Amazing Race 19 Recap, Week Two

After a non-elimination leg last week, this week gives us the ominous Double Elimination on the Amazing Race. They spelled it out last week for the losing couple, and this week they make it clear to everyone; coming in 10th is just as bad as coming in 11th. This ups the stress level a little for everyone as they head to Indonesia, and we get plenty of reaction shots of people whimpering and panicking and generally saying, "Wow, this sucks!" (Maybe these people are a little under-ambitious, given how many of them seem to be worried about not coming in 9th.)

There's a lot of airport bickering, which is genuinely unfortunate; Justin and Jennifer have the kind of sibling relationship generally described in a Eugene O'Neill play, and we're stuck watching it. We get a long, brutally whiny sequence between the two of them, and then they blessedly go off to sulk at each other while we fly to Jogjakarta!

After that, we get what looks like a genuinely terrifying taxi ride to the Road Block (seriously, there are countries where you take your life in your hands when you get into a moving vehicle, and Indonesia looks like one of them. The taxi drivers looked like the only laws they obeyed were the laws of physics, and then only reluctantly.) Bill and Cathi, last week's last-place finishers, got a cute little Speed Bump where they had to untangle some climbing ropes, and then everyone went spelunking. (Personally, I think "spelunking" is a better term for throwing heavy rocks into deep bodies of water. Spelunk! Spelunk!)

The Road Block was decent enough--the Racers had to rappel down into a hollow lava tube, retrieve a ceremonial mask and dagger, and return--but it's really not the sort of thing that gave the later Racers a chance to catch up or the early Racers a chance to fall behind. It was more or less just a straightforward, "What order did you get here?" challenge. But the Detour...

Okay, the Detour wasn't that exciting either. It was a split between one of the Race's fairly blah "try to get money out of strangers" challenges, which I've never been a big fan of (something to do with the fact that people from an affluent nation who are also trying to win obscene sums of money are also begging for cash from people who probably can't spare it)...and another "try to get money out of strangers" challenge. Meaning that no matter which Detour they chose, we had to see people doing stuff nobody wanted to try to wheedle change out of strangers who had better uses for the money. If I wanted to see that, I'd go to New York. (Rimshot.)

But after the Detour, that's when the Race went from the mediocre to the absolutely sublime. Because when the Racers collected their cash, they had to go to an orphanage and turn it in to get their next clue. That's awesome in and of itself. The Race has done a few things like this lately, where the Racers actually have to do something constructive and decent for the people of the country they're in, and I can't approve enough. And what happened next was even better.

You see, there was a little sign next to the grateful orphans who all cheered and clapped at the friendly Americans handing them money. And what it said was, in essence, "Don't stop with the money you collected on the Detour; give all the cash in your possession to the orphanage before you leave." The orphans still gave the clue that led to the Pit Stop, mind you. You could still leave without reading the sign and you would know where to go. But when you got to the Pit Stop, Phil would (and did, several times) tell you to go back and give until it hurts.

And so, the actual question of who would get eliminated was determined not by luck or even physical skill, but by attention to detail and careful reading skills. Several of my favorite teams became even bigger favorites by stopping to read the sign like any good team should, and I got a little bit of a schadenfreude charge out of seeing a couple of my less-favorite teams get the "However" from Phil. (When Lisa and Kaylani showed up, Phil reversed it by saying, "You got here tenth...however...a whole bunch of other teams failed to read the sign you read, so you came in 3rd." The response, "I hate you so much right now.")

In the end, irritatingly gimmicky Survivor survivors Ethan and Jenna came in 10th, and adorable but out of their depth gay couple Ron and Bill came in 11th. Both are now gone, and short of seeing Justin and Jennifer get the boot, there's really not a whole lot that could improve my mood. Most of the remaining teams are nice, lots of them are interesting, and there's a lot of people I can root for here. I'm looking forward to this Sunday's episode!

(Which, from the looks of things, will involve an utterly brutal counting challenge. I always love these!)

If Arthur Dent Was In 'The Dark Knight' Instead of Harvey Dent

"Mister Dent?"
"Hello? Yes" said Arthur.
"Some factual information for you. Have you any idea how much protection that coin would offer if I just let this building blow up?"
"How much?" said Arthur.
"None at all."

"All right," said Bruce. "How would you react if I said that I'm not a dissipated old-money playboy at all, but actually a brutal street-hardened vigilante who dispenses justice at night in the alleys of Gotham?"
"I don't know," Arthur said, taking a pull of beer. "Why, do you think it's the sort of think you're likely to say?"

"You barbarians!" he yelled. "I'll sue Commissioner Gordon for every penny he's got! I'll have him hung, drawn and quartered! And whipped! And boiled until...until...until he's had enough."
Batman was running after him very fast. Very very fast.
"And then I will do it again!" yelled Arthur. "And when I've finished, I will take all the little bits, and I will jump on them!"

"So this is it," said Arthur, "we are going to die."
"Yes," said Rachel, "except...no! Wait a minute!" She suddenly lunged across the chamber at something behind Arthur's line of vision. "What's this switch?" she cried.
"What? Where?" cried Arthur, twisting round.
"No, I was only fooling," said Rachel, "we are going to die after all."

Arthur blinked at the walkie-talkie and felt he was missing something important. Suddenly he realized what it was.
"Is there any tea in this warehouse?" he asked.

"Look," said Arthur, "would it save you a lot of time if I just gave up and went mad now?"

Self-Taught Superheroes, Part Twelve

I will remember my first sight of him until the day I die. He gleamed as though he was lit by sunshine wherever he stood, as if he stood in a slightly brighter world than the rest of us. His hands glowed with that same summer light, but even stronger; when he fights, sometimes it's hard to actually see his fists beneath the aura they project. His costume was a mix of bright, vivid red and rich blue, with the scales of justice emblazoned in pure white on his chest. (And okay, not that I'm really into him because he's way older than me and it'd be creepy if he actually wanted to date a sixteen year-old girl, but he's a total hottie.) And somehow that silver headband with the sculpted wings looked just right on his head.

I should stress, for the benefit of everyone who might be forgetting that I was dreaming about that day, that the Groucho Marx glasses and big fake cigar are not part of his actual ensemble. (Adam, on the other hand...)

The two of us stared at each other for what felt like forever. Probably more for me than for him. Finally, he spoke. "Hi," he said. "I'm Captain Light."

"I know," I said. "Um, I mean, I saw the picture of you in the Herald. The one where you stopped the bank robbery. It was kind of blurry, but um...not hard to miss." I paused, wondering what to say to the hero who'd inspired me. "Oh, right. I'm Hummingbird." I waved a little. "Hi."

"Hi," he said again. He smiled shyly. I suddenly realized that he wasn't sure what to say either. It kind of crashed in on me in that moment that the big famous superhero that inspired me to fight crime, the man whose name was synonymous in the newspapers with "heroic", hadn't even been doing this for a full year yet. He didn't really know much more about what he was doing than I did. It was a little like going up in a plane for your first flying lesson and finding out that your teacher had just gotten his pilot's license last week.

"I, um...I followed one of their planes here," he continued. "Normally I can't keep up with them, but this one had suffered some engine damage. Slowed it down just enough that I could stick with them. What about you?"

"I stowed away," I said. I tried to make it sound like an actual plan. "I was looking for their communications center, figured maybe I could bring the army down on them."

He nodded. "That's a really good idea," he said. "Better than mine. I was just figuring that if I found Lord Raptor himself and brought him in, then maybe the group would lose direction. Or something. I'm, um...I'm actually still figuring this whole thing out as I go." His eyes widened, painfully blue and earnest beneath his mask. "I just feel like if I have these powers, I should do something good with them, you know? Something to help people."

I nodded so fast my head blurred. "Yeah!" I said. "I mean, there are people out there getting powers practically every week, it seems like, and what do most of them do? They go out and rob banks, or beat up people who ticked them off, or just wreck stuff for fun. I don't get it."

"Not all of them," he said. "I've met a couple of people like you, really nice people who want to do something to make the world a better place. Like--" His fists suddenly surged with light. "Oh, right," he said. "Um, we should probably save this for later."

I turned around to see another dozen or so of Raptor's goons. They were all hugging the walls, probably because if they didn't they'd get stomped on. And looking at the thing that would do the hypothetical stomping, it would probably leave them pretty permanently unable to get up.

It stretched maybe twenty feet down the hallway, and looked like a giant mechanical lizard with eight legs. The "head" was actually a shielded canopy, with a human pilot in the cockpit. Twin shoulder-mounted cannons looked like they were a lot more lethal than the stun guns that the infantry was packing, and the "chest" had racks of missile launchers that I didn't want to think about. It's hard to dodge things like clouds of toxic gas or walls of expanding flame.

Captain Light didn't hesitate. He flew right past me and charged, hammering his fist straight into the cockpit of the mecha. (Oh, yeah. Anime as well as D&D.) There was a coruscating sunburst of light, and a sound like a jackhammer striking a gong...but the metal barely even dented. The mechanical beast wasn't even rocked backwards.

Loudspeakers clicked into life as the man in the cockpit spoke. "Lord Raptor requests the pleasure of your company for dinner," he said. The cannons swiveled to target us both. "Formal dress is not required."

TO BE CONTINUED...

Amazing Race 19 Recap, Week One

Oh, hey--the Amazing Race started again! Sorry, I really did mean to say something about this earlier, but there was a lot of blogging to do, and then there was a season finale to Doctor Who that was a lot of fun, and before I knew it the second episode had already aired. So let's at least try to catch up with events in the first leg so that we can get around to recapping the second leg before the third leg airs, okay?

Said first leg begins in California, in a very picturesque Buddhist temple near LA. We are introduced to the eleven teams...and since this is a big chunk of the episode as well as just generally important, since they're our "cast" this season, let's take a long look at them. In no particular order...

Laurence and Zac: This is already a favorite team of mine, as well as probably a favorite to win. The kid has already circumnavigated the globe in a sailboat; needless to say, "killer fatigue" is not going to be one of his big issues. The dad seems active enough to overcome his age differences, and they both seem relentlessly polite, quiet and nice. These are the kind of low-drama, high-competence teams favored in our household.

