Backer Update #51 (Game Over)
“With the inherent callousness of governments that try to care for more than seven billion people it is inevitable that some oil will need to slide between the pieces of the machine to keep us humane. The Justice Backers are that oil.” – Ember Joseph, The Daily Pills
Do you like that beautiful quote backers? That’s us they’re talking about. In The Daily Pills! The most read site among people who have a specific chair for reading. This is actually the first positive quote we’ve gotten from anyone on their staff since we started. That Donovan guy called us ‘vigilantes safeguarding only fetishized anonymity’. Their head politics reporter Miriam said I was ‘a jumping-off point for campaign questions and nothing more’. With how much the world talks about us it’s almost like I am something more. It’s almost like the name Alpha Dog means something to people who happen to not be me.
You guys can guess what changed their mind about our little crowdfunded superhero team. It figures it would be something big and flashy like this rather than all the small bits of good we’ve done over the past year and a half. Just go ahead and ignore that the Eastern Justice Backers stopped Woman’s Touch before her rocket-powered hands could pulverize anyone in her way. Disregard how Impala’s Backer team in the west stopped those quadruplet serial killers who were competing with each other.
Act-of-Goddess you can’t ignore. You know, when she first got here I didn’t know if she was going to work out. Sure she’s the most powerful of us by far, but at the time she wasn’t exactly a team player. (Anticipating the comments: I know I wasn’t either, but I also wasn’t the one having trouble addressing friends by their names rather than calling them ‘mortal’ or ‘scurrying rodent’.) She’s mostly past that now, just in time to become more famous than the rest of us for siphoning that tsunami away from Europe and dumping it back into the ocean. That’s what it took to convince The Daily Pills we weren’t just hooligans blowing stuff up for views.
We don’t need to talk too much about that tsunami. Goddess did a great job, but it was just some water behaving badly. I want you guys to hear about the mission the rest of us were on while she was keeping the U.K.’s pale ankles dry. We finally caught up with Game Master.
I’ll do some quick narrative time warping for you backers who weren’t here when we first started following his weird odorous trail. (There are so many of you now that I bet most of you are new!) It was just after we’d dropped Woman’s Touch in jail. Impala had taken more than half of my team west, so we were in kind of a sorry state. It was down to yours truly, my dogs (the puppies were still just itty bitty blueprints), Orb, Transplant, Act-of-Goddess, and Pawn. Then Pawn left. I still can’t get him to tell me why he took off. He says he’s participating in some medical research but he’s never been the best liar. I think he met a girl.
Some strange stories were hitting the news sites, the kind of thing that you see and assume it’s fake until you see it pop up on your Connectera sidebar. Whole buildings in office parks were getting secretly raided in the middle of the day. Discreet barriers would go up and block all the entrances and exits. People trying to get in would be turned away by automated ‘security’ announcements. Everyone working at the time was trapped inside. People thought it had to be a group of terrorists, but it was just Game Master.
People say I waste my genius, but this guy is on another level. He’s got an IQ the size of the large hadron collider, but he drops out of high school and uses his smarts to write computer programs that skim money off the top of online transactions. He then takes his new fortune and uses it to set up a series of mostly automated factories to make robots. It’s a damn shame somebody uploaded Hostage specs to the web; now any idiot with a couple hundred thousand dollars and some old PCs can cobble a robot henchman together.
Nobody knew why he did it. When the barriers came down and all his robots snuck back into that semi-truck that delivered them, his victims were free to leave. The ones that were still alive rarely supplied coherent accounts of what went down. Apparently he gassed them with some mild psychotropic stuff, forced them to dress in renaissance fair costumes, and then made up stories for them to act out. It was like a giant role-playing game for his amusement. He’d make them swordfight robots or each other, drink mysterious potions, quest for magical jewels that he’d placed on a different floor, etc…
He did such a great job separating the buildings from the rest of the world that he was sometimes able to stay and enjoy himself for more than fourteen hours before anybody on the outside suspected anything. He blocked all communications. You might think this doesn’t sound that bad. What’s wrong with missing a day of work to play dress-up and breathe some happy gas? The problem was that Game Master took it very seriously. The swords were real. His robot dragon would actually take a bite out of you if you didn’t dodge roll the way he wanted. An average of five people died every time he played his game. He played it seven times. The FBI could never predict where he was going to hit next, so it was up to us.
