🚀 go-pugleaf

(continued from part two...)
                                   ***********

     The Superuser found a half dozen mages pinned down near the
Revolutionaries' firing range, unable to make any serious progress against the
rain of bullets pouring out of the armory.  It was heavily fortified and had
thus far resisted their magical attempts to pierce its walls.  The Superuser
spotted someone with a familiar brown head of hair and a flannel shirt
crouched down behind and overturned truck and angled towards him, ignoring the
bullets bouncing off his battlesuit's shields.
     "Hey!" said the mage with a start.
     "Easy, I'm on your side.  You're Thane, right? Nora's friend?"
     "Nora?"
     "Yeah, you know: Rainy Day Woman."
     "Her name is Nora?"
     "What, she didn't tell--? Shit, I don't believe what I just did.  She's
gonna kill me."
     "Relax: I won't tell her you let it slip."
     "Thanks.  What's the situation here?"
     "There's a couple dozen people in there, near as we can tell, and they've
got enough firepower to last for weeks.  We've been trying to knock them out
with a sleep spell, but it's difficult to get coordinated when there's people
shooting at you."
     "Say no more.  Well, I can pinpoint them with my sensors... But there's
nothing computerized in there that I can wheedle my way into and take
advantage of.  Looks like our best bet would be for you guys to cover me while
I hit 'em with some heavy stun blasts.  If I make a fast enough flyby, I
should be able to nail them before they have a chance to back away from the
windows.  What are you smiling for?
     "It's funny, in a way.  You know, even with all that technology, you
still have to resort to brute force."
     "Sometimes the least complicated methods work best.  Alright, look: as
soon as I'm airborne, I want you guys to hit them quickly with everything
you've got, then get down."
     "Sounds like a plan to me."
     "Then let's do it."
     The Superuser blasted into the air and shot out of view, building up
speed in preparation for his run.  The mages hammered the armory with
concussion blasts, lightning bolts and animated clumps of Earth for as long as
their strength held out.  As expected, this accomplished little other than to
draw even heavier fire.
     "Don't let up for a second, men!" cried the Sarge, "They're nothing but
weak-kneed pantywaists out there! Sooner or later they have to show
themselves, and when they do we'll blast them into little pieces."
     "Sarge, there's a metahuman bogey coming in from the east!"
     "Blast 'im!"
     "But he isn't a mage...!"
     "He's on their side! That makes him worse than a mage!  Open fire now!
That's an order!"
     The Sarge had just turned to reach down for a rocket launcher when the
Superuser's attack began.  The concussions rocked the entire building.
Windows exploded inwards and guns and gunners alike were tossed around like
toys.  The Sarge was blown off his feet and flung into a stack of Bob City
Ordinance and Ammunition ammo boxes (Best Bullets in Bob).  The Superuser spun
around and made a second pass, this time demolishing the front of the battered
armory and burying most of the Revolutionary soldiers under a liberal amount
of rubble.  A sensor sweep showed no fatalities.  Satisfied, he let his
momentum arc him away from the building and prepared to make one more pass to
be sure the gunmen were ready to be taken in to custody.
     Suddenly, and without warning, an errant radiation blast sliced into his
path.  Slamming on the brakes to avoid it threw him out of control, resulting
in a less than graceful collision with a guard tower.
     "Perfect," he groaned, picking himself up, "just perfect.  First I get
nailed by a hopped-up RF generator, then I have to face off against my own
girlfriend, then I blow Rainy Day Woman's secret identity, and now I get
taken down by friendly fire.  What else could go wrong today?"
     As if the Superuser's question had called down the wrath of the great
prophet Murphy himself, all of the battlesuit's systems froze and a knot of
