🚀 go-pugleaf

     "Darkness..." mumbled one of the students in the upper level of
Jordan High School. "The early morning hours... such a perfect
opportunity to prepare for my plans... Concealed under the cover of the
night, I can ensure that none will discover my evil enterprise until it
is... too... late!!" Thunder cracked and boomed in the distance, as the
student turned once more to the device in front of him. Around him,
the dull phosphorescent lighting glinted off the machines of the metal
shop. In the background, a janitor stoicly mopped the floor, ignoring
the rantings of this wayward freshman.
     "Soon..." said freshman murmured, running a hand along the smooth
contours of the device he had created. "Soon I'll show them all! I'll
teach them to give me low grades in Pre-Calculus! Soon... they will
know the -wrath-... of Kid Karaoke!!!"

                 Tales of the Jordan High Defense Forces
                             episode two
                             "Oooookay."
                           by Jesse Taylor

     Joe Smith (yes, that really is his name) had a great many things in
his life to ponder, at the moment. Not least of these was the fact that
the entire world was, in his mind, really really high. I mean, we're
talking practically stratospheric, here. But great as this feeling was,
it still ranked slightly below the crisis of the day.
     Corn flakes. He had run out of corn flakes. It didn't seem like
something important, in the great scheme of things, but it bothered him.
Corn flakes were normal. They didn't have weird, spoon-related brand
names. They didn't shoot energy beams at him. They were... normal. Put
them in a cereal bowl and they didn't try to fly around. Pour milk on
them and they got soggy. They tasted the same, still. They were something
he could look at and know that they were utterly normal.
     Perturbed, he shook the box once or twice. No corn flakes. With
slow, methodical thoroughness, he began searching his apartment, locating
several things he had thought he'd lost, including a broken automatic
beverage stirrer.
     But no corn flakes.
     Sighing, he resigned himself to the fact that today was most likely
going to suck very, very hard, and decided that checking the mail would
provide the most normal way available for him to slowly ease himself into
it.
     Sadly, the mail did not seem to want to provide any sources of
normalcy at the moment. A bill (Joe wondered who the hell would be
billing him, after all he'd only just moved to this apartment the day
before), two ads for some disgusting-sounding raisin-based beverage,
two post-cards from Brazil addressed to someone named 'Marge', and...
     Joe shook the tiny box labelled 'free sample'. Yes... cereal! It
was toasted rice puff cereal, but cereal nonetheless. Humming to
himself, Joe headed back for his apartment, pausing only to throw away
the postcards and the bill. The ads he decided to keep, because they had
interesting pictures of scantily-clad women on them.
     With barely-restrained glee, Joe slowly poured the free sample of
Toasted Rice Puff Cereal into a bowl, hunting around a bit before he was
able to find milk to go with it. He listened to the sound of them slowly
dissolving in the milk for a while before taking a bite, savoring the
normalcy of stale toasted rice puffs in milk.
     His reverie was rudely interrupted, however, by the sound of a
piece of ninja equipment clattering to the ground.
     Joe sighed and looked over at the girl who was trying to sneak up on
him. "Hello, Kasumi."
     Kasumi blinked at him, then sighed and pulled off her ninja mask.
"How'd you know it was me?"
     "As if there's more than one female ninja in this town," Joe said,
taking another spoonful of cereal and chowing down on it. "And even if
there were, you're the only one with her arm in a sling."
     Kasumi bit back her normal "But I'm not a ninja, really!" retort and
started poking around. "So what's up?"
     Joe looked at her and sighed. "Haven't you ever heard of the concept
of, oh, 'privacy'? Try knocking on the door first next time."
     "I'm trained in picking 642 kinds of locks, and I can crack any safe
known to man. I do -not- have to wait outside."
     Joe rolled his eyes. "I'm fine. The world is still completely
insane, but I think I've managed to zone out enough that it's no longer a
problem."
     "Cool... er... I think," Kasumi replied, pondering that. "So, er,
want to come out patrolling with me and Ben?"
     "Hmm..." Joe munched on another spoonful of Toasted Rice Puffs.
"Patrolling?"
     "Yeah, you know. Hunting supervillains? Fighting crime? That sort
of thing?"
     "You -know- that I think that all this superhero and supervillain
stuff is just a burrito-induced hallucination, right?"
     "Well... so? Just because it's a hallucination doesn't mean you
can't have fun doing it."
     Joe pondered this. "That's... the weirdest reasoning I've ever
heard. But it works. Okay, fine -- I suppose I don't have anything more
productive to do than ride around with a bunch of teenagers in silly
costumes and chase things that don't exist."
     "Yay!"