I wanted to get started sooner but we needed bodies. Our funds were flagging because of our small size (not blaming you guys). Impala took the majority of our benefactors when she moved out. After covering all the merchandise we needed to ship there was barely enough to keep our twin choppers fueled. (Another newbie memo: they’re codenamed Chomp and Bit.) We had the pleasure of sifting through the thousands of applications and finding people willing to work for less than we were offering before. They also had to actually have powers. I know a lot of you out there want to be here with us, but it just wastes our time and money when you pretend. What’s the endgame of adding fancy special effects to your videos if you’re just going to show up here as powerless as a crucifix against a komodo dragon?
A few good people answered the call. Salt Shaker joined up first. I was skeptical how useful the ability to control salt crystals was, but it turns out she’s like a Swiss army knife: salt micro-missiles that explode and blind enemies, salt shields, salt spears, and the occasional mineral salt chemical reaction if we needed an explosion or some smelling salts. Plus she can top off your fries if they’re too mealy. She can only use the salts she stores in her body and on the surface of her skin, so she’s usually walking around with crystals in her hair, on her arms, and even in her eyebrows. When we first got her into that white and silver costume of hers she would’ve made a perfect Christmas tree topper.
Electric Eel came on next. He’s our first special needs Backer, since we’ve never had to significantly modify living quarters before. He was exposed to some unknown chemical runoff when he was stomping about in a swamp as a kid. Skin irritation turned into a coma. When he came out of it he nearly died before his parents figured out he needed to be submerged in fresh water every day. His body has gone a bit fishy in a couple of ways, some of them pretty useful in a fight; he can produce a thick coating of slime that makes him impossible to hold onto; he can even toss it in these thick ropes and snag things. Here’s the kicker: he then generates a strong electrical current that travels through the slime and shocks who or whatever it’s attached to. It’s the exact opposite of a clean kill: it’s gross as hell and it only knocks people out. We threw a rubberized green suit on him and put him to work.
He had it kind of rough growing up black in a mostly white neighborhood, but he turned out really solid. It took both of our combined efforts to convince his parents that this was something worth devoting his life to. I even had to make a house call. I’m going to avoid that next time if I can. Orb can get off his invisible round ass and do it.
The last hero we snagged was Opossum Player. She tells me she’s going to go over her origin story with you guys in one of her diaries soon, so I’ll let her explain the noir comic that is her life. Here’s what you need to know for the exam: she was murdered. It didn’t really take though. Somehow her body absorbed the details of death and incorporated them into her mind. Any time she wants she can perfectly mimic a corpse that has been killed in any number of ways: stabbed, shot, drowned, burned, diseased… Her body literally manufactures the associated injuries and stops her heart. She also does a great shambling corpse routine to scare the misdemeanors out of common thieves who’ve seen too many zombie movies.
Another upside is that she can recover from most injuries in seconds. She’s not quite as indestructible as Pawn, but she can at least keep herself in one piece. Her costume was tough though. If she’s going to mimic a dead body we can’t have her in colorful armor. Our designer took care of that. Her outfit has muted colors and pieces of it can be pulled away to resemble whatever ripped clothing best matches the injuries she bakes into her flesh. I added the little opossum mask.
Three new heroes wasn’t bad. Salt Shaker is thirty-eight, Electric Eel is twenty-four, and Opossum Player is twenty-three, so we’re skewing kind of young again. That gives some credence to the theory that young people are the best at throwing off expectations and blazing new trails. Some people would call it ‘throwing your life away’, but those people can’t turn tsunamis away like they’re turning a page.