Ernie and Cindy: Oh, look. A dating team, one of whom describes themselves as a "control freak" and talks in self-deprecating terms about how they fight but love each other. Toss those on the pile with the rest, will you? Admittedly, they don't seem to be as spectacularly train-wrecky as some of the "bickering couples" we've seen on the Race, and I give Cindy major points for saying thank you to people in Chinese on this leg. But nothing has convinced me yet that they are going to be enjoyable to watch. They seem competent enough, though, and I suspect they'll be around for a while.

Jeremy and Sandy: Technically speaking, they are on the Race. All the evidence seems to suggest it. Their names are on the credits, they are listed in the Wikipedia entry for the season, the CBS website lists them as being in the show. However, I must admit I have no memory of them. Neither good nor bad. Their appearances made literally no impression on me. If the Silence were running the Amazing Race, this is what they would be like. (Minus the electrocutions, of course.)

Justin and Jennifer: Hate hate hate die die die shutupshutupshutupshutup! But enough about their dialogue for the entire first episode, what do I think of these two? (Rimshot.) Seriously, they cannot exit the Race fast enough for my tastes. They are whiny, they are in perpetual bicker mode from Second One, and they actually act, in interviews, as though this is endearing behavior. Elimination is too good for them.

Ethan and Jenna: This season's token "stunt couple", they are both winners of Survivor and he is also a cancer survivor to boot! Presumably, they also are searching the world for the hook-handed man who kidnapped their infant daughter to induct her into their ninja clan, unknowing that she is actually the last heir to Narnia. Oh, and despite all that they're still remarkably boring.

Andy and Tommy: Apart from the fact that I keep expecting the bearded one to break into "The Rainbow Connection" at any second, these two actually seem like nice guys. They also seem like they're dumb as posts, the pair of them, but appearances can be deceptive...and athleticism and a positive attitude can carry you past a lot of challenges in this series.

Kaylani and Lisa: Why is it, whenever there are two women on this show that start right out by telling everyone how they're not stupid and lots of people think they're stupid but they're really a lot smarter than they look and sound, that it immediately makes them come off as dumb? I wish I knew, and I'm worried that it might be me. In any event, they are this season's Pretty Women Who Will Show Everyone That Pretty Women Are Competent. (They are not off to a great start in this episode, but more on that later.)

Liz and Marie: Unfortunately for them, they have already been nicknamed the Doublemint Twins in our household and they don't seem likely to be able to do anything to shake that nickname. They also don't seem likely to last very long; they're young, they don't seem to have a whole lot of reserves of patience, and they don't have the life experience to teach them how to deal with stress.

Bill and Cathi: They seem nice. Boy do they seem nice. They seem like they would instantly make friends with all the other Racers, the kind of friendships that last well beyond the Race. Even years later, I see them as the type that are still sending out Christmas cards to Liz and Marie and cooing over Jeremy and Sandy's baby (who may be named Melody and may not be theirs)...and all those connections will be forged on the strength of about three episodes, because that's how long I give them.

Amani and Marcus: This season's Overcompetitive Guy and Supportive Wife, Marcus seems to at least be one of the nice Overcompetitive Guys who runs around and makes grunting noises, as opposed to one of the Overcompetitive Guys who trash-talks everyone else and pouts whenever anything goes wrong. Still better in small doses, though.

Ron and Bill: They seem like the "sweet gay couple" version of Bill and Cathi. Really nice, very friendly, definitely the kind of people you can root for...but you can just tell after about five minutes that they're going to go out early. Very, very sweet though.

So after all these characters are introduced, they all begin racing! The first challenge is to find an umbrella with letters on it that complete a word puzzle involving the teams' first destination. I like the idea, but unfortunately it's yet another Race puzzle with a brute force solution, and most of the teams simply sprint back and forth between Phil and the umbrella stand until they find the one they're looking for. The last team, Kaylani and Lisa, add injury to injury by getting a Hazard for being in last. (Hate this. Bad Race design to penalize the team that's already furthest behind. But given that Kaylani and Lisa manage to screw themselves far worse than the Race designers could even dream of, heck with it.)

Which is what happens next, as Kaylani and Lisa lose one of their passports at the first gas station. Much drama ensues--and for the record, this does not feel like a "bickering team" thing to me. This feels like, "We are completely and totally FUBARed and we haven't even hit the first airport and I am very upset." I think that anyone who thinks they would handle this well hasn't gone through it.

Luckily, a random stranger finds the passport, discovers from Twitter that the women with camera crews following them around are probably on the Amazing Race, and drives it to the airport on their behalf. I am not saying they wouldn't do this for the 62-year-old couple, but it probably didn't hurt that they were astonishingly beautiful women.

From there, we all just skip to the chase and get to Taiwan, where there's a beautifully designed puzzle that tests everyone's mental abilities. No brute force solutions, just a simple case of listening and repeating a key phrase. This is the kind of simple, yet sublime challenge that I love about the Race when it happens.

...of course, Bill and Cathi are four hours behind everyone else because they can't find the clue that leads them to the Road Block, but that too is part of the Race. They wander around for ages while everyone else does the challenge (and the subsequent relatively simple Dragon Boat race afterwards), nothing but Amazing Editing ever suggests that they even come close to seeing another team, and honestly, they are the luckiest recipients of a non-elimination leg ever.

And next week, which is now last week, we get a double-elimination leg to make up for the non-elimination leg! I wholeheartedly approve. Talk to you about it before Week Three!

Now It Can Be Told!

1969. The offices of Marvel Comics.

STAN: So, Jack...we've built up the Marvel brand, established ourselves as an exciting new comics line for adults as well as children, and created some iconic characters that will stand the test of time. I think it's time we dealt with our major competitors.

JACK: Walt Disney?

STAN: No, I think our plans for Disney will have to be...longer term. No, I was referring to DC. Their brands continue to be more recognizable than ours, and their reinventions of classic Golden Age characters are proving to be dangerously popular. I think it's time to crush them. Are you ready to implement "Plan Poison Pill"?

JACK: The alliteration thing, Stan? It's got to stop. It's become a sickness.

STAN: I don't know what you're talking about, my astonishing artist of pencil-pushing perfection! My magnificent mind is every bit as alert as an amazing aardvark, and my brain is bursting with brilliant bideas bat brush balefully babble bubble **slaps self** You're right, Jack. But I only have to hold it together for a few more years before I can pass the editorial reins on to my disciples. And we won't have to worry about competitors, not if you're willing to do your part.

JACK: My part? I've been working on every book we publish for almost a decade, Stan. I've strip-mined my imagination for every sellable concept I ever came up with, from the Fantastic Four to the X-Men to Captain America. We even threw in Toomazooma the Living Totem, Stan! Let's face it...I can't come up with another best-selling idea.

STAN: I know, Jack. That's not what I'm asking you to do. What I'm asking you to do is far more sinister, far more devious...a plan that will cripple DC for decades to come. I want you to defect, Jack.

JACK: Defect? But they'll never--

STAN: Of course they will. We stage a falling out. Some nonsense over money, we'll funnel your royalties through Swiss bank accounts for a while. You'll decide to look for a better deal elsewhere, and who better than our major competitor? And then...

JACK: And then what? I write their titles? I don't exactly think that's going to cripple them, Stan. Not unless your plan is to have them trip on piles of money.

STAN: Oh, you'll make them money. That was never in question. But it's what else you'll do to them that interests me. Remember those "New Gods" ideas you had? The ones we agreed were cool but uncommercial?

JACK: ...I think I see where you're going with this one, Stan. You want me to introduce them into the DC Universe.

STAN: Exactly! They'll never sell, but DC's writers and editors will be fascinated by them! They'll keep trying to launch them and relaunch them, make them the centerpiece of their mythos, maybe even launch a gigantic company-wide crossover based on them! But they'll never be anything more than a cult phenomenon. DC will slowly sink into obscurity trying to make them popular, while we will rise to the heights of popularity!

JACK: And I get to finally write all the characters we thought were too crazy to publish! Kamandi, the Forever People, Mister Miracle, Glorious Godfrey, Granny Goodness, Devil Dinosaur--

STAN: Wait. Let's hang on to that last one. I kind of like the sound of it.

JACK: Seriously, Stan. Get help.

Self-Taught Superheroes, Part Eleven

Surprise doesn't take long, when your mind moves at superhuman speeds. Shock takes a little longer, though. When I got ambushed by two gangs of Lord Raptor's mercenaries, each one about eight people strong, each one equipped by a wide-beam stun projector that pretty much negated my speed advantage, I just stood there for a long moment in stunned panic. The alert sirens blared, Lord Raptor's men shouted, and I felt the panic stretch out into an eternity.

Somewhere at the end of that eternity, I realized that they were shouting at each other. I also realized that the alarms weren't about me.

Obviously, I wondered what they were about, but now that the shock was over, I was back in the zone. I broke right, sprinting headlong down the corridor towards the first group of thugs and diving into a skid as they finally realized that they needed to keep their attention less on the new situation and more on the superhero right in front of them. They blasted the stun projector over my head just as I grabbed the ankle of the guy holding it and dragged him backwards into his buddies. They went over into each other in a tangle of limbs, and I'm not ashamed to say I bounced a few heads off of the floors to make sure they didn't get up.

I looked down to the other end of the corridor, hoping I might see a group of semi-conscious mercs at the other end, but no such luck. The armor they wore protected them against their own weapons. They'd shrugged off the stun blasts easily...

...and at hummingbird speed, I had just managed to get the chestplate off of the lead soldier and duck behind it when they got their first shot off.

To the soldiers at the other end of the hallway, it probably seemed like they were fighting under a strobe light. The stun cannon fired so rapidly it lit up the hallway almost twenty times a second, but even on full auto, that left me plenty of time to pop up and run about five steps before I had to duck behind my improvised shield. The strobe effect probably made it seem like I moved even faster; I could see the expression of sheer terror on the face of the trooper holding the gun just before I kicked it out of his hands and laid into them.

A few seconds after that, and it was all over. Mind you, I was sweating like a pig and craving Kool-Aid so bad I could almost taste Sharkleberries, but I had taken out sixteen full-grown battle-hardened mercenaries with my bare hands. My adrenalin was pumping like a freaking beast.

