JordanJaded’s Top Ten Weirdest Justice Backer Moments
(jordanjaded.blogstack.com)
With all this Drill Baby and Lichen drama going on, everybody’s been asking their favorite blogger (and when they don’t answer they ask me) what they think the Justice Backers should do in this situation. I’ve always been pro-backer myself, but more as a sideshow and fuel for my writing than legitimate sociological experiment. Everyone’s having a field day posting their listicles and things, but I haven’t seen this one go up yet so I’m going to try and squeeze it in there. I didn’t bother to do a poll or anything since most of you are here for my opinion anyway. This is just a list of what I think are some of the top conversation pieces that have come up because of the backers in the last few years. I owe this coverage to them; without their shenanigans I never would’ve had anything to write about when I started this site three years ago. Now I get like two million unique visitors a day! These aren’t in any particular order except for number one, so let’s start the ride! Starting with…
10. The search for the Mindyville lemon: The Justice Backers crashed an elementary school science fair in the heart of Mindyville, Arkansas, hardly cause for writing an article. They were there to capture one kid’s dad for running a 3D printing operation designed to get plastic guns and harpoon launchers into criminal hands. The weirdness started when the tubby middle-aged guy in question awkwardly ripped off his sweater to reveal an arsenal of flat, cream-colored plastic weapons. One shot from his 3D shotgun nearly killed one of the judges, but luckily Alpha Dog’s para-mutt-ic was there to stop the bleeding.
In the middle of the fight Transplant happened to grab one of the experiments away from its cardboard explanation. It was a simple lemon battery. Transplant’s powers modified it so it grew a few thorns and leaves and then he chucked it at 3Dealer (as some on the internet called him). It was a glancing blow that didn’t pierce the guy’s plastic armor. The fight went on and everyone forgot about the little old lemon rolling across the gymnasium floor. Eventually they collared the guy and turned him into the police. The kid who made the lemon project retrieved his mutant fruit and put it back on display. To his surprise it blew out the lights he connected to it.
Now if you don’t know how a lemon battery works, here’s the quiz notes: two pieces of metal are sadistically jabbed into the innocent young fruit (sorry, science experiments always sound like Saw-style deathtraps when I describe them) and they generate an electric current when they interact through the electrolytic medium that is the lemon’s citric acid. The power comes from the metal, not the lemon. That’s the main reason we can’t just power everything with some kind of giant Country Time turbine. The lemon Transplant touched, however, seemed capable of generating power on its own.
After the fair the lemon’s trail almost immediately went ice cold. The kid claimed he lost it after several weeks of it not rotting on his kitchen counter. Most people think his parents are liars and that they sold it to some corporation for about fourteen gajinkafillion dollars.
Try as they might, no internet sleuth has been able to track it down. There has been the occasional suspicious clue: a grainy photograph of a lemon-topped carousel running without being attached to anything, an extremely well-lit cabin that was supposed to be off the grid, and a small recall of a batch of organic lemonade that seemed to shock anyone who drank it. The conspiracy theories multiply every day. Whether you call yourself a lemonhead or not, you have to admit it was one strange event after the other with that sour mystery generator.
9. Kharmie Buttercup’s bestseller: Everyone remembers the star author of Salt Shaker’s fan fiction corner series. Everyone wishes they could forget what happened after: some bigshot publisher keen on choking the life out of the preteen girl market snapped up the special little internet moth and told her that if she changed all the character names in one of her fan fictions, they would give her an editor and a book deal. The company didn’t even bother to ask us, the sane people of the world, how we felt about the offer.
Cut to a few months later and bookstore shelves were filled with the first edition of A Tear-Filled Mask: a super-powered romance by Kharmie Buttercup. Her thinly-veiled Justice Backer characters weren’t fooling anyone. The main character was Gibonnie, a girl with all the powers of a gibbon. Sound familiar? She was joined by such bastions of creativity as Pride Lion (Alpha Dog), Daydreamer (Dreamweaver), Spring Doe (Impala), Bronze God (Golden Boy), and Can-can (Tin Soldier).
