DeathGrasp watched the giant main viewscreen of the master control room of his floating fortess, his arms crossed, and his lips in a sneer.
On the viewer, the Legion Of Liberty were hurling their metahuman powers against the forcefield surrounding the fortress in vain.
DeathGrasp blinked his green luminesent eyes, shook his head, and clucked his tongue.
"Superheroes suck. They really do. They're for kids, and 30 year old virgins. Case closed",
DeathGrasp mumbled to himself as he walked back to his chair.
" Now, the military I can respect. But these jokers. Full of inner demons and freaky kinks. Wearing tights, or in the case of some of the chicks, latex. Come on, go to a bondage bar, go to Vegas, folks. But no, somehow they've decided they need to be a ruling class of self appointed supercops. Deviant nannies. It'd be depressing if it weren't so hilarious".
DeathGrasp sat down, and tapped some controls on the left arm rest.
His right hand was sheathed in a large thick heavy steel glove that noticably weighed him down on the right side, and made button pressing impossible.
Hence the buttons on his left side.
"Enough watching these assclowns bounce off the shield like moths off a lamp, time to swat 'em. Targeting Boson array".
As he uttered the last sentence, he simultaniously worked an inset roller ball in the arm rest that correspondingly worked a vecter-crosshairs on the main viewscreen.
DeathGrasp locked the crosshairs on Mr. Starshine, and....
It had started about 3 days ago.
DeathGrasp's floating fortress, which looked like a stack of flying saucers impaled on a dowel with an inverted toilet plunger head for a base, had slid out of the clouds, and positioned itself 20 miles off of America's eastern coastline.
It hung there for a good 2 hours to instill an air of queasiness, and then the party started.
Hembug had watched all this on his internal TV tuner.
DeathGrasp cut in on every channel.
His slicked back blonde hair, glowing green yes, and pointy bony face would forever be scorched into cultural memory.
"Hello? Mr. President? Can you hear me? I assume so, I gave ample time for all the jackass news stations to draw eyeballs to screens, so here I am. I'm DeathGrasp. Pleased to meet you. Well, the demands are simple. Cede soverignty of the United States to me. Period. All the other stuff, the money, the pussy, that'll come in due time once I own the place. So, hand it over. I assume you'll put up a fight about this. But, I beg you to spare the loss of lives and treasure. I assume that'll fall on deaf ears too, but I wanted it on record I gave you that chance. Well, that's it. Get back to me. Sending you my phone and e-mail over a scrambled channel. There you go. I'll give you some time to talk with your advisers and such. 5 hours should do it. Bubye".
The fighter jets were scrambled within the hour.
America watched in horror as they were evaporated into whisps of smoke by a sweeping energy beam in a staccato rythm like popcorn popping.
DeathGrasp cut in.
"See?", was all he said.
A second larger group of fighters was scrambled, and a group of carriers was mobilized.
They circled round towards the back, hoping to "sneak up on it", or come at it from a less defended angle.
This time, there were no news cameras allowed.
No matter, DeathGrasp cut in with footage from his own scanners.
Every plane was popcorned out of the air as well.
Then, the beam was brought down like a club, and sheared the 3 nearest carriers in two.
Then, it quartered, and eigthed them for overkill, for spite, and shock value.
DeathGrasp cut in in person again.
"Yeah, that's just gonna keep happening. I'd surrender if I were you".
The rest of the carriers retreated.
2 days later, the president had authorized the use of nuclear force.
An ICBM missle was launched towards DeathGrasp's fortress.
DeathGrasp reclined in his chair, smirked, and let it get close to let the home viewing audience build up suspenseful hope.
Then, he triggered a wide spread of bosons from the main guns, causing the radioactive material in the missle to decay into lead, and raised the sheild.
After the conventional blast cleared, he cut in over the TV channels again.
"Okay, now you've irritated me. I'm going to have to spank you for that one.
Hmmm,....you know, I bet a lot of people would miss Disney World..".
It was then that the Legion arrived.
The shield would hold.
DeathGrasp turned out the lights and went to grab some much needed zs.
He'd handle the Legion tommorrow if they were still there.
Vee-Dubyah had seen enough.
Screw the Legion, he was going to help.
He fired up his engine and took off.
He maxed the speedometer at 300mph, and took off with the gyro-lift.
Still not fast enough.
He pushed the needle past the speedometer, past the radio, past the glove compartment, somewhere onto the passenger door.
His body panels began to warp. He willed them to hold together, and molded to fit the wind tunneling.
