Opossum Player Diary #24
(transcribed from video log)
What’s up my backers? How many people are going to watch this in the next twenty-four hours? Last time was a new record for me: four millions views in one day! One! We’re going to go ahead and smash that record today though because I’m going to tell you what you have been dying to hear. That’s right. Uhuh. It’s origin story time! Rah! Hiss! Siss boom bam! Fireworks! Pshew! I promised you it was coming and Opossum Player always delivers. I’m like a pizza guy that way.
It all started when I was murdered. There was this boy named redacted in my redacted class at redacted school. He was kind of cute with his redacted eyes, his redacted hair, and his little redacted that always redacted. He’s in jail now. Anyway, I had a crush on him for like three months. The first time he made me blush was when he saved my life in a game of dodgeball. Well, he resurrected me; it was that version of the game where when you catch a ball you get to bring a player who is out back in. Pretty ironic huh? He brings me back just to go and stab me seven times. At least the guy who hit me in dodgeball only did it once. Without him though I guess I never would have learned that I could go ahead and resurrect myself professionally.
I even asked redacted to prom. That’s how little I actually knew about him. He was just the guy who let me play dodgeball for another three minutes until I got hit in the face again. That’s enough to base a relationship on right? Ha. He said yes. We never even got inside the redacted though.
I met him outside it and he didn’t like my dress. I don’t know how he couldn’t because I made it myself. Even then I had a thing for gray and the whole phoenix-from-the-ashes thing. The dress was supposed to look like a pile of ashes that I was rising out of. I thought it turned out awesome, but after I couldn’t drag him into the redacted he eventually admitted he would be embarrassed to be seen with me while I was wearing it. Dick. It’s a couple of dances and some bad pizza and he can’t suck it up for the night and just smile? Our school had like three proms a year anyway; I think they used them to milk a little extra money out of us. Budget cuts… what are you going to do?
We never even went inside and he stormed off quacking like an angry little duckling. I thought that was the end of our epic romance. Less than a single date… that might be some kind of a record too. That wasn’t the end though. He started badmouthing me to everybody, calling me a freak and stuff. He spread a rumor that we skipped the prom because we were trying to have sex out behind the building. He said we didn’t actually do it because it turned out I had crabs. Not true.
I called him out on it in front of a bunch of his friends and then he got really creepy. I started getting hang-up calls and threats online. He busted into my locker at school and poured some kind of red-dyed bouillon over all my stuff. I guess it was supposed to look like blood, but I honestly didn’t mind my textbooks smelling like chicken soup.
He thought he could at least get me to unplug by hacking my social media household and knocking over all the furniture. He failed at that too. Even when I’m playing dead I’ve usually got one had in my pocket texting. There’s no way I’d give up my all my E-friends because some litterbox-head posted a few fake statuses.
That’s about when he stopped trying to do the whole cinematic psychological horror thing and just snuck up on me one day with a kitchen knife. I was walking home from redacted practice. I was all sweaty and hot and huffing and puffing so I didn’t hear him coming. It was just starting to get dark as he pulled me into a gravelly pit next to the street that was part of some construction project. I hit my head on a concrete pipe thing and couldn’t really move to stop him. He stuck his mom’s infomercial-bought stainless steel turkey knife right into my guts.
My powers don’t hurt, but that’s only because I’ve used them so much that I’m numb to them. Getting stabbed hurt. That was the only time I ever really felt like I was dying. He stuck me again and again and all I could do was leak everywhere. I think I heard him say something about shutting me up for good. Then he left me in the pit.
All my blood must’ve gotten cold on those rocks, because it crawled back inside. My heart was like, ‘Oh what the hell? Guess we’re back up and running!’ and started going again. I really didn’t know what to do, so I just picked myself up, brushed myself off, and walked the rest of the way home. I was dazed, so I didn’t notice I still had all the stab wounds squishing together when I walked like the middle of an accordion. Have fun picturing that. My pops certainly didn’t have fun looking at it.