Even if you didn’t try to read them you can guess the plot beats: Gibonnie falls in love with a villain who only ever accidentally killed people. Then a secret government agency comes after her because reasons (she’s just so pretty she can’t be allowed to exist). Kharmie stretched that silk thread out into three books and a movie deal. It was bizarre and horrifying to watch as the lowest common denominator of justice backer fan swarmed like locusts to get their copies. We should move on; I’m getting queasy just thinking about it.
8. The goldenism scare: Whatever was done to Golden Boy as an embryo in a test tube is still unknown, but some aspects of it briefly resurfaced for a few months and freaked everybody’s hypochondriac mothers out. ‘Goldenism’ was the term quickly minted to explain children born without any urge to participate in, or understanding of, the creative process. These toddlers’ drawings looked like high school drafting projects. At first people were thinking autism of some sort, then OCD, and then one guy who was a few courses short of actually being called a doctor made a comparison to Golden Boy. The problem was that the kids didn’t really receive the same fortitude or instant-talent ability that the famous justice backer demonstrates.
There were a million suggested causes for seventy or so afflicted kids across the developed world. The usual suspects were flogged to death in the internet’s public quadrangle: vaccines, GMO foods, cell phone radiation, too much red meat, yadayadayada…
Nobody stopped to think how that might make Golden Boy feel. He made a statement addressing the issue and trying to convince the parents that their children weren’t diseased. That convinced some people he had somehow been sleeping around the country and impregnating women in order to make his own race of supermen. Then he shut up about it, because how on earth do you fight that kind of idiocy with words?
Goldenism came and went with no answers. Some kids grew out of it. Some didn’t. Some never had it in the first place. It was a blip on the medical radar, but one that had new mothers needlessly terrified for several months.
7. The phantom orb: An invisible sphere rolled through a charity benefit and knocked people down. Its shape was only revealed as their spilled wine spread over it. We all immediately thought of Orb, but he always appears at the center of the ball he creates and this one didn’t seem to have a pilot. Early theories still blamed the backer and said it was some kind of silent protest against the ‘charity theater’ the wealthy put on. The invisible ball was supposed to represent the invisibility of the people they were supposedly helping, but who weren’t invited to the black tie event.
My personal opinion is that it’s another example of justice backer sleepwalking. Sometimes, at night, you just lose control of your bodily functions. For most of us that means yellow sheets, but for people with powers it could mean all sorts of things. We’ve heard about Act-of-Goddess nearly drowning her team in seawater when she slept. I think the phantom orb was just a random projection of the actual Orb’s sleeping mind. He just didn’t admit to it because, you know, it’s embarrassing!
6. Doc Donor’s door-to-door organs: For a while it looked like the first independent Justice Backer, before Sportfish showed up, was going to be the young black athlete people had nicknamed Pony Express. (They called him that because he delivered his neighborhood’s mail… on foot.) He showed the unusual ability to run or walk for days without tiring. His first test mission had him teaming up with Doc Donor, who had recently been trying to donate some of her extra organs to hospitals.
The hospitals wouldn’t send appropriate transportation to retrieve the organs because they weren’t sure of their source, so the backers boxed them up professionally and sent Pony Express across the nation to deliver them where they were needed. Unfortunately, it didn’t matter how many dying people they had inside, no hospital would take the freely given organs because of liability concerns. It was a disappointment for everybody, Pony Express especially so. He was so disillusioned by the red tape deaths occurring that he gave up on heroics before he even started. For a while though there was a chance a man with a mailbag full of icy human organs was knocking on your neighborhood hospital’s door.
5. Precon: Oh boy. I could write a book about this one. I might. Most other bloggers barely have the fortitude to touch the subject. Plus any criticism at all sent towards the prehero community is met with a waterfall of whining, offense-taking, and occasionally threats.
