🚀 go-pugleaf

           CRAPSHOOT & CO. #10: DOUBLE DIGITS AT LAST!
                        By Robotech_Master

Concerning Continuity:
    It doesn't really matter, as this storyline probably won't
cross over with anything, but this takes place maybe a couple
weeks or so before the Industrial Revolution.

                              -----

    "Excuse me," Chance ventured, "but who are you?"
    "You said that already," Zen Navigator told him.
    "Yes, but that was the end of the last installment," Chance
explained.  "I had to say it again now, to remind the readers of
where we left off."
    "Oh.  Well, carry on, then."
    The four unemployed people exchanged glances, then the orange
man stepped forward.  "I'm Claymation," he said.  "This is my
partner, Filmation."  The red-haired girl waved.  "The perky
intern--"
    "Ex-intern," the ex-intern corrected.
    "Sorry.  Ex-intern, is Kissy McCall, and this is Jimmy
Smathers."
    Jimmy looked up from his GameBoy.  "Hi."  He then looked back
at the Nintendo device and continued playing it.
    "You're superheroes?" Chance asked.
    "Well, no...actually, we're supervillains.  At least, Clay
and I are," Filmation said.  "Kissy and Jimmy are just supporting
characters."
    "But we're unemployed," Claymation added.  "We were in a
series called 'Dashing Superguy and his Pac-Shmoe Kirby' that
never made it past the pilot episode, and we've been sitting
around here for over a year and a half now waiting for work."
    "There was SUPPOSED to be another episode featuring
Relativity Woman, Dr. Toon, the Armadillo, and Bunny Wabbit.  It
might even have been our origin story!" Filmation complained.
"But the Author just gave up on it."
    "That's too bad," Chance commiserated.  "We've gone for long
stretches without a story, but not THAT long."
    "And YOU'RE on issue #10," Claymation said accusingly.  "Fil
and I got about ten PARAGRAPHS, then zip."
    Chance shrugged.  "Well, if we should happen to stumble upon
something approximating a plotline, you're welcome to come along.
We'll let our Author handle all the paperwork."
    "Hey, great!" Jimmy said.  "To be in a plotline again!
Wowee!  Maybe I'll even get a Super NES!"
    "How utterly thrilling," Kissy McCall muttered, looking
disdainfully at Jimmy.  She had to be in a plotline with THAT?
    "Say..." Zen wondered.  "Where exactly are Dashing Superguy
and Kirby?  Weren't they featured in that episode, too?"
    "Only in the first couple of paragraphs, and not by name,"
Filmation explained.  "I think that just counts as a reference,
not an actual appearance, so they didn't actually show up in the
story."
    "Um, whatever you say," Chance said doubtfully.
    "Or it could just be that the Author of this post thinks
they're too annoying and ridiculous to bother with," Kissy McCall
put in.  "Come to think of it, that may be why the original
series concept died in the first place."
    Just then, conversation was interrupted by the sound of
gunshots in the hall outside!  Chance and Zen looked at each
other, then dashed for the door.  Claymation and Filmation were
close behind.  The foursome got there just in time to see the
fedora'd individual from earlier that day rush by, followed by
his short, Asian companion.  The man was firing from a revolver,
and submachine gun fire was answering from the dark-suited men
dashing up the hall after him.
    "Automatic weapons versus a revolver?  I don't like those
odds," Chance remarked.  "Time to even them up a bit."
    "Allow me!"  Claymation dived between Zen and Chance, melting
into an orange blob before reforming as a knee-high orange brick
wall across the corridor.  All but two of the men tripped over
him before they could stop.  They hit the ground and their
submachine guns went flying.
    The other two screeched to a halt and brought up their
submachineguns.  As they started firing, Chance hit the ground,
but Filmation stepped forward.  Accompanied by sound effects that
sounded like they came right out of "Thundarr the Barbarian," she
threw up a cartoonish energy field that stopped the bullets, then
fired green energy blasts from her hands that caused the two
thugs to hit the ground, surrounded by a green cartoonish aura.
    Chance got up.  "Whew!"  He returned the .45 to its holster.
"Guess I didn't need this after all."
    The orange wall melted and resculped itself into Claymation's
normal shape.  "Who was that those guys were after?" he wondered.
    "I don't know...but I thought he looked familiar," Chance
said.
    "Shall we find out?" Filmation suggested.
    "Indubitably!  I shall lead the way!"  Zen Navigator dashed
off down the corridor...in precisely the opposite direction to
that taken by the man in the fedora.
    "This way," Chance said, pointing in the right direction.
"Just don't ask, okay?"  Claymation and Filmation shrugged, and
followed him.

