Tales of the Parodyverse

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CrazySugarFreakBoy! points out that he posted this story before midnight in his time zone. :)
Thu Feb 01, 2007 at 02:55:43 am EST
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Gender Versus Genre: The Curtain Call of the CrazySugarFreakWedding!
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Gender Versus Genre: The Curtain Call of the CrazySugarFreakWedding!

All hell had broken loose, and Mars Meltsher, the “Women in Refrigerators” Killer, was carefully wending his way through the panic and confusion of the crowd as calmly as an invited guest might navigate through the polite social circles of a sedate dinner party.

Mars had employed his characteristic facility for “Homicidal Applications of Home Appliances” to temporarily possess all of the ovens, microwaves, toasters, blenders, vacuum cleaners, washers, dryers and other household machines on the premises, directing them to perform a simultaneous “Zerg Rush” swarm assault against all of the identified costumed crimefighters, law enforcement agents and military members in attendance … not to defeat them, since that would be suicidal, but rather, simply to distract them, just long enough for him to take his sniper’s shot at the altar … not at the bride, but at the groom. Through the crosshairs of his scope, he saw Dreamcatcher Kokopelli Foxglove’s head snap back, as the bullet of depleted Serious Matter embedded itself into his brain.

Mars heard April Alice Apple’s screams of shock and anguish as he wandered unobtrusively through the stumbling clusters of alarmed civilians which the wedding had attracted, exercising his secondary skill for blending in, as he proceeded cautiously but urgently toward the altar. He’d bided his time until the official obligations of the ceremony were completed, so that the visiting spirits presiding over its declarations of vows would depart, before stirring up the pot, and he’d implemented covert surveillance measures to ensure neither of the newlyweds could exit the scene without him noticing.

Mars reached the trampled patch of ground where Dream had fallen, within minutes of deploying his blitz of remote-controlled housekeeping conveniences, soon enough that they were still occupying the attentions of the superheroes, soldiers and other security forces, and within seconds of dropping Dream, soon enough that several attendees were barely aware that he’d been shot, and those who were hadn’t managed to push past the herds to help him yet, since anyone with any demonstrated competence at combat was being kept busy, defending both themselves and those less capable of self-defense from the smokescreen attack of automatons. He’d successfully hidden in plain sight, even when he drew his piece and pulled the trigger, but now, as he prepared to dispose of April, he needed to be seen, to inspire more stories within which he played the most important part, so that the word-of-mouth reputation that fed his power would continue to grow.

Except that April wasn’t there.

Even though he’d already accepted commissions to assassinate April from equally concerned parties, Mars had rejected the ridiculously lowball bid of Argh!Yle! to do away with the same target, if only to maintain his professional reputation, so the Evilest of Socks had taken it upon himself to seek his revenge against Dream by smuggling himself into the wedding as part of a discount gift-pack of tube socks purchased for the soon-to-be-married couple by Visionary, but his subsequent plans were thwarted when Spaz the Chupacabra, the CrazySugarCryptoCreature!, discovered his presence and turned him into a chew-toy. Minutes before the ceremony began, Griffin stumbled upon the pair while wandering, and Naari Magweed used her gift of animal friendship to persuade Spaz to release Argh!Yle!, after which she pleaded with Katarina Allen to sew him back up. Once Maggie had given the Evilest of Socks “a kiss to make it better,” he’d grudgingly disclosed the infamous identity that he’d failed to hire, sparing Hallie seconds to conceal April’s crimefighting costume beneath a semi-solid holographic simulacrum of her earlier He-Man-themed Halloween attire, prior to the commencement of the ceremony. Likewise, as soon as she heard the shot that dispatched the father of her child, the Priestess Pelopia, the Disciple of Logos, snatched Oliver “Ollie” Hastings and Iris Paintbrush Sunrise up into her protective embrace, all while directing Maggie, Griff and Samantha Featherstone to safety with flawlessly brisk efficiency.

Mars wasn’t aware of any of these facts when he made his appearance manifest, which was the only reason why the sensation of a sudden impact across the back of his neck could stun him enough for him to lose his grip on his gun. The more significant surprise came when he turned to meet the steady, intense gaze of the red-haired “Leapin’ Lizard-Lass” with the red-rimmed eyes.

“What are you, retarded or something?” April demanded furiously, clenching her gloved fists as she stood in her well-worn, faded green-and orange-hued, lizard logo-festooned outfit of goggles, hooded zip-front sweatshirt, tank top, sports bra, spandex shorts, fanny pack, elbow-and knee-pads, legwarmers and sneakers. “Who the hell do you think I am? I’m the goddamn Groovy Gecko-Gal, and you’d better pray that my husband can pull another Phoenix out of the hat, because that’s the only difference between me beating the shit out of you and killing you.”