Soon, he began to see DeathGrasp's fortress on the horizon. He pushed the needle past the passenger door, all the way to the middle of the rear bench seat.
The paint on his hood began to blush red, and beads of oily sweat began to form from the strain.
Vee-Dubyah rammed into DeathGrasp's shield at aproximately mach 20.
He flattened like a penny on a railroad track.
The sad Vee-Dubyah pancake flittered towards the ocean like a leaf.
It all happened so fast, no one in the Legion even noticed.
Harry awoke screaming "No!! Not yet!! Don't go!!".
Then, he paused a moment, and said "...oh yeah!!", and jumped out of bed to look for something to write on.
10 minutes later, he had doodled a rough schematic of the doohickey that his daughter had shown him in the dream.
Vee-Dubyah floated deep in the ocean, no sense of up or down, pain being numbed by the cold, and slowly, weakly, reconsituting himself.
After all, with no organs, or nerves, or really any rational scientific apparatis to justify his lifehood, really what he was was an energy field of will surrounding this hunk of metal, and as such, no bodily harm could really "kill", him, so, not limited by lethality of of even catastrophic injuries, he could keep willing, and willing, until his "body", repaired itself.
Harry held the completed thingamawhatsis in his hand.
He'd busted into an abandoned Toys R Us, and scavenged the necessary parts.
It was a confusing distorted shape, based on hyperspatial geometry, made from bent shelf pegs, and strewn and tied together with christmas tree lights, and powered by a 9-volt battery.
"Here goes", he whispered.
He fired it up, and vanished in a ripple of sickly orange light.
Deathgrasp awoke, freshened up, and strolled back into the control room.
He looked up at the giant main viewscreen. The Legion was still at it.
Vee-Dubyah reconstituted himself enough that he vaguley resembled a Volkswagon, and could get the gyro-lift working again, and then let himself float like a balloon out of the water.
DeathGrasp locked the crosshairs on Mr. Starshine, and....
....Harry materialized behind him with a ripple of sickly orange light, and dropped the thingamawhatsis shaking his hands and shouting "Hot!! Hot! Shityeow!!".
DeathGrasp swiveled his chair around to face him with an annoyed expression.
Harry affected a karate pose he'd seen in a Bruce Lee movie.
DeathGrasp squinted, and then snapped back in recognition.
"Harry Hombeck??", he asked.
Harry blinked rapidly in confusion and said "...Hembock, actually..do I..?", he probed.
"I've studied you, you're the other one who was exposed to the Derkonite!".
Harry popped out of his pose, and stared blankly.
"Pardon?".
"The Der...oh, right, the green meteor! I call it Derkonite! My powers come from it too, but in my case, it absorbed my flesh, instead of absorbing into it, here..it's easier to just show you".
DeathGrasp stood up from his seat, and removed the heavy metal glove from his right hand with the unsnapping of a couple elaborate clasps.
Hary's eyes bugged as the hand slid from it's containment.
It was skeletal, green and transluscent like molded plastic lit from within by tiny bulbs, and a faint green aura hung around it, like a bank card hologram, and when Harry looked at it just right, he could see that hologram was of the flesh and muscle of the hand.
Like it was either phased into another dimension, or that it had disintegrated, and left this hologram impression in the air around the bones.
DeathGrasp held it up, and flexed the fingers.
"Freaky, huh?".
Harry glared agape for a few seconds, and said "...and the meteor did this?".
"Yep, ain't it something? Doesn't hurt either, you'd think it would. Anycrap, the stuff ate up and replaced my hand, seeped into my bloodstream, and did this to my eyes", and with that, he pointed to them routine-12 style with his flesh hand "and it...told me things, helped me build this place".
Harry grimaced in skeptical incredulity "why you telling me all this?".
"Don't you see? You're like me! We're the same! The Derkonite chose us! Of all people who should understand, I thought it'd be you. You can help me! ".
"Do what? Blow up innocent people? Um...no thanks, I think I'll just kick your ass and bring you in to the proper authorities".
DeathGrasp smirked, chuckled, and shook his head "proper authorities...can you hear yourself? Has society been so good to you? Has the world been so kind to you? You hate this decaying society as much as I do! I've seen you on the news, I've read your interviews. You want this hatefull world to be at an end as much as I do. Proper authorities? It's a contradiction in terms! Look at the country you're defending! They threw a NUKE at me! If that had gone off, radioactivity would've been in the ocean. PROPER authorities? The Legion Of Liberty perhaps? A bunch of hateful fratboys jacked up with powers they don't deserve? Please, Harry, you're on MY side whether you know it or not. And as for innocents, I've not killed a single one".