Game Master was the first big test for our new recruits. Sure they’d stopped your standard array of cutpurses and heroin dealers, but you never really cut your teeth until you go up against a super villain. We coordinated with the Unfridgable Girl and her stable of virtual gumshoes to try and pick up Game Master’s trail. Eventually we found a suspicious freight truck that kept taking routes those vehicles are rarely seen on. We started tracking its license plate through our police contacts. Then a backer called and told us he was looking right at it as it pulled into the parking lot of the Winter Trees office building. It’s some company that makes and distributes tinsel or something; it doesn’t really matter.
We were in the air shortly after the tip. By the time we got there Game Master had been at it for several hours. We’d advised our anonymous tipster to call the police as well, but it seemed they did not take the tip seriously; there was no police presence when we arrived. As I said before, Act-of-Goddess was busy smacking a few waves back into the ocean. Transplant and Orb had taken Chomp up to Canada to track down rumors of some kind of flesh-eating beast. It was just me and the new recruits.
The building was perfectly boring on the outside. The truck was parked lengthwise in front of it to block the main doors. On closer inspection we could see thick strips of translucent plastic barring all the windows. All the blinds and curtains were closed.
“Let’s smash something and get in there,” Opossum Player suggested. “Which one of the dogs is the smashing one?”
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
“I don’t have a smashing one,” I answered. She was supposed to have learned their functions and commands by that point. “Lebron’s blowtorch can probably get us in.” I pressed a button on my gauntlet and sent the dog up to the main door. We followed right behind him and watched as he opened his mouth, ignited the flame, and pressed it against the bottom of the door’s frame.
“How are we going to stop all the robots without the others? Orb would just crush them. Goddess would bring in a few Olympic swimming pools and short them out,” Player said.
“I can probably short them out just as well,” Electric Eel offered.
“I’m altering my salts right now. In twenty seconds I’ll be able to rapidly corrode their metal bodies,” Salt Shaker added. I thought it was going to be a piece of cake. Even if those plans didn’t work out, we had five robots of our own that I could simply sick on them. It turns out having a Plan D might not have hurt.
Lebron was barely a third of the way up with the torch when the automatic doors opened on their own. A group of strange colorful forms lunged out, grabbed us, and dragged us in. They even got all the dogs before one of them could run and send a distress signal. We were swiftly pulled deep inside the building. All the lights were out… or maybe they put our lights out… it was impossible to tell.
When I woke up I was separated from the team, my dogs, and my gauntlet. Somebody had dressed me up like Robin Hood or something. They had taken my costume off. That means for an indeterminate amount of time I was sitting naked in a rotating office chair. I wasn’t in the best mood, but I also wasn’t in the worst mood. The sterile office setting had been transformed not just by props, but by a thick fog of psychotropic gas rolling across the floor. I giggled without knowing if I was happy.
A robot that looked a little like a knight helped me to my feet and corralled me into a line with three other drug-addled players. None of them were from my team so I assumed they were employees. A bunch of little plastic conifers blocked the area in front of me. It occurred to me that I should probably get out of the line and find my team, but my feet did not agree.
When my turn came the robot handed me a sword that I could barely hold up and pushed me through some curtains into a women’s bathroom decorated with big, fake, striped mushrooms. All the sinks were running so I guess they were supposed to be the waterfalls of the five-stall enchanted forest. I stumbled forward, the blade of my sword scratching the tiles as it dragged. I held my breath. I heard nothing but the faucets and a scream from another floor. Then the stall at the end of the row burst open, door quaking loudly as it hit the wall. A robotic satyr emerged with glowing purple eyes and a fake brown beard that looked like it was from the cheapest costume shop you’d ever been to. A voice over the intercom called to me. It was the first time I’d heard Game Master speak.
“You’ve been a bandit all your life,” he told me. “Now it is time to redeem yourself. Drive off the satyr. Protect the village you once victimized. You have two more strength and intelligence than the last one to attempt this. You can succeed. I know you can.”