A punch from the opposite direction blindsided him, as Meggan Foxxx swung her leg out to strike his midsection. “I ain’t gonna make that distinction,” she snarled viciously, even as Mars caught her kick and used her own momentum to toss her toward April. “Whether my baby’s dead or just hurt, I’m gonna rip your dick off and shove it down your motherfucking throat,” she promised, landing catlike on her feet from decades of practice as a professional dancer.

“Hey, it’s Mars Meltsher!” pointed out Gwendolyn “Wendy” Leslie, the Agent of Chaos known as PsychoAcidPervGirl!, as she literally pointed to the scarlet bar sinister superimposed over the Venus symbol on his chest.

Dream’s wife was the supposedly fictional female superhero whom she wrote stories about in the comics she created, his mother and increasingly infrequent “honorary sidekick” was actually a capable costumed crimefighter in her own right, and his sister was secretly his supervillain arch-enemy who had since reformed at least enough to aid his allies … Mars saw the intelligence that he’d gleaned from his most reliable reports starting to fail in a spectacular cascading pattern, and at a catastrophic rate, but he remained relentless in his resolve.

“You have two choices,” Mars coldly informed Meg and Wendy. “Stand aside and allow me to do my job, or stand against me and share your friend’s fate. Both of you are already on my long-term list, and it would only take a minimal amount of interference to move you to the top. Within the world of superhero stories, women as a whole are akin to a vestigial appendage, as ineffective and as intolerable to the health and well-being of the body they occupy as an inflamed appendix. Your mistake is in assuming that this procedure is somehow personally motivated. It’s a surgical operation, pure and simple. There is no place for your gender in this genre.”

“Should we be hunted down and burned as witches, then, whenever we dare to dispute the rule of the patriarchy or the dogma of its ideology?” Professor Olivia Hastings, of Miskatonic University in Arkham, Massachusetts, narrowed her eyes, as her nerve endings tingled when her own witch’s magic mingled with those of Ruby Weaver and Princess Lileblanche of Esperine.

“Maybe we should stick with playing with talking Barbie dolls, that tell us how hard math and science are for little girls’ little brains, instead of working on boys’ toys, like cars or computers, and studying to become better engineers and scientists,” Anna “Inanna” Kensington, the Blacksmith of Hammers of Hephaestus, Inc., gritted her teeth, as her sidelong glances spotted the compact but advanced technology that Kara Harper, Muffy Framlicker and Amy Aston, of Extraordinary Endeavor Enterprises, were removing from their pockets and preparing to activate.

“We don’t possess the competence or the constitution to act as truly powerful authority figures, after all,” Washington State Gov. Roslyn Rashomon pursed her lips in condescendingly feigned amusement, as Barona Miiri of Perfectgaard unsheathed her matching Caphan Houri needle-daggers with deadly intent.

“Our investigative skills aren’t even sharp enough to see through a superhero’s secret identity when it’s a simple pair of glasses,” mocked Bernice Teschmacher, of Who Watches the Watchmen? Magazine.

“All we’re meant to do, as damsels in distress, is wait patiently for our knights in shining armor to find the time to rescue us, and be polite enough to pass away quietly, alone and forgotten, after they’ve been immortalized for their legendary deaths,” seethed Elisabeth “Bettie” Barrie, with a bitterness that stung Kat more than she cared to admit.

Almost all of the superheroes in attendance were still coping with Mars’ contingencies, but almost none of these new women were superheroes, and it dawned upon him that he was surrounded by dozens of them now, and they fell upon him like a hard, heavy rain.

Asil Ashling lashed out at him with a frustration that was borne of a lifetime of being seen as a lesser appendage of another person, while Bethany Shellett struck him with a fury that could only come from being reduced to a pawn in other people’s plans. Mary Pfeffercorn rounded on him without mercy or restraint, paying him back as a proxy for every man she’d let take advantage of her, while Amber St. Clare beat him with a savagery to meet, if not exceed, the brutality of the queer-bashing homophobes from whom she’d hidden her sexual orientation. Gloria tossed Catbot at him, paws forward, to prevent him from properly aiming the pistol he’d retrieved, while Penelope “Penny” Geoffries, of the “Amazing Super-Friends,” knocked off his featureless mask, revealing the most unrecognizably unmemorable, nondescript and ordinary face any of them had ever seen.