garbled error messages cascaded onto the status display, accompanied by the
following ominous notice: "panic: core memory corrupted due to radiation
exposure -- rebooting."
     "Dohw!"
     The Sarge heard footsteps approaching and instinctively rolled silently
to his feet and unholstered his sidearm.  Using the dust to cover his
movements, he ducked behind a fallen equipment locker and crouched down
amongst a pile of supplies knocked loose from their shelves by the explosions.
Then he heard the voices; four, maybe five men, and one woman.  The enemy.
     "Thane, be careful."
     "Don't worry; Anna's cast a spell to stabilize the building long enough
for us to get everybody evacuated."
     "Why should we even bother? They wouldn't do the same for us."
     "Just shut up and start digging.  We don't have much time."
     The flannel-clad mage spotted an unconscious body buried under a layer of
concrete chunks and beer cans over by a fallen equipment locker and rushed to
help him.  The Sarge heard him approach and cocked the hammer on his .45,
swearing an oath that he wouldn't be taken alive.
     The Superuser managed to get his systems reinitialized just in time to
see the mages pulling the unconscious Revolutionaries from the debris on his
heat sensors.  The scanners pinpointed all of the warm bodies in the vicinity
and labeled them as friendlies or unfriendlies, even attaching names to heat
signatures that matched those stored in his database.  He saw Thane, and he
saw the body man he was trying to help.  He also saw a blip tagged as an
unfriendly getting ready to blow his head off.
     "Oh shit..."
     He was in the air and targeting the blip in seconds, but the blip with
Thane's name on it was in his line of fire.  The battlesuit's tactical
computer, in a thoroughly irritating and poorly timed demonstration of its
shortcomings, suggested waiting for the friendly blip to move out of the way
before taking a shot.
     Thane had just lifted a six-pack of Bob City Beer (Best Beer in Bob) off
the man's chest when he heard the equipment locker rattle.  He looked up and
saw the Sarge glaring down at him from behind the barrel of his .45.
     "Freak!" spat the Sarge, "That's what you are! A freak! I'll see you all
die, if I have to plug every last one of you myself!"
     Thane shut his eyes, hoping a useful spell would come to him at the last
second.  It occurred to him that he might be able to turn the gun into a water
pistol.  It further occurred to him that by the time he remembered how to do
that, he'd be dead.  Someone behind him screamed.  The Sarge's head snapped to
the side as a .38 came crashing down against his skull.  Thane opened his eyes
again and saw him keel over and kiss the floor, and another man dressed in a
black leather jacket stepped forward, holding a Gun.
     "You... you saved my life!" he gasped.
     "The beer!" hissed the Punk.
     "Wha..."
     "Gimme the beer!"
     Thane's brain suddenly reminded him that he was still holding the six-
pack and informed him that it might be a good idea to hand it over at this
juncture, which he did.  The Punk then vanished into the shadows just as the
Superuser came tearing into the scene.
     "What the Hell (Tm)...!" he exclaimed, looking down at the Sarge, "Man, I
thought you were a goner! I wanted to take a shot at this lunatic, but you
were in the way! What happened?"
     "Some guy with a gun saved me... in exchange for some beer."
     "Wow. That's really... Wait, what kind of gun was it?"
     "A .38, I think. Might have been a Saturday Night Special; I don't know
much about guns."
     "I don't believe it!" the Superuser gasped, "But it makes sense: Bob City
is his territory. He must have snuck in through a back entrance somehow. And I
missed him, dammit!"
     "What are you talking about?" asked one of the other mages as the
approached.
     "Don't you see? Thane here was just rescued by the Gun Avenger!"
     "No way," said Thane, awestruck.
     "Way, you lucky bastard! And he didn't even wait around for us to thank
him.  Now that's what I call a hero."