The metal goat man pulled a pitchfork out of its stall, bleated, and charged towards me. I lifted the sword just enough to block its first swing. The force of it knocked me into one of the stalls and onto the toilet. I had a feeling this particular game did not have respawns, so I was about to say my prayers when something smashed into the side of the satyr’s head like a chunk of ice.
The metal around one of its eyes turned lumpy and greenish. Six more missiles struck the creature all over its body. While it was distracted I pushed myself off the back of the stall and lunged forward with the sword, piercing its chest all the way through thanks to the corrosion. I let the weapon fall with the robot. When I turned and saw Salt Shaker I giggled. I actually had a reason this time; they’d put her in some frilly ball gown. I guess Game Master needed a damsel rather than a protagonist. She told me to shove my giggles where the sun doesn’t shine (not very dignified for a noblewoman) and then helped my drugged wobbling body out of the bathroom.
I’ll let the videos tell most of the rest of the story when they go up. I’ve got to leave something for the backers who have gone above and beyond with their giving. The broad strokes are that she sobered me up with a whiff of some salty concoction, we fought our way through a few floors rounding up the team and helping them shed their silly costumes, picked up my bound and gagged dogs from a janitor’s closet, and then fought some more until we reached the top floor. We just sort of knew he’d put himself there. Every game master hovers over the game.
The office he was running things from was guarded not by a robot, but by a middle-aged Hispanic woman who was kind of heavyset. She didn’t look so tough at first, but Game Master had taken her brainwashing to the next level. When she saw us she grabbed a broadsword and charged at us without caring she was outnumbered. To be fair she held us off for an embarrassingly long time. After she nearly took Opossum Player’s head off with the sword (no idea if she could survive that), Electric Eel shot out a rope of slime that snagged the weapon. He pulled it out of her hands and it went sailing through the top of a cubicle and into the cap of a big fake mushroom.
I thought she’d give up, but she just pulled a double-headed battle axe out from a printer tray and started swinging it instead. The strangest thing was that her fighting style with the axe was radically different from the sword. She didn’t brandish either of them like a fool, but like two different professional fighters. It was like Game Master had shoved the fighting skills of both a medieval knight and a pillaging Viking into her skull. As it happens, he’d actually found room for four different warriors. When we got the axe off of her she grabbed a katana and started screaming at us in Japanese! After that we had to fight her spear-wielding Roman gladiator form.
Electric Eel finally knocked her out and Lebron put plenty of restraining wire on her. With his last line of defense gone we were able to just push our way through his screens and unplug the little freak. I know you’re expecting some fat, white, bespectacled nerd, but you’re only a third right. He was white but he was also as thin as a broom; he looked like he hadn’t eaten since the Bush administration. He had an absurdly long and scraggly beard that had various curled extension cords and board game pieces tied into it. He also wore some kind of computer crown covered in USB ports that was fed into a bunch of wall jacks. I didn’t want to touch him, so I had the dogs drag him out. He protested vociferously.
“Don’t interrupt the game! This is their only chance to live a life of adventure. You’re sending them back to the emotional darkness of the twenty-first century! How can you be so cruel?”
I had my IT dog Dialup connect to the building’s computer systems and order shutdowns of all the robots. The only remaining problems were a few of the more intensely brainwashed individuals, but none of them put up as much of a fight as the woman Game Master set to guard him. A quick dose of Salt Shaker’s smelling salts broke the spell on most of them. Except for her. We couldn’t get her to snap out of it. I asked Game Master what he did to her once the runt calmed down a little.
“I was just trying some new techniques,” he snickered. “They worked quite well. When she’s holding the right weapon she has all the skills of the warriors of old.”
“Why did you do this to these people?” I asked him.
“Was it too many mommy hugs or not enough?” Opossum Player gibed.
