8/28/11 - Tea with the Cannibal Dynamo

INCIDENT REPORT
8/28/11
11:57 AM

Transcript begins:

Oh !@#$ me, can't we get any decent booze in this !@#$ place? I refuse to touch that brown heroin, son. It's worse than !@#$ coke. At least you can get help to quit coke. Coffee? They just laugh at you.

Well, okay, maybe some tea. It's not as bad for you. But I want it black, you hear? None of this cream and sugar !@#$.

That's it. Black as death's big shiny !@#$. Only people who take cream in their tea are steers and queers, and I ain't no bull.

Yes, that was a joke. You can laugh. I won't shoot you.

Okay, incident report. We're live on this, right? Oh, we've been live the whole time? Well !@#$. Okay. Let me adjust my !@#$ tie, here. Oh, wait, don't have one. Never mind.

Yeah, it's not every day I walk back to storm emergency central wearing nothing but waders, a gun, and a smile, huh? Been one !@#$ of a !@#$ed-up morning, son.

So, the report.

It was about 9 in the AM, and I was waltzing through Coney Island, making sure anyone who needed saving got it.The wind and the rain are up, the streets are flooded with water and strewn with trash, and if I were normal I wouldn't be able to see more than five or ten feet in front of my face.

Of course, I'm not normal, so I'm just the right person for this job. I mean, if you're going to look for people who got left behind...

I ran into a few people disobeying the evacuation orders, and I made sure they had no !@#$ kids with them. Anyone with kids got SPYGOD VISIONed to the nearest shelter. Anyone without, I gave them the speech and kept on walking.

Hey, it's like I told you when I took this job, I don't give a !@#$ about civilians and mandatory evacs. You want to stand there in the face of a Hurricane and pretend you're Leonardo DiCaprio and this is the !@#$ Titanic? Have at it. Just don't drag your kids into it, for !@#$ sake.

Anyway. I'm on Sea Breeze, heading for West 5th, and I see one guy I know doing just that. It's one of those Free people. You know, the ones who stay behind and have a party in the park when the city converts?

Well, he's just standing there, arms open in the wind like he's waiting for Kate !@#$ Winslet. I ask him if he's okay and he says yeah, he just wants to make sure the Temple's okay. Guess he used to go there or something.

I don't even give him the speech. I figure he knows what he's doing, so I tell him to get scarce when the water hits his knees. He says he can't promise anything, but that's good enough for me. So I go on my way.

And I swear I don't get twenty feet into the mist and the wet before I hear him scream.

I turn around and all I can see, where he was, is a big dark shape. For a moment I wonder if my vision's failing me, but then the shape stands up, holding that poor guy up along with him, and I see what it is.

Best description? A big brass minotaur, maybe ten feet tall, with metal-strip muscles and black gears inside and out. His eyes are black as, well, black as this tea, at least until his rib cage hinges open on both sides and he stuffs this poor guy inside of it.

The guy wasn't even dead when he put him in there, but suddenly there's this whoomp like a gas stove lighting up, and the shape's on fire on the inside. I can hear the poor guy screaming, and the thing's eyes light up, and fire boils out of its eyes and mouth and ribcage, and that poor guy isn't dead yet.

Jesus !@#$. I ain't forgetting that in a long time. You know how a man screams when he's burning to death? Now imagine him burning and not !@#$ dying.

So what's a guy with a trench gun to do? I start stalking over there, thinking this mother!@#$ gonna get my metal. It sees me coming and starts laughing balls of fire.

And it says "I have been looking for you, little man. Come feel the fire of Moloch."

And I say "!@#$ you you !@#$ !@#$ piece of vagrant eating !@#$ !@#$ !@#$," and let him have it with some SPYGOD VISION.

Which, of course, does not !@#$ work on giant metal supervillains with flames for insides.