Preheroism is when a deluded or young (and deluded) person on the internet becomes convinced they are destined to be a superhero but that their powers, like wisdom teeth or appendicitis, just haven’t come in yet. They divide themselves into two categories: PP and LP. PP stands for pre-powered and means their abilities have unexplained origins. LP means that they think the Lichen is going to show up and turn them into one of its plant-people soldiers. (I’m not going to get into the whole Lichen proxy thing; that’s too dark for this particular list.) All of this I’m-so-special nonsense was relegated to chatrooms where they sniffed each other’s farts all day until the fluke happened. One of them turned out to be real.
Sacred Queen does in fact have powers. So far, none of the other preheroes have panned out. Instead of being adults and admitting it was all just fantasy, most have doubled down. They have pride parades where they piss off actual marginalized groups. They walk around in cardboard costumes and insist they should be allowed to do so in school, in Walmart, at funerals, etc. Then they took the ultimate step and organized their own convention called Precon.
Lots of media outlets showed up at the center they rented out of morbid curiosity. Imagine it: hundreds upon hundreds of overly-sensitive liars pretending to fly through hallways and buying up merchandise catered to their own fabricated power set. I have a few personal favorite preheroes who showed up to get interviewed: Shadowcreep said he could turn into your shadow to follow you around and mentioned how he did it to girls all the time, Bumble Bear claimed she was only overweight because she was preparing for hibernation (in June?), and Lot’s wife visibly wiped the sweat from her zit-covered forehead while explaining that she was a living salt golem accidentally created by Salt Shaker. If that doesn’t qualify as weird I don’t know what does. I may have to make a special list just for Precon 2 when that happens this year. I hear they’re raising their ticket prices.
4. The Backer Bistro: Why do creepy awkward things have to make so much money? Make sure you look at my picture gallery for this one if you haven’t heard about it; the costumes really make it.
Someone decided that since there is a theme restaurant for everything from 50’s rock cafes to mildly racist Mexican mariachi cantinas, there needed to be a justice backers restaurant for the whole family to enjoy! Just like precon, morbid curiosity seems to be what drives the bistro’s profits. If you’ve ever wanted to see a white guy in an Electric Eel costume hang kid’s-toy slime ropes from his arms while balancing cheeseburgers, this is the place for you.
By the time you get tired of their bad costumes they’ll have two or three ‘villains’ emerge from the kitchen and perform the world’s most terrible scripted fights on stage. I’ve been once. Even the kids there don’t get it; they just stare blankly like they’re watching two of their action figures come to life and do the nasty. Seriously. It’s like watching that. It’s like watching two featureless plastic groins rub against each other and produce a squeaking sound.
Don’t get me started on the food either. The punny names are so bad that you might lose your appetite. There’s the alpha’s hot dogs with color-coded relishes, a fried steak called the golden brown boy, the opossum fillet-er (uh ew)… and we can’t forget the ‘deck’ of rectangular pancakes complete with the Secret Shuffle logo burned into them. I had the Trans-eggplant parmesan. It was alright. BUT I WAS STILL OFFENDED.
3. Abe the lynx hugged his deceased owner: We all miss park ranger Oaky Kolden, the soft-spoken national park advocate who sadly passed away four years before his awkward but heartfelt set of internet videos finally got the popularity they deserved. I still watch one every Monday to build up enough faith in humanity for my weekly Walmart run. His catchphrase, ‘you can be whatever you want when you grow up as long as you’re never done growing’, is already so ingrained in the public’s mind that it’s going to start showing up in kids’ essays any day now. (Every single one of those essays should get an A.)