He’d managed to block the majority of their blows, but as a trio of teenage mutant samurai catgirls yowled and raked their claws across his exposed cheeks, Mars lost the last traces of his patience.

“Jesus, you’re not even ugly, you’re just … boring,” April scowled scornfully. “At least Temuera Morrison’s pug-nosed mug had a charmingly rough-and-rugged character to it, once we saw that he was what Jango and Boba Fett both supposedly looked like, under their bounty hunter helmets. But you … you don’t have any personality at all. Who the hell are you, when you’re not proving what a tough guy you are, by picking on victims who aren’t afforded the powers or the preparations to fight back properly?”

“I AM AN ARCHETYPE!!!” Mars roared, literally bellowing hard enough to push back anyone near enough to hear his echoing words, as his previously plain and unremarkable visage twisted into a pulsing, shifting, inhuman mask of sheer hatred. “I’ve transcended my origins of mere humanity, and evolved into a living embodiment of violence against women! My face is that of all the family members and adults who have abused and molested you as girls, and all the so-called friends and lovers who have beaten and raped you as women! I am a primal force underlying human nature, and against me, all females are helpless!”

“Would you just shut the fuck up already, you pretentious douchebag?” groaned a familiar voice, eliciting spontaneous outbursts of laughter and tears of joy, as the Agent of Chaos known as CrazySugarFreakBoy! shook his head and rose unsteadily to his feet, freshly clad in his Impossibilitium Silly Suit. “Giving me a migraine … yeah, you know what you really are? You’re a sales gimmick. You’re a shock tactic. You’re a cop-out. You’re a tool, a plot device, a shorthand bit of script, substituting for actual character development. You’re a discount collection of hand-me-down clichés, a weak crutch for even weaker writers, and you know what? You’re not even misogyny, you’re … gynophobia.”

Mars blinked in disbelief.

“Yeah, asshole,” Dream nodded, grinning as neon green blood dripped down from the bullet hole between his eyes. “Looks like you missed.”

“I hand-crafted that bullet from depleted Serious Matter,” Mars denied. “It was almost impossible to obtain, which was why I could only procure enough material for a single shot, but I made my mark. You should be dead.”

Dream absently fingered the bullet hole in his forehead, before moving his tongue in a searching motion around the insides of his cheeks, and spitting the bullet out onto his palm. “Damn, that stings just to touch it,” he winced in admission, as he pinched the bullet between the tips of his thumb and forefinger, holding it up at eye level while the wound in his head finally closed and healed itself. “Yeah, guess I was wrong. You got me, alright. And on any other night of the year, this much Serious Matter in my skull might have been enough to put me down for good, too.”

“Whoa, you mean you can roll automatic saving throws on Halloween?” Wendy beamed. “You’re more metal than I thought, big brother!”

“Trust me, speaking as a fellow Dethklok fangirl, Dream is about as ‘metal’ as Dean Venture,” smirked Isabel “Izzy” Shapiro, as she finally revealed her presence to the rest of the attendees. “Fortunately for him, he’s every bit as cute as Dean, too. In fact, I almost showed up to this shindig dressed as Triana Orpheus, but unfortunately for me, this isn’t a social call.”

Mars growled impatiently at the interruption and leveled his gun at Izzy’s head, but for the first time since he’d acquired the weapon, the hammer of his pistol fell upon an empty chamber. The small, hollow clicking noise somehow echoed across the outdoor area, as Mars gradually grasped its implications.

“You can’t kill what’s already dead,” Izzy reminded him, her initially genial smile sharpening into a razor’s edge of menace, as the air around her darkened and thickened with fog. “I would have figured you’d be smart enough to know that already, but then again, you’re dumb enough to attempt a hit on the boy I still love, at the one time of year when the barriers between what’s living and what’s dead are at their weakest.”

“Not just the time, but the place,” Dream groaned, rubbing at his forehead to ease the headache he’d just started to feel coming on. “Parody Island is connected to cosmic forces that routinely breach that barrier, and that’s before you even factor in the lighthouse we share with Willingham. This place is one big beacon, practically calling out to any spirits who want to cross over, from either side of the divide to the other.”

“And you, Mister Primal Archetype of Violence Against Women, have inspired a lot of lost souls to find their way here,” Izzy observed in a falsely clinical tone, as an ever-expanding circle of female figures began to emerge from the murky mists surrounding her.

“We came,” whispered the mother and girlfriend of the Yellow Flashlight who had succeeded Perpendiculax, in unison. Mars remembered dismembering them both, and stuffing their body parts into an oven and a refrigerator, respectively. “Now, you must come with us, and taste of our pleasures.”