Harry went to say something, but took too long thinking of it.
"Look, you think once I bring the U.S. government to it's knees, I'm just going to sit on a throne, and twirl my mustache? I have a plan. One that works, and everyone will have a place in it. I'm not some cheesey comic book supervillain, I'm here to save this troubled world. Look".
DeathGrasp pulled a remote from his belt, and pulled up a world map display on the main viewscreen.
Harry's mind clouded as DeathGrasp furiously and lengthily described his master plan.
Something about Isreal, something about getting America off oil dependence with Derkonite reactors, and derkonite tipped and powered drills tapping geothermal lava flows, something about China, something about using Iran as a beachhead into the middle east, a lot about worldwide socialism, which stuck out in Harry's mind, because he kept prefacing it with "and there's that dirty 'S' word again", followed by an idiot grin.
A lot of it flew over Harry's head, but by the overall gist he could gather, it actually seemed plausible.
Whole thing tumbled together neatly like a puzzle.
But, there was one little problem that needed addressing....
"...I've got to think about this..", Harry said as he sat down in DeathGrasp's chair winded by it all.
"So you agree with me? It's a good plan, isn't it? I mean look..", he sped up the animation of the geopolitical forces flowing over the map like weather, and finally snapping together into a coherant mechanically running system that would bring universal prosperity to all, and abolish all war. As the animation whizzed along, DeathGrasp waved his arms like a conductor as if his movements were pulling it together.
"...and click! It comes together. No more imperialist U.S. incursions, no more goddamned bubba mentality in the world, religion abolished, fossil fuels exterminated, heaven on earth".
Harry sat like Rodin's Thinker "yeah, yeah, I get it, no more assholism, and oatmeal in every bowl...".
Harry stood back up "yeah, sounds great. Sign me up".
DeathGrasp punched the air and shouted "yes!! Ohh yes! You will NOT regret this! Oh man, we're going to make such an awsome new world together. My genius, your invincibility, we'll be unstoppable".
DeathGrasp put his glove back on, and shook Harry's hand with the now shielded skele-hand.
"Great, great, so...can you tell me more about the Derkonite?", Harry inquired.
"Oh man, yeah! A big chunk of it powers the place, wait'll you see!".
DeathGrasp took him to an elevator, and they went down for a long time.
Several hundred floors.
And all the way, DeathGrasp rambled about totalitarian capitalists this, and plutocratic sonsabitches that, and punctuated each spittle laced paragraph by hitting his flesh hand into his metal glove.
Harry tried lightening the atmosphere with an occasional "Yeah", "uh huh", "wow, y'don't say", or when feeling particularly bold "boy, you really believe in that stuff, doncha?", accompanied with an enigmatic smirk.
Finally, they reached the reactor room.
There it was. The Derkonite.
A 20 foot tall column of it.
Green and angry, just like in his nightmares.
"...and you say you think it came from an alien ship?", Harry asked, sounding almost bored.
DeathGrasp stared into it's glow patterns with a hypnotic awe.
"Of course! Where else?".
"Well, it's a theory anyway", Harry remarked casually, and tossed something over the rail.
DeathGrasp snapped to attention and wailed "what did you just DO?!?!?!".
"You'll see", Harry said with a smirk, and bolted back into the elevator.
Harry's portable matter transmitter impacted at the bottom of the crystal, absorbed a massive power boost, and beamed the bottom half of it away in a massive flare of Derkonite tinged greenish orange.
The column hung there for a split second after the beaming like Wile E. Coyote realizing he was in midair, and then plopped 10 feet with an ugly shattering crash.
And then, things started exploding.
DeathGrasp shrieked like a child, and shook his fists in the air.
Meanwhile, Harry was back up in the control room looking for some sort of escape pod, or a map to a shuttle hanger, or...something.
The moment the the Derkonite crashed, the main power systems failed, and the moment they did, the shields dropped, and the moment the shields dropped, The Legion Of Liberty came in the for the kill.
Mr. Starshine hit the main support strut with a full volley of solar pulses, while The Swirley formed inverted water vortices like liquid drills that rammed the station again and again, while Ms. Electrode charged those vortices with lightning adding to the havoc.