    Sheri Brown and Sasha Borodurov exited from the Russian
Embassy with similar looks of disgust on their similar faces.
They'd been thwarted by bureaucracy--the ambassador was friendly
enough, but he simply couldn't believe that a division of the
Soviet Army could have been left out there in the middle of
nowhere, and was going to have to consult with Moscow about
it--which could take days, weeks, or even months.
    "Where to be the others?" Sasha wondered.
    "I think they said they were going to the 33rd floor," Sheri
replied.  "Let's see if we can find them."
    Once they arrived, the first thing they noticed was the
half-dozen or so dark suited men getting up and collecting their
submachine guns.  Sasha gasped, pulling out her Skorpion machine
pistol, but Sheri beat her to the punch, firing twin blasts of
bubble gum that entangled the first two gunmen, then pelting the
other four with double-fist-sized wads of gum.  By the time Sasha
was ready to shoot, the gunmen were no longer a threat.
    "Where are the others?" Sheri wondered.
    Sasha looked around.  "To be that way," she guessed.  "To
follow me!"
    "You bet!" Sheri summoned her "costume," letting the bubble
gum ooze out through her pores, and ran after her.

    Chance et al finally caught up with the man in the fedora and
his short Asian companion.  The man at first raised his revolver,
but lowered it when Chance said, "Hey, wait, we're friends!  We
took out those gunmen back there, and also zapped the station
wagon that was chasing you earlier.  Can we talk, here?"
    "Are you guys superheroes or something?" the man asked
suspiciously, noting the odd appearance of Claymation and
Filmation.
    "That's right," Chance said.  "I'm Chance aka Crapshoot,
they're Claymation and Filmation.  And you--Hey!  You're In--"
    "Don't say it!"  The man jumped forward and clapped a hand
over Chance's mouth before he could get out more than one
syllable.  "As long as my name isn't mentioned, my appearance in
this story is just a reference.  But if you out and out say that
I'm--who I am--it could be seen as a copyright violation."
    "But--you went by your real name back in the She-Devil
solo..." Chance said after the man took his hand away.
    "Times change, kid.  Just don't say my real name, whatever
you do."
    "Oh, I see.  It's just like not looking into the--"
    "Don't say that either!"
    "Oh, right, okay."  Chance thought for a moment.  "Well, we
HAVE to have SOMETHING to call you...can't keep on referring to
you as 'the man with the fedora.'  Hmm...I know!  We'll call you
North Dakota Smith!"
    "North Dakota Smith?"  The man looked doubtful.
    "Yeah.  'ND' for short.  How's that?"
    The man thought about it for a moment, then slowly grinned.
"I like the way you think, kid.  Okay.  North Dakota Smith it
is."
    "Okay, great.  Now, um, would you mind telling us why those
guys were after you?" Chance wondered.
    North Dakota Smith considered this.  "Well...I wouldn't
normally, but since it's necessary to the plot..."  He reached
into his leather jacket and brought out a velour case, opened it.
    Inside was a small object, about the size of a pea.  It was
white, oblong, and glowing slightly.  "What IS it?" Chance
gasped.
    "It looks just like a TicTac," Filmation observed.
"Peppermint."
    North Dakota Smith closed the case.  "After my last job,
delivering acetone to a place in Bob City, fell through, I found
out about this.  This little TicTac was created by a team of
scientists, using residue left over from when Trashman used the
Atomic Listergun to remove the Ill Dudes from Superguy's tomb."
    "You mean--" Filmation breathed.
    "--it's a thermonuclear TicTac?" Claymation finished.
    ND chuckled.  "Thermonuclear TicTac?  Good a name for it as
any, I suppose.  I was supposed to deliver this to an
archeological institute here in Seattle--in this building, in
fact--but when I got there, I found those guys--" he jerked his
thumb back in the direction from which they'd come "--had got
there already."
    "Who ARE those guys?" Chance asked, momentarily wondering
what an archeological institute would do with a thermonuclear
TicTac.
    "Some sort of neoNazi organization, I think," Smith said.
"They want this thing to power some new death weapon of theirs or
something.  And they won't stop until they get it."
    "I see..."  Chance thought for a moment.  An idea was
beginning to come to him.  "Here!"  He pulled a peppermint TicTac
package out of his pocket and shook out all the mints.  "Put the
thermonuclear TicTac in this, and put a regular TicTac in that
case.  Then you can give those guys the fake TicTac, and we can
keep this one safe!"
    North Dakota Smith looked at Chance, and considered this.
"You might just have something there, kid.  Okay, let's do it."
The change was made.  And, as it turned out, just in time...