When Oaky was alive he and his wife often raised or rehabilitated wild animals that had nowhere else to go. One of those animals is a Canada lynx named Abe that Oaky had raised since it was a kitten with an injured paw. Abe is kept at the Oaky memorial nature center near the park where his owner worked. As it so happens, that center was visited by one of the lesser known and under-appreciated justice backers: Loved One. His power: he adopts an involuntary psychic disguise in the presence of others that automatically reproduces the voice and appearance of a deceased loved one. You can imagine why he doesn’t go out much.
Lucky for the weepy-eyed among us, he went out to visit the nature center late on a weekday when few other visitors were there. He walked by Abe’s enclosure. As luck would also have it, a teenage girl was trying to get a picture of the napping cat at the time and accidentally switched her phone over to video mode. The device picked up the whole scene: Abe’s ears pricking up when Loved One coughed, the cat’s eyes adjusting to the light, his tensing muscles that seemed to say he was about to pounce, and the adorable, pathetic, tear duct nuking mewl the animal made when he couldn’t reach over the walls of the enclosure.
That was when Oaky’s wife showed up. Apparently Loved One had called ahead to warn her he was coming and she immediately opened the enclosure’s door and let the hero in. Abe the lynx wrapped his big fluffy paws around Loved One’s shoulders and started nuzzling him like we needed the static electricity between them to power a few city blocks. That was when everyone, including Loved One, realized that his power affected animals as well. Abe saw ranger Oaky, who he hadn’t seen in years. He asked him where he’d been over and over again with his wild meows and purrs that sounded like they should’ve been coming out of a cat the size of a teacup rather than one the size of a keg. I cried guys. I’m not too ashamed to admit. The world cried. The sprinkler systems in any building where the video played went off because EVEN INANIMATE OBJECTS CRY WHEN THEY SEE ABE AND OAKY TOGETHER AGAIN. Everyone bonded over that cat and his sweet beautiful lie we all let him believe. I guess it was kind of weird too. Honestly I included this one mostly because I thought it was an injustice that newscandy didn’t put it on their ‘top ten backer moments’ list. I hear that Loved One has scheduled regular visits so the kitty can have his snuggles.
2. The cow tipper: It’s exactly what it sounds like. It was a very slow week for criminals. If you thought that cow tipping was just an urban legend… well, you’re right. It’s not physically possible to tip cows on your own. Not only can they be around a half ton of hamburger, they tend to get annoyed when you shove them. Even if you did manage to knock one over they’d just get back up and stomp the snot out of you.
So this guy was really more of a cow harasser. He was a mean teenager who literally thought he could express his anger by trapping sleeping cows on their side. Apparently the dairy owner was a high-tier backer and had a personal line to Alpha Dog. Maybe they thought it would be funny, who knows. Regardless, an entire team of superheroes in helicopters showed up to stop him from smacking cows on the backside. The owner didn’t want to press charges, so the backers just harangued him a bit and took some embarrassing mugshot-style pictures. They sent the kid home and put the pictures online so he could enjoy a little public opinion flogging.
It kind of backfired though, since he now has a quarter of a million followers on his Chirpo account and was named Betterbedhead’s thirteenth sexiest internet boy last year. I love weird stuff, but not even I can make this up.
1. The Justice Backers destroyed my wallet: Number one is not all that odd either, but it’s obviously near and dear to my heart. A while ago I was blogging under the influence and getting into a couple heated arguments with Deckard-defenders when they tried to call me a hypocrite. They said that whatever amount of money I gave to the Justice Backers couldn’t possibly be enough to give me the right to talk about their exploits like an expert. One thing led to another and I ended up saying that I would donate half my yearly salary to the electronic-privacy-for-the-underprivileged charity called My Eyes Only (they were helping a lot of people recover from Secret Shuffle)… but ONLY IF all of the justice backers commented on the blog entry in question. Then they did. I screwed the pooch pretty badly.
This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.