                                   ***********

     "BY THE TOWERING HEIGHTS OF THE NORTHERN ROCKIES, I SHALL SAVE YOU,
BENEDICT, MY LOYAL COMPANION!!"
     He charged like an antlered demon, dodging and twisting through the
missile-storm, lasers dancing and gleaming off his silver costume.  Heavy as
the fire was, it was nothing to one such as the Antlers of Steel.  Driven by
both the desire to rescue his faithful friend and a burning desire to seek
revenge upon those who had killed innocent mages, the Heroic Herbivore could
not be stopped my mere laser-fire.
     Never a particularly observant superhero, he completely failed to notice
the heavy beam weaponry atop the starship's fuselage when it spun to point in
his direction.  He also didn't notice the convenient holes already punched its
it's hull.  The enraged moose simply dove straight into the center of the ship,
impacting before Benedict could get a firm target lock.  Several meters worth
of armor plate barely slowed him down.
     "AND NOW, FOUL VILLAINS, TASTE THE WRATH OF......OOPS!!"
     Not only had the armored hull failed to slow him down, the two-hundred-odd
bulkheads he had gone through, plus the other side of the hull had also not
made much of a dent in his speed.  Finding himself hurtling over Bob City,
Space Moose screeched to a midair stop just barely too late to keep from
hitting the wall of Manchu Towers.  Embarrassed, the blushing bovinoid yanked
his antlers out of the wall of the building and spun around to fly back off
towards the distant starship.
     "I am glad that Benedict did not see me.  He always lectures me for hours
when I do that."

                                   ***********

     Radian heard the crack, rolling like thunder across the near-silent
battlefield.  Almost all motion had stopped while the two titans searched for
one another.
     "Hot damn," Radian said.  "There the bastard is," and with a blaze of
light, she lifted up and screamed towards the inexorable figure of Bulletproof.
A hard wedge of radiation formed around her hand ... she was going to do
Bulletproof, and she was going to do him up close and personal.
     Closer, closer, closing quickly, Bulletproof grew in her sight.  She
lifted her arm, and began to shout in triumph ... or Kyoko did, it was hard to
tell...when Bulletproof lifted his arm and smashed it into her side, sending
her skidding down, into the mire.  She felt ribs snap with the force of the
blow.  All light, all radiation faded away as she tried to regain her feet. The
injuries weren't fatal; they wouldn't even be around in the morning, but there,
then, they _hurt_.
     "Hi, there," said Bulletproof, lowering his arm and turning towards her. "I
suggest you freeze."
     "I'm ... not going to surrender, bastard. I know what you did to the last
guy who tried that."
     "I didn't ask you to surrender," rasped Bulletproof, and he raised his arm
again.  "I suggested you freeze."  Liquid fire erupted from Bulletproof's
forearm in a twenty-foot burst.  "And if you can't ... too bad."

23:6  Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I
will dwell in the house of the LORD for ever.

                                   ***********

     Aboard the cruiser:
     Benedict shook his eyestalk.  "Space Moose, you idiot.  When will you
learn to control your inertia!"
     The Dalek knew there was no stopping the Moronic Moose now.  There was no
time to spin the main guns around again, and point defense had proven to be
completely inadequate against the Heroic Herbivores indestructible hide.  He
would be back any moment...yes, there he was, flying back through the cloudy,
smoke-filled skies with an embarrassed look on his snout.
     Maybe there was another way.  The Awesome Force were competent superheros,
who could only be defeated by overwhelming them with massive firepower.  Space
Moose, on the other hand, was rather low on brains.  The Addled Antlered Idiot
had been known to mistake giant killer Venus Flytraps for salads, so anything
was possible...