I went for the door, but my opener had stopped working. So I grabbed one from an unconscious soldier. On further thought, I grabbed them all. Even if I didn't need them, I figured that was sixteen guys who weren't going anywhere soon.

Every few minutes, I had to track down a new goon to get a fresh one, but I really felt like I was making progress. There weren't nearly as many soldiers, and the ones that I did bump into seemed distracted and panicky, easy to evade. After a while, I started following them just to see what the fuss was about.

Pretty soon, I found out. A squad I was following charged through a bulkhead that slammed shut behind them. I heard the zap of stun projectors, a bone-jarring crunch that was like no sound I'd ever heard in a fight, the crash of metal hitting metal. Then silence. I ventured towards the door cautiously, uncertain of what might be on the other side...and then I found out.

The bone-rattling thud sounded again. Then a third time. The door began to buckle under titanic strain, its surface bulging suddenly with each blow. Finally, it crumpled completely and a man stepped over it to face me.

And that was how I met Captain Light.

TO BE CONTINUED...

Sef-Taught Superheroes, Part Ten

My dream kind of skipped ahead to the point where I got caught.

In real life, it didn't happen right away. In real life, I managed to shift some of the sacks of rice around to the point where I could make a little bit of space for myself to squeeze into (I'm not actually very big. Like I said, I think I've probably got one more growth spurt in me. Either that, or I'm always going to wind up with a reputation as a dirty fighter solely because enemy groins are actually closer than their chins.) Lord Raptor's men unloaded the goods with the kind of bored, passive indifference you might expect from people who were hardened mercenaries dealing with non-threatening groceries, and left me in the pantry.

I pulled myself out of the rice as soon as they left. I figured they were probably leaving the putting away of the food for the actual kitchen staff, and I didn't want to hang around while someone put each bag of rice on the shelf and noticed the toy surprise at the bottom. I slunk over to the door, keeping an eye out for security cameras the entire way...and the door didn't open.

That was a little awkward, to say the least. Although superhuman reflexes did save me from smacking headlong into it.

After a few seconds of examination, I found the electric eye located alongside the door, and it didn't take a genius to figure out that Lord Raptor's men had some kind of device to open it. It was actually a really good idea; even if someone did get into the base, they'd have no way of moving from room to room without an escort, while Lord Raptor could maneuver troops around freely. It was the kind of detailed, extremely significant intelligence on Lord Raptor's operations that I really wished I'd known before I snuck into their base.

Then the door opened. I'm not sure who looked more startled, me or the guy staring at me.

He didn't stay startled for long, though. One of his hands was already reaching for his belt when I grabbed it and dropped my hips into a throw that sent him sliding into a few dozen cartons of eggs. (Jujitsu. Seven point six minutes, seven hundred ninety-six in the Dewey Decimal System. Time well spent, I think.) Because I didn't stay startled for long either. I covered the distance between us in a sprint that would have made Usain Bolt slink away in shame and converted my momentum into a kick that had very little mass, but lots of velocity. The mercenary's eyes rolled back in his head and he slumped into unconsciousness.

I searched him for anything I could find that looked like it might be a door opener. Took me a couple minutes, but I found what I was looking for. After that, it was off into the rest of the base. That was about when I realized just how stupid I really was when I came up with my plan. The base was huge, with miles of featureless corridors and no maps to be seen anywhere. Probably Lord Raptor's men drilled for ages to learn where the barracks were and how to find your way to the bathrooms and stuff, but I didn't know where I was going even if I knew how to get there, which I didn't. And of course, I was wearing a bright green and white outfit with a red mask covering my mouth. I could not have stood out more if I'd actually been wearing the cheerleader outfit I was dreaming about.

And I didn't know it was even worse than that. The doors were linked to a central computer system, and each door opener had its own unique serial code. As far as the computer was concerned, Raptor Soldier #97681 had just wandered away from his station and was taking an erratic walking tour of the entire base. Took them about ten minutes to decide to go after me and about thirty seconds to find me after that. Well, that's just a guess--it's not like they gave me their split time or anything--but given that they could track my exact location every time I went into a room, I figure it wasn't exactly hard for them.

Which was right where my dream jumped to. Me, in the middle of what seemed like endless featureless corridors that branched onto endless featureless corridors, suddenly finding herself trapped between two groups of soldiers wearing stun cannons.

That's when the alert sirens went off.

TO BE CONTINUED...

Empire Strikes Back Love Must Stop!

So I decided to indulge my love/hate relationship with John Scalzi's opinion pieces this morning by reading a column he did for Film Critic on how Ripley's status as the preeminent female character is as much due to the dearth of genuinely well-written female characters as it is due to Ripley being awesome, well-written, and well-acted. (I also decided to indulge my love of starting a blog post with "So I...", which I try not to do so much anymore.)

And what do I find? Apart from an actually extremely well-written essay about the way that even the "strong female characters" in sci-fi and fantasy are really just male fantasy figures, only nowadays they can kick people's ass, that is. I find this quote: "Some distance behind Sarah Connor is Princess Leia, who looks great on paper (a senator at 19! Leader of the rebellion! Feisty with Han Solo!) but who is woefully underwritten in every film she's in except The Empire Strikes Back and who isn't the focus of the series in any event."

So let me get this straight. When Princess Leia was risking her life by covertly spying for the Rebel Alliance, when she withstood brutal interrogation and truth drugs, when she cunningly stalled for time by "confessing" false information under duress, when she single-handedly took charge of her own rescue and shot her way out using someone else's blaster, then planned her own escape route, then deduced that the rescue was too easy and that they needed to act as though they were on a timetable...that was the "woefully underwritten" Leia.

When she got dragged around like a sack of potatoes by Big Strong Man Han Solo, when she carped and whined about every decision Han made only to be proven wrong at every turn because Han knows better about such things than a silly little girl, when she got forcibly kissed by Han only to swoon into his arms because all a woman really needs is a take-charge man who knows what he wants in the bedroom, when she hung out in her room changing her outfits and doing her hair and leaves Han and Chewie to make sure the Falcon gets repaired and C-3P0 gets found, when her primary contribution of the entire movie was to have a sudden "female intuition" that Luke is in danger...that's the strong female character who almost competes with Ripley.

This is how badly fan opinion has ossified in regards to the Star Wars trilogy. Even on a level where one movie is blatantly, demonstrably, provably superior to the other, even when a respected and devastatingly brilliant sci-fi writer like Jeanne Cavelos has already published a scathing essay pointing out how obvious it is that Leia becomes less and less feminist as the series progresses (my comments above owe a great debt to said essay, BTW)...we still get a token, "Empire is the best movie" thrown in there. Because it's just the Truth now, and facts only get in the way.

And since there are no comments on that column, I have to rant about it here and hope he sees it. Hey, it worked once before...

My New Fan Campaign (Football, Not Comics)

For those of you who may not know, I'm actually something of a fan of football. Not rabidly so--this weekend's football did not, for example, take priority over a trip to the zoo with my sisters and our kids--but I do enjoy the game. And even though I'm a Minnesotan and hence a Vikings fan, I appreciate good football no matter who plays it. (Unless they're the Cowboys, but thankfully I haven't had to worry about them playing good football in a while.)

And as a result, I've been paying more than a little attention this year to the Indianapolis Colts. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the team, they have had a long run of dominance in their division and frequent trips deep into the playoffs (and a Superbowl win.) But this year, quarterback Peyton Manning, after a long streak of consecutive appearances that threatened to someday eclipse Brett Favre's record, suffered a neck injury and has not been able to play. In his first two games out since his rookie start, the Colts have suffered humiliatingly large losses to the Houston Texans (who they used to regularly dominate) and the Cleveland Browns (a perennial cellar-dweller team.) Replacement QB Kerry Collins has looked utterly overmatched.

Which is why I'm proposing a fan campaign to nominate Peyton Manning as this year's NFL MVP.

Think about it. The Most Valuable Player is the player that makes the most difference to the team, and clearly, this year Peyton Manning is demonstrating that he is the one thing that stands between year after year of double-digit wins and playoff appearances...and losses to the Texans and Browns. Who better to be the MVP of the league?

Next week, the Colts are playing the Steelers. Tune in for the next chapter in the saga of Peyton Manning, future MVP!

Self-Taught Superheroes, Part Nine

One of the things they never really tell you about being a superhero is how boring it gets.

I know, not exactly the best way to begin another installment of my wild superheroic adventures, right? But it's true. When Batman or Spider-Man go out "on patrol", they always run into power-mad supervillains or rampaging monsters or cosmic weirdness. At the very least, they get to whale on some muggers or rapists. But you don't really hear much about the issue where Spider-Man wanders around the city all night and doesn't see anybody and he finds out the next day on the news that a burglary happened six blocks away from him and he missed it.

All of which is by way of pointing out that when I was asleep, my subconscious compressed about six weeks of patrolling and dullness and really minor crimes into a sort of weird jumble that felt like it took no time at all, and it was already the next time I fought Lord Raptor's men. Which, believe it or not, happened at the supermarket.

I mean, in retrospect, it kind of makes sense. You're feeding a small army of mercenaries, you're trying to keep from establishing any kind of paper trail that would lead back to you, and you have no scruples about stealing...of course you're going to raid supermarkets for supplies. It was the Lord Raptor way of doing things, really. Never buy what you can take. And lucky me, I just happened to be out picking up dinner at the exact store they attacked. (Dinner...and twinkies. And Kool-Aid. And pixie stix. My pixie stix budget is roughly a hundred bucks a month.)

The first sign was the sound of stun cannons. They make a sound that you'll never forget once you hear it, a sort of cross between a bass string twanging and an elephant getting a suppository. The second I heard it, I knew. I raced into the women's room, pulled on my costume...

But one of the nice things about experiencing the world in "hummingbird time" is that you have a good long chance to think things over in a crisis. And what I thought about was the fact that Lord Raptor had a lot of men. And a lot of ships, too. Stopping these guys from raiding this supermarket would just mean a half-dozen guys who went to jail for about a week before they got broken out, and maybe Lord Raptor would go hungry for a few days until he went and raided a supermarket where I wasn't. And I'd be spending weeks waiting to be in the right place at the right time. I had to come up with a better plan than that.

