Opossum Player Diary #33

(transcribed from video log)

B-b-b-b-ackers! Do I have a story for you my beautiful little goblins. It’s about the brand new knight in shining armor we bought on the internet. It turns out his armor’s not so much shiny as it is covered in crusty racism!

Everything went fine when Tin Soldier came out to train with us. Alpha Dog cranked a couple of hours into his key and he was a good little toy-boy the whole time. He did what he was told. Alpha Dog gave him this big-ass box of ammo to load his rifle with. We don’t do normal guns, so we gave him rubber bullets. The big dog says they still have plenty of stopping power. He can do other stuff with the gun anyway since he’s got like a utility belt; there’s a grappling hook he can shoot out of it and cool stuff like nets too. We gave him some tasty new Justice-Backers-brand orders so now he isn’t allowed to kill anybody.

Like I said the training went fine. The soldered soldier hit all the targets we put in front of him. He did some drills with the dogs so we could see how well he worked with them. With his old-timey uniform it kind of looked like a fox hunt when he was giving the dogs orders. Maybe we should get him a robo-horse and a bugle or something. That’s the weird trumpet they had right?

Anyway the day after that we got a mission. There was this research student in some chemistry program down in Louisiana. She got blown up. Just like me she kind of shook it off. She can do that now because some weird chemicals in the explosion bonded to her cells and gave her the ability to turn into a purple cloud. That didn’t sound too scary until we heard that the cloud was basically made out of acid and could eat through anything it touched.

She went nut-balls on this crazy power trip and started telling everybody she ran into to call her Toxic Violet. Then she decided her first act as an indestructible cloud person would be going through her diary and dissolving every guy that’d ever done her wrong.

I know how tempting it is to get revenge on badly behaved boys, but I never melted any of their faces. After she killed one guy we were all over her like glitter on everything I ever made in school (yes, even the essays).

The team that went to vacuum her up was me, Orb, Electric Eel, Salt Shaker, and Tin Soldier. We brought two of the doggies with us too since the big dog had modified them with these big vacuums on their mouths. They kind of looked like dogs wearing those white cones vets give out. He told us he’d lined the vacuum bags with stuff that neutralizes most caustic compounds so Violet couldn’t acid her way out.

Her Connectera was covered in old arguments with guys, so it wasn’t too hard to guess which one she would go after next (hint: it was the one that cheated on her a baker’s dozen times). We chased her away from his house and into this gross boggy place with a bunch of concrete sewer pipes big enough to walk through. It smelled like crayfish ass.

Once she realized she couldn’t outrun us she tried to fly way up into the sky. Salt Shaker kept her down by shooting some missiles above her that exploded. The salts in them caked up her cloudy bits and forced her back down. That was when I finally got a good look at her. She was real pretty except for all the evil seeping out from between her teeth. You can’t really take your clothes with you when you’re an acid cloud, but she didn’t really look like she was naked either. The purple gas just kind of clung to her body and she sort of made a costume out of it. She hovered in front of a big pipe, legless, giving us the evil eye.

“Don’t make me kill you,” she threatened. Puffs of purple smoke came out of her mouth with every word.

“No can do Sweetie,” I said. “Murderers go to jail. Them’s the rules.

“If you put me in I’ll just slide right through the bars,” she said.

“We’re going to shove you in a bag and go from there,” Salt Shaker said.

Violet decided to spray it instead of say it; she puffed out her cheeks and shot a jet of purple gas right at our feet. Everybody jumped back, including me. It really wouldn’t have mattered if she’d barbecued my tootsies but my poor boots would have never recovered. Orb put himself in his ball, but it wasn’t like he could do much since you can’t squash a cloud. Violet flew at him and broke over his mind-marble like water.

Salt Shaker tried to corral her with more missiles and even had to do this dandruff-looking explosion thing to keep her away. That was when I started to get scared; she was a lot faster than I thought she’d be. The dogs couldn’t get close enough to start sucking her up. Tin Soldier had a spray can attached to the end of his rifle that sprayed glue, so he managed to keep her back too. Electric Eel was the only one without some kind of protection. I kind of put myself in front of him like a shield just in case she decided to go after him.

I didn’t even get the chance to protect him. Toxic Violet swooped in towards him and spread out her arms so she was leaving a wide blanket of gas. Eel was exposed. I stood in front of him to take most of the gas, but something pulled me out of the way. It was Tin Soldier. He’d grabbed my arm right as the gas was hitting me and pulled me away. That left Eel with no cover. I was certain he was screwed.

