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This message Premiere #37: Contact was posted by The Hooded Hood presses on with this interminable story on Sunday, October 13, 2002 at 13:09.
Premiere #37: Contact
Premiere Archive (Previous episodes)
Who's Who in the Technoverse
The Hooded Hood's Homepage of Doom
Who's Who in the Parodyverse
De Brown Streak by Dancer
Herbert P. Garrick hung his tie onto its rack in the proper place and turned round to reach for his cufflink tray. It had been a frustrating day. Appointed supreme commander of the SPUD helicarrier and remaining military forces in Parodiopolis he had arrived to find that the current CO Colonel Dan Drury was hardly ready to step down, and that he had somehow worked a special presidential mandate to justify his insubordination. Garrick had spent most of the remaining time trying to get in contact with the world military leaders who had sent him, but for some reason they all appeared to be off-air. No wonder Garrick felt the need for familiar ritual to calm him down before bedtime.
De Brown Streak handed him a coat-hanger.
“What?” Garrick swallowed as he realized he was alone with the world’s most wanted mutant terrorist. “How did you…? What do you want?”
“Well, I want to rip your spleen out and make you eat it,” DBS noted, “But for now I’ll settle for some information. I want to know what you know about our government’s dealings with Technopolis before it arrived on our world.”
Garrick sneered. “And you think I’ll tell you, mutate? I know you. You don’t really hurt people. You don’t have what it takes to make me talk.”
“So you know that about me and you still hunt me like an animal,” frowned Josh Clement. “But you’re right. I won’t be like you. But what you haven’t worked out is that I’m the nice one in this good-cop bad-cop game.” He turned and pointed to the man behind Herbert Garrick. “Have you met Messenger?”
___________________________________
“This place is a mess,” Al B. Harper observed as he strode into the Lair Legion’s living room. “What happened?”
“Beavers,” answered spiffy impatiently. “Can you fix up that cellular regenerator or not?”
“Yes, or course I can,” Al answered testily. “I just need a sufficiently powerful computer to operate it while the power source lasts. And since the Supreme Interference is hardly likely to volunteer to help and DK can’t hook us up with his Plutonic systems that pretty much leaves HALLIE.”
“Frankly she’d be my first choice anyway,” admitted Visionary.
“I’m online again after the attack by the Technopolitan Death Squad,” HALLIE agreed, flickering her hologram fuzzily into focus. “But I’ve felt better.”
“Just let’s get this Technopolitan cellular regenerator working and we’ll all feel better,” spiffy urged.
“And quickly,” suggested Xanadelle. “We’ve just heard fromCrazySugarFreakBoy! and the field team taking down the Thermonuclear Man. They have casualties.”
“Who?” asked Mark Hopkins tensely. “We already have Finny in a coma and G-Eyed and Nats down. And it may be Amazing Guy’s only chance.”
“NTU-150’s out until he’s had a few weeks in the body shop,” the Sov-Blok agent answered. “Donar’s a mess. So’s Exile. And…we’ve just heard that Hatman’s beyond critical. He transformed himself into a miniature sun, and although he got his severed arm back when he reformed afterwards he’s taken third degree burns over his entire body. If this thing isn’t working by the time he’s brought here then the only headgear he’ll be wearing is a halo.”
There was a gasp from the doorway. Sorceress had just been shuttled back by Amy Racecar after her escape from Mad Wendy’s mindscape. “Jay?” she breathed. Just like that all the angry things she had been intending to say about him abandoning her to the Red Watchman evaporated from her mind. “What about Jay?”
spiffy looked up from the report Xanadelle had handed him. “It’s bad.”
___________________________________
“It was in November 1862 that an alien hive intelligence called the Mynadrine Host first landed on our planet,” Herbert P. Garrick revealed. “At first it was thought that they came from Mars, with their war-tripods and metagenetic weaponry. The human race had little defense against them. That was our first modern contact with extraterrestrial life.”
“Modern contact?” De Brown Streak questioned. “What do you…”
“Another time,” Messenger interrupted. “Get on with it, Garrick.”
“Somehow a bunch of adventurers called the League of Improbable Gentlemen discovered that actually they had only used Mars as a staging post, a place where they had established an interdimensional gateway from the Mars of another reality. They managed to destroy the gateway, and the Host, being a hive species cut off from its queen, were easily destroyed thereafter.”
“And this was all hushed up, of course,” DBS muttered.
“Of course,” argued Garrick. “People don’t want to know these things. They may think they do, but we know better.”
“What has the Mynadrine Host got to do with Technopolis?” Messenger demanded.