                                   ***********

     Approaching slightly more slowly this time, Space Moose found and entered
through an awesometonium-torn hole in the side of the alien starship.  Inside,
he found the charred remains of three Daleks, their armored shells melted by
the flaming Dalekanium of the missile warheads pierced by the telephone-pole
sized spike.  The doorway leading to the rest of the ship had been sealed, and
was mostly wielded shut by the heat of the now-exhausted flames.  Standing tall
and proud, Space Moose thudded his antlers into the ceiling that was far too
sort for one of his Moosely Physique to stand up properly.
     "I MUST..." *THUNK* "Ow!  How come this never happens to Chewbacca the
Wookie?"
     And so, standing scrunched-over and squatting, the Antlers of Steel looked
down at the slagged saltshaker shapes before him and shuddered.
     "Dalek Warriors.  The most evil creation of that arch-fiend, Davros.  Long
have I feared the day that he and his evil minions would locate this peaceful
planet."
     He looked towards the door, where the lettering "2402" had been nearly but
not fully burned off.
     "It is as before, when Benedict and I commandeered Cruiser 2402 and turned
it against Davros' fleet.  Oh, how I wish that ship had survived our escape t
this Altverse, I am certain that Benedict would have repaired it to help defend
against this evil plot against Earth's mages."
     He shook his Moosely head, antlers scraping noisily on the ceiling.
     "But now is not the time for memories.  As before, a thousand Daleks may
lie beyond that door, ready to attack the moment I appear.  This time, I do not
have Benedict's knowledge of their ways to aid me.  I must fight this battle
alone, and pray that he has not been harmed."
     He looked out the gaping hole in the outer hull, where he could make out
the distant but recognizable shape of the Masked Bruce strafing a formation of
Daleks.
     "Benedict briefed me well before that assault, long ago, on this very
class of ship.  I know the interior schematics like the back of my hand."
     He paused to look over a schematic of a starship interior lightly etched
onto the back of his left front hoof.
     "Few heroes could withstand the firepower of the Dalek guards.  Fewer
still can move with the speed necessary to negotiate the endless corridors of
this vessel.  And none know the layout.  This is a job that can only be done my
me, and me alone.  THIS LOOKS LIKE A JOB FOR SPAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACE
MOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOSE!!!!!!!!!!!"
     Without further unnecessary pontification, Space Moose charged the interior
door, shattering it open.  As expected, the corridor beyond was filled with the
familiar, nightmareish shapes of his opponents, all screaming their battle cry.
     "EXTERMINATE!!  EXTERMINATE!!!!  EXTERMINATE!!!!!!"
     He tore into the alien monsters like a moose possessed.

                                   ***********

     "Holy shit." said Radian, as she pushed herself backwards from Bulletproof
and his flamethrower.
     "No Python references? Nothing about newts?" Bulletproof asked.  "How about
'Burn the witch?'"
     "What are you talking about? Why?"  If Bulletproof wanted to talk, Radian
was willing to let him, as the Kalapurnea inside her and her own muta-vampiric
nature combined to slowly heal her ribs.
     "I'm talking about fear.  Terror.  I want to scare every damn witch,
warlock and demonologist on this planet and I want them to _stay_ scared.  And
if I have to play the trigger-happy vigilante who'll kill anything that moves to
frighten them, then that's what I'll do.  I want anybody who even thinks about
taking advantage of power to remember you ... and what happened to you ... and
think twice.  I want every magic user who ever dreamed of world conquest, who
might otherwise think that it's possible to try it and get off scott free, to
know that there's someone who won't think highly of it.  I'm going to be the
boogeyman in magic's closet, and if you don't eat your peas, why, big bad
Bulletproof will get you."
     "Goodbye, Radian."

                                   ***********

     The Awesome Force One shook like a porn queen faking an orgasm. Damien
was thrown from the ladder and this time landed on his butt without breaking
anything else, thought the jolt hurt the injured parts like Hell (TM).
     "That was insane!" Chris yelled at Anne as he gave her a huge hug.
     "It worked." Anne's voice was now tired, and tears streamed down her
cheeks from the emotional drain and the pain.
     "But for how long?  The ship is coming around, once it's port guns are on
us, we'll be helpless."
     Anne stared out the window for a moment.  She looked at the smoking
control panel with it's broken lights and shattered guage covers.  She hobbled
quickly to one of the consoules and tapped a few buttons.  "The Quantum
Absurdity Beam," she said. "It's still on line."
     Chris smiled and helped her to the contraption at the back of the Brain.
She sat in the chair and put the heavily wired goggles onto her head and
slipped her hands into the control sleeves mounted on the chair's arms.
     They powered up, calculated mass, area, aburdity to rationality ratios,
range, and everthing else needed to fire a weapon of this complexity.
     "Ready," Anne finally said.
     "F-no! Wait!" Chris shouted and hit the emergency abort button.  "Look!"
     Anne slipped off the goggles and stared out the view port.  The alien
ship was distinctly moving away, albeit very slowly.  "Magnify," she said.
     Chris magnified the image.  At the aft, port quarter panel, a gaping hole
was visible.  It was no ordinary hole, though.  It was perfectly shaped like a
pair of moose antlers.
     "How odd," remarked Damien as the sand paper tongues of a score of cats
began caressing his wounds.
     More cats ran into the brain and leapt upon Anne, cleansing and healing
her injuries.
     She closed her eyes and concentrated on the sensation that was entering
through her wounds.  Suddenly she was shaken awake by the rememberance of the
battle that still raged beneath them.
     She walked back in the Quantum Absurdity Gun control chair and got in.
     "Open a channel to Andy Awesome," she said.  "Tell him the alien ship is
on the run and the Quantum Absurdity Beam is at his disposal."
     "The Hell(tm) with a channel," gasped Damien painfully.  "Put it on
the damn loudspeaker."
     "Aye Aye!" smiled Chris, switching on his microphone.