<----->

     "nngghh..." Gina blinked funny starry patterns out of her vision
as she looked up at the sky. "gghhn..." she managed to emit, with effort.
"...paaaain..."
     Rolling over tiredly, she tried to figure out how she had gotten
from her previous location, a rather normal (if a tad dark) coffee shop,
to this new location, to wit: lying on the ground in the middle of a
forest. "Wargh... that... must have been -really- good coffee..." she
muttered, shaking her head woozily.
     For the benefit of the readers, she began mentally going over the
events of the past few days. Opening a portal from her normal altiverse
to an altiverse where super-powers worked (she still couldn't quite
remember why she thought 'altiverse' instead of 'universe', but she felt
certain that this was probably unimportant at the moment), teleporting
herself and her friends through said portal, popping up in the middle of
nowhere, meeting her Author, that sort of thing.
     All of this seemed perfectly all right to Gina at the moment,
which was mainly due to the fact that she was now weirded out to the
point of being simply numb to the whole deal. The additional weirdness
of teleporting -again- to an even -more- remote portion of the
altiverse was just plain peanuts compared to what had gone before.
     "Okay..." she said, rubbing her eyes to try and make the little
colored patterns in front of them go away. "In woods. Hungry. No food
in woods." Having assessed the situation, her Girl Scout training took
over, and she proceeded to select a random direction and start walking
that way, pausing only to dash back and retrieve the slightly singed
TI-82 calculator that she'd had with her.
     [Author's note: Not like any of this makes any bloody sense, but
it probably might have made a bit more sense if you've read %N#1-3.
Go. Read. Use the 'more' command, Luke.]

<----->

     "Nothing," Ben said, from the shotgun seat of Kasumi's car as the
three members of the Jordan High Defense Forces (plus their reluctant
sidekick Joe) careened down I-40.
     "You know, it occurs to me that we probably won't find any crime
out here on the highway..." Joe remarked from the back seat. Next to him,
Weston moaned the moan of the sleep-deprived as he desperately tapped
away on a Powerbook's keyboard.
     "You really shouldn't leave papers 'til the last minute..." Ben
chided Weston. "'sides, you could have just asked Rob to run his
Random English Paper Generator program."
     "Yeah, but then I'd have to listen to him philosophize about how
cows are the ultimate beings in the universe. Again," Weston muttered,
typing words seemingly at random, in the apparent hope that they would
eventually result in something that made sense, or at the least would
earn partial credit.
     "You people are strange, do you know that?" Joe remarked.
     "We know," Ben and Kasumi chorused. Weston just whimpered and kept
typing.
     "So..." Joe said, looking out the window. "Are we supposed to find
something soon?"
     "Hopefully," Kasumi said, dodging her car around an 18-wheeler. How,
you ask, was she able to steer so well with one arm in a sling? Ninja!
"Or maybe not. At least we don't have to go to class, either way."
     "Hmph. Kids these days..." Joe sighed. "There's nothing out here.
Just cars... grass... more cars... trees... more cars... an exploding
water-tower... yet more cars..."
     They drove on in silence for a few seconds or so.
     "An... exploding -what-?" Kasumi yelled, slamming on the brakes.
Cars all around them skidded to avoid the suddenly stationary vehicle in
the middle of the highway, and added yet more explosions to this
episode's budget. Kasumi ignored them.
     "Exploding water tower," Joe repeated, pointing. A water tower did,
indeed, seem to be in the process of exploding, or at least
disintegrating in a rather spectacular manner.
     "Is this something we should investigate?" Ben queried,
thoughtfully.
     "Well... I dunno... Explosions aren't normally something that
superheroes are supposed to investigate, right?" Kasumi wondered. "I
mean, unless there's a supervillain causing it..."
     "Like we have anything better to do," Ben said, shrugging.
     "Hyperevolution of the underlying metaphor," Weston agreed, still
typing furiously.
     "Oooookay," Kasumi said, shrugging and making a 90-degree turn,
heading in the direction of the water tower.
     "er," Joe said, quietly.
     "Hmmm?"
     "Don't you think it would be a good idea to, um, stay on the road?"
     "Expository symbolism!" Weston exclaimed.
     "No, we're fi--" Kasumi wrestled the car out of a skid as they went
careening across the grass on the side of the road. "--ne. This is, after
all, a--" She paused a moment for dramatic effect. "--Ninja Car!"
     "I thought you were heavy into the denying you were a ninja bit,"
Ben observed.
     "I sorta gave up. No point hiding it around you guys since you all
know, and all."
     "Ninja Car?" Joe mused. "No such thing."
     "Sure there is," Kasumi protested. "Watch -- I'll engage the Secret
Ninja Cloaking Field... um..."
     "Um?" Ben and Joe chorused.
     "Freudian hypotheses!" Weston yelled.
     "It didn't work," Kasumi said, thoughtfully.
     "Told you," Joe remarked.
     "Um," Ben said, pointing out the window.
     "Trees," Kasumi observed, nodding. "We're heading right for the
trees."
     Joe rolled his eyes. "I knew this day was going to suck when I woke
up this morning."
     Weston looked up. "If we're going to die, do I have to finish my
homework?"
     "Yes," Joe said, nodding sagely. "But you've got fifteen seconds to
finish."
     "Oh," Weston looked at Joe. "That's not much time at all, is it."
     "Nope."
     "Bummer."
     About at this point, the car finished careening wildly across the
grass and started careening wildly up the side of the small hill (which
also had grass on it, but we digress). Fortunately for the car's
passengers (although they would still consider it unfortunate, humans
being the fickle sort of beings that they are), the car hit the tree line
at the top of the hill at just the right angle and speed to go shooting
up and over the trees, and, in fact, over the scene break into the next
scene.