So instead of beating up Lord Raptor's thugs, I sprinted down the aisles, darted across the checkout counters during the split-seconds when Lord Raptor's men were distracted by a would-be hero who wound up with thirteen stitches across his chin where he hit the floor after falling asleep in mid-stride, used the pallets that Lord Raptor's men were already loading as cover, flung myself into the cargo hold, and ducked behind a stack of industrial-size jars of barbecue sauce. It took me about two seconds.

I should mention that one of the lousy things about experiencing the world in "hummingbird time" is that I'm impulsive and prone to making decisions that I regret much faster than an ordinary person is capable of. But by then, it was too late; a huge pallet of uncooked rice got shoved in next to me, and I didn't really have any choice but to stay where I was while they loaded the rest of the cargo bay and took off.

In "hummingbird time", I had roughly the equivalent of six weeks to think of a plan for what to do when they unloaded all this stuff and saw me.

TO BE CONTINUED...

Awesome Team-Ups I Want To See, Volume X

The "Criminal Minds" team heads to Gotham.

Think about it. Garcia and Oracle would totally make bestest cyber-buds, Reid and Tim Drake could work together to solve a mystery, Morgan and Nightwing would go out and kick ass together, and Hotch and Bruce can have a chin-measuring competition. And of course, depending on which season you set it in, either Gideon or Rossi would sit down with Alfred and have an incredibly interesting and illuminating conversation about Batman's psychology. (Still not sure who Greenaway would work with. Maybe Huntress? It seems like a good fit...) J.J., of course, would be working with Commissioner Gordon. (Supposedly, the writers of "Criminal Minds" structured the entire thing as a metaphor for the Knights of the Round Table. I think that the Batman mythos are an even better fit, though.)

And naturally, they'd be up against a whole freaking Rogues Gallery of Batman's foes. (The comment that inspired it all came from my lovely wife, who pictured Gideon describing the Joker from 'The Dark Knight' as "an organized serial killer whose M.O. is pretending to be disorganized.") The Riddler, the Mad Hatter, Zsasz, Scarecrow...seriously, why is someone not making this right now?

Who am I kidding, I'm saying this on the Internet. I could probably get twenty thousand hits searching for the fanfiction alone.

Self-Taught Superheroes, Part Eight

(Apologies for the delay...last week just kind of disappeared on me. 57-hour, six-day workweeks will do that to you...)

In my dream, I felt just like I did when it all happened. The excitement, the exhilaration...fear kind of got mixed in there, too, because I knew it wasn't a game--the guys I was fighting had real guns and they were really trying to hurt me. Maybe even kill me. But the feeling that surged through me that first time was confidence. I was out there, fighting bad guys with my brand-new superpowers, and I realized right away that I had a knack for it. As soon as I put on that costume, I knew I could do this.

Of course, in my dream, the costume was Buffy the Vampire Slayer's cheerleading outfit from Sunnydale High. But in my dream, that made perfect sense.

I caught up with my very first bad guys outside of a chemical supply warehouse in downtown Cleveland. They weren't hard to spot, really; they'd landed in a giant airship that looked like what you might get if a vulture and a helicopter had ugly little babies, marched out, and shot the security guards with stun cannons. Half the group was holding the police at bay, and the other half was looting the warehouse. And me? I was running there at a good sixty mile-an-hour clip. (I think if I get another growth spurt, I might be able to do ninety, but right now my legs just aren't long enough.)

(I also think that I didn't really have blue sparks shooting out from under my feet whenever I took a turn, but I did in the dream. And it was awesome!)

I heard about it from my dad. Not that he had connections in the law enforcement community or anything; he just was on the phone to the warehouse placing an order when it all happened. I was in the lab for a check-up; he does monthly check-ups with me ever since he gave me the serum, about nine months ago. (It's weird, the way so many things started happening "about nine months ago"...that was when my dad cracked the cure for my chronic fatigue syndrome, that was when Captain Light made his first appearance, that was when Shining Dragon Fist left her monastery...I'm not a big believer in "fate" or anything, but nine months ago was like a sort of starter's gun to the new crazy world we live in.)

Oh, and nine months ago was when Lord Raptor's men began stealing stuff. Big, bold, crazy robberies, done from VTOL airships in a pattern that nobody seemed to be able to spot. They must have been around before then, of course; you don't assemble that kind of manpower and equipment and a gigantic hidden fortress from which you plan to hold the world's capitals hostage all overnight. (Ooh, spoilers!) But nine months ago was when they went public.

And eight months ago, they robbed a warehouse in Cleveland and I heard my dad talking about it on the phone, telling his friends to stay hidden and let the bad guys take whatever they wanted. And I thought about my costume, hidden in my room, and about the news stories I'd been reading about the mystery flying man in Chicago who fought crime...and I knew what I was going to do. I ran back home, changed into costume, and sprinted for the warehouse.

Along the way, I stopped for a few minutes at the local library to learn kung fu.

And when I got to the warehouse, I put it into practice. It was incredible. The bad guys looked like they were moving in slow motion. I could actually see the energy blasts coming out of the cannon, and I could even dodge them. I hit one guy with a sweep kick, popped back up while he was still mid-fall, and elbowed him in the chest before he hit the ground. Their body armor stopped some of it, of course, but I was actually kicking butt! Me, a sixteen year-old girl who used to have a permanent excuse letter from gym class, beating up genuine evil mercenaries with guns!

Liam Neeson didn't really tell me what a good job I was doing, though. That was just in the dream again. (It was Liam Neeson from 'Batman Begins', by the way, not Liam Neeson from 'Phantom Menace' or Liam Neeson from 'Krull' or Liam Neeson from 'Darkman'. Although weirdly enough, later in the dream it was Liam Neeson from 'Clash of the Titans'.)

The problem was, there were a lot of them and they'd already gotten most of what they were after by the time I got there. Their leader--he had red shoulderpads--gave the order to evacuate, and a few guys stayed behind to keep me busy while their ship took off. I kind of made the guys regret their career choice, though.

In real life, lots more stuff happened after that. But in the dream, it only took about five minutes before I fought Lord Raptor's men again...

TO BE CONTINUED...

Self-Taught Superheroes, Part Seven

Things got a little bit crazy about then.

No, not crazy. The other thing. Crazier.

Because when the blue-skinned girl did something that I think you'd have to be a telepath to understand, it wasn't just Captain Light that got back up. It was everyone. She undid whatever Mister Meme did to their minds, and she healed their physical injuries, and she even untied them telekinetically. And suddenly it wasn't a handful of desperate superheroes against a horde of supervillains, it was our team against their team. And we have a big team.

You do not know "crazy" until you've been in a really big full-scale super-on-super melee. You're switching off opponents every few seconds because one of their guys comes at you from behind while you're fighting another one of their guys and just when you're starting to have trouble fighting two enemies at a time, then one of your teammates breaks free of their fight and knocks one of your opponent halfway across the room, where they promptly get up and just start whaling on whoever happens to be closest. And then you put your guy down and look around for someone to fight just in time to see some guy that you thought your best friend knocked out getting up for more.

And everyone's going nuts with their powers. I'm just fast and agile, but Stormcrow was literally the eye of a hurricane. An actual hurricane in the middle of our conference room. And while our conference room is big, a hurricane makes it seem a lot smaller. Freezing rain was pouring onto every flat surface, people were slipping and sliding, lightning bolts were zapping out all over the place--it was a lot more comfortable for us than for the bad guys, because Stormcrow has really good control of her powers, but I was still soaked to the skin for the second time today.

And vines were tangling around supervillains and smacking them into walls, and Neutrino Man had caused some sort of a minor runaway nuclear reaction in the corner that was flash-boiling the freezing rain into radioactive steam that was choking a bunch of bad guys (he swears blind that it's quick-dissipating and has no long-term side effects. This. Worries. Me.) And laser blasts flew through the air and projectile darts launched at people and got swept up in the hurricane and wound up hitting entirely other people and anyone who wasn't otherwise occupied was kicking or punching or stabbing or hovering in the middle of the room thinking really hard...

And in the center of it all, Regent and Captain Light were duking it out. Regent launched a punch that would have knocked my head clean off its shoulders and halfway down the hall, and Captain Light didn't even flinch. The impact sounded like another thunderclap in the din, but Captain Light just smiled.

Then he punched back. The whole room lit up with a blinding flash as Captain Light's energy field interacted with Regent's force field in a way that neither one of them expected. Regent went backwards into the wall hard enough to embed itself in it, and Captain Light...didn't move. But his whole costume was covered in soot and it smoldered in places until the rain put it out.

"Enough of this," Regent said. He pried himself out of the wall and touched his left wrist with his right. A door opened in the air. "You have forced my hand further, Captain. When next we meet, I will have to take stronger measures to carve this cancerous notion out of the world I am destined to rule."

Captain Light started towards him, but Silver Rage blocked his path. The statue's grip prevented him from flying further. "Destiny is just what we make it," he said, fighting to free himself in time to stop Regent's escape. "You might be powerful, but that doesn't make you better than anybody else."

Regent chuckled. It was a soft sound, but it somehow carried over the wall of noise. "You don't know anything, do you? I am Regent, one of the Lost Monarchs of the Shadow Histories, and I will reclaim what is mine. And next time, I will not be so merciful." And with that, he stepped through the door and vanished.

After that, it was just a matter of mop-up. A lot of mop-up, but mop-up nonetheless. We beat the bad guys that didn't make a run for it when they saw their leader vanish, we dumped them in the hands of local law enforcement, I had something like a gallon of Purplesaurus Rex Kool-Aid (ever since I got my powers, I have been absolutely addicted to sugary drinks. At least they're cheap.) And then I realized just how tired I was, and I practically collapsed onto my bed to sleep.

And I dreamed about how it all started...

TO BE CONTINUED...

Review: Soulless

I'm a little late to extol the virtues of "Soulless", by Gail Carriger, given that she's already got something like three sequels published and is almost finished with a five-volume cycle of novels about protagonist Alexia Tarabotti (called "The Parasol Protectorate")...but it's just so damn refreshing these days to read a sci-fi fantasy novel that doesn't make me want to break out the red pen and edit the book into something readable that I feel like I have to tell people about it. "Soulless" is genuinely fun, a charming and light-hearted read that will leave you wanting to read passages out loud to random passers-by, and it's also an inventive spin on the oh-look-it's-werewolves-and-vampires-again genre, this time with a steampunk twist. (Everyone always does werewolves and vampires. Someday, I will write my novel about the ancient and epic rivalry between mummies and Frankenstein's monsters.)