Nasty thing decides to !@#$ fire out of its mouth, right at me. So I'm dodging and weaving, trying to get close enough to get a good shot in with the trench gun without getting barbecued. And it's tossing fireballs out of its mouth and throwing them from his hands like something from Super Mario Brothers on Martian Speed, blowing up half the !@#$ neighborhood in the process and laughing fire.

And yes, he gets a good bead on the !@#$ Temple. !@#$ jerk.

At a time like this, a man wonders why he didn't bring a more complete armory with him. But at a time like this, wondering such things is highly !@#$ counterproductive, and likely to get you killed. So you have to take in some facts and improvise.

Fact one, he's fire, but with all the water and steam he's probably not seeing too well, which is the only reason I'm not a big shish-SPYGOD yet.

(Yes, it's shish, not kebab. Shish-kebab is lamb. Shish-taouk is chicken. Shish-SPYGOD is me.)

Fact two, this is the third time in recent times someone's targeted me specifically using fire. It's like they know something maybe they shouldn't.

Fact three, there's trash all over the place, some of which may be useful.


So I duck behind a wall, grab a floating mannequin, and do a quick costume switcheroo while trying to get him to engage in some expositional, pre-kill dialogue that used to be all the rage with supervillains back in the day. Unfortunately, he really wasn't interested in telling me who sent him, or why, or how much he's being paid. But, fortunately, he was really !@#$ slow to get over, and since he was in range of my trenchgun, he was a little more cautious now.

(Fact four.)

He did say one thing, though, which both amazed me and got me the perfect moment to prop that mannequin up. Then he blew the !@#$ out of it before he realized it wasn't me. And then I stood up and returned the favor.

Silly me, I aimed for his mouth, and it didn't do a whole !@#$ of a lot. Lucky me, I hit his chest instead, and the poor fellow inside of him took the brunt of the damage. He died, right then and there, and promptly stopped burning.

Which meant that Moloch lost his mojo.

Now, maybe he didn't have a backup plan, maybe he's just another coward who's useless without his gimmick, and maybe didn't like the looks of my alien love penis, but he really looked !@#$ surprised and scared without all that fire. He took two steps back, pointed the finger of I'll Be Back, and pressed something on his chest that made him go all Star Trek.

And that leaves me standing there in the rain, buck naked except for the waders and a gun. Someone staggered by and gave me the WTF look, and I said "I said mandatory evacuation!" And that got everyone heading out and off to their nearest shelter, including a few kids I'd missed.

So yeah, that's my report. One decent dead guy who was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, one supervillian assassin with one !@#$ of a nasty gimmick, and one more for the power of improvisation in the face of impending doom.

Gotta love this town, huh?

Hey, got any more of this tea? This !@#$ is actually pretty !@#$ good.

Transcript Ends:

(SPYGOD is listening to Lunchbox (Marilyn Manson) and drinking all the black tea he can get his cold hands on)

8/26-27/11 - Come on Irene

Nothing like a !@#$ hurricane to un!@#$ your head.

That and our ongoing investigations as to the whereabouts of GORGON, which bore some strange and disturbing fruit last night, thanks to Thurl. But I'll get to that !@#$ soon enough!  We have a slightly more pressing problem right now.

The problem, in case you've been locked up in your master's basement for the last few days, is that mother nature, grand !@#$ queen that she is, has decided to visit some fun on our Eastern shores. Her name is Irene, she measures in at a few hundred miles across, and her category 1 !@#$ just slammed into North Carolina this morning.

And guess where she's heading? Right up the coast to us, taking in New Jersey along the way. Which may or may not be a terrible thing, depending on your opinion of the !@#$ Garden State. Me, I always associate it with second rate mobsters, drunken casino bums, and playgrounds full of toxic waste, so I suppose a 75 mph cleanup wouldn't hurt too badly.

Except of course for the fact that, when idiots decide to hole up and brave the elements, they invariably have their children with them. And they're not any !@#$ better at surviving idiot-killing storms than their !@#$ parents are. So I have to temper my normal lack of sympathy for denizens of the Trash Can State with the fact that there's kids involved.