“I didn’t do anything to them,” the maniac explained. “I did it for them. My game gives them purpose. The one they were in was so boring. Nobody realizes it. Their job. Their education. They’re just terrible games. Someone made the rules and tossed them in without a care as to how they would feel about it. They play by the rules because they don’t have a choice. I give them a better game, a game that lets them fight for honor, fame, thrills, and survival. I let them give up and bleed out when they want to because that’s what a good Game Master does. The ones who choose to fight get a real chance to win. They get to slay dragons.”
“You could’ve at least given them a chance to sign up,” Electric Eel said. That kid needs to work on his banter. He always sounds like he’s dampening his opinions to keep everybody mellow. It’s like he’s trying to get elected to the least flashy position… class treasurer or something.
“Everyone needs a game!” he shouted in response. He bared his crazy smile like he was flashing some glowing plutonium and cackled towards the fluorescent lights that were just coming back up. “And every game needs a master! Hahahahahehehehehehehe!” That was when I threw a gag on him.
We helped everyone get out of the building. We were able to stay long enough to absorb some thanks before the ambulances started to show. That was when I made an executive decision. I knew the paramedics and doctors would have no clue what to do with that brainwashed woman from the top floor. I had the perfect cure in mind for her. While she was still unconscious I loaded her into Bit with the rest of the team. They weren’t super comfortable with my decision but they got on board when I explained the situation.
Do you guys remember Dreamweaver? She’s the powerful telepath without a body who used to be on my team before she got pulled away in our mitosis. If anybody could help somebody parse the junk out of their own brain, it was her. I immediately called Impala and had her send Dreamweaver over. Of course what she actually did was send Golden Boy over and Dreamweaver hitched a ride in his brain. Once he was here all he had to do was stand near our patient until Dreamweaver could transfer to her. Then we let her sleep.
When she awoke she was back to her old self… for the most part. She smiled more than was necessary. She thanked us profusely. She started telling us about her kids and her husband and her daily routine of delivering coffees and putting sticky note memos on every surface that would hold one. The brainwashing didn’t go away though. Dreamweaver just helped her store her four warriors into neat little mental boxes.
“It must sound pathetic,” she told me when we were alone. “Game Master really did help me a little. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so alive as when I was mercilessly trying to run you through. I’m a little sad to be going back. Tinsel is not as exciting as you might think.” So I offered her a job.
Hear me out! When she grabs those weapons she has strength like you wouldn’t believe. I think it’s adrenaline. It’s like the whole women lifting cars to save their babies thing. She can activate it any time she wants and become a skilled knight, Viking, samurai, or Roman legionnaire. I can’t let a four-in-one hero walk out that door without saying anything. It turns out I was right to ask because she said yes! She didn’t even have to think about it that long.
That’s one more hero in the bag. We’ve got her an armored costume and some new weapons coming in this week. It’s a nice look that has touches of the armor of each of her warrior personas. She let me pick her hero name, so from now on you guys can call her Paladina! She’ll be starting her diaries soon.
Game Master is the third major super villain we’ve brought down. (I know some people don’t count Wing King because he was so loony, but when a mad scientist attaches bird wings, bat wings, and dragonfly wings to his back, I’ll count him as super just for being so devoted to such a dumb idea.) Now that we’ve captured him we’re going to be busy turning him into trophies. Be on the lookout for plenty of ‘We beat Game Master’ T-shirts and bumper stickers. As usual we’ll get a nice resin statuette of him made up, complete with a base themed after a ten-sided die.
It won’t be long now before The Daily Pills has to have a whole section for us. Especially since I’ve got something else coming in. It’s super exciting, but I can’t tell you guys what it is just yet. (One hint: It’s not the puppies; they’re not ready yet.) Once it gets here I’ll make an unboxing video and show it off for you. For now feel free to pass the time until the Game Master videos go up by perusing the diaries of our new members and checking out the backer rewards and the shop. There’s a licensed Justice Backers version of the Beach Detective board game on sale now for fifty percent off. (If you order during the sale it includes two extra game pieces: Doc Donor and Dreamweaver!)