The novel focuses, unsurprisingly for something that bills itself as "An Alexia Tarabotti novel", on Alexia Tarabotti, an outspoken Victorian woman who was born without a soul. This doesn't seem to inconvenience her ethics, emotions, or principles, but it does mean that she involuntarily renders any vampire or werewolf that touches her back into mortal form for as long as she holds onto them. This makes her a "person of interest" to the werewolves and vampires of London, who are entirely too civilized to eliminate her as a threat to their very existences, but definitely sensible enough to want to keep an eye on her. As such, she finds herself embroiled in intrigue, as well as in a romance with the Alpha of the London werewolf pack.

This romance is actually one of the best parts of the novel. It's charming in that "Jane Austen's 'Emma'" sort of way, but Gail Carriger is the kind of writer who very proudly and openly acknowledges that romance generally leads to sex. The characters in this novel are grown-ups, they have naughty bits, and they enjoy using them. I am a big fan of sex-positive attitudes in literature, I always feel like there are far too many writers who disdain talking about what their characters do in the bedroom (because who could possibly be interested in that?) and so a writer who not only writes sex scenes, but does them extremely well, is a rarity to be treasured.

Apart from that, though, the novel has plenty of humor, an interesting plot that draws you on, a lead character who is sensible and funny and independent, a guest appearance by Queen Victoria, and almost enough dirigibles. (According to the interview with the author at the end, the regrettable lack of actual dirigible travel will be rectified in the sequels.) I'd say more, but the horrid thing about good reviews is that you don't want to reveal too much. With a bad review, you want to explain every grim detail to warn the reader away, but a book like "Soulless" begs to be experienced rather than explained. So go read it. You'll enjoy it immensely.

Self-Taught Superheroes, Part Six

The blue girl looked around. The room was filled with madmen, monsters, killer robots, living statues...an entire team of supervillains, assembled by the arch-nemesis we didn't even know we had, Regent. Us heroes? Most of us were down on the ground, tied up and unconscious to prevent them from killing themselves. The survivors were bruised, bloody, and about as beaten as we could get without being actually beaten. But for a moment, all of it paused as we waited in stunned silence for her to explain her sudden appearance.

"Wait, don't tell me," she said. "I have a test on this next week..."

Yeah. That didn't exactly break the stunned silence.

"Okay," she continued, "the guy in purple and gold is Regent, that's obvious. The girl on one knee next to him is, um...Hummingbird, and the robot in the corner...is that the Doomsday Clock? Shoot, I can't remember now. I think the girl with the knives is Stabbily Ever After, but I don't know for sure because duh, you can't draw her picture, and they're fighting, um...Feeral? No, wait, Saavij."

She continued pointing at us, one by one. "And that's Captain Light on the floor and Gunmetal Grey standing over him and Silver Rage with the axe next to him and, and, um...no, wait, don't tell me...oh, it's right on the tip of my tongue...Bloodcalled! Wow. I've never seen a real vampire, not since they all went to the Black Nebula in 2754. I thought she'd be paler. And--"

Regent interrupted. "A time traveler," he said. "Interesting." He gestured towards the fox-woman fighting John Q. Public. "Vulpine, subdue her. Not too much damage, please. She has valuable intelligence for us." The beast pulled away from John, her teeth scraping grooves into his baseball bat as she lunged backwards, then she turned and leapt for the blue girl...

And gently glided to a halt in mid-air. "Oh, come on," the blue girl said, as Vulpine flailed helplessly in a vain attempt to gain momentum. "I'm flunking history, not telekinetics. I thought you were supposed to be some kind of master strategist or something?"

Regent nodded his head graciously. "Part of a master strategy involves gaining intelligence through the effective use of feints and gambits. For example, I know that you are overconfident, not easily vulnerable to physical force...and thus I change my tactics. Meme?" He gestured to the teleporter. "Share your understanding with her."

I raced across the room, hoping to knock Mister Meme out before he could work his crazy death-wish mojo on our only chance for surviving all this (slim as it was...) But the cyborg woman dashed away from John Q. Public just as fast, dropping into a fighting stance right in front of me. "I want you to be aware that I'm not happy about this," she said, her words spilling out too fast for anyone but me to follow. "I view the state as nothing more than a tool of oppression against the masses, and Regent is really just another dictator. But he's a dictator who planted a small bomb next to my aorta, and there's really only so much you can do to bring about a new age of enlightenment and a freedom from the tyranny of government when you have a smoldering crater where your heart should be."

I launched a feint at her midsection in Serpent Style kung fu, then shifted stances and styles at the same time to aim a kick at her face in a Tae Kwon Do style. (I make up for my lack of depth in any one style by knowing a lot of them. It's kind of what happens when you have five minutes to kill, a stack of books on martial arts, and a reading speed that gets measured in pages per second.) I was gratified to see her head snap back with a sharp grunt of pain, but she wasn't down for the count. And I knew I probably had less than a second of real time before Meme did his thing.

The cyborg slashed at me with her knuckle claws, and I barely managed to avoid them. I'd never seen anyone as fast as her except me, and it was a close second. She launched a flurry of darts from a wrist-launcher, and I had to fling myself to the floor as they passed overhead to embed themselves harmlessly (I hoped) into Zombie Samurai. I got back up, but I could tell it was already too late. Meme's eyes had locked with the blue girl's...

And she laughed. "Oh, puh-lease!" she said. "Amateur hour is officially freaking over, pal. I'm already taking college credits in telepathy; did you really think a vat-grown one-trick pony like this was going to do anything?" She held up a finger, and Mister Meme slumped to the ground, unconscious. "He's all thud and blunder, no subtlety. Doesn't even know how to stop a simple Circadian reset."

She turned, glaring at Regent. "Honestly, if I hadn't also aced my 'Ethical Uses of Unusual Abilities' course, I'd peel you out of that armor and give you a good spanking. As it is, I'll settle for earning extra credit towards my major." She closed her eyes, and waves of invisible energy poured off of her like a heat haze.

Regent reached down and ripped a hunk out of the floor, hefting it with both hands. His earlier sang froid was clearly gone. "I don't know what you think you're doing," he said, "but I have no further patience for it. I'll--"

"You'll put that thing down," Captain Light said, slowly rising to his feet. His fists crackled with unearthly energies. "I know it's a cliche, but why don't you pick on someone your own size?"

TO BE CONTINUED...

How To Make Twilight Awesome

I watched the Rifftrax of 'Twilight' last night, and while I could review the film itself, I think I know my reading audience well enough to be reasonably sure that you've all formed your opinions of the film/book/franchise already, and they're not good. (The only thing I think is directly worth mentioning is the lighting in the film. They chose a tonal palette of muted, wintery blue and green lighting that made the whole thing even more of an ordeal than it would have been already. I felt like I was watching the world's first movie shot entirely underwater.) But it did occur to me that the movie could actually have been very intense and intelligent if they'd made one small change...

It would have been actually pretty decent if Bella hadn't loved Edward.

I mean, I'm not telling anyone anything they don't already know when I say that Edward comes off as a creepy, domineering, borderline abusive stalker. He threatens her, he breaks into her room, he veers between wildly overprotective and actually endangering, he constantly talks about how he loves her so much that he wants to kill her...it's a non-stop Disturbing Behavior Festival, and you spend the whole movie wishing Bella would come to her senses and get a restraining order.

But what if that's exactly what she did? What if she really did recognize that Edward was downright dangerous, that his obsessive attraction to her was a threat to her life and safety, and that he really was a bloodthirsty monster whose tenuous self-control was the only thing that stood between her and a brutal death with an eternal unlife hungering for the blood of the living if she was "lucky"? What if, on realizing it, she then realized that there wasn't a whole hell of a lot she could do because getting someone involved was just signing their death warrant, and her only hope involved establishing an emotional connection with the Cullen family so they saw her as more than just a meal? You've already got the tension of "abusive boyfriend and girl who knows that nobody can help her", might as well make deliberate use of it instead of fighting it for your entire franchise.

A four-book series about a teenage girl trying desperately to stay on the good side of a group of barely-sane vampires, knowing that there's no hope for her if they take a mind to kill her, but needing to use them to keep her away from the even crazier vampires because apparently her super-power is being yummy? That might be readable.

If, y'know, someone else wrote it.

Self-Taught Superheroes, Part Five

"It was Captain Light that forced my hand," Regent said, swatting John Q. Public halfway across the room with a casually dismissive gesture. He got back up--John had a knack for rolling with punches, and an absolute refusal to give up--but he was wobbly. A bipedal vulpine creature with red fur loped across the room in a single vicious lunge to take advantage of his momentary weakness.

"Before Captain Light, the heroes were merely...firefighters," he continued. "You ran around, you stopped villains where they arose and made threats of themselves, and you never thought that there might be someone who planned instead of simply rampaging." I raced in and aimed a rapid-fire punch at his mid-section, but my fist skidded off of an invisible energy field and slid off to the side, its momentum harmlessly dissipated.

In my peripheral vision, I saw Saavij backed into a corner by a humanoid robot wielding twin khopeshes. (I played lots of D&D, okay? I can tell you the names of lots of different medieval weapons.) Her long swords clashed in a blur against its wickedly-hooked ones, but reinforcements were already coming to the robot's aid. "But Captain Light...he had a vision. An idea. Under Captain Light, you became a movement. And movements are dangerous things."

"A movement, an idea...these spread from person to person. They unite them under a banner. Inevitably, you would learn of my existence, and you would oppose me. And this I could not bear." Goth Grrl's shadow had already enveloped her, transforming her body into a monstrous creature of living shadow, but she was duking it out with a raven-haired woman with glowing red eyes who was flinging around shadow bolts of her own. And an androgynous woman in a tuxedo who was flinging multi-colored blasts of burning smoke, and an armored man wielding a sword of pure flame...yeah, we were outnumbered pretty badly. At least two to one, now that most of our team was unconscious and suicidal.