Now I have to cut to a while later. Redacted’s brain completely crapped itself when he saw me in school the next day. He started screaming like a maniac and knocked over a bunch of desks trying to get out of the room. I just shrugged and played it like I had no idea what was wrong with him. I heard he dropped out of school. When I looked him up a little later I saw he’d gotten arrested for redacted and been sentenced as an adult. That seemed a little harsh just for some redacted, but it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.
A couple years after that I got the idea to start being a vigilante. I was out of high school at that point, but one of my redacted’s friends was hanging around one day and talking about school. They were still sophomores. I was just listening in when I heard about the creepy new redacted coach who got a little too much pleasure out of watching young girls jump around. There were even some rumors he’d raped a girl. I decided to pay him a visit.
I broke into his cruddy little house while I knew he’d be at a practice. I didn’t have to be careful since I knew he wouldn’t call the cops on me, so I just smashed a window with a rock and crawled in. I didn’t know where the most dramatic place to seat myself was. The kitchen smelled kind of bad thanks to a few rotting tomatoes on the counter, so I went into his TV room, sat in the least scuzzy chair, and grabbed a porn magazine from his coffee table. I pretended to read it and waited for him to come in.
“Who the hell are you?” he asked when he strode in carrying a greasy bag of Chinese.
“Just like every other dead girl you see on the news, my name is not important,” I said. I practiced that speech a lot in the mirror. I actually had one of my poet friends write it because she’s way better with words. “What people will want to know is your name. Who’s the monster who killed that poor girl whose name escapes me?”
“What are you talking about? I’m calling the police,” he said and pulled out his cell.
“Have fun explaining the corpse of a nubile young woman reclined in your chair,” I said. He was about to say something when I lifted my shirt and made a wave of bruises appear on my stomach and ribs. I cocked my arm back and broke it in two places so it looked like a mangled chicken wing. My eyes went bloodshot and finger-shaped bruises appeared on my neck. Then I leaned forward and fell out of the chair, slamming my head against the floor as hard as I could.
He started screaming like he was falling down a well. I got a little worried somebody else would hear him and call the cops, so I quickly picked myself up and put every bone and skin cell back in order.
“What… what are you?” he blubbered. He was clutching at a little crucifix necklace. I was so tempted to just say I was the devil. You guys have no idea. I’d love nothing more than to spin my head around and just gleefully yell, ‘Iiiiiiiii’m Satan!’, but that wasn’t part of the plan.
“What I am doesn’t matter either. What matters is that I have the power to perfectly mimic the body of a young dead white girl, which is the last thing you as a creepy old single guy want in your house. Can we agree on that?” He nodded. “Good. You’re a very bad man redacted. I know what you do to the girls you’re supposed to be coaching. No more. You’re going to quit your job and move into a new field. Food prep maybe. Something that suits you. If you don’t, I will kill myself again and lay on your floor. I’ll be covered in marks that indicate that you did it.”
“I’ll just put you outside,” he countered.
“Then I’ll come back. Do you really want to dispose of a dead body every day for the rest of your life? You’re going to have a time limit too, kind of like you have right now. You see I called the cops just before you came in and told them I was at this address and I was afraid for my life. I can still call them off if you agree to my terms.” That was a bluff by the way. I had no idea how long it might take cops to get there, so I didn’t call them.
“I’m not a bad guy,” was all he said in response. “I just can’t control myself.”
“I’ll control you then,” I said. “Do we have a deal?” I thought about sticking out my hand for him to shake, but he wasn’t good enough to lay a finger on my waxy dead skin.
“Yes,” he said. “Just get out of my house.”
That is how Opossum Player was born. I didn’t just get him to quit coaching. I started shopping around online for pervs who needed to be scared straight. A sex offender here, a wife beater there. None of them had the guts to challenge me after I dropped dead in their beds or showers. It’s a shame I can only cause them problems as a corpse, but that’s the world we live in.
