Breaking News (84 hits)
Category: UberMadness! EntryRating: 2 on 2 reviews (Rate this item) (V)
Submitted by Coyote (View user info) at 2006-10-08 22:55:35 EDT
This post was an official UberMadness! entry. Click here to view the original matchup.
There was mass hysteria again, upright and uptight citizens shooting each other in the face or fucking like dogs in the road while civilization lurched and staggered from catastrophe to catastrophe like the lead in an amateur production of "Richard III".
It was all mind-numbingly tedious to Mr. Galactic. If it wasn't a killer asteroid bearing down on Wichita Falls or a supervolcano in Birmingham, it was a hyper-contagious virus that made people's eyeballs blast off like little squishy bottle rockets, or a plague of psychotic vampire drag queens.
To be fair, the vampire drag queens weren't really a plague; it had later transpired that it had just been the Greenwich Village Halloween parade, but the principle was the same. Some breaking news would cut into his evening, usually just when he was beginning to make progress on the Sunday crossword puzzle, or when he'd finally managed to overcome the negative first impression his mild-mannered alter ego always left on women. Then his evening was effectively killed, the wire-rim geek glasses came off and the pyjamas went on, and he'd heroically zoom off to the rescue, frying the baddies with his Quasar Eyebeams™ or crushing them with a Supernova Sonic Shockwave™, or simply just beating the piss out of them with a handy tree. Afterwards he'd be expected to pose for the cameras, supply quotes both witty and wise, and give a full statement to the police, before heading back home to find that neither his date nor a seven letter word for "cod" were still on the tip of his tongue. "Breaking News" had become the bane of his existence.
In the beginning, it had been new and fun. Beating the piss out of people had been its own reward, and even when that paled a little there was still the pleasure of all the free stuff he collected from the grateful peons he'd saved. And the women, of course, as long as he could put up with the relentlessly tiresome pseudo-kinky requests that superhero fetishists always thought were so original.
Inevitably the thrill faded, to the point where he stomped through life in a constant state of low-level irritation. He could have flown, it would have been quicker and far more practical, but stomping was a lot more satisfying.
And so it was that when news of the Great Transgender Crimson Rutilated Flying Saucer Attack and Associated Universal Psychotic Episode of 2006 came spilling across the scrollbar of his television, Mr. Galactic flipped to the Golf Channel and watched Tiger Woods sink a 40-foot putt, with no real interest. His only reaction when Tiger's internal organs were boiled in situ by a single beam of the Crimson Rutilated Death Ray and came boiling out of every orifice in a ghastly torrent was to chuckle slightly and reach for his beer.
His phones were ringing off the hook, of course—even the unlisted land line—but the Death Ray had been scavenged from old microwave ovens, the Flying Saucers were cramped and smelled like wet dog, and the thought of going out there to do battle with the ruby slipper-shod, self-obsessed, catty Transgender Saucerlings again was enough to make him put a gun to his head and pull the trigger. He went into the bathroom to wash the powder burns off his face and comb the bullet fragments out of his hair, and when he got back, the phones had stopped ringing.
With a certain morbid curiosity, Mr. Galactic flipped back to a news network and was more or less cheered to see cameramen backing hurriedly away from their stories, reporters decapitated by rusty garden tools, and an honest-to-goodness rain of frogs in Amsterdam. The Dutch appeared to be taking it in stride; tens of thousands of twitching amphibians were being crushed into a lumpy paste by the wheels of bicycle commuters in full-body raingear.
Well, for once the world was going to weather this crisis without him. He watched Las Vegas nuked by the Campus Crusade for Christ, and chugged his last beer. He'd once foiled a plot by Dr. Electro to turn Lake Mead to acid and boil away the Hoover Dam, and still been taken to the cleaners at the Venetian's blackjack tables the next night; he was happy to see the place go.
The blockbuster headlines were coming faster than he could stand it now, and the novelty of sitting on his ass swigging beer where normally he'd be springing into action and saving the day was wearing thin... particularly since he was out of beer. Not only that, but the news anchors on about half the 397 channels he got were pleading for Mr. Galactic to rescue them, and it was threatening to kill his buzz.
He was damned if he was going to put on that fucking spandex monkeysuit costume just to snag some beer and a pack of smokes. It was only three blocks to the All-Nite Stop-N-Stab. If there was any trouble, the Somalian emigrant slushee-jockeys would be armed to the teeth.
Mr. Galactic actually caught himself giggling as he scooped up his keys from the little dish by the door and stepped out into the night. There was so much shit hitting the fan that there was every chance he'd have to use all of his powers just to get home alive, and here he was, leaving his crimson cape and codpiece hanging in their secret compartment in back of the linen closet.
He hadn't felt so alive in years. Even his brief stint as a psychotic supervillain hadn't made his heart pound like this. The prospect of possibly being caught in the act of crushing the life out of someone with a Supernova Shockwave™ and compromising his secret identity for once and for all, throwing everything away in a single magnesium flare of recklessness, was so intoxicating that he flirted with the idea of detonating the neighborhood just to see if he could get away with it.
He walked past a group of nuns kicking a biker to death and chuckled. So far so good. The cop feeding an alleycat into a wood chipper elicited a mild twinge of conscience, but nothing that could stand up to his need for a 40 oz. of Genny Cream Ale. When he was almost to the convenience store, and a horde of ravening priapic zombies had just chased a screaming sorority girl down a narrow alleyway, he made the mistake of looking up at the sky.
The warhead was spin-stabilized, and coming in so fast that there was absolutely no chance he could vaporize it at a harmless altitude with a surreptitious eyebeam. He could probably survive the blast; it couldn't be more than a megaton in total. However, there was the matter of the beer.
Giddy exhilaration turned into an icy lump in his gullet. Just his luck, there was a news crew trailing the zombie gang rape hoping for a lead story in the next cycle. Maybe they wouldn't notice. At that moment, Mr. Galactic would have traded anything just to have the life-crushing boredom of his old life back. He sprang into action, deflecting the inbound nuke to an isolated part of Western Australia; his superhuman muscles absorbed the terrible momentum of the killer projectile and twisted it away. Windows shattered with the force of the sonic boom the warhead trailed in its wake and the pavement split beneath his feet. He hoped those 40-oz. bottles were made of sturdy glass.
As the news crew stood speechless, cameras rolling, he suddenly knew what it must feel like to be caught masturbating in public. It was all over.
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Submitted by Alter (user info) at 2007-09-26 20:29:21 EDT (#)
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Submitted by kaos-king (user info) at 2007-06-04 23:23:13 EDT (#)
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