                                   ***********

     "IIIIIEEEEE!!!"  Dr. Odd Science yelped and pulled the M.E.C.H.A. jet
through a high-Gee roll to evade another shot from the cruiser's aft
turrets.  The alien ship seemed to be highly non-centralized- the three
batteries locked on him didn't even seem to notice when Awesome Force One
had caved in it's starboard side.
     Think.  He had to think- the Reflex Cannon had scored nearly a direct hit,
and the starship hadn't even slowed down.  His cannon couldn't shell out
nearly the damage that had been done by Awesome Force One's ramming attack,
which had damaged, but not felled the alien invader.  What could possibly
stop....?
     "THIS LOOKS LIKE A JOB FOR SPAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACE MOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOSE!!!!"
     "What the?"
     The M.E.C.H.A. jet tumbled out of control, caught in the insane hypersonic
cone left by the Antlered Arctic Avenger's passage.  He quickly
stabilized and twisted into another sharp bank in case the Dalek ship had
drawn a bead, but it did not fire- the starship had retargeted it's
weapons on the small, Moosely form streaking through the air towards it.
     Dr. Odd Science flipped a knob on his comm gear, trying to find the
common frequency used by Team M.E.C.H.A. in the past to communicate with
Space Moose.  "Turn back!  You'll never survive those guns!" he shouted, but
the airwaves near the cruiser were filled with static from the Dalek
jamming.  Realizing that now would be a most opportune moment, Odd took this
chance to retreat, pulling the M.E.C.H.A. jet into a sweeping bank to take it
out of the battle and give the autorepair systems a chance to work on it.  He
kept the camera monitors on, though.
     Looking at these, Dr. Science shook his head.  "Space Moose, you idiot.
You won't last thirty seconds outside that......hmmmm."
     Odd noted another tactic to remember when employing metahumans
(MetaMoose?) against more conventional technology.  Rather than assaulting the
exterior of the starship, Space Moose had simply plunged into and through it's
hull, leaving a curiously antler-shaped hole.  Of course, the Antlers of Steel
could have saved himself trouble if he had flown twelve feet to his right and
entered through one of the many awesometonium-torn holes in the ship's armor,
but nobody had ever accused Space Moose of being too bright.
     The Authors only knew what dangers lay waiting inside that armored
behemouth.  The guns on it's outside had been nasty enough, and there had
to be hundreds, if not thousands of Daleks waiting inside.
     Or were there, Odd wondered?  The massive battlecruiser's guns had
rapidly fallen silent, and the ship was listing badly.  Perhaps it's internal
security was not so effective, after all.  Odd made a mental note to go over
what the scanners had been able to get on it after the battle.  It was limping
away randomly, almost drifting. Behind it, the Awesome Force One seemed to be
de-powering some sort of front-mounted weapon and was turning away.
     "Looks like this part of the fight is over."  Dr. Odd chuckled, "Wonder
what's going on in there."

(continued in part four, following...)