"It has been said, of course, that you cannot kill an idea." As he spoke, Regent was punching back at me. I dodged--I was still a lot faster than him--but his misses shattered concrete where they landed. He only had to get lucky once. "The people who say that lack ambition and planning, though. The trick in killing an idea is catching it before it has time to breed."

Shining Dragon Fist's hands glowed bright with her inner qi, but the woman she fought had fists that seemed to absorb that light. The eyes that woman had...I couldn't let myself get distracted, but I'd seen eyes like that before. They were like Zombie Samurai's eyes. Dead eyes. "And so I planned," Regent said, drawing my attention back to the fight. "I knew that I was dealing with heroes, and heroes have weaknesses. Loyalty, integrity, decency...these are levers, for a man who knows how to move them."

Zombie Samurai was advancing on a ten-year old girl, his sword drawn. This would have bothered me a lot more if the little girl hadn't been holding a sophisticated rifle, taking chunks out of his dead flesh with each shot. One of them ricocheted off his steel-reinforced skull with a loud 'clang', and he staggered...but kept going. That was, until a squat, toad-like humanoid of indeterminate gender tackled him into the wall.

"And so I created a threat." Regent's fist whizzed past me, so hard I felt the breeze of its passage. "One that you would have to battle, because it was evil. One that attacked your friends, so that you would have to help them. One that stirred the anger and hatred you try so hard to resist, causing you to react without thinking. 'Mister Meme' was my Trojan Horse, softening you up for the kill."

Gunmetal Grey's steel fists clashed against an axe blade as he dueled a silver statue whose eyes blazed with an inhuman fury. His perpetually-morphing metal skin healed each nick and cut, but I could tell that it happened slower each time. "And now we move into endgame. You were already defeated before I even entered the field of battle, and your every action merely postpones the inevitable. Should you yield and swear fealty, even at this late hour, you will find me merciful...but I cannot allow you to oppose me."

I tried to focus on my own battle, as I kicked and thrust and swung punch after useless, ineffectual punch against the force field, but I couldn't ignore the others. Saavij was now matching her two swords against four enemy blades, desperately whirling them to block the twin daggers of another little girl. This one had a cold, terrifying smile and the gleam of madness in her eyes. John Q. Public had his bat shoved into the jaws of the fox-woman, which left him open to punch after spike-knuckled punch from a cyborg woman with a mohawk. Her fists were coming away bloody now, but he refused to cry out. All around me, everyone was fighting their hardest...and they were losing. We were losing--I caught a glancing blow to my shoulder that spun me around so hard I tumbled to the ground.

"Yield or die," Regent said. He'd never even raised his voice. "You are fighting a general who has won a thousand battles before your grandfathers were born. This moment was destined to happen. I have planned for every eventuality. Your only choice is whether to suffer in futility, or bow to a superior...force...?"

His voice trailed off as he heard the growing hum from the center of the room. The battles slowed, then stopped as we all looked up towards the wind that came from nowhere and went to nowhere. We all watched as the light grew from a glimmer so faint it was almost imaginary to an almost blinding radiance.

And then it faded, leaving a woman floating in the center of the room. Her skin was a rich, royal blue, contrasting vividly with her blonde hair. She wore a dress made out of some kind of slick plastic, and there was some kind of strange device on her wrist. She looked at us with a faintly confused smile on her face.

"Hi," she said. "I'm here to watch the first battle between Captain Light and Regent." She looked around at the semi-conscious heroes, the desperate grimaces of pain, the horde of villains. "Um...am I late?"

TO BE CONTINUED...

Self-Taught Superheroes, Part Four

It's not easy, carrying a body.

It's even harder when the other person, the one who's holding them under the arms, is taller than you are by a good foot. My arms were aching from the effort of keeping the feet properly elevated. I was determined not to show the strain, though. We were two people on a mission. (Well, peopleish. I've got bird DNA, and Zombie Samurai's dead and still walking, but I think we technically qualify. Nobody knows the rules anymore. Not when we've got electric cat-women on our team.) Our team was depending on us. I just hoped I hadn't screwed everything up too bad.

I should probably clarify, the body we were carrying out wasn't dead. It was Mister Meme--I know, you probably guessed that one--and he was "just" unconscious. But I was still worried, because one of the things I've learned about being a superhero is that it's a lot harder to knock a person out than it looks on television. I've punched bad guys nine, ten times, as hard as I can, and all I've got for my troubles is a really pissed-off bad guy who's spitting teeth. And I'm not proud of it, but I've sent some guys to the hospital when I was just trying to subdue them. Mister Meme was unconscious. That could mean concussion, skull fractures, maybe never waking up. We couldn't afford that.

That was what was going through my head. On the surface, I was trying to remain calm and collected. I had to. I'd told Zombie Samurai that all this was part of my plan. "We need to get him back to our headquarters," I'd said, "and we can't afford to risk moving him through the city with his powers. Every human being is a potential hostage. We get him back to base fully neutralized, we take stock of the situation, and we do whatever we have to in order to make him fix our friends."

That was what I told him. But he looked at me with those eyes...dead eyes. Killer's eyes. And I knew he knew. Just as sure as I knew, looking at him, that he'd used that sword when he was a living man to end someone's life, I could tell that he knew that when I came into that room, when I hit a helpless man over and over and over, each blow rocking him back faster than he could possibly recoil...I wasn't trying to knock him out so we could carry him back to base. For a few seconds, before I got control of my anger, I was just lashing out at the person who hurt my friends. For a few seconds--and a few seconds, to me, feels like a few minutes--all I wanted to do was kill someone.

And I could tell that Zombie Samurai understood. He didn't say anything, though. Maybe things like that, you don't have to talk about.

We got him to our transport flyer and made it back to base in record time. (I don't know whether I inherited some sort of intuitive flying skills from the bird DNA, or if the flyers were just designed to be really user-friendly so that henchmen could pilot them, but I was great with those things.) My stomach was clenched up in knots; we didn't know just what to expect when we got there, but we knew it would be bad.

The bad news was, only five of them were upright. The good news was, the rest of them were trussed up and semi-conscious. I have never felt more grateful to see my friends beaten up and bound with electrical cord than at that moment. "What happened while we were gone?" I asked Goth Grrl. "How come you're not like...the rest of them?"

Goth Grrl looked down at me. She looks creepy when she's staring at you; it's the black eyes. Black-on-black-on-black, no pupils or irises. They stand out even more against the ultra-pale skin. "I share my head with a ghost and a primal darkness spirit. It gives you a different perspective on death."

I nodded. "And the others?"

Gunmetal Grey cocked 'his' head. I could hear the servos whirring under the synthetic skin. "It appears I have no analogue for 'death' in my database. The concepts Gaian Champion was talking about did not translate."

John Q. Public had heavy bags under his eyes, like he was wearing the weight of the world on his shoulders, but he gripped his baseball bat tightly. "Just too stubborn to die, I guess. Same as the Fist, over there."

Shu bowed deep and low. "It is a question of being centered within the universe," she said. "The wheel of karma turns, and it will continue to turn after this body is passed on to its next life. I tried to explain it to the others, but..." she shrugged. "It took me my entire life to achieve the humble understanding I now possess."

I looked over at Saavij. She had found a hunk of meat somewhere in the stores and was gnawing on it. "Kra pochitila mar ka sangiri!" she shouted, pulling into a defensive crouch to protect her prize. "Fo-od! Go-od!"

"Right. Got it." We'd been working with Saavij, but she still had a vocabulary of about fifty words of English. Metaphysical concepts probably didn't get through to her. "Okay, let's start waking this guy up and explaining why it's in his best interests to undo his messes." If we can, I added mentally. His head was lolling in a way I didn't like.

It was a few very tense minutes before Mister Meme opened his eyes. In that time, we tried cold water, light slaps to the face, shouting...but it wasn't until John reached over and pinched the guy's earlobe as hard as he could that Meme's eyelids shot open and he yelped loudly. "Wha-huh-wazza?" he mumbled.

I'd never seen anyone but me move as fast as Zombie Samurai drew his sword and darted in to put its edge right at Mister Meme's throat. "I will make this very simple, animal. This is an amazing world that I have been returned to, filled with wonders to stagger the imagination. I have no doubt that if I slit your throat, we will find someone else in this fantastic new universe to restore our teammates. So while I am willing to spare your life if you undo what you have done, do not mistake this for a bargaining chip. Not for a moment."

Meme's eyes narrowed. "What makes you think I can fix it?" he asked.

"Because you are not dead. If the idea kills anyone who understands it, you would not be able to pass it on. There must be a piece of information, something you withhold from your victims that prevents them from seeing the true solution."

Meme grinned again. God, I hated that grin. "You're pretty smart, dude, you know that? A lot smarter than me. Me, I'm dumb, I'm shallow, I'm amoral..."

I couldn't help it. I snarked, "And those are your good qualities?"

He looked over at me. A thin line of red appeared at his throat before Zombie Samurai could pull the sword back. "No...and that's just what I was made to be. I was grown two weeks ago, built out of flesh to become what I am. Obnoxious, stupid, dangerous, the kind of threat that you'd have to bring into your base to deal with...and a large-scale teleporter." His mouth opened, wider than any human mouth possibly could, and light burst forth from it. It flooded across the room in a stream, manifesting into over a dozen human forms. The one in the middle wore a suit of sleek golden armor, with a dark purple cloak draped over his shoulders.

"I am Regent," he said. "I understand that it will take you some time to understand how thoroughly you have been outmaneuvered, but you would be wise to kneel and show fealty now. The alternative is pain."

TO BE CONTINUED...

Breaking Political News!

Entire Republican Party Dies In Series Of Horrific Automobile Accidents

Deaths Occur Mere Hours After Obama's Traffic Safety Speech

Disassociated Press--A wave of tragedy struck the Republican Party today, as virtually all elected Republicans in Washington D.C. were struck by moving vehicles and died. The tragedy comes mere hours after a speech by President Barack Obama, in which he came out in favor of pedestrian safety. Said one horrified bystander, "It was the most bizarre thing I've ever seen; they were just hurling themselves in front of cars!"

Ironically, just hours before the hundreds of Congressmen perished, Barack Obama delivered an address to the nation in which he came out strongly against just such behavior. "I think that all Americans agree that the worst thing you can possibly do, for your own safety and that of motorists, is to go play in traffic. Flinging yourself in front of a motor vehicle with a carefree 'Wheeeee!' on your lips is dangerous, perhaps even suicidal, and I am strongly against it."

