I'm like *seventy-percent* sure I'm allowed to be doin' this.
by
[Knight Note: The day I can even *begin* to comprehend myself having my fabled sizable fanbase is the day Savio Vega claims the WWE World Heavyweight Championship.]
>/* Genesis "Land of Confusion" _Invisible Touch_ */
TBS <Reagan puppet>: Oh, goody two-shoes, beddy-bye boze time again!
>EYRIE PRODUCTIONS, UNLIMITED
MMK: *So* self-congratulatory, it's--
TIFF: Oh no you don't.
[A brief pause.]
MMK: But--
TIFF <firmly>: No!
[A brief pause.]
SANDARA: So self-congratulatory it's *what*?
MMK: It's... EYRIE~!
[TIFF sighs. There is a brief silence.]
SANDARA <suddenly>: Oh! Heh heh.
GAVOK <singing>: Masquerading as a man with a reason, my charade is the event of the season...
>Inspired by NEON GENESIS EVANGELION created by Hideaki Anno, Gainax,
>et al.
TIFF: That's good. This gives us a better shot at recognizing how anybody was supposed to be characterized.
>Most characters created by Hideaki Anno and Yoshiyuki Sadamoto
>except
>
>DJ Croft created by Benjamin D. Hutchins
TBS: Through the exigency of boiling down a litre jug of Satan's spunk.
>Jon Ellison created by Larry Mann
>and
>Lara Croft created by Toby Gard
>
>Additional material and inspiration cadged from TOMB RAIDER by Core
>Design, Ltd.,
TIFF: So there's gonna be block-pushing, switch-flipping, and Lara swan-diving onto broken glass about fifty times in a row?
SANDARA: I don't think that's how you play Tomb Raider.
TIFF: It's how *I* play Tomb Raider.
WAND: Somewhere, Alan Quartermain and Indiana Jones are crying into their beers.
> X-COM: UFO DEFENSE and sequels from MPS Labs (whoever
>owns them nowadays), THE X-FILES created by Chris Carter, and
>2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY by Arthur C. Clarke
SANDARA: And the cognitive dissonance? Why, that's public domain!
>Written by Benjamin D. Hutchins and Larry Mann
GAVOK <singing>: He's a real... a Real Mann's Mann!
> Aided and abetted by the Eyrie Productions, Unlimited crew
WAND: Or, as William Gaines would rightfully put it, the Usual Gang of Idiots.
> and special-guest-for-life Phil Moyer
TIFF: They've had Phil chained up in the basement since 1986.
>(c) 1997 Eyrie Productions, Unlimited
GAVOK <Cracker Jack>: Unlimited sounds better than Limited. It makes us sound more powerful.
>SATURDAY
>APRIL 1, 2000
MMK <narrating>: The Y2K bug hits four months late! Surprise!
TBS: GOODNIGHT everybody!
WAND: You knock that shit off.
MMK, TBS <simultaneously>: Sorry.
>Had there been any observers on the surface of the Moon, they
>would have been able to see the flash at the Earth's South Pole.
SANDARA: Minutes later they would have seen him in Brazil. That guy can *run*.
> At that distance there would have been no sound,
TBS: ...because if there *was*, all involved would have had much bigger problems.
> and the observers might have wondered what was going on down there.
WAND <Wisconsin accent>: Oh, those Earth boys are blowing up their axis again.
GAVOK <Wisconsin accent>: You hate to see that happen.
WAND <Wisconsin accent>: You do. You really do.
>Those unfortunate enough to be at surface level, in contrast,
>knew all too well what was going on - though they could not understand
>its cause.
TIFF: Lavos is *pissed*, y'all.
The science stations of Antarctica were all in ruins, torn
>apart by violent shockwaves and blasts of energy.
SANDARA: Second Impact. The greatest April Fool's joke... *ever*.
> Most of the people
>who were there had already been killed, and those few who were not
>dead knew that they would be soon.
GAVOK <Rohug>: And the living will envy the crackheads.
>Amid the howling winds, a lone figure stumbled haltingly
>across the snow.
WAND: And now, it's a cameo from the splash page of Uncanny X-Men #114!
[ALL applaud politely.]
> Unlike the others who were still left, he did not
> stare in paralyzed fear at the giant, howling monster which cast a
>sickly golden glow over everything within miles, a glow which grew
>brighter with each passing second.
MMK: Another Buddhist protesting nuclear proliferation, huh?
TBS: It's tragic, really.
> He did not have time to be afraid
>now; his time was running out, and there was something he had to do
>before he died.
GAVOK: For he, like so many others around the world, was a compulsive corpse-looter.
>He spied the object he had been searching for: an emergency
>survival capsule, designed to protect a single person from the most
>hostile of environments, capable in fact of withstanding the ravages
>of the most powerful nuclear and N2 munitions in existence.
SANDARA <Smithers>: Please, Mr. Burns, for the love of God, there are two seats!