Onboard the fortress, secondary power had maintained lighting, computers, elevators, and the main gravity lift, and some moderate enertial stabilization, but despite that, Harry was still earning his sealegs from the buffeting outside.
"Goddamned Legion, leave it to them to shoot first and ask questions later. How do they know there's no hostages aboard, much less me? Dicks", he thought to himself, and punctuated with a groan.
Out in Earth orbit range, the bottom half of the Derkonite crystal materialized, and then immediately fell into re-entry.
Vee-Dubya finished resolidifying with one final dent pop, and watched the fireworks show being put on by the Legion.
Harry suddenly felt a blinding wave of agony and nausia that hurled him to the floor.
After a few moments, his mind and vision cleared, and he looked upward and saw..eyes clearing finally...DeathGrasp.
His glove was off, and his skele-hand was gnarled into a tight fist, and he immediately realized he'd been punched in the side by it.
"That sickness you're feeling? I just turned your liver into jerky. My hand can kill ANYTHING, even YOU!", DeathGrasp snarled.
Harry sensed he might actually be right, his healing ability was taking slower than usual to take care of this, by the time he could crawl to his feet, the weak, feverish, dirty-blooded feeling still hadn't gone away. He had gotten used to even absurd injuries dissolving away by now.
This one was putting up a fight, as if an evil living thing were inside him, fighting the force that had been protecting him the last year or so.
Then he realized, that was essentially what was happening.
It didn't take an Einstein to realize this was not good.
Harry feigned feeling okay, stood tall, smirked, and said "that the best you got? Try it now that I'm ready for ya, pussy".
DeathGrasp ran at him growling and trailing a strand of saliva.
Harry didn't flinch.
He'd seen worse than this punk.
Right off early in his career too.
It had been about five or six villains after The Black Trident, and after failing to be killed by any of them, he was once again feeling sorry for himself.
He drowned his sorrows in some household cleaners, and after his system inevitably shrugged them off, he wept himself to sleep.
Four hours later, he awoke with a start from a very strange dream.
He was driving through his neighborhood, his wife was there in the passenger's seat, and she was eerily quiet, except for telling him when to take a turn.
Gradually, she guided him to a creepy backwoods part of town, and bid him to pull into the long dirt driveway of this property with a creepy shack on it.
Then, she said "remember the way you came", and "when you wake up, check the news".
And then he woke up, shaken, flushed, and with a cold queasy feeling.
Mindlessly, he went into the living room, and fired up the TV.
Right there, as the picture tube heated up, was the news.
And there it was, a missing girl, a missing girl who reminded him of his daughter.
Who was last seen in the neighborhood in his dream.
The queasy feeling got geometricly worse from there on.
Waldo Berch undid his fly and dropped his pants, exposing his pale pimply ass, and hairy thighs.
Sauntering slinkily over to the stereo, he fired up the German techno CD on the stereo.
It was dancin' time.
Greta Anderson whimpered fearfully through the duct tape.
Harry turned another familiar corner, and was met again by more familiar landmarks and houses he had never seen outside of the dream.
As with all the other times, he kept mumbling "thisiscrazythisiscrazytrhisiscrazy..", while trying to contain the shivers up his arms by grasping the steering wheel tighter.
Waldo dropped and kicked aside his bikini briefs.
Now Greta could be treated to yet more undulating flesh as he got into his dance.
Harry stood on foot, having parked a few yards down the street to keep from being heard, and stared up the driveway, a chill in his soul.
After a couple minutes hesitation, he finally said "fuck it", and held the image of his daughter in his head to pump himself up.
As the song faded away to it's final conclusion, Waldo started inching toward Greta with a meaningful expression.
She closed her tear soaked eyes tight and sniffled as Waldo ran his penis scented hand along her cheek and whispered "shhhhh".
Just then, Waldo thought he heard something.
The sound of footfalls pounding very hard and fast, and getting closer.
Greta's eyes opened at the instinctual sensing of his hesitation.
They widened with hope as he turned away from her.
The footfalls sounded like they were coming up towards the house, closer, closer,...up to the house...RIGHT up to the house without slowing down, and then...
Harry exploded through the living room window, glass tearing through the flesh on his hands, and the parts of his face and neck that merely holding his arms in front of his eyes and mouth couldn't protect.
He slammed full force into something heavy, but with a soft give to it that it took 2 whole seconds to ascertain was a person.
Harry and the unknown person fell together, and Harry's relatively light weight came down full force mostly on his bony knees and elbows.
In particular, he felt something fleshy under his right knee that resisted, and then gave way with a bursting sensation.