He was smart enough to backpedal and drop himself into a deep muddy puddle. The gas didn’t really penetrate into the water. While Violet was hovering over the pond waiting for him to surface, Tin Soldier let go of my arm, grabbed Orb, jumped, and tossed the round old man down into the puddle. There was a big splash like Shamu off the high-dive. All the mud and water in the air sort of soaked up Violet and left these purple globs of slime all over the edge of the puddle. The dogs started vacuuming those up as quickly as they could so she couldn’t reform.

“What the hell man?” Electric Eel exploded as he pulled himself out of the mire. He had brown crud and weeds in every bit of his costume. I assumed we’d need to hire some kind of super laundry lady to handle it. I could see some burns on his arms where a little bit of the gas had gotten him. I felt a little guilty they were there, but it wasn’t my fault. Like Eel and everybody else I was way more pissed at Tin Soldier. If he wanted to kill us he had plenty of opportunities in training. Eel stomped towards Soldier. The robot held up its gun and stopped Eel in his squishy tracks.

“I will defend myself,” Soldier said.

“Put the gun down,” Salt Shaker ordered. She pointed her own hand at Soldier and I saw a bunch of little crystals grow out. Soldier turned his gun on her.

“I do not take orders from natives,” Soldier racisted all over her. I couldn’t believe my ears. I thought I might need to chop them off, wash them out, and put them back on to make sure I heard right. You guys remember that Salt Shaker’s Native American right?

“Excuse me?” Shaker roared. I think it took all she had to not rust him into oblivion right there. I love that salty bitch. Orb pulled himself out of his ball and tried to calm the robot.

“I don’t take orders from any type of Indian,” the robot insisted and pointed his gun at Orb. We were all pretty shocked. We’d never heard him say anything that sounded so human before. All of a sudden it was like he actually had a personality. It was just our luck that personality was a blazing racist. It was also our luck that I was technically the only white one there, which none of us had been forced to notice until that second.

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“Do you take orders from me?” I asked. Soldier stared at me for a second before his head darted back to his darker teammates. I started walking towards him; a rubber bullet would bother me less than a mosquito bite.

“In the absence of Alpha Dog, yes,” Soldier confirmed.

“Well then I order you to put your gun down and stand perfectly still,” I said. He looked like he didn’t want to comply. “That was an order soldier!” He lowered his rifle and then slung it over his back. He looked me in the eye with his weird flashlight-eyes.

“Don’t let them touch me,” he practically whispered to me.

“What is your problem? They’re on your team,” I said.

“They are not soldiers. They are the enemy. It is a shame you and Alpha Dog do not understand that. It seems the war was lost mere months after I was put in that box.”

“What war are you talking about?” Salt Shaker asked. Soldier didn’t answer her, so I repeated her question. She looked at me like she didn’t want me to humor him, but how else were we going to find out? I hate being dragged into stuff like this. This kind of crap was supposed to be over before I was even born.

“The war of the races,” the robot said. “The war I was built to fight in.” That tidbit of information hit us just like Toxic Vi would have; it burned the skin.

“Why are you dressed like a revolutionary war soldier then?” I asked.

“My creator saw the coming war as a second war for independence. The white man would be fighting for freedom from the poisonous infiltration of Israel, Africa, and the Orient. My uniform exists to unite the true masters of America.”

“Masters is right,” Electric Eel grumbled. “When we unboxed you… you said it was a war against tyranny.”

“The tyranny of clamoring minorities,” Soldier said.

“I guess Daye Janus wasn’t too happy with the civil rights movement,” Salt Shaker said. “He thought the firehoses were going to be traded in for tanks.”

“Do not speak ill of my creator,” Soldier scolded. You could practically hear the heat sizzling on his mouth-grill-thing. His hand twitched like he was going to grab his gun again, but I think he remembered his order.

“So why did you pull Player off me? You’re trying to get me killed because I’m black?” Eel accused.

“Not so,” the robot answered. “I have been ordered by Alpha Dog to not harm humans who aren’t the target of our missions and to protect the Justice Backers.”

“I’m a Backer!” Eel insisted.

“Opossum Player is a Backer. I was protecting her from the gas. Though it was unlikely to kill her I thought it was better to be safe. You, Electric Eel, are not human. You are the property of the Justice Backers. Only creatures with souls deserve my protection.”

“I could fry you right now!” Electric Eel seethed. I saw electricity jumping between his fingers. I knew he wouldn’t do it though. None of us was sure if Tin Soldier was actually alive. He seemed petty and foolish enough to be your everyday human being.