Fortunately for them, a number of our strategic talents are at work as I speak, shoring up beaches and streets, battening down hatches, zipping up and down the coastline and trying to rescue idiots ahead of the storm. I hear there's a running, one-sided gun battle with some fools out the Outer Islands who are insisting they're going to wait it out, but that should end right the !@#$ quick as soon as we have Tank walk in and explain where they're spending the night, tonight.

(He has to stick a 30-ought up his !@#$ and pull the trigger in order to get off. No joke.)

But that leaves Neo York City, smack in the !@#$'s path.

The good news is that they must still have hurricanes 500 years in the future. The city's defensive grid handles high winds the same way it handles bombardments, space lasers, and hijacked passenger planes, which to say pretty !@#$ well. Once the storm gets to the point that it starts doing damage, the grid essentially forms a bubble around the entire city, and we have the privilege of watching the wind and rain roll right past us, like we were watching it on TV.

The bad news is that, much like giant metal insects coming up from under the harbor, the defensive grid isn't worth !@#$ against flooding. Which means that we're still in danger of major water damage, especially in the low-lying areas. We have some pump systems in place, of course, but we're still looking at the water level rising and spilling into the streets, which means washed out basements, disrupted services, stranded folks, possible drownings, exposure, the whole !@#$ seafood dog.

Which is why hizzoner is telling people to get the !@#$ to the shelters, right the !@#$ now.


Now, you'd think we could fine-tune the defensive grid. There is something that looks a lot like a control room, right in the middle of the city. It's a big sphere that's made of the same metal that's coated the other buildings and streets. No matter what happens during the conversion, it always stays just where it is, right at the center of the storm of streets and buildings, which would indicate it's got some kind of sway in things, right?

But all that's in there is a big chair and a lot of screens. The screens flip through the streets in a swift, endless loop that's too fast to really watch, and don't connect up with any cameras we've ever seen, which is kind of spooky. And sitting in the chair does abso!@#$inglutely nothing but give you a good view of the screens.


Dr. Yesterday tried working on the chair and the screens, back in the day, which means to say he put his wife on the job. She got absolutely nowhere. And that's saying something.

But all that really means is that the city isn't going to completely save our bacon. That means it's up to us to handle this, like any other city would. However, no other city has yours truly as a proud, civic-minded citizen.

So, once again, I have been named first assistant storm warden. This essentially means I get to prowl around the streets in the areas most likely to be affected with my trusty megaphone and scream abuse at people who are not getting a !@#$ move on. Tragically, I am not allowed to shoot anyone for not complying, as apparently not evacuating a dangerous area in time of civic emergency isn't a shooting offense.

Looting, on the other hand, is. So you better !@#$ behave, certain people who I just know are going to take advantage of a bad situation. SPYGOD sees all.

Well, okay, not as much as I'd like. There's still that issue with GORGON and where they decamped to after they ran from West Papua. But thanks to yet another waterlogged favor to the Kingdom of Atlantis, we have something approaching an answer.

It seems that one of GORGON's subs went down on the way. Crashed and imploded well north-west of their starting destination, right around the middle of the East Mariana Basin. It was barely recognizable by the time his people found it, but I guess some things remain as they are, even 6000 meters down on the ocean floor.

Which means, unless it was really !@#$ lost, we have a general heading. And that makes finding them a little easier than before. Not a lot, to be truthful, but at least now we have something of a starting point, rather than "anywhere but where they left from."

(Unless it's a ruse, or they doubled back)

Anyway, that's for another day. For now, I've got my Versace waders on, a trench gun across my back, and I'm out telling people to get back in, or get to the shelters. No one's questioned why I'm wearing a rubber dress so far, and with any luck they'll remember what happened the last time some drunk !@#$ tried.

Come on, Irene. We're !@#$ ready for you.

(SPYGOD is listening to Here Comes the Rain Again (Eurythmics) and staying sober until this is over. Maybe)