One driver said of the carnage, "I was just driving along, and I saw Eric Cantor, but I never expected him to just fling himself in front of my car! He even shouted 'Wheeeee!' while he did it!" The driver, like those of the other vehicles, will not be charged with vehicular homicide until the unusual occurrence can be fully investigated.

For now, the nation mourns, and prepares to hold special elections to replace the deceased Republicans. It is uncertain who will stand for those elections, however, as President Obama has just come out in favor of the two-party system.

Self-Taught Superheroes, Part Three

It had been fifteen minutes since we disconnected the IV, and his eyes were just now beginning to open. The police told us they hadn't taken him off the sedatives since we brought him in eight hours ago, since he was classified as "Dangerous - Potential for Non-Physical Threat." The cops are still learning how to handle supervillains, but they're learning fast.

I wasn't in the room with him; I got to stare at him through a two-way mirror, pacing back and forth fast enough to create a heavy breeze in the room. Neither was Josh; he was back at base, making sure that Susan's condition was stable and sending people out to deal with other little crises that popped up. The world doesn't stop just because one of your best friends gets sick. These days, it doesn't feel like it stops for anything.

Finally, the guy sat up and looked around. He tried to get out of bed, but the restraints stopped him cold. They were the kind we designed to handle bad guys with super-strength, since we weren't sure if he had any kind of telekinetic powers, but from the way he reacted, he wasn't any stronger than a normal person. He looked around wildly, saw my new partner, and glared at him.

"You might have some difficulties convincing me to commit suicide," Zombie Samurai said, staring back at him with milk-white eyes. "After all, I am already dead." I am supposed to be a hardened superhero, with almost nine months of experience under my belt, but I gotta tell you, that creeped me the heck out. I can only imagine what it did to the guy in the room with him.

Sure enough, he jerked around wildly in the restraints a little more, like a fox caught in a trap. Finally, he subsided and looked over at Zombie Samurai. "What do you want?" he asked.

"You know already," Zombie Samurai said. (Yeah, he's got a name. Don't care, he's a samurai who's also a zombie. I am calling them like I see them, here!) "You are an animal, with an animal's cunning. I can see it on your face; you intend to bargain your freedom for the life of your victim."

The guy smiled. I really wanted to punch that smile. "Yeah, pretty much," he said. "So are you the one who can make that decision, or do I need to talk to the chickie behind the glass?" He looked over at me. Not just at the mirror, or in my general direction, right at me. "You might as well come on out, little girl. I know you're in there."

I didn't come out. Because I'm not stupid. Instead, I pushed a button to talk to him through the intercom. "I think I'll stay in here," I said. "I'm not dead just yet, and I don't think I'd like it." I pressed the button again. "Um, no offense."

The guy pursed his lips like he'd just eaten a lemon. "I can't get into your head," he said reluctantly. "I can see it, but it's like a tape recorder moving at the wrong speed. Your leader picked the right freaks to talk to me, you and your freak buddy here."

"Then I guess you're out of luck," I responded. I realized I hadn't hit the button yet. "Then I guess you're out of luck," I repeated. "You can't do anything mental, you can't do anything physical, and your buddies are all in jail right with you. You want to make a deal, Mister...?"

"Meme," he said. "Mister Meme." He attempted a sort of vague half-bow, but the restraints kept him from doing too much. I seriously don't know how police deal with people like this every day without smacking them around. "And yes, I do. I want out. Out of the restraints, out of the crappy prison, and maybe a ticket to someplace nice with no extradition treaties. Haven't done my homework on those, though. Does Rio work? I think I'd like Rio."

"Cute." Great. Just what we needed. We were facing off against the Fighting LOLcat, and he was acting smug. "You want to make a deal, we'll bring Susan in and have you fix whatever it was you did to her and then we'll talk to the cops about maybe reducing your sentence for attempted murder."

He laughed. He actually laughed. Zombie Samurai hadn't even moved, just kept staring at him with those freaky dead eyes, but the guy was actually laughing. "You think this is still about 'Susan'?" I mentally winced--I hadn't meant to use her real name. He was a telepath, though; he probably knew already. "You're going to have to let me out soon, chickadee, I guarantee you that. You won't be able to fit them all in here for me to fix."

"What?" I asked. I knew what he meant already, but my mouth hadn't caught up with my mind.

"Memes are ideas that reproduce." He kept staring at me, that ugly little smile still on his face. "Susie girl has an idea in her head, a puzzle with 'Kill Yourself' as the only answer. And just like any good brainteaser, she's going to pass it on. You and your freak buddy are immune, but..." He chuckled. "In fact, now that I think about it? Let's extend that free pass to all my friends. Or otherwise you're going to go back home to a stack of corpses."

Zombie Samurai looked over at me. I was really glad for the two-way mirror, because I didn't have a clue what to do and it was written all over my face.

TO BE CONTINUED...

The Other Problem With "A Good Man Goes To War"

I watched "A Good Man Goes To War" again last week, and it still didn't sit as well with me as some of the other Moffat Who episodes have in the past. I'm aware that some of it is due to the episode's status as a "mid-season cliffhanger"--after all, it literally has to end with the Doctor at least somewhat outmaneuvered by his enemies, and with the bad guys having gained some form of triumph. I'm also aware that some of it is due to the fact that the conflict with said bad guys has to, by its very nature, see-saw wildly over the course of the episode. They must first be built up as a formidable threat so that we legitimately doubt the Doctor can defeat them; then they must be utterly defeated by the Doctor so that he can "rise higher than ever before"; then they have to pull some form of triumph from the jaws of defeat so that he can fall "so much further". (Neither of which is true, but given that it's River describing events there, I'll excuse her as having a certain degree of understandable bias.)

But what bugged me on rewatching it was River's speech to the Doctor at the end. You know, the one about "All this is to some extent your fault because you're so terrifying to those who would oppose you that they've gone to insane lengths to defeat you." Which is not too dissimilar to Davros' "You claim to be a non-violent explorer who doesn't like weapons, but you do seem to have a habit of getting other people to do your dirty work," but I could at least excuse that one away because it was freaking Davros talking, and Davros is such a vicious and amoral little twerp that hearing him chastise the Doctor's ethics was a little like getting a lecture on veganism from Adolf Hitler.

But River is supposed to be a viewpoint character. She's supposed to know more than the Doctor, for Pete's sake, due to the peculiarities of their temporal relationship to each other, and she's laying the blame for Melody's kidnapping at the Doctor's feet. Why? Because apparently he's become so good at fighting evil that bad guys are getting ruthless and desperate and over-the-top in their efforts to stop him. Because he actually frightens the wicked and the cruel the way they frighten everybody else.

Hey, you know what might be an option for them? NOT BEING SO F***ING EVIL. The Doctor doesn't just swoop down on random people off the street and mess up their lives. He went after these people because they were kidnappers who experimented on children, because they were murderers who mutilated their own troops and turned them into horrific mindless killing machines, because they were allied with a race of yes-I-will-say-it monsters whose goal is to destroy the universe and who actually succeeded once. River says these guys are scared of the Doctor? I wanted the Doctor to respond with, "Not scared enough. Because they haven't stopped."

But instead the Doctor changes the subject to realizing that he actually knows who River is (and he's excited by it, not squicked out, which is another thing wrong about the episode) and we're left with a vague sort of impression that maybe River's right. And she's not. The only people who are afraid of the Doctor are the bad guys. And honestly, if you hear that wheezing, groaning sound and worry that this time, he's come for you...then you must have done something pretty bad. People like that deserve a little fear, if only as punishment for all they inflict.

Self-Taught Superheroes, Part Two

(Apologies for the delay in posting--I literally didn't realize it was Thursday until I got up today. This week has been rocketing past! This one's also a little shorter than the last one. The last one was actually longer than I intended it to be, this is more in line with the "normal" length. Anyhow, less talk, more superheroes.)

I probably created a pretty major scene when I came into the room. I mean, soaking wet straight through my costume, mask off, little bits of half-digested tranquilizer in my hair...it's no wonder everyone stopped what they were doing and stared at me. "Hummingbird!" Josh cried out as he launched himself out of his chair. His eyes were wide with surprise. (Josh is the only one who calls everyone by their code names, all the time. I'm pretty good about it in public, everyone else is hit or miss. Except Adam, who's miss or miss.)

I waved back in the direction of the dorms. "SusanImeanGaianChampionshe'sinthebathroomshe tookawholebunchofpillsIthinktheguyshewasfightingdidsomethingtoherbrainshepukedmostofthem upallovermebutshe'sstilllookingprettywoozyandshe'stooheavyformetocarryweneedtogetherdown herefastsothatsomeonecangethersomemedicalattention!"

Everyone just kept staring at me for a second or two, until I realized I'd forgotten to talk at a normal speed. "Susan. Upstairs. Sick. Took some pills, lots of pills. I don't think she's dying, but she needs help." I forced each word out at a deliberate pace, putting what felt like an eternity between each word. Even then, I think it probably came out at a machine-gun pace.

But it was slow enough. Josh sprang into flight, cruising through the archway at about fifty miles an hour and already accelerating. (This is why we have no doors at the Academy.) While he was gone, the rest of us made a place for him to set her. Darcshield went to the supply room to get medicine (thankfully one of his four PhDs is in medicine), while I made a mental note that we needed to get our act together and turn some of the space around here into an infirmary. Assuming there wasn't one around here already--that was the problem with appropriating your headquarters from a criminal mastermind instead of building it yourself, nobody knew where the heck anything was.

Josh got back with Susan before Darcshield got back with meds, and he put her down on the floor and did his best to make her comfortable. It was scary seeing her like that--she looked so pale. Normally her skin was a dark green, a kind of a forest green color. But now she was only a shade darker than I was. (Yes, I do have skin the color of mint chocolate chip ice cream. That's just the way the ball bounces when your dad cures your congenital degenerative metabolic condition with an infusion of hummingbird DNA. I guess I'm lucky I didn't grow feathers.) Susan's eyes were open...ish, and she was kind of mumbling, but she was too weak to make any of it out.