It was Waldo's penis.
A long continuous blood curdling enraged shriek filled the shack.
Harry rapidly assembled where he was, and what was going on, and climbed off of Waldo with an "eeew!", when he saw where his knee had landed and then a sympathetic "eeeeeWW!!", when he'd seen he'd crushed Waldo's prick.
He surveyed Waldo, and noted all the glass cuts and contusions.
"Good", he mentally noted as his own wounds vanished.
Then, finally, in the corner of the room on a mattress on the floor, he saw Greta.
With Waldo still rolling on the floor shrieking and bawling, Harry went out in the kitchen, checked the drunk drawer, and found the big scissors.
Everyone had big scissors.
Harry came back, and started cutting the tape off Greta's hands, feet, and mouth.
Just when he'd snipped enough she could peel herelf off the rest of the way, his back and right lung exploded with a heavy impact, and then a fireworks burst of agony.
Waldo had dragged himself to his feet, and come at him with a butcher knife, which was now protruding from just underneath his shoulder blade.
Harry coughed up a mouthful of blood, and croaked "get the fuck out...RUN!".
Waldo tackled him to the floor and twisted the knife sideways with a crunch of bone, and then his lower extremities became numb and non-responsive.
Waldo climbed up his back, and hissed some spittle punctuated lunacy into his ear.
Harry became faintly aware his pants were being pulled down.
His gut turned to lead.
Just then, he heard a scream of rage and a repeated metal clanging, and Waldo was off of him.
He rolled over by shifting his weight by nudging his shoulders, and saw Greta hitting Waldo in the head with a toaster, he blocked the fourth strike, and punched her full force into the kitchen.
Finally, his stubborn nervous system started sending him data to and from his legs, and he climbed slowly to his feet, like in one of those frustrating nightmares where the air dampens movement like water.
He reached around to his back, and pulled the knife out, this also took a time delayed eternity, as Waldo began kicking Greta.
As the knife sucked out of the hole, all sensation in his body kicked back in, and he bolted toward Waldo with the knife,...and tripped over his pulled down pants.
Waldo turned and saw, and tackled toward him again.
Harry held out the knife, and Waldo ran into it with his belly.
He bolted back screaming like a woman, and then realized it had mostly sunk into fat, and pulled it back out with a growl of rage, and came at Harry again.
Harry had gotten his pants back up, and stood his ground.
Waldo proceeded to slash at him as if he were a blender on frappe.
Harry held up his hands and bore a flurry of undescribable pain as blood and fingers flew like cocktail shrimp and sauce at a foodfight at a catered party.
Finally, on one of the strokes, the knife got stuck in the carpal bones of Harry's left mangled stump, and this bought Harry a split second to counter attack.
He jumped backward, kicked back off of the couch against the back wall, and catapulted at Waldo sending him back toward the kitchen counter, where slipping on his own soggy bikini underpants, his head slammed against the corner of the counter, cracking his skull like an egg, and making him plop to the floor like a sack of potatoes.
He gave a few momentary spasms, and then finally stopped.
Harry however, had kept his prayer fueled focus on watching his hands knit, and sprout new finger-buds.
After it became clear the madness had past, and his fingers were going to fully restore, he sat down on the couch in shock and wept a bit.
After awhile of crying into his now fully restored hands, he looked up, and saw Greta, bleeding, contused, swollen, and bearing a sarcastic "my hero", expression on her face.
Harry snapped out of it, and walked her outside, and bid her to sit out on the porch while he called the police.
After making the call, he explored the shack for other captives, only finding a slimy maggot ridden body in a trunk.
After that, he slammed Waldo's head against the counter until it splayed open.
"Y'know, just to be sure", he told himself.
Harry and Greta sat on the porch in awkward silence until the police arrived.
This experience encouraged Harry to doggedly improve with each successive mission.
This was not something anyone would want to repeat.
From that point on however, Harry became a media darling, especially when he started progressively taking villains out more efficiantly.
Eventually, this led to his line of cheapo action figures, and a never-published comic book by a hack cartoonist who got his origin story totally wrong.
Despite the perks and new revenue, Harry continued to be haunted by "the Mr. Berch incident".
He brutally taunted himself for every little bit of harm to innocent people he felt he could've prevented, and pushed himself even harder the next time.
But the public loved him.
The Legion Of Liberty, not so much.
Posted on Nov 1, 2006, 12:31 AM from IP address 76.178.216.28