WAND <Burns>: I like to put my feet up.
> And now, the man reflected ruefully, it would be put to the ultimate test.
TBS: A press slam and running body splash.
[GAVOK pounds his chest and snorts.]
>Carefully shifting the precious cargo he carried in his arms, he
>reached down and pulled the release handle on the pod's side.
MMK <man>: I... choose *you*... Snorlax...
[MMK goes through the motions of dying.]
>Instantly the dorsal hatch snapped open.
WAND: And then Snorlax, carrying out his master's final wishes, rolled over and took a fucking nap.
> Gingerly, he lowered his charge into the padded interior.
TIFF <Major Katsuragi>: I'm sorry, Mr. Davies. I'm afraid you're going to have to live.
>Sensing that she had been set down, the injured girl struggled
>to open her eyes.
GAVOK <girl>: Ow.
>Through a blurred haze of pain she looked up at the
>shadowed form of the man, silhouetted starkly by the golden light that
>grew still brighter behind him.
>"... Daddy?" she said weakly. And then the hatch snapped
>closed again, sealing tightly and leaving her in darkness, and there
>was only the muted sound of the winds, and the creature.
>The man looked silently down at the closed pod for a moment,
>and then fell to his knees, overwhelmed not by fear, but by sadness,
>an unbearable sorrow that he would never see his beautiful little girl
>grow to be a woman.
>"Misato..." he whispered as he fell against the pod, shielding
>it as best he could. "I'm sorry... "
WAND: You know, it never occurred to me before, but Misato and Superman have almost the same origin.
>Then, for him, everything went white, and the horrible wailing
>sound that had flooded Antarctica for hours ebbed away into an even
>more terrible silence.
SANDARA: Good. Australia was *this* close to calling the cops to shut them up.
>In the churning Antarctic waters, the survival pod floated,
>dented and battered but still in one piece.
TBS: It was promptly swallowed by a particularly hungry whale.
>The explosion had blown it into the air and catapulted it out to sea like a shell from a
>howitzer. It had sailed through the air for several kilometers before
>it came down again,
> landing in the warming waters with a terrific
>splash, and finally righting itself.
GAVOK: Marco!
MMK: Polo!
>Its sensors detecting that there was no longer any serious
>danger from the outside environment,
SANDARA <pod> Well, Antarctica just exploded... what the hell, let's go swimmin'!
> the pod consented to its
>occupant's request to open after it had stabilized. Its emergency
>beacon activated as it did so.
>Shakily, clutching the bleeding wound on her lower chest,
>fourteen-year-old Misato Katsuragi got to her feet.
SANDARA: Call her Ishmael.
> Struggling to
>avoid toppling out of the pod and into the churning ocean, she stared
>in mute shock at the epicenter of the explosion, now many miles away,
>trying vainly to comprehend what had just happened.
WAND <Bill Hicks>: A calm, peaceful serenity called Arizona Bay.
>From this vantage, it looked like two brilliant beams of
>golden light were lancing up into the sky, slicing through a hole in
>the dark clouds and disappearing above them.
TBS: And then the two-headed wolf pops its heads out and howls, and the party gets the hell back to Rockaxe.
>And through it all, the roaring of the winds, and the higher-pitched howling noise above them,
>continued.
GAVOK <Reagan puppet>: Wow! That's one heck of a nurse!
>Perhaps it was just as well that there were no observers in
>orbit to see the full extent of what had happened,
[...was Mir in orbit and manned in 2000, or what?]
> for they would
>surely have been terrified beyond capacity for rational thought.
TBS <narrating>: Well, I mean, except for the Silver Surfer. He did take a peek, right, but he just kind of rolled his eyes and flew off.
>The twin columns of light Misato could see spread out as they towered
>above the clouds, diverging and branching, and taking on the distinct
>shape of four giant wings.
GAVOK: It's a Squaresoft final boss, and it's pissed!
> Wings which stretched miles into space,
>eclipsed from any surface view by the massive glowing disk of red and
>yellow death which had engulfed Antarctica and spread out to touch the
>capes of the southern continents.
WAND: Hey, she found the Yashichi. Cool.
>It was almost as if a giant ethereal damselfly had lighted on
>the planet and created a huge tidal ripple in its wake.
SANDARA: As though a million strained metaphors cried out at once... and were suddenly silenced.
> Indeed, in a
>matter of minutes the effect of that ripple would begin to make itself
>known all over the planet.
GAVOK <ripple>: Hey! How you doin', I'm the ripple, just dropping by to say hi, I figure -- hi! How are you, I'm the ripple, new here, just thought I'd...
For mankind, nothing would ever be the
>same again.
>That went double for Misato Katsuragi.
TBS: Misato Katsuragi is *twice* the man anybody else is!
TIFF: I... what?
WAND <Misato>: Looks like I picked the wrong week to stop drinkin'.