    Zen Navigator looked around.  On his quest for the mysterious
fedoraed individual, he had somehow gotten separated from the
others, and furthermore, had wound up in the elevator again.
With no pressing demands on his time, he examined the control
panel.  "I wonder what would happen if I were to press the 'door
open' and 'door close' buttons at the same time?  Would the door
stay open or closed?"  He tried it.
    Strangely enough, something DID happen, but it did not
involve the doors.  A metal panel above the floor buttons slid
open, revealing a large, glowing, red button.  "This is curious."
Without the slightest hesitation, Zen pressed it.

    At this time, there are a few things about the Builtmore
Tower that should be revealed to you, the reader.  The Builtmore
Tower was the brainchild of an eccentric billionaire of the 1960s
and 70s, one James "Builtmore" Towers.  (He earned his nickname
through his habit of building more and more skyscrapers and other
high-rise projects than most other magnates of his day.)
    Towers believed that the human race would eventually destroy
itself on Earth--perhaps within the next few decades.  Now,
Builtmore liked the human race--without it, he could hardly have
gotten where he was, could he?  So, he resolved to save humanity.
    But how?  Other millionaires, of both his day and the distant
past, had done great humanitarian works, but they hadn't amounted
to very much.  So Towers took a more pragmatic view--in order for
the human race to continue to exist, a portion of it would have
to be removed from the planet to the safer regions of deep space.
    For a billionaire of Builtmore Towers's stature, gaining
access to even the most secret technology was relatively simple.
So was hiring the world's brightest scientists and engineers, and
secretly obtaining materials to build the world's largest
spaceship--and making sure that they all "forgot" about it
afterward.  Had he wished it, he could probably have built an
army strong enough to conquer the world.  But it was not
Builtmore's intent to create more of the destruction that he knew
would come inevitably.
    The project took several years to bring to a climax.  The
starship, Towers decided, would be located in Bellevue, near
Seattle.  Putting it closer to the equator might have been a
better choice, since that would have allowed the launching ship
to take greater advantage of the earth's rotation.  However,
Towers was confident in the ability of the starship's nuclear
engines to lift it clear from the earth, no matter what the
gravity.  He thought that Seattle would be a prime location in
terms of climate, geography, and demographics.  Besides, he was
quite fond of the many fine beers from the region's abundant
microbrewries.
    The starship would be disguised in almost all aspects as a
skyscraper that would, appropriately enough, bear his name.  This
skyscraper, Builtmore Towers, would be completely
self-sufficient, containing its own greenhouses, shopping
district, living quarters, offices, and anything else that
residents might need.  By the time the design was finished, there
would be little or no need for residents ever to leave its
confines.
    Because it was simpler that way, none of the Builtmores
Towers residents save him knew anything about the evacuation
plan.  Towers had carefully screened those seeking apartments,
selecting only those whom he felt best represented the wide
genetic diversity present in mankind.
    Astonishingly enough, few of the people who knew about the
Builtmore Towers project ever said anything about it.  Even the
project engineers received great amounts of money to keep
silent--who would have believed them anyway?  (However, it is
strongly suspected that Towers was, in fact, the inspiration for
the villain Hugo Drax, from the James Bond film MOONRAKER--one of
the engineers must have talked.)
    In 1982, James Towers died of a massive coronary.  The only
person close to him who knew everything about the Tower including
its launch sequence, his nephew Washington "Watch" Towers, was
living abroad in London.  Even though Builtmore had entrusted
Washington with the secret in the hope that he would carry on his
quest to safeguard at least part of humanity after he was gone,
Watch didn't want to leave London, being much happier spending
his uncle's inheritance.
    So the skyscraper starship waited for twelve years...


                   WHAT'S GOING TO HAPPEN NEXT?

            ISN'T THAT A BIT OF A HACKNEYED QUESTION?

           WHAT HAS ZEN NAVIGATOR GOTTEN HIMSELF INTO?

                 BUT ISN'T THAT KIND OF OBVIOUS?

 WILL THE AUTHOR BE ABLE TO CATCH UP WITH WHAT'S GOING ON IN TIME
     TO COMPLETE WHAT HE NEEDS TO GET DONE FOR THE INDUSTRIAL
                           REVOLUTION?

                         YOU'LL FIND OUT.


          SUPERGUY -- We're Not Your Father's Artichoke.