“They came from the Technoverse, of course,” the G-Man replied. “In due time they also apparently sought to conquer Technopolis’ Earth, but were repelled by its science heroes. But by then Technopolis has duplicated the Mynadrine interdimensional technology and sent explorers to our Earth themselves.”
“When?” DBS wanted to know. “How?”
“Before the first world war here, I believe,” Garrick admitted. “Later Hitler was most taken by a renegade Science Councilor turned cyborg supremacist called Hel Rotvang. And there were others. Technopolis made covert contact with several world governments, trading limited advanced technology in exchange for… raw materials.”
“Anything we might have heard of?” Messenger demanded cynically.
“Oh, some of Anton Vishnar’s work, Sentinoid technology, some giant Samuri robots, a few of the super-soldier projects,” Garrick boasted. Then he looked straight at the postman. “Prophetic Genesis,” he added.
“And nobody ever wondered why Technopolis was so interested in trading with us?” De Brown Streak demanded scathingly.
“Of course we wondered,” Garrick shot back. He squirmed for a moment then confessed, “But we thought we knew. We didn’t realize they were establishing a beachhead for a major dimensional transfer of their city. We thought they just needed the human organ-donors.”
___________________________________
Ziles’ cloaked spaceship landed on the lawn right outside the front entrance of the battered Lair Mansion. The Xnylonian had summoned it remotely to get her team away from Technopolis after Premiere had passed out only a ten leagues from the city.
“Wow, are we glad to see you!” CrazySugarFreakBoy! yelled as she limped down the gangway followed by Hunter Victorious, Cobra, ManMan, and the Dark Knight. “We thought you might be dead or taken over.”
“I was,” ManMan admitted. “Taken over, that is. I, um, I think I stabbed the Hooded Hood.”
“Wow. And how did old Hoodily retcon himself out of it?”
“I, er, don’t think he did. Knifey?”
ManMan’s sentient blade chipped in. “It felt pretty lethal,” he admitted. “The Technopolitians had equipped Joe with some kind of tech that dampened the Hood’s power and the Hood was already pretty exhausted. I think I killed him.”
Dreamcatcher Foxglove looked stricken. “Did you see the body?”
“I think the building kind of blew up shortly after that,” ManMan explained.
“Ah-ha!” grinned CSFB! “I knew it. No body, no dead villain. Everybody knows that.” He looked pitying at ManMan. “Boy, I’m glad I’m not you when he gets back.”
“Is Premiere with you?” Cheryl asked the returnees.
Dancer appeared at the spaceship door to a surprised chorus of welcomes from those who had thought her lost. “He’s inside, sleeping,” she explained. “He’s hurt and exhausted, poor man.”
“Then I’d better go to him,” Xanadelle announced. “Excuse me.”
“And who are you?” Sarah Shepherdson asked the Sov-Blok agent.
“Me? I’m his lover,” she answered. “You?”
___________________________________
“The US Government has been trading people to Technopolis for them to organ-harvest?” De Brown Streak shouted.
“Calm down, mutate!” Herbert Garrick answered. “Of course we haven’t.”
Joshua Clement shook his head. “I thought you said…”
“I said there were exchanges. They couldn’t leave something as important as this in the hands of elected governments. So they turned to… another solution.”
“What?” insisted Messenger.
“I can’t tell you,” responded Garrick. “I don’t really know. Some kind of black operation, an international cartel. Fingers in dozens of military and espionage operations, from SPUD to HERPES. A kind of Shadow Cabinet. They handled this in exchange for first pick of the technology. It’s not safe to know any more than that.”
“So this isn’t a sudden invasion after all,” Messenger realized. “The Technopolitans set it up over the course of a century. The Red Watchman was only able to transfer his city here because Technopolis had already installed the major dimensional transfer apparatus at this end. Maybe as a bolthole, maybe intending eventual conquest. The Watchman just jumped the timetable.”
“Possibly,” conceded Garrick. “In retrospect it might have been better to look more closely at the trade agreement.”
“You scum,” snarled De Brown Streak. “You and you government cover-ups and your high-sounding moral statements hiding sleaze and…”
Messenger’s comm-link squawked to life. “Hold the indignation,” he warned DBS. “We have a signal. Uh-oh.”
“Uh-oh what?” Garrick and De Brown Streak asked together.
“We have confirmation of the major Technopolitan push. Damn near everything they have, heading this way. We’re expecting war at dawn.”
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- Premiere #37: Contact - The Hooded Hood presses on with this interminable story - 13:09 on October 13, 2002
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