When I heard the Justice Backers split up and were doing some recruiting I immediately applied. Life’s been fan-freaking-tastic ever since. Not perfect though.
I’m still having a little trouble making friends. Alpha Dog’s always busy and Orb’s always doing yoga or something. Transplant’s cool but he’s a dude and I need some lady friends to hang with. I got excited when Paladina joined but she buddied up with Act-of-Goddess right away. I think it’s because they’ve got this sort of bond over old things. When Goddess is talking like she should be sitting in a throne, Paladina can grab her broadsword and talk the same way. They’re always palling around pretending it’s the glamorous dark ages together. You’d think I’d be able to fit in there somewhere because of all the dead bodies they had back then, but no. Apparently it doesn’t matter that I can even look like I have the black plague.
Salt Shaker doesn’t like me that much either. I told her we could hang out since the other two girls already had their own little club, but she brushed me off. It’s not like I smell like a dead body. I guess it’s just because we’re so different. She’s like twenty years older than me and Native American and stuff. Plus she barely ever comes out of her room. I wonder what she’s got in there; every time her door opens it smells like the ocean for a second.
Oh oh oh oh! I almost forgot to tell you guys. There’s a storm a brewin’. I think we might be going after some really shady guys soon. I actually heard about it from Monkey Girl.
I’d never met her before the other day, but she showed up at the Barn with Golden Boy to pick up Dreamweaver now that she’d finished working on Paladina’s baked noodle. I did my best not to gush and I totally completely failed. She was my biggest furriest hero while I was out floating my bloated gray body in pedophiles’ swimming pools. She was super nice too; it’s a shame she can’t stay. It kind of makes me wish I’d joined Impala’s team, but Alpha Dog’s had more slots available.
Monkey Girl didn’t have a lot of time to talk to me because she needed to talk to Alpha Dog about something. While Golden Boy went to get Dreamweaver, I kind of tagged along with her to Alpha Dog’s workshop. He was monitoring two of his dogs on treadmills and testing them at different speeds and inclines. He didn’t seem to be in the mood to talk. I don’t even know if he knew I was there since I just leaned up against the wall and listened in.
“Hello Eben,” Monkey Girl said. Alpha Dog didn’t look up from his tablet. “It has been too long.”
“Happy to see me?” he droned.
“Yes. Are you not happy to see us?”
“Catching up would be great, if that was what you were here for.”
“You are still upset?”
This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
“Upset, no. I don’t get to be upset. I’m the a-hole who forced everybody to move to the other side of the country.”
“You know it wasn’t like that.”
“I didn’t think it was until basically all of you went with her. It wasn’t exactly a fifty fifty split. I knew it was me, but I didn’t think it was… that much me.”
“You have a new team already. You did great work beating Game Master.”
“New team, more money. Still a smaller team than yours and still less money than yours. I’m doing all the major promotions and getting fewer contributions.”
“You are the best at making backers excited. Impala doesn’t know how,” Monkey Girl offered. That seemed to sand him down a little.
“So did you want to catch up?” he asked.
“Actually I have something to say about,” Monkey Girl admitted. “We have news of a villain. We think he is closer to you and maybe your team should investigate.”
“Really now? What are we talking here? Serial killer? Bomber? Power mad wackadoo?
“Blackmailer,” Monkey Girl answered. Alpha Dog scoffed. He whistled. The two dogs on the treadmill switched out for two of the others. The orange one stopped and let me pat his head before he hopped on the machine.
“Why do you need to come out here to give me a lead on a blackmailer?” he asked. “That’s not even good enough for an E-mail attachment.”
“He is ruthless,” Monkey Girl said. She sounded serious. “He does not do the blackmail the normal way.”
“What does that even mean? Does he do it by snail mail?” Alpha Dog asked. Monkey Girl reached into her pocket and took out a small stack of black bordered cards. I couldn’t see what was on them, but they definitely weren’t normal playing cards. He took them from her and flipped through them. He whistled again and one of his dogs came over to scan the cards with its eyes. It growled a little and walked away.
