Tales of the Parodyverse

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Nats
Tue Aug 23, 2005 at 12:32:17 am EDT
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Repost: Penultimate Visionary
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Penultimate Battlers: Negasonic Teenage Warheads
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Nats
Tue Aug 23, 2005 at 12:25:00 am EDT
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Penultimate Visionary
Prologue: A Particularly Nice Day for a Turkey Sandwich

Traffic was halted due to an overturned city block, caused by a massive tussle between roving gangs of inner-city super-punks. It was a nice day, though, so Visionary decided to walk. He had just finished completing his tax return (he worked as a brochure proofreader for a local travel agency) and felt like celebrating, by doing the same thing he did every afternoon: going to the local coffee shop, the Bean & Donut Café, for a nice cup of java and a cruller or two. Actually, decided Visionary, he was in the mood for a crisp turkey and lettuce sandwich on rye, lightly toasted, and maybe, if he was feeling daring, with a slice of provolone on it. He was also debating about getting his car fixed, but with the skyrocketing price of fuel and the tendency for vehicles to spontaneously turn into giant battle robots, he figured that he might be better off converting his twenty-year-old Honda Accord into a giant flowerpot, only it would be mighty difficult to hang it off his apartment’s windowsill.
“Awfully buggy out today, don’t you think?” he asked several people standing next to him at the crosswalk. They must have been time tourists, thought Visionary, judging by their attire, which resembled outfits from the movie Tron. Probably lost, too, considering their general bewilderment; perhaps they’d taken one too many steps on their Cosmic Stairmaster.
Visionary swatted at one particularly annoying gnat, catching it with his palm as it hovered close to his yellow raincoat. “Ahh, got you that time, you little devil.”

“Damn! We lost a camera.”
“Sorry, my fault. I wanted to get an angle on those Tron rejects.”
“That’s another couple hundred thousand down the drain. Be more careful.”
“Hey man, it’s hard steering these things, you know.”

Visionary reached the street corner opposite the Bean & Donut, which was located in downtown Parodiopolis, put two quarters into a small vending machine, and picked up the latest issue of The Minor Metropolitan, a weekly tabloid newspaper detailing the most ordinary news fit to print, owned by Humdrumco, publishers of periodicals like Plebian Monthly and The Boring Routines of Innocent Bystander Man, a hit with the disheartened and disenfranchised youth.

“Obvious product placement.”
“Can you blame ‘em?”
“Probably not. Can you get a closer shot on that?”
“Sure, gimme a second.”

Visionary looked both ways (twice) before crossing the street, but was still almost clipped by a rocket messenger. Still, he thought, it could’ve been worse. It could’ve been a ghost taxi, or a people-drawn warhorse.
The bell above the door chimed its familiar chime as Visionary walked through it. “Vizh!” exclaimed most of the gathered patrons.
“Hey, guys,” Visionary greeted the League of Regulars (their cute little nickname for the gang of habitual customers that seemed to almost dwell at the café). “What’s news?”
“Same old, same old,” said Gavan Carstensen, curator of the local museum. He was specifically an expert in nu-myth, with a degree in mythological politics. “How art... er, how’re you?”
“I’m feelin’ pretty good,” said Visionary, seating himself at his normal corner spot.
“What’ll it be, Vizh?” asked Sarah Shepherdson, the waitress behind the counter. “Cup of joe with a cruller on the side?”
“Make it turkey on rye,” replied Visionary, “lightly toasted, with...”
“...lettuce and a slice of provolone?” she finished for him. “Living dangerously, huh?”
“Well, it is a particularly nice day for a turkey sandwich,” he said.
“You can say that again,” said Lisa Waltz, mildly famous lawyer, and, secretly, sexual revolutionist. She had been in and out of the news ever since she got a client acquitted due to the semantic discrepancies between the terms “zombie pirate” and “pirate zombie.”
“Did anybody catch the news this morning?” asked Mark Hopkins, also known as ‘spiffy,’ a young and hip performance artist and poet who frequently utilized ferns in his many creative endeavors. “I heard there was an ‘Encino Man’ alert about a possible mime attack,” he said, referring to the current system of terror alerts based on titles of Pauly Shore movies, ranging from ‘Jury Duty’ to ‘Son in Law’ to the dreaded ‘Bio-Dome.’
“Nah,” responded Lisa, “The French Foreign Legion of Super-Heroes already took care of it, from what I heard.”
“Here you go, Vizh,” Sarah smiled, handing him his turkey sandwich. “I put your usual brand of mustard on it.”
“Thanks, Shep,” Visionary thanked her, picking up his sandwich. He was about to take a bite when he noticed a small insect had settled on it and was seemingly staring him down.

If only Visionary had known the answer to the important mystery surrounding his life. A huge-but-secret nationwide search had gone out, and Visionary had been selected as the most mundane person in the country. What he also didn’t know was that Humdrumco also owned a television channel, broadcast everywhere in the world except for Parodiopolis, specifically about Visionary’s daily and ordinary adventures. The small army of bugs that seemed to pester him wherever he went was actually a flock of miniaturized “Fleabot” cameras, steered by operatives located inside Parody Tower.
The world was a strange and wondrous place filled with weirdness and madness. In a world like this, populated by heroes, villains, aliens, monsters, and everything in between, people sought escapism in the form of boring, mundane stories and shows, and nothing was more mundane than Visionary. He was a star.
The ratings were spectacular.





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