Every backer commented! Even the non-powered ones! Alpha Dog, Impala, Monkey Girl, Golden Boy, Orb, Transplant, Archive, Wallflower, Pawn, Salt Shaker, Opossum Player, Electric Eel, Dreamweaver, Act-of-Goddess Loved One, Paladina, Tin Soldier, Doc Donor, the Unfridgable Girl, and even Truck all wrote, ‘you totally have to do it now.’ So I did. No, I won’t tell you exactly how much it was, but you should be satisfied when you learn that I was forced to eat ramen noodles and toaster pastries for about seven months. That’s what I get for opening my mouth.
That’s it for my list of weird moments. Join me tomorrow as I open my mouth for a living some more and hopefully don’t get caught in the justice backers’ searchlights.
Act-of-Goddess Diary #199
(transcribed from video log)
Hello. I’m feeling the true fury of a goddess today, so I hope you’re ready to sit through a rant. Is there anything else I should cover before I erupt all over this diary? Oh, some of you will be expecting my movie updates. I’ll do them really quickly, but then you must prepare for the frothing magma!
I know I have been flooding all of you with my mini-reviews lately; it’s an unexpected consequence of our current situation. Though all of the others seem to think Pawn and Transplant have betrayed us, Paladina and myself (the only backers with direct experience of brainwashing) aren’t convinced the Lichen’s influence is completely voluntary. The mind is meant to be solitary. Even Dreamweaver knows this and understands she is at best a stowaway on someone else’s ship. Imagine being an artist hard at work finely stroking your brush across the canvas and in a moment of distraction an unseen hand adds a few strokes of their own. It’s confusing… like the ground under you suddenly becoming a dark sea. Anyway, my point is that I have been keeping my mind off the subject with my usual coping mechanism: film. Here are my three mini-reviews for today.
First up was the animated family film Chippy Shoulder, which followed the adventures of a young girl who was somehow born as a porcelain doll. I found the mechanic of her acquiring cracks and chips over the course of her adolescent years as a representation of the self-esteem issues most girls face to be entertaining, if a little on the nose. I sometimes give films secondary accolades if they stick with me enough to appear in my dreams, and this one did. Perhaps it’s because having a Justice Backer with porcelain armor doesn’t seem all that far-fetched. Chippy slipped comfortably into my group of dream friends as we did battle with the Lichen in a giant flowerpot.
The second movie was the creature feature The Dryad of Eastmill. I give it points for having a unique setting in the lumber mill, but I don’t know if it intended for all the characters to come off as extremely gay. Everyone in the movie is so desperate to prove they’re the manliest logger that they just end up looking like they were compensating for something. I honestly though the movie would end with the main character’s wife dying to the splintery claws of the dryad and him finding solace in the large bear-like arms of the machine inspector. Thanks to that and the rather stiff special effects, I’m forced to say it wasn’t really worth the time.
Last but in no way least: The Red Eye of Space. It’s a science fiction epic you may not have heard of because it only had a limited theater release in 1982. It’s about a team of astronauts traveling into Jupiter’s perpetual storm, the great red spot, to gather data. The harsh alien weather proves too much for the team as it slowly rips apart their vessel. I was on the edge of my seat the entire time. Then, during a particularly tense scene, I found I was actually flying just above the edge of my seat. The movie has a wonderful speech, delivered by a female climatologist who actually didn’t have her clothes torn off by the forces of gravity, which really connected with me. It describes the way I often feel when channeling the raw power of the Earth. I have reproduced it in full for you here. Keep in mind these words were being spoken in place of a prayer that one of the remaining scientists suggested they should say while the storm was battering their last-remaining module.
O great red eye of space, with your destructive gaze, hear our weak human words. We forget. We forget the powers of nature when we blind ourselves with plastic and light and video screens. We think of sadness and anger as storms when in truth they cannot compare. There is nothing like a storm. They destroy the books that describe them. They destroy the people that fear them. They ravage the worlds of the void in ways that make us inconsequential.
