Friday, January 6, 2012

The Impossible Five – Introduction and Chapter 1

Hi everyone

Here is a little experiment.  Everything previously on this blog was non-fiction, but now I’m going to write an extended fictional storyline. I’ve been hesitant to try this because I don’t want strangers stealing my ideas. But at the same time, if I truly want to become a professional fiction writer, I have to get stuff out there.  So I’m starting out with a fun little bit and see where it goes, and save my more complex stuff until |I see how successful this is. The idea is at least one blog post a week will be devoted to the story. The most comments I get though, the more frequently the parts will appear.  So if you’re enjoying this story, start commenting and you’ll get more of the story sooner.  But at least once a week for sure until the story is done.

Chapter 1

They thought he was the dumb member of the Impossible Five, Wallbreaker thought to himself, not for the first time.  Perhaps that was just as well.  People might be even more afraid of the guy who could lift three tons of they realized he had a brain.  Not of them (the patriotic O’Connor, the currently mind-powered Rita Con, the pill-powered Crack Heroine, and the energy shooting Glowing Man) were geniuses, mind you.  Not like the Groovy Guys’ Techmaster. Techmaster was smarter than any human had a right to be, but only in the area of science.  Which for most people would seem impressive. But Wallbreaker had started to notice that his friends had a bit of a blind spot.  They didn’t notice for example that sometimes heroes and villains, and even their families sometimes underwent quite noticeable personality shifts.  For example, the Missile used to have a strict no-killing code. But one day that changed and he decided it was okay to kill under certain circumstances.  This upset a lot of heroes but no one acted like this was actually out of character.

Wallbreaker thought he had the answer: they were all fictional characters in some daytime TV soap opera.  That would explain the personality shifts, very young people suddenly being teenagers, people constantly returning from the dead, etc. Of course, that raised the question of who the actors were, but Wallbreaker figured that he was just experiencing the personification of what was being acted out. He kept this theory to himself, of course.  He’d rather not be placed in a rubber room or worse, be made to not notice what everyone else was not noticing.

Today the Impossible Five were at a funeral for one of the Groovy Guys.  The name was a bit of a misnomer because one of their team was a gal named Token Woman, who wielded an amazing token of power. But they were among the first of the great hero revival of… Wallbreaker could never remember the year for some reason. So no one ever brought the name issue up out of respect for the team.  This respect for them was why they were there.  The Blazer, another member of the Groovy guys had died.  Everyone was sad because he was well liked.  Wallbreaker wished he could be sad but the Blazer had died so many times and come back that it just didn’t affect him as much as it did the other heroes.  Still, he had to act sad for appearances sake.

Perhaps inappropriately for a funeral nearly everyone was dressed in costume. Rita at least looked respectful because her current costume was a black business suit with bow tie.  And Wallbreaker was also wearing a suit in lieu of his usual blue tank top and black sweat pants.  But O’Canada was wearing his Canadian flag costume, the Crack Heroine was wearing a white jumpsuit that showing way too much cleavage for a funeral, the Glowing Man was glowing yellow as usual, the Missile was wearing his red costume with an overly phallic helmet and chest insignia, The Coinmaster was wearing a costume with a giant penny insignia, etc.

Token Woman, whose brown costume with gold diamond chest insignia was at least a bit demure, came up to him after a few others had spoken and O’Canada had sung the national album for whatever reason that O’Canada sings the national anthem at funerals.  “Do you want to say something?” Token Woman asked.  “I know you and him were close.”

“I… I just don’t have anything to say.”  He had spoken at so many funerals for the Blazer that he had run out of any new stuff to talk about.

“Yeah, we’re all taking it pretty hard. Hang in there big guy.” She kissed him on the cheek.  Rita scowled but said nothing.  Wallbreaker sensed that she was as attracted to him as he was to her. But he didn’t feel right about starting something. First off, like most male heroes he had… certain shortcomings; he feared that spending too much time around the Glowing Man might be responsible.

But that wasn’t the real problem.  The real problem was that Rita’s life was… complicated.  Every few weeks she seemed to learn something about her past that was completely at odds with what everything previously believed to be the case.  It was challenging enough being her teammate. Wallbreaker was concerned that his own past might get messy if he pursued something with her.  Let’s see, first she was the younger self of Henrietta Hawke, the villainess Con Artist. Then after she had spent a lot of time she was revealed to be a close of Hawke.  But then she was a goddess of the rainforest. No wait, before that she was Rita Strong, daughter of a mad scientist who operated on her when she was a child. And then….   

He was interrupted from his reverie by the sudden appearance of a grey haired, grey bearded man in a brown cloak. He held an orange cube in his hand.  He said, “I knew all you heroes would be together here today.  So today the Master Plotter will strike!  Evil will win this day! Ha ha ha ha!”

Good lord, thought Wallbreaker. Who writes this crap? That dialogue is corny beyond belief.  Surely other soap operas had better dialogue than these super-villain speeches?

“I’ll get him”, said the Glowing Man, firing an energy beam at the Master Plotter. The beam stopped just short of him and fizzled out

“Fool!” said the Master Plotter. “Did you forget about my Plot Device?  With this same device I banish you all from this world… forever!”

A swirling light engulfed the heroes.  Almost by instinct Wallbreaker grabbed Rita’s hand.  It wasn’t that she needed protection. It was that since the Master Plotter was fond of banishing people, he wanted to ensure they both wound up in the same place.  And Wallbreaker figured that there was a good chance that Rita’s back story would shift in such a way to ensure that everyone around her got home safely.

Thank goodness the Master Plotter thought it was too easy to just kill everyone.  Oh, they’d come back, but deaths could pretty painful sometimes. Instead, everyone’s leg’s disappeared, then their torsos and arms, then their heads. And everything went black.

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