‘I’m turning you off,” I said and walked round behind him. He tried to turn and look at me but he wasn’t allowed to move his feet.

“Can you place me in the storage compartment on the helicopter?” he asked. “I don’t want their fingerprints on me.”

“You’re sitting right next to them,” I said. I grabbed his clock key and pushed it forward a few rotations to use up his energy. When it stopped moving he shut down and his eyes darkened. I think that was an even weirder mission than Game Master.

After we loaded him into Bit we headed straight back to the Barn to have a word with big dog. He didn’t even believe us at first. He asked why we were hauling his inactive metal ass into the Barn and scuffing his stupid metal feet.

“Maybe you could have mentioned that the brilliant scientist Daye Janus was a warmongering white supremacist,” Salt Shaker said.

“What? That’s ridiculous. I’ve read like three biographies on the guy and none of them say anything about that. He had an uncle in the Klan or something, but that’s it.”

“Tin Soldier almost got me killed because I’m too black to bother with,” Electric Eel said. He’d been stewing the whole helicopter ride and he looked angrier and more dejected than I’d ever seen him. I mean it’s not like we’re best friends, but I could feel how upset he was. I don’t think he thought something like that would follow him into his new home full of superheroes.

“I doubt that,” Alpha Dog dismissed. “He’s not perfect. His eyes are actually slightly worse than 70’s TV cameras; he probably just thought he saw something that required that course of action. He can make mistakes just like you.”

“He denied that we had humanity,” Orb confirmed calmly. Alpha Dog seemed to actually listen to him. Orb doesn’t lie. I don’t think he even exaggerates.

“That thing explicitly said it was built by Janus to fight in a coming race war,” Salt Shaker added. She probably thought Orb wasn’t angry enough about the whole thing. “I know we signed up for weird stuff, but you can’t expect us to tolerate a piece of malfunctioning racist hardware that might get us killed. You need to decommission it.”

“No,” Alpha Dog said after rubbing his forehead for a minute.

“No!” Salt shaker shouted back. “What the hell is your problem?”

“I understand this is an issue,” the big dog said. “I’ll see what I can do about his parameters. I won’t let him into the field again unless it’s clear that he is to do everything in his power to protect and assist every person on the team.”

“He doesn’t think we’re people,” Electric Eel reminded, trying to drill the point in. Sometimes the big dog’s made of granite though.

“The fact is I spent so much money on him that we cannot write him off as a loss without losing significant support. If I could do it all again I’d be a little more cautious, but for now he stays. He’s my property and he’ll do what I say. He won’t hurt anybody. I haven’t said it yet, but good job with Violet. You guys did great work out there. For now you’re dismissed. Leave him in my shop.”

That was all he’d say about it. Salt Shaker stormed off into her room. Electric Eel did the same and Orb took the robot into the shop. It’s no wonder his last team got so pissed at him. Two of our guys could quit over this and they’d be totally right in doing so. I don’t want to be on team racism.

Suddenly I was alone in the kitchen thinking about how light my skin was and then reminding myself that this wasn’t even about me. That stupid tin wrench was thrown into our works at the worst time. We hadn’t even finished becoming friends yet. Our rooms aren’t even that comfortable to retreat into yet.

Two days later he told us Tin Soldier was coming out with us again. He said that he couldn’t alter his personality or his beliefs because the 70’s computer that is his brain is so different from anything he’s ever touched, but that the soldier now knows he has to work with us regardless of his feelings. Nobody’s happy about it. I’m honestly shocked Salt Shaker didn’t quit right there. Somehow we’re all still here. For now.

Give me some questions goblins. Let me laugh and choke on your silliness for a while and forget my broken home.

Randomdestroyer: Are you guys really going after that guy over his card game? I know it’s technically illegal, but come on. Shouldn’t you be stopping terrorists and giant monsters and stuff? People just need to suck it up and maybe live less perverted lives if they’re worried about their secrets turning into toys.

People can be as perverted as they want to be as long as they don’t hurt anybody. Deckard’s doing plenty of hurting and that’s what put him on our radar in the first place. Besides, we haven’t actually run into any giant monsters yet. Fingers crossed though.

Ch4rming3ch0: Have u though about defecting to Impalas team? U seem like u wanna make freinds & their all friends over there. Just sayin.

Somebody has to cover this half of the country. It wouldn’t be right for me to jump ship just because nobody wants to wear friendship bracelets. I’ll keep trying. It’s really really hard to not like me. Thanks goblins. Now let’s all crawl into our caves and get some sleeping done.