It felt like forever before Darcshield got back, and I'm pretty sure that even went for the people who experienced time at normal speed. But he forced some gunk down her throat, and then he sat her up while she puked her guts out again all over the floor (sorry, I'm describing a lot of puking and not much in the way of exciting escapades of superheroism. We do those, too, I promise!) Then he poured some other gunk down her throat that she didn't puke up. "Activated charcoal," he said, in response to people's stares. "It'll bind up the drug, keep anything that's still in her stomach from being absorbed into the bloodstream. There's also a cathartic in there to get her to, um...expel it quicker."

"But when she wakes up," I said. "Will she try again?"

He paused for a long moment. "I don't know," he said at last. "This is physical medicine. We don't have any telepaths on the team, nobody who can tell what he did to her mind. The only person who knows what he did to her, and how to fix it if it needs fixing, is..."

"Him." Josh finished the thought. "The guy who did this to her." He frowned. "Looks like we need to go see a man in a cell."

TO BE CONTINUED...

Utterly Shameless Plug, 2011 Edition

Naturally, it goes almost without saying that in addition to my general pop-culture savviness, I also happen to be an erudite scholar of the first order. As such, it should surprise virtually nobody that I am featured in an academic publication of the highest order, from the textbook publishers at University of Ottawa Press.

Called "Braaaiiinnnsss! From Academics to Zombies", and edited by Robert Smith? (the mathematician who made a media splash a while back by modeling the spread of a zombie virus mathematically), this textbook features a variety of academic essays on the truest and most vital topic of the age: the zombie apocalypse. Mine is but one of a veritable cornucopia of scholarly discussions on the zombie problem that faces the world today, a humble contribution on the epidemiology of the zombie plague.

The book is available at a variety of outlets, such as:

http://www.press.uottawa.ca/book/braaaiiinnnsss

(or, for those of you who would prefer to read the essays in French, at: http://www.presses.uottawa.ca/livre/braaaiiinnnsss)

and of course, Amazon has it at:

http://www.amazon.com/Braaaiiinnnsss-Academics-Zombies-Robert-Smith/dp/0776607707

So remember, it's three a's, three i's, three n's, and three s's. "Braaaiiinnnsss"! Be very careful about asking for it by name.

Self-Taught Superheroes, Part One

The shower stall would probably have felt cramped even if I hadn't been sharing it with Susan. With both of us in there, I barely even had room to wriggle.

Okay. I should probably mention that we were both fully clothed. And the water was on. And it was really, really cold. And Susan was only about an eighth of the way awake, and getting less so every minute. Which was, natch, why she was under icy cold water with Yours Truly holding her upright and giving her a good slap every few seconds.

At least, that was the plan. It had a few flaws.

The first flaw was that, as I mentioned, there was not much room. If Susan tipped about six inches one way, she was leaning against the wall. If she tipped six inches the other, she was slumped onto me. That leads me naturally to mentioning the second flaw, which is that she's a good head and a half taller than me. And, um, she's kind of...I'll say "full-bodied", because you might get the wrong idea if I called her "stacked", seeing as how I'm already describing the two of us showering together. Suffice to say that I could barely see the face I was supposedly slapping because there was a massive wall of breast practically smothering me at about mouth level.

You could probably say that this wasn't turning out to be my favorite day ever.

It hadn't started that bad. Word was really starting to get out about the Academy, and we had three new recruits show up that day. I didn't get to see one of them, but Adam did; he said she was calling herself Skreem Queen, and he talked about her like he couldn't think about anything else. But that's Adam. I think he falls in love once a day and twice on Sundays. He'll move on to the next girl soon enough. (Or at least, he'll move on to hitting on the next girl soon enough. Guy's been shot down more often than Snoopy.)

The other one called himself Blue-Collar, and he seemed nice; he was an older guy, maybe in his forties, but he didn't act all overconfident and try to pretend he knew more than everybody just because he was older than most of us. He was polite, listened a lot, and he even told us his real name. There are people who have been here longer than I have that haven't given a real name yet.

The last one kind of...okay, not kind of. There's no real way you can "kind of" creep someone out when you're a walking corpse with a metal plate that covers half your face and a giant freaking katana you carry around with you everywhere. He gave his real name, but everyone started calling him "Zombie Samurai" within about thirty seconds. It's probably going to stick way better than his real name.

But yeah, three new people. Recruits, teammates, roommates, whatever you want to call them. That put us up to twenty-five. I started to feel like maybe we were hitting a critical mass of some sort, like maybe Josh's big plan was starting to work. (He just calls it The Plan. I swear, you can hear the capital letters.)

But then the Destructors hit Los Angeles. The first time we fought them, there was about four of them. This time, there was nine...and we were already split into three teams because the Grand Finale was laying waste to Seattle and we needed about seven people just for him, and the Shadow Confederacy had just broken through into our dimension right on top of the Mall of America. Twenty-five people didn't feel like nearly enough some days.

We did alright, though. A couple of the new Destructors were just wannabes, guys who heard about the "super-villain" craze and thought they could use their training or skills or whatever to hang with the gang and commit mayhem. One of them wasn't even wearing a cup. I have official news for you. When you're fighting someone who can hit you three hundred seventy-two times in the instant that you blink, you definitely want to be wearing a cup.

I thought it went well. Admittedly, I thought that the guy fighting Susan seemed to have a strange attitude and one of those creepy, weird auras that screamed, "I have mental powers!" But I also thought Susan wrapped him up in tangle vines and cut off his oxygen before he could do anything. (One of the weird things about actually having real-life superheroes is that you find out that all the powers that sounded really lame in the comics, like plant control, turn out to be terrifyingly bad-ass. "Weather control"? Nobody ever picked it in my gaming group, but Stormcrow has made grown men piss themselves. And she's younger than I am.)

But when we got back to the dorms, Susan started acting...funny. Just staring off into space, with this sad look on her face. Which wouldn't have seemed out of place on Stormcrow or Goth Grrl, but Susan was always cheerful. I started to worry about her, then. When she went into the bathroom and didn't come back out, I decided to go with my gut. (Rule Number Thirty-Two of the Academy, as contributed by John Q. Public: Always go with your gut.) I kicked open the door and went inside.

I found Susan slumped down on the floor with a bottle of sleeping pills next to her. Most of them were gone. It did not take a nuclear scientist to figure out where they went. (We actually have a nuclear scientist on the team. But I was not about to go ask him right then, obviously.) Whatever that guy was, he must have had some sort of...I dunno, psychic sting or something, some sort of delayed-effect blast that hit her hard and made her suicidal. Which meant that in the long term, we needed to figure out if it would wear off, or at least find someone who could reverse it. In the short term, though, I needed to keep Susan awake and alive.

It wasn't going well. I had managed to manhandle--okay, womanhandle--her under the shower head, and the cold water was going full blast. But I had no idea how to get her to puke up the pills, which was kind of important if she was going to live through this. Everyone else had gone downstairs to talk (Josh says it's a "debriefing". We all just say we're talking about how we can do better. Josh is awesome, but he takes himself a little too seriously sometimes.) The long and short of it was, I was soaked to the skin in icy water, my best friend on the team was barely conscious, and my original plan--shout myself hoarse and pray someone had super-senses they hadn't mentioned yet--was not working.

So I did the only thing I could think of. I punched her in the stomach.

Not hard, or anything. I mean, I'm only sixteen, even if I do hit a little harder than your average sixteen year old girl. When it comes to brutality, I'm a "quantity over quality" kind of kid. But it turned out that with a belly full of pills that Susan's body was already trying to get rid of, that was enough. She let fly with a big mouthful of ick, all over the top of my head.

It added a lot of extra suck to an already sucky day. But at least I was already in the shower.

TO BE CONTINUED...

What the Hey

I've been reading 'Chicks Dig Time Lords' and 'Whedonistas' lately, both from Mad Norwegian Press (what can I say, Mad Norwegian had an excellent presence at CONvergence last week)...and one of the things that it reminded me of is just how much fun it was to write fan-fiction. That sense of writing on the fly, with no grand plan, purely to see if people liked what you wrote...I realize I kind of missed that.

There's just one problem. I don't want to write other people's characters.

So starting on Monday, until I get sick of it or people beg me to stop, I'm going to try writing a fanfiction that doesn't use any established characters, set in my own universe. (Yes, I'm aware that this would just be "writing fiction". Hush. My brain seems to think there's a distinction, and if I can fool it into writing more, I'm going with it.) I'll write, and see what comes out. I know where I'm starting, at least...and you'll find out on Monday.

Review: My Sucky Teen Romance

Hey, everybody! I just got back from CONvergence, a local sci-fi con that we've made it a habit of going to the last few years. It was a nice experience--among other things, I bumped into an old friend I haven't seen for over a decade--and one of the coolest things was getting a chance to see Emily Hagins' new film, 'My Sucky Teen Romance'.

You might not have heard of Emily Hagins--I hadn't--but she's a film-maker from Austin, Texas who has made a couple of feature films prior to MSTR, 'Pathogen' and 'The Retelling'. This film, her third, focuses on a group of teens going to a local sci-fi con (clearly inspired by and shot at CONvergence) who run afoul of a vampire...one who's exploiting his resemblance to Robert Pattinson and the current 'Twilight' craze to get his fill of teenage blood. It's got quite a few sharp, clever lines, makes use of the con setting well to make it look like they spent a lot more money on it than they did, and is generally fun and witty.

Oh, and by the way, Emily Hagins is just now turning eighteen. Just in case you weren't impressed yet.

All eighteenage aside, this is a very good film. It's low-budget and that does sometimes show (but not as often as you might think), and the use of authentic teenagers as actors means there's some stiffness now and again (but in a film that's very much about teen awkwardness and romance between shy and introverted people, that's not always a drawback) and it does briefly get a little talky towards the end of the second act...but frankly, this is not a film you need to grade on a curve to say nice things about. There are a lot of people who are making movies on much bigger budgets with much more polished actors who have turned out a much less watchable product than 'My Sucky Teen Romance'. Put this in a room with 'Transformers: Dark of the Moon', and you'd be muting Optimus Prime after about five minutes.

I don't know where this film will go from here, theatrically or on DVD, but I'm definitely going to find out. There are a few fourteen year olds I know who would love to see it.