“You took our flesh from us,” hissed the liberated lawyer ex-wife of Atomic Adam. Mars had tormented her into insanity, and turned her into the human host of the supernatural supervillain Ellipso. “Now, we will have an eternity to know your flesh.”

“So eager to play, but so reluctant to admit it,” giggled the once-perky, pregnant wife of Rubber Ralph, as Mars retreated from her approach, recalling how he’d raped her, then burned her alive. “Welcome to the worst nightmare of all … reality.”

“Your suffering will be legendary, even in Hell,” cooed the girlfriend of the Arachnid-Kid, her broken neck lolling to one side as she leaned over, from behind Mars, to breathe her words into his ear. After she’d been murdered, Mars had retroactively impregnated her with the seed of her boyfriend’s costumed criminal arch-enemy, the Grimm Griffin. “Come … we have such sights to show you.”

“You can’t let this happen!” Mars insisted to Dream, as he tore himself away from the embrace of his victims. “No matter how much you might despise me, the code of conduct you’ve devised, for the role you’ve created, precludes your allowing them to execute me!”

“Actually, based on my most recent stretch of history, it seems to me a lot more like my role is to get killed, get brought back to life, and get stuck with settling up other people’s old karmic scores,” Dream snarked ruefully. “Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t have a clue what was gearing up to go down here tonight, but I sure as all hell felt a shit-storm brewing, just beyond the horizon line. You chose to call down the thunder, and the thunder came, and ain’t none of it that’s got a goddamn thing to do with me, because all I did was open the door, for what was already anxiously awaiting you on the other side.”

“There are fates worse than death, and what they have in store for me is among them,” Mars persisted. “Could you live with that?”

“Hey, if you want me to save you, I will,” Dream challenged, his eyes widening as he closed the distance between himself and Mars with swift strides. “But being saved by me means being with me. There are fates worse than Hell itself. Could you live with that?”

Mars’ smug sneer evaporated, as he stared into the depths of Dream’s glaring neon green eyes, and suddenly saw the darkest truth of what was hidden within their light. Mars tripped and fell backwards, as he scrambled away frantically from Dream, rushing voluntarily into the open arms of all the women who sought vengeance against him, for all his violence against them, but even as they tore him apart, he struggled to distance himself from Dream, screaming at him to keep away, until the forms of both Mars and his victims stretched and spun together into a swirl of black smoke, leaving behind only the memories of his last cowardly cries.

“Did that guy just choose suicide, and eternal damnation in Hell, over the prospect of spending even a single second longer around you?” Wendy gushed to Dream. “Brutal!”

“Well, thanks for the ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card … yet again, I guess,” Dream sheepishly acknowledged to Izzy, as his new wife wrapped her arms around his waist.

“He’s fucking useless,” Izzy warned April teasingly, rolling her eyes in affected exasperation as she tousled her former boyfriend’s fluorescent orange hair. “I mean, as long as you know you’ve signed on for a lifetime of being his Brock Samson … ”

“‘Oh, Brock, what would I do without you?’ ‘You would have died,’” April snickered, alternately raising and lowering her voice to imitate the characters, as she recited the lines of dialogue from The Venture Bros. After she kissed the day-glo yellow cheek of her new husband, she clasped his former girlfriend’s hand in her own, squeezing her fingers affectionately. “Seriously, though, what he said … thank you.”

“From all of us,” Meg smiled gently, even as she blinked back tears.

“He may be a total dork, but he’s still my only big brother,” Wendy grinned broadly, sniffling as quietly as she could.

“For a ‘super-hero,’ you seem to have recruited rather a harem of would-be bodyguards,” Bettie arched her eyebrows sagely, even as she bit her lower lip mischievously.

Without Mars’ remote control, the home appliances’ homicidal applications soon sputtered out, and as Jay Boaz and Louis Laughing Fox finally found themselves free to rejoin the rest of the CrazySugarFreakFamily!, Dream surveyed the scene and exclaimed, “Hey, what the fuck, man? Is this a funeral or a party?”

As the crowd took their cues from the series of 1980s teen sex comedy movie soundtrack tunes, courtesy of the Globetrotting Gangbusters’ DJ Druid Druggist, Dream launched into his best Rodney Dangerfield impression, bugging out his eyes as he bellowed, “HEY, EVERYBODY! WE’RE ALL GONNA GET LAID!!!”

… And we danced
Like a wave on the ocean
Romanced
We were liars in love
And we danced
Swept away for a moment
By chance
Yeah, we danced
And danced
And danced …
- The Hooters, “And We Danced.”


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