<----->

     "Aiie! Ack! Help!" Gina yelped as debris rained down all around her
from the exploding water tower. "It's not my faul--eeep!" she yelled at
no-one in particular, as she dodged a large chunk of the exterior. Now,
obviously our intrepid reader is now wondering exactly what the hey is
going on here, but it'll be explained in a moment when our four heroes
come plummeting into the scene right... about...
     "AIIIEEEEE--" *WHAM* *bounce, bounce* "Ooowwwww..."
     ...now.

     Gina looked at the slightly bent form of the Ninja Toyota, dodged
another piece of shrapnel from the insistently exploding water tower, and
hurried over. "Geez -- are you guys okay?!"
     "Almost... done..." Weston muttered, continuing to type away on his
paper, apparently having ignored the landing.
     "Are we there yet, papa smurf...?" Ben whimpered from the passenger
seat.
     "Ow," Joe added to the conversation.
     "Ow," Kasumi agreed. "Who...?" she blinked at Gina.
     "Er, I'm... Crash!" Gina said, blinking at Kasumi. "Hey, is that a
ninja sword?"
     Kasumi blinked and quickly hid the ninja sword that had slid out of
her sleeve. "No! Ahahaha! What a silly idea!"
     "Er, right..."
     "Ow," Joe insisted, opening the door and rolling out, proceeding to
kiss the ground repeatedly. "Safe! Safe! I'm saf-- yipe!!" he rolled
aside again as another chunk o' water tower crashed into the ground next
to him.
     "What happened here, anyway?" Kasumi asked, prying her door open and
hauling herself out of the car.
     "Er... I... made it blow up..." Gina said, sighing.
     "You're a supervillain?" Kasumi said, queryingly.
     "No! No! I'm a hero! Really!" Gina protested.
     "Blowing up city property isn't very heroic..." Kasumi said,
thoughtfully.
     "What about Mighty Guy?" Ben suggested. "He's a hero, and he
destroys lots of stuff where he is... and where he goes through... and
where the rubble lands from the stuff blowing up where he is..."
     "That's a different Author, though. Different rules."
     "Oh."
     "Did you say Author?" Gina queried.
     "Er... nothing," Kasumi said, coughing. "ANYWAY, we're the Jordan
High Defense Force..."
     "You guys are a superhero team?" Gina enthused. "Cooooooool! Can I
join?"
     Kasumi blinked, taken aback. "Er," she said, blinking again.
"Well..."
     "Wait, wait, wait," Joe said, looking up. "We only just met her, and
we're going to let her join the group? How do we know she's not lying
about being a superhero?"
     "Well... but..." Gina shrugged. "It's a convention of the genre.
You're supposed to blindly take my word that I'm a superhero, and let me
join the team, despite the fact that that's a really stupid idea, and you
know nothing at all about me."
     "Oh." Joe pondered this for a moment. "Oh, well that's okay, then."
     "Yay!" Gina enthused.
     "So... why DID the tower blow up?" Ben wondered, peering at the
remains of the water tower, still fountaining water.
     "It's..." Gina looked down. "...just something I do."
     "What, you make things blow up?" Kasumi blinked, confused. "But...
you've been leaning on my car for the last five minutes and nothing
happened."
     Gina blinked, looked down at the car, looked at herself, then at the
car again. "...huh. Weird."
     "The car's Ninja Nature must be interfering with you blowing it up,"
Ben offered. Kasumi whacked him with a bo stick. "Ow! I mean, um, it must
be the paint job. Nothing Ninja about this car, nope nope."
     "Anyway..." Ben said.
     "Antidisestablishmentarianism!" Weston explained, still tapping away
furiously.
     "...right. Don't mind Weston, he has a paper due... oo... in ten
minutes."
     "Aiiieee!" Weston yelled. "Back! We've got to get back to school!"
     Gina blinked. "Is he high?"
     "No, but that's never stopped him before. C'mon, we'll give you a
