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A Small Scene Seen Through The Spyglass: An Interactive Interlude Involving The Hooded Hood ... With Much Love To The Incredible Ian Watson. ;) Sunday, 25-Apr-99 07:07:55
The masked menace known only as The Hooded Hood was alone in the room, having dispatched his disciples to continue their combat training by themselves while he took time out of his densely scheduled itinerary of planning and preparations to peer through his portals at the private lives of his sworn arch-enemies in the LAir Legion; in this, it was a typical Tuesday afternoon, except for the amount of attention that the cowled conqueror had alloted towards studying each specific member of the Legion. More and more frequently, one nuisance of a name had begun to creep into his consciousness and dwell within the dark recesses of his enraged obsession; a silly-hearted simpleton spawned by a worthless whore of a mother, whose continued existence upon this earth, much less his impressive successes as a fledgiling superhero, defied all acceptable standards of logic and reason, and therefore represented a threat to the Hooded Hood's hope of reshaping this chaotic and nonsensical reality into an orderly and streamlined universe (not a multi-verse of parallel timelines, mind you, but a single, easily understood history) that would mirror his own glorious image - why couldn't the fools grasp that his ideas were to their own benefit!? This untested youngster, whom the Hood had deemed beneath his esteemed notice until his recent debut, clearly a callow and coddled child who yet nonetheless preoccupied the malevolent megalomaniac's ponderings to a greater and greater extent nowadays, had been born with the improbable moniker of Dreamcatcher Foxglove, but had earned the Hood's eternal enmity while operating under the professional code handle and trademarked smiling face insignia label of: Crazy Sugar Freak Boy ! And while the might have been loath to admit his ... idle concerns to his assembled entourage of underlings, his unspoken doubts ate awat at his insides as he observed the flickering images that floated in front of him. ----- Oh yeah, the backstory to this setting? Lee O'Callaghan, a forensic psychologist and former Miskatonic University student of tenured psychology professor Olivia Hastings, has just met up with Melanie Hastings, a.k.a. Meggan Foxglove, Olivia's older sister, who is semi-retired from the pornography industry, in order to get her perspective on what life is like for women in her profession (well, actually professions plural, seeing as how Meg's worked as everything from a nude magazine model to a stripper, with a couple of years as a hardcore sex film actress long ago thrown in for good measure), since the victims in the murder case that Lee and Olivia have started working on together seem pretty consistently to be hookers or "call girls" of some sort. The interaction between these two women is a difficult process, because Lee has a hard time imagining how any woman with an ounce of self-respect would allow herself to be degraded in such a fashion, and Meg's response to any criticism of her lifestyle usually involves falling back into her tried-and-true "f**k you" stance, so even though neither one is openly voicing their feelings of disapproval for the other, nor are they exactly opening up to the other or learning how to sympathize with each other's points of view. In many ways, it's kind of funny, because it's very reminiscent of how Meg and Olivia related for a number of years, before Meg told Olivia that the whole reason she'd deliberately remade herself from the stellar student and "daddy's favorite girl" into the black sheep and "bad sister" was so that their father would leave her alone and stop touching her; before this point, Olivia felt a lot of resentment towards Meg, whose irresponsibility had forced Olivia to take on many of the obligations of the "older sister role," and Meg acted as brash and rebellious as she could as a defensive mechanism. When Meg's son Dream rollerblades into the kitchen where they're talking, it's almost a welcome interruption, because it gives the two ladies a chance to focus on something besides the growing unspoken hostility between them - as usual, Dream is utterly ignorant of the emotional minefield he's stumbled into, and proceeds to tell Mom all about his busy day at the comics shop with his roleplaying circle, which allows Meg opportunities to hug her baby and play with his short bob of hair while gently scolding him about wearing his rollerblades in the house. Lee is rather startled by Meg's tenderness towards her son, for it's quite a contrast for the world-weary "working girl" (as Meg has, subconsciously, rather forcefully presented herself to Lee) to also be such a doting and attentive mommy bird, and this sharp relief makes Lee wonder if perhaps she's been slightly biased against Meg. After Dream happily introduces himself to Olivia's former student, "Special Agent Dana Scully of the FBI," as he continues to call her, and tells her a million different stories within the course of only a few short minutes, Meg tries to get her young man to scoot out of the room, because she's none too comfortable discussing the details of her life when she used to pour milk over her body, as part of her "Dairy Queen" routine on Tuesday nights at Deja Vu, in front of her son ... this quickly develops into a small argument between Dream and Meg, since Dream doesn't see what the big deal is about Mom's past (he never really learned about concepts like shame or embarassment), while Meg doesn't want her little boy exposed to her sordid past (a challenge now, since she used to take him to the clubs as a tiny one when she couldn't afford a babysitter). We now join the argument, already in progress. ----- "I don't see why you don't want me visiting you at the clubs anymore. All the girls there were really nice to me, like a bunch of protective aunties." "Yeah, well, let's just say they were a little bit too nice to you near the last, when you were in high school and you stopped by. I'll be damned if any boy of mine gets taken advantage of by some cheap slut." "Is that why you didn't like Izzy? Because you thought she was a mean bitch who'd hurt me?" "Babe, I know it sounds harsh, but you deserved better than Isabel. You shouldn't have to settle for less, or for ... well, for a girl like me. And I sure as hell don't want your first time to be like mine was." "Oh, that! Don't worry; I already had my first time a while ago." "What!? Um, would you mind telling me when exactly this happened!?" "At my fourteenth birthday party, when you took me out to the strip joint where you were the headline act to celebrate my growing up with the other pretty women who worked there as exotic dancers, since most of them had been kind enough to look after me and help raise me when I was a small boy barely in elementary school, as you took the time to explain, and