have I mentioned I haven't even had time to zip up, yet?

Finally, after far too long, I get to the river. The timer says I'm at 03, 02, 01. We jump the !@#$ in and I pray it's just enough time to get him deep enough to not hurt anyone else but us.

And then a really funny thing happens. The poor guy pees himself, and this somehow shorts out the blackbomb. That is not supposed to happen, but it does.

We stand by the edge of the river. He laughs, gagged. I laugh. No one else is, but !@#$ them.

And when I try to get the gag off his mouth so he can tell me how he came to be skydiving in the nude with a me-triggered bomb around his ladyboy parts, someone unceremoniously blows his head off with what had to have been a .50 caliber sniper rifle.

SPYGOD vision proves useless. I'm stuck babysitting a dead body with a bad-ass bomb wrapped around it until the Neo York PD can send over a bomb squad. And they take their sweet !@#$ time with that, let me tell you.

What the hell happened? Probably the clumsiest yet eerily almost-effective assassination attempt I've had pulled on me in a long time. It would have been airtight if the person who'd programmed the bomb hadn't forgotten to tell it to discard any secondary genetic material, so the poor Katooey's last fear pee wouldn't turn the whole show off.

But watching with a gun just to make sure dead men told no tales? Diabolical. They must have factored in the possibility that I would have done something entirely unexpected.

Needless to say, that put me completely off Thai. So I'm enjoying Indian, instead, and availing myself of some of these lovely Bollywood boys between courses. Metalmaid has been kind enough to fan us while we saunter about, which is kind of unnerving, but under the circumstances, not too unwelcome.

So there you have the secret to adventure. Wear something unpractical, go pee on official Neo York business, and look to the skies, son. Look to the skies.

(SPYGOD is listening to We Have Explosive (FSOL) and having a cold Kingfisher)

5/10/11 - They Stole SPYGOD'S Brain

"I've got to be sick to be ill / I've got to take my smiley pill"

(Art by Dean Stahl)

It's not in my !@#$ing head, right now. I know I must have left it somewhere, because it's not in my head. I know this. I do.

But if I do know this, then how can I not have a brain? How can I know this without having a !@#$ brain?

I suspect drugs are to blame. Lots of drugs. Probably the drugs I've been taking all night long to try and forget the utterly !@#$ day I had today.

What kind of day? Well. There's a story for you.

I got up at 5 in the AM. I told last night's entertainment to put their !@#$ clothes back on and leave by way of the guest express elevator. It goes right down to the back alley behind The B.U.I.L.D.I.N.G. and doesn't let anyone see you coming or going.

No, I did not offer them breakfast or a shower. Showers are for guests. Breakfast is for really important guests. Entertainment gets to ride down in the elevator, unlike would-be spies and assassins, who get to take the air stairs.

Air stairs are fun. I tell the ones I've left alive that they're invisible and they need to walk down them, all 100 floors, to the bottom, and maybe I won't shoot them in the back of the skull. Then I tell the next person in line that the first one just missed it. Same with the next.

(The city of Neo York hates me. This I know. I get photos of would-be assassin flavored street pizza tacked to my front door along with big !@#$ bags of dog !@#$ and worthless eviction notices. Weekly.)

The next two hours are a strange blur, mostly taken up with me !@#$ing collapsing in the shower from a lack of alcohol, coffee, and tjbang sticks. After I've had all three of these things I collapse again for about fifteen minutes from systems shock, and am woken up by my METALMAID running over my feet to announce that breakfast is served.

I'm halfway through my Hunters breakfast (eggs benedict, rum-soaked fruit, several big !@#$ screwdrivers) when I get a video call from the President. I stand up to salute him and realize I'm not wearing any !@#$ pants. This makes the resulting conversation more than a little surreal, but I just ride with it.

It turns out that our friends at HONEYCOMB have infiltrated the Heptagon and are holding a number of research scientists hostage. They're demanding access to the VAULT, but not saying exactly what they want. Of course, I !@#$ well know they probably want some secret plans or the weapons we took off that alien spaceship we snatched away from their kill team in Mali last week. That's the sort of !@#$ they're always after.

I suit up, backwards, and spend ten minutes stumbling around before I realize that I've !@#$ing put things on the wrong way. By that time my ride's already there and I'm having to jump off the balcony rather than let them see me half-naked with my uniform on wrong. The resulting abseil onto the deck of the Flier looks !@#$ed silly and I nearly get someone killed.

It takes a half an hour to get to the Heptagon, in DC, from The B.U.I.L.D.I.N.G, in Neo York. I use that time to get wise to the situation on the ground, debate the morals and ethics of just !@#$ing blowing the !@#$ building off the map, take some more tjbang sticks, and offer several winsome young superspies the opportunity for promotion. When they unanimously refuse I tell them they've passed the SPYGOD test, and then excuse myself for some pathetic self-abuse off the back observation deck.

This is important to clear the mind before action, you see. A mind thinking about that isn't thinking about the more important things, like whether to eviscerate someone with their own jawbone or just shoot them between the eyes until there's nothing above their nose but a big !@#$ smoking brainhole. And in a life or death situation, that hesitation can be darn fatal.

So we get there. Action happens. Big bad bloody action that leaves a lot of people dead, dying, or wishing they were doing one of those two. HONEYCOMB learns once again that you never mess with someone who eats bullets and blades and returns the favor with three-fisted action neo-karate chops that warp space and time and turn you inside out like a noggin-punched octopus.

You know what happens then, son? Several very dull and draggy hours in which nothing happens, and a horde of report-writing bureaucrats The COMPANY sent over to take everyone's statement take everyone's statement until we're all making mistakes and forgetting things.

I eventually tire of being treated like a criminal by my own organization, make a few calls, and declare the inquiry over. The Flier takes me home, but it's too late to get good Thai and all the good hookers are doubtlessly servicing someone else by now.

So I reward myself by personally investigating what HONEYCOMB was actually after. The whole plan was to retrieve the contents of a bag of strange, new designer drugs we took off one of their mules in Guadalajara, three days ago. The pills are round and move on their own.  They are said to break down the barriers between worlds, and allow strange, alien creatures to take over the minds of their users, so as to facilitate an invasion from beyond time and space.

I took about fifty of them with a fifth of scotch because it seemed like the right thing to do, for America. Also, as you may remember I previously mentioned, to get this horrible day out of my head. And now I am so godforsakenly messed up and brain broken that I think shooting my own brainpan out with the toaster would be a very good idea.

That is, of course, provided I can bribe METALMAID to rewire to toaster to lethal capability. She locked herself in the supply closet a half hour ago after I tried to make love to the television set. I think that was the aliens' doing, but I'm not sure.

SPYGOD is listening to Get Higher (Black Grape) and drinking Black Pony Scotch