“What am I looking at here?” he asked her. “They appear to be trading cards. Other than the iridescent ink they’re chemically normally for this kind of thing.” I leaned forward and caught a glimpse of one of the cards. It had a normal person’s face on it and there was some text and some symbols below it.
“Every person on the cards is real,” Monkey Girl explained. “This is what he does. He steals people’s secrets and puts them on the cards. Then he sells the cards in packs to criminals and internet bad guys.”
“Internet bad guys? Sounds like your English still needs some work.”
“Well what do you call them?” she asked, frustrated. “Sometimes they are harmless. Sometimes they harass. Sometimes they steal. They do it all without leaving the computer. You tell me what to call them.”
“Jackasses. The word is jackasses. Some people might say troll but I think jackass covers it better.” He flipped through the cards again. “You’re telling me he’s running a collectible trading card game where the main mechanic is blackmail material? He makes his money selling the cards?”
“Yes,” she confirmed. “The cards can be used in a game called Secret Shuffle. They play this game and the winner takes some of the loser’s secret cards. Impala say they have a form of honor where if anyone cheats or takes the secrets off the cards they get targeted too.”
“I think I see how it works. I used to play the TCG Thunder Agate a few… god is it decades? Decades ago. This symbol here, the femur… it looks like a rarity symbol. Most of these have femurs, so they’re probably common.”
“Archive did say this too,” Monkey Girl added. “The femur is common, the ribcage is uncommon, the hand bones are rare, and the skull is legendary.”
“The rarity is determined by the value of that person’s secrets right? A troll who hides his real name is common, but a senator hiding an affair is legendary.”
“That is right. The game is spreading online like fire. He needs to be stopped.”
“This still doesn’t sound earthshaking to me,” Alpha Dog said. “Secrets get around online all the time. What does it matter if he made them into a game?”
“These are real people!” Monkey Girl exclaimed. Sounded like she was getting tired of his thick skull. “Three people have committed suicide already. They were in the game and someone who had their cards used them. You know what happens after? If the secret is not valuable anymore the cards are taken out of the game. They get throwed away or burned.”
“Three dead?” Alpha Dog pondered.
“That is not all,” she said. She pulled one more card out of her pocket that she’d kept separate from the rest and handed it over gently. Alpha Dog’s eyes bulged and he put his hand over his mouth. I couldn’t resist. I stepped forward and looked over his shoulder at the card. He did a double take when he noticed me but didn’t really protest. I asked who it was.
“It is the Unfridgable Girl,” Monkey Girl said. I gasped a little. Every Backer and every lower case backer knows her from online. She runs like ten million JB fan sites, even the official one.
“How did this guy get her information?” Alpha Dog asked.
“She does not know,” Monkey Girl said. “The jackasses are after her. Now that they know her address and what she looks like she has had to move. She cut her hair and changed the color. The jackasses left dead animals outside her door.”
“You don’t have to call them jackasses every time,” Alpha Dog said. I told him to not be a jackass about it.
“Will you at least look into this for her? We owe her so much,” Monkey Girl asked. Alpha Dog stared at the card.
“What’s this blackmailer’s name?” he asked.
“Deckard.”
“Hmm, clever,” Alpha Dog mumbled. I’m calling it right now. That Deckard guy is going to be next on our list. I think I’m really going to come in handy this time. I can’t do much against guys with wings or robot suits, but I can manipulate the manipulators. If you try to use my secrets against me I’ll just slit my wrists to get all the negativity out of my system and then come gunning for you.
Time for questions. Eeny meeny miney this one…
Ikeadeluxefamilypet: I don’t have enough money for your videos. I can only afford Orb’s because he’s my favorite (no offense). Would you mind telling me what Game Master made you do in his game?