O great red eye of space, we ask nothing of you. We understand you will keep us from our goal and take our lives from us. We understand we are just dust in your wind. Mankind cannot beat the storms. We can only hope, on the edge of death when pride is torn away, to catch a glimpse of your greatness. We can only hope to feel your power in us and around us in the thin moment before chaotic finality. We see you great red eye of space… and you see past us!
I would have to give this one a recommendation based on that last sentence alone. Rare is the story that flatly states mankind can’t solve all its problems. Every once in a while it helps to just see other people, as stand-ins for you, get steamrolled by the forces around them. It makes you feel alright about the times in your life when indiscriminate walls kept you from what you wanted.
The movie got me thinking about the great red spot. It is a storm, the kind of thing my powers can normally access. Just for fun I tried to reach out to the gas giant with my mind and see if the storm was within my grasp. Alas, my powers cannot escape the Earth’s atmosphere. Oh well. A storm like that could blow through all of our arguments and stop the people who needed to be stopped. Drill Baby and the Lichen couldn’t argue with the red eye of space.
That brings me to my rant. Alpha Dog is back to his old weaknesses in the face of Transplant’s and Pawn’s supposed treachery. (This is worsened by the fact that we suspect Dreamweaver may be doing reconnaissance in their heads and we don’t know if she’ll get a chance to return to us.) Suddenly it has become our fault the team drifted apart. I did not know it was my job to make sure we were all so close that betrayal wasn’t possible. Even with all his blustering, it is abundantly clear to the rest of us that our current predicament has more to do with him than anyone else.
This all started the day after our encounter at the mountaintop. After the things our former teammates had said, Paladina and I did some snooping around for information on Drill Baby. We watched the Sportfish videos and read the E-mails Alpha Dog had neglected to show us. I did not understand why the man hadn’t been on our radar sooner. I got everyone together in the Bay and we all confronted him about it. We were in the theater room, which has a projector and a screen draped over one of the tanks. Our leader was acting strange, simultaneously packing a suitcase with random things that didn’t seem to belong and trying to reach someone with a video call. There was a loading icon up on the screen. When I started firing questions there was a busy signal playing in the background the entire time.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m packing. All of you should do the same. We need to leave the Bay, at least for a little while. In fact, we should leave tonight. I doubt those screwy plants need to sleep; there’s no telling when they’ll show up,” he said.
“What are you talking about?”
“Uh, hello! We’ve been double-crossed! Transplant and Pawn are working for some big greasy dandelion that wants to destroy the energy infrastructure of the entire freaking world! They know that we won’t allow that. They also know, courtesy of the traitors, where the Bay is, so we need to leave. They could attack here any time.”
“If they wanted to stop us from stopping them,” Golden Boy said, his index fingers pointing in opposite directions as he crossed his arms, “wouldn’t they have just captured us on the mountain?”
“A fair point,” Orb said. He rarely even participates in these arguments. If I know anything about our enlightened friend, which I probably don’t, he must have sensed significant discord.
“Maybe they just couldn’t bear to look at us when they killed us. You know, the guilt or whatever. They’ll probably send those green wads with the dead eyes to do us in our sleep. Stab us with big-ass thistles or something.”
“What are your orders regarding Drill Baby?” Tin Soldier asked.
“I don’t have any orders for that. Don’t do anything.”
“Why not go after him? He’s a giant jackass!” Monkey Girl said.
“The guy ignores green tape; he’s not running around chopping heads off. The Lichen is the one that’s going to hurt people. That’s our target.”
“So we’re on his side?” Paladina asked. “It seems like we’re damned either way.”
“Wait, if we’re leaving… where are we going?” Golden Boy asked. Alpha Dog was about to answer when his call finally connected and a face appeared on the theater screen. We all turned to see Salt Shaker in casual clothes, with a wooden fence behind her.
“What is it Eben?” she asked, scratching at her temple under her sunglasses. We heard a little splash.