because it was a happy fun occasion you let me drink that whole entire six-pack of strawberry daiquiri wine coolers all by myself until the swirling lights exploded in my head like World War Three mushroom clouds. When I went to lie down in your dressing room, Geri - the nice British lady who used to open for you back then, with the vavoom curves and the dyed ginger red hair - came in to check on me. She asked how I was doing and I told her fine, that I was just sorta woozy and disconnected but in an ever so pleasantly sleepy way, and she started to take off her clothes and slide on top of me and stuff. I got a bit nervous and confused, since I was still pretty discombobulated from the spinning stars behind my eyes, but she stroked my face and said softly, shhhh, shhhh, it's okay, I'm just giving you your birthday present is all, and you trust me anyways, don't you hon? And I said yeah of course, because when I was practically a tater-tot she used to give me candy even when you had already told me no more sweets until after dinner, so even though I still felt slightly light-headed and more than a little mixed-up, it was an exciting kinda mixed-up, like that unbearably ticklish flip-flop feeling you get in the pit of your stomach when the roller coaster car lurches downhill and the bottom drops out from under your feet and if you half-close your eyes you can almost pretend you're flying through the sky like Superman. Whenever the world around me started doing loop-de-loops because the wine coolers had turned my tingling into that type of numb that still lets you feel everything that's going on around you and touching you but you're not afraid because it's only an out-of-body experience like you're watching yourself on a really cool surround-sound widescreen television set, Geri would just play with my hair and keep saying, shhhh, shhhh, it's alright, you're doing fine hon, just like you did for me when I was a little one and cried because I was scared that the monsters from my nightmares were hiding in the dark. It felt really good, even though the spinning sensation inside of my mind made everything seem hazy and misty, like when you're in that weird phantom planet place between half-awake and half-asleep and even the blurry parts are cool, I guess ironically enough because they are so blurry and indistinct and undefinable, until you twitch or something and wake yourself up. When it was all over, Geri just curled up next to me in the bed for a while, snuggling into my chest and breathing all slow and shaking with the sweat covering her skin making me chilly where it dripped onto me, before she kissed my cheek and whispered in my ear, happy birthday lover, and the way she said it, not like she was my babysitter or my adoptive aunt or anything even remotely close to that anymore, but instead like how the girls with the colorful makeup talk to all the guys in those late-night made-for-cable movies where people always meet in neon-lit alleyways, the only way I know how to describe it is as if an electric jolt had run through my nerves and thrilled me to the whole length of my being. Afterwards I guess she wanted to pretend it had never really happened outside of maybe an imaginary story parallel universe, so I figured I should be polite and follow her lead, except that every once in a while when you weren't around she'd do odd things like wink at me or blow me kisses and giggle, hullo lover, in that neato keen cockney accent of hers, like that night we shared was this hidden treasure we'd discovered between us, a special secret connecting us like the memory of stealing from the cookie jar together. I enjoyed it a lot, and I don't regret it one bit, even though I couldn't help feeling quite sad when Geri hugged me tight and told me, goodbye luv, you'll be an awful heartbreaker someday, wiping away tears she must have thought I couldn't see just before she left for her cross-country club tour. I mean, even if it was only for that one night, what we had was at least as good as watching the digitally remastered computer-generated-image enhanced director's cut widescreen re-release of the original Star Wars trilogy in the theaters, and maybe even better." When Dream finally ended his tale, with an unassuming smile and a chug off a Jolt cola bottle, Meg gaped and Lee merely blinked in stunned amazement. Meg peered at him, shaking her head. "Why didn't you ever tell me that before?" Dream shrugged. "You never asked." ----- Even with the disciplined mental focus required of one whose indomitable will had broken the highly trained minds of every single last psychologist who had arrogantly deigned to take apart his impenetrable web of psychoses, the Hooded Hood was nearly overwhelmed by the conflicting internal reactions he experienced from witnessing Dream's spontaneous and unforseen revelation to Meg, so perhaps it's no surprise that the one aspect of the confession that he managed to key in on during those initial moments concerned an idiosyncratic but otherwise harmless personality trait. My God, he realized, startled by the sensation of true surprise for perhaps the first occasion in his whole life. He said that all at once. He didn't even breathe. There's no way he possibly could have. Whenever he speaks, it's always in this endless, senseless stream of rampantly cacophonic run-on sentences. He spouts dizzying babbles of half-articulated ideas with only the most tenuous of apparent connections to one other, no matter how attentively one listens in and tries to glean their impenetrably obscured, intended meaning. And yet, he presses on, infuriatingly oblivious and indefatiguably hyper, the toy car motor of his miniscule mind simply spinning the wheels controlling his impudent, idiotic, music box of a mouth until the clockwork gears inside of his very skull itself must nearly squeal in protest. He never meditates to mull matters over, never considers the consequences of his courses of action, never even slows down his perpetually accelerating pace, and above all else, he never ... ever ... stops. He doesn't even pause; not to collect his obviously disjointed thoughts, not to figure out what words or phrasings he should use next in order to avoid sounding so jarringly jumbled, not even to take the time out needed to inhale. He just keeps on going and going and going, until his freewheeling festival of random association returns from its countless sidetracks to travel the full extent of whatever course he'd originally intended. I mean, how does any human being just ... _talk_ for that long, without eventually running out of air and passing out? In that instant, as he switched off the screen, the Hooded Hood decided that he REALLY hated CrazySugarFreakBoy. CrazySugarFreakBoy! |
| A Small Scene Seen Through The Spyglass: An Interactive Interlude Involving The Hooded Hood ... With Much Love To The Incredible Ian Watson. ;) (CrazySugarFreakBoy!) (25-Apr-99 07:07:55) |
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