Pssssh. I’ll be your favorite soon; don’t you worry. Game Master’s robots didn’t even know I was alive so they kind of just left me on the floor. I snuck around on my hands and knees and ended up meeting the rest of the team in a stairwell I was tossing myself down. I bet it’s a better video than Orb’s. His camera is always rolling too fast for you to even see much.
BestinternetnameTM: Who cooks now that Golden Boy is gone?
Salt Shaker’s pretty good at it. At least I think she is. The stuff she makes smells amazing but she only ever makes enough for herself. I eat a lot of microwave pizza pockets and candy. I’d be worried about dying from it if I wasn’t so good at dying already. Truck makes gumbo on Sunday sometimes… but that’s it. We don’t really hang around in the kitchen and play games like Alpha Dog’s first team did. It’s a bummer. I wanted us to be the super friends, not the super colleagues. Alright I’m done. Night my sweet little backies. More hero jazz tomorrow hopefully.
Salt Shaker’s Hair-Raising Fan Fiction Corner
This series will act as a supplement to my normal diaries; I’m doing it as a favor to Alpha Dog, who tells me that Archive used to do an extra series and he thinks we need one. I shared this idea with him jokingly but he apparently thinks it’s actually a good idea.
You all know there is plenty of terrible fan fiction out there. I must confess that I often search it out to satiate my predatory need to deride. I used to have to sniff it out like a bloodhound and settle for scraps from a slew of different sites. Not anymore. I’ve discovered a goldmine. An endlessly renewable vein of monstrous grammar and strange childish obsessions. I’m drooling just thinking about it.
Her name is Kharmie Buttercup and her natural habitat is fansethigh.com. Her specialty, for which she receives many earnest requests and commissions, is Justice Backers fan fiction. She originally specialized in spy stories starring anyone’s favorite cartoon or television characters, but has found the skills she developed in that “genre” translate well into romanticizing and fetishizing the everyday life of the superhero. I’ve been lucky enough to mostly avoid her gaze as she seems more, let’s call it inspired, by male characters.
In this series I will share some fan fiction gems I have discovered about the Justice Backers, starting with this commission written by Kharmie Buttercup. It utilizes the obnoxious “X reader” format which allows the reader to pretend they are actually the one doing the romancing. The stage is the Amazon rainforest shortly after the Justice Backers have defeated a demonic river dolphin previously thought to have been folklore. A fatigued Transplant is carried to a nearby village, complete with straw huts, to recuperate. A new Backer is by his side as the sun sets. We begin.
Transplant X Reader:
The Jungle is Ours – Part 1
By
Kharmie Buttercup
(mild sexiness)
You wipe the swet from you’re brow and sit down on the next to the tiny hut and Transplant is right next to you there. You’re holding 2 glasses of water that 1 of your team’s leader Alpha’s dogs filtered 4 you. (you had giggled some a lot because the dog looked like throwing up when the water came from out of its mouth) You hand 1 glass to Transplant and he takes it, you’re fingers brush against each other and you pull your hand back quickly hoping he didn’t notice that.
“Are all the abttles that tough?” you ask him. He drinks his water and you watch his throat move as he gulps it down. His skin is very tan and beaded with swet. His hair is just wet enough stick cutely to his forehead. You wonder if this is what normal girls feel like when they look at cute boys that just finished football practices. You are a hero now so you would never get that for real because it is one of so many things you have choosen to give up to fight for justice.
“That was a pretty bad one,” Transplant says to you as he looks at you and smiles. “You did super good for your first time in battle. Most new heroes quit on their very first mission but you are a natural.” You are lucky that it is so hot because the Amzonian heat hides you’re blushing. You’re not sure if you should tell him that he is the main reason you joined the Justice Backers, not to get famous since you kind of already were because of your blog where you wrote about crime and broke big stories. “There’s something special about your powers,” he says and suddenly looks like he’s thinking about something scary and far away.