“What are you doing?” Alpha Dog asked disgustedly. Salt Shaker turned her phone around so we could see her bare feet dipped into some clear water. Tiny salt crystals formed around her ankles and then crumbled into the water where they dissolved. The camera swung back to her face.
“A friend of mine has a saline pool. I’m just adjusting the salt levels for him as a favor. Hey guys.” She waved at the rest of us. Some of us waved back awkwardly. We hadn’t seen her in a while. She looked very relaxed, especially for a person whose partner was in the thrall of a colossal toxic weed.
“Where’s Sugarcane?” Alpha Dog asked. “Did Pawn take her? We can be out there in redacted.”
“They’re called babysitters Eben,” she said, “and my mother makes an excellent one. Sugar’s fine.”
“Do you know where Pawn is?”
“No, he couldn’t say.”
“So you’ve talked to him since that plant snared him!?”
“Yes.”
“And you’re not upset!? Your boyfriend just betrayed the Justice Backers! You remember that you’re still a reserve Backer right? You’re supposed to be on our side.”
“I am on your side. I’m also on Pawn’s. He explained everything he could to me. What the Lichen wants them to do… it’s his calling. He needs to do it. I told him I understood. He’s standing by his family and we’re standing by him.”
“Are you going to fight us?”
“No. I’m trying to stay out of this. You’re not wrong and the Lichen’s not wrong. That drill jockey is though. If you guys need me to come in for that I will.”
“We don’t need you for anything!” Alpha Dog shouted before abruptly hanging up on her.
“Eben that was rude,” Paladina said. Eben threw a wrench into his bag so violently that it bounced back out again. One of his dogs meekly picked it up off the floor and dropped it back in before walking away with its head down.
“Have you chosen an evacuation location?” Tin Soldier asked to break the silence.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe Impala will have us at the Burrow. Pawn and Transplant never went there did they?”
“They’ve been there several times,” Orb said.
“We can ask Saint Nameless,” I suggested. If you don’t remember, Nameless is an anonymous donor whose wealth and connections provided us with the Bay facility a few years ago when a similar situation forced us to vacate the Backer Barn. He has been our top donor every year by a wide margin. “He might even be willing to put us up in a nice hotel.” He immediately rejected my idea. He’d never shown any hesitation to beg to Nameless or lick his boots before, so I pressed the subject.
“We just can’t,” he said. The other backers fired a volley of why questions.
“Because Saint Nameless is Drill Baby! Okay! He’s a rich weirdo and he loves how we break the rules all the time so he dumps money on us.” The others were stunned, but I was furious.
“So the real reason we need to move is that Drill Baby knows our location! He would attack us if we did anything to stop him. Or, something I’d wager is worse in your opinion, he would stop donating!” I shouted.
“Are you friends with him?” Golden Boy asked.
“No!” he protested. “I mean, I went to one of the guy’s pool parties like twice or four times. That’s all. I just wanted to show my face to acknowledge his contributions. I ate some pulled pork sandwiches and clinked a beer bottle with him. We’re not exactly blood brothers.”
“Were we not invited to these pool parties?” I asked. You’d think someone like me, who could turn an Olympic-sized swimming pool into a hot tub with some well-placed geyser water, would be guaranteed an invitation.
“You guys know what’s up. I was protecting you. Drill Baby’s been a smirking controversy for years. I kept you away from him so you didn’t have to feel bad about taking his money.”
“We would be fine without it,” Orb said, his piercing stare being the closest thing I had ever seen to aggression from him.
“Yeah, we would’ve been fine if you wanted to live in some abandoned sewer pipes instead of this nice aquarium. If you wanted to shove everybody into one rickety helicopter. If my poor dogs were stuck with steel teeth instead of titanium.”
“We would be fine,” Monkey Girl said. “The good backers would take care of us.”