“What do you mean?” you ask, not sure what he means. Sometimes you get embarrased about you’re pwoers because you can’t always control them and they go off without warning. (you have the abilities to fly and take away other people’s gravity against their will so you can make them float around and not do anything about it. one time you woke up the whole house because you took away the dog’s gravity and its barking woke up your parents who were super mad at you)
“I’ve never seen anything like them,” he says and you breathe a reliefed sigh. “All the plants I use are stuck in the ground. I would give anything to be able to fly around like you.”
“I’ll take you flying sometime,” you say confidently and finally remember that you should be smiling back. “Most of the time I need someone to help keep me rooted though.” You look to see if he would get the hint since he can control roots. He is frustratingly oblivious. You are about to drop more hints like A-bombs when some of the other Backers show up and totally ruin the moment.
Alpha’s doggies come up barking and licking at both of you with their rubbery tongues. Your best friend in the whole world Opossum Player sits down next to you and gives you a hug and sticks out her tongue and pretends to be dead for a second because she knows it creeps you out.
“Bleeeeeaaahhhh!” she says and laughs. Alpha, Salt Shaker, and Wallflower who is visiting from the Western Backers all sit down around you and high-five each other and start talking about the epic battle.
“That dolphin didn’t stand a chance,” Wallflower gloats to everybody silently with her brain waves because she never opens her mouth.
“Some of the legends about that demon say it can turn into people and seduce people into the river where it kills them,” Salt Shaker says. She is always showing off like that. You don’t say anything even though you already know everything about the dolphin you just fought.
“I guess it’s time I admit I’m actually a dolphin,” Transplant jokes. You laugh a little bit too hard and everyone looks at you funny.
“Uhhm excuse me,” you say and walk away from everybody awkwardly. You wonder why you’re always screwing things up. All you want is to be a superhero but you can’t even get that right without looking stupid. You walk over to the super clear river and look into it at your reflection staring back at you. 1 single tear drops off your nose and screws up the refecltion.
You look at the giant dead body of the dolphin demon on the other shore. You were the one who killed it when you used a gravity wall to smash it against the ground. You can’t help but think that maybe the dolphin wasn’t evil and it was just looking for a friend in all the legends. Suddenly the water gets a lot stronger and pulls the dead creature back into the river. The river takes care of its own.
Something touches the back of your arm and you whirl around ready to throw a big pile of gravity in your enemy’s faces. It’s Transplant! He backs up and holds up his hands to calm you down.
“You ran off,” he says. “I just wanted to see if you were ok.” Suddenly you feel like crying some more but you hold it in so he won’t see. You turn back to the river but you can’t help it so a teeny whimper escapes from the little open aprt of your mouth. Transplant reaches his arms around you from behind and grabs you. “Let me show you sometihng,” he whispers softly.
A tree starts to grow under the two of you because of his powers. It wraps around your legs and starts lifting you higher and higher into the air. The sun is setting but ther eis enough light for you to see everything. You look down and see millions of flowers in the treetips. They spell something out that can be read. It’s your name! The tree branches slowly spin you in a circle to be looking at him.
“I thought it would be better than a bouquet,” he says. “I didn’t know how else to express my feelings but for with my plant powers. Do you like it?” You hug him and snivel like a person whit a bad gooey cold.
“You’re my hero,” you say weakly.
“And you’re mine,” he says. You’re mouths get closer and closer and then you start to kiss pasionately. Your first mission is done and now you have a boyfriend! What are you going to do now!?
To be continued!
Thus concludes our first piece of fan fiction. I hope you’re as titillated as I am. I’ll give you poor backers a while to vent some of the erotic heat that’s bound to be building up in your bedrooms after that. The next bit of fan fiction will be chosen in a few days. If you need some more genius fiction to tide you over until then, you can try the links below. Goodnight everyone.
Archive X Wallflower: I Can Read you Like Manga by Slumberian
Alpha Dog X Woman’s Touch: Pat the Dog by Pinkpuddledrinker
Monkey Girl X Electric Eel: Pregnancy Shocker (or Barrel of Monkeys) by Kiss’em