“Badly spelled praise and Bitcoin only gets us so far.” The team and Alpha Dog continued to argue back and forth while my temper stewed. I did not like being under Drill Baby’s gaze, so much so that I couldn’t tolerate it for another moment. I slipped out of the room while the others were distracted and made my way to the center of the Bay. My toes lifted off the ground and I flew over the pool where we keep Chomp and Bit. I held out my hands, palms parallel to the walls, exhaled, and focused.
There weren’t too many choices. The place needed to be isolated so no other humans would see the building. It needed to be far enough away from the natural disaster I was channeling that it wouldn’t threaten us. I found a patch of tundra in redacted. There the winds whipped at high speeds and the ground nearby had just collapsed, but there was a stable patch next to it. My connection would weaken as the dust from the collapse settled, so I wasted no time. I told myself the walls were my palms. The floors the soles of my feet. The roof the crown of my head. The air conditioning my breath. My aura of connection extended beyond my body. The existing connections in the Bay, the fish tanks, acted as useful antennae for my powers.
I’d never transported an entire building before, but as my aura pushed all the way to the entrance tunnel I knew I would succeed. Drill Baby is the only type of natural disaster I would try to escape. He is not my element. He is a drowning tar. The building shook. The pool beneath me sloshed over its edges and the fish in it scattered away. A bit of the tundra wind swirled around me and slowly turned the helicopter blades. I made us safe within the tundra’s storm so man could not reach us, a beautiful inversion of my new favorite film.
A few problems struck me just before I touched my toes back to the pool’s edge. In my fury I’d forgotten about the finer veins and arteries of a living home. The toilets now led straight to nothing. The lights went out. I did not wince until I remembered the internet would be gone as well. If I thought Alpha Dog was angry before…
I will not bore you with a drop-for-drop retelling of all the spittle that flew from his shouting mouth. He’s Alpha Dog though, so his bark is far worse than his bite. He knows if he actually berates us rather than the situation, we would simply take our leave. So he gushes up into the air like Old Faithful, almost as regularly. The team is mostly pleased with my executive decision to move us to barren tundra, as far as I can tell. We’ve long had a backup generator designed to be powered by my channeling of lightning storms, so we used that to restore the electricity. As far as bathrooms I merely opened small ocean portals in their place. There was nothing I could do about the internet, but Alpha Dog managed to connect us to some satellites. It’s quite slow, but it works. We will remain here until the Lichen/Drill Baby fiasco is over or until I find a better location for the Bay.
I think it is time for questions.
Ramboner: Your powers are all natury… do you think maybe you could’ve gotten em from the lhicen?
I have no memory of the creature, so no. I have mulled over some similar possibilities. Since we know the creature can create super powers in humans, there might be a chance that these alterations can be passed down through the generations. Perhaps all of us with unexplained abilities, Opossum Player, Archive, Wallflower, Impala, et cetera, are indirect results of much older Lichen meddling. I do not know, but it does seem possible.
C0ncernedbr1t1zen: How is anyone supposed to oppose Drill Baby? Stop driving their car? Most of us can’t afford to even protest his actions. Aren’t immediate human concerns like that dangerous lichen more important than a fuel shortage or climate change that is at least decades away?
You’re asking questions I am not qualified to answer. I’m tempted to say that less suffering now is better than more suffering later, but my answer comes from a place of privilege. I can fly and generate electricity as I please, so I will never feel the most obvious hardships of the crisis when it arrives. On the other hand, as callous as one might feel saying it, humans are more renewable than both petroleum and the atmosphere. Does admitting that make me the villain? Nobody may be qualified to answer.
Wing4rdium: I lost like sixty bucks last week betting ont he backer puupy race. Who do you hink is going to win this time so I know who to ebt for?
My money is on Tin Soldier’s puppy. It’s not that I don’t trust my little Nymph to do her best, but those two machines just seem to want it the most. I’m retiring for the night everyone, thank you for your questions. I will no doubt be back soon, if not with news then with more movie reviews. Goodnight.