lift." Kasumi ducked into the Ninjamobile. Gina shrugged and squeezed into
the back seat with Joe and Weston.
     "What's with the girl scout uniform, anyway?" Joe asked, blinking.
     "Don't... just don't ask."
     "Ooookay."
     "So what brings you to our fair <snicker, giggle> city anyway,
Crash?" Kasumi asked, finding a service road and skidding down it towards
the highway.
     "I... teleported."
     "Blowing stuff up -and- teleportation?" Ben queried, blinking at her.
"Kasumi, can I have power envy now?"
     "You don't -have- any powers, Ben."
     "'zakli."
     "People can't teleport," Joe stated, flatly.
     "Can too!" Gina protested.
     "Can not."
     "Can too!"
     "Children, please," Kasumi growled.
     "...children?" Joe and Gina chorused.
     "Eep! Dissention in the ranks!" Ben eeped.
     "Le Guarde-Frienet!!" Weston exclaimed.
     "Hmmm... children, she called us. Only one thing to do," Joe
decided. Gina nodded, and the two of them blinked at Kasumi.
     "Are we there yet?" the two chorused, in as obnoxiously cute
voices as they could manage.
     "Dowh!"
     "Hey... um... could one of you guys carry my TI-82?" Gina said,
finally, as the Ninjamobile roared towards Jordan High. "I... um...
don't want to have it blow up."
     Joe blinked at her and sighed. "Look, it's impossible that you could
make something blow up just by being around it. It just doesn't happen."
     "What about the water tower, then?"
     Joe shrugged. "Coincidence."
     Gina sighed. "...please?"
     "Oh, all right." Joe sighed and tucked the grey-cased graphing
calculator away in his coat. Little known to him, or any of the others,
the words 'Tracking Function Enabled' flickered once on the screen, then
went dark as Joe put it away.
     "We're hee-eeeere!" Kasumi yelled, skidding her car into the senior
parking lot, and nearly running over the parking lot attendant. "Tra-da!"
     "Paper! Ahahahaha! Must print! Must print!" Weston exclaimed, hammering
himself against the car door.
     "...ooooookay," Gina muttered, hurriedly getting out of the other side,
followed by Joe.
     "Huh," Ben muttered softly. "We managed to get through a whole day
without once encountering a villain."
     "...BEN!!!" Kasumi yelled.
     "Ahem," said the teenager in silver lame' pants and a 'Born to sing
horribly' t-shirt.
     "Oh, hi. You're a villain, right?" Gina said, peering at him. "Geez,
that's a stupid outfit."
     "You're one to talk," the teen shot back. "I am... Kid Karaoke!!
Grovel before me in awe!"
     Joe golf-clapped.
     Kasumi looked Kid Karaoke over. "Look, just go away. I'm in a bad
mood, and I might have to hurt you."
     "Hmph. Maybe you'll change your mind after you feel the power of...
The Karaoke Machine Of Doom!!!" Kid Karaoke laughed evilly and pressed
'play' on his streamlined silver device.
     "The Karaoke... what?" Kasumi blinked, and paled. "No! Not--"
     o/~ Feeeeeeelings, nothing more than feeeeeeeeelings... o/~
     "WAaaaaargh!!"
     Kasumi doubled over, wincing in pain. Joe shuddered and dropped.
Gina gave a little whimper and covered her ears, looking as if she were
in agony. Ben managed to make a couple steps towards Kid Karaoke before
collapsing.
     "I thought... Joe was... immune to... super-powers..." Ben whimpered.
     "Super... powers? No... this guy... actually *is* this... bad!"
Kasumi forced out through gritted teeth.
     o/~ Myyyyyy giiirl, taaaaalkin' 'bout myyyyy giiiiirl... o/~
     "K-kill me... please..." Gina whimpered. "Bad singing... must be...
my secret weakness..."
     Kid Karaoke advanced, grinning evilly. "And now, the grand finale...
Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds!"
     "Aaiiiee!" was Kasumi's thought on this issue.
     "Eh," Gina said, getting up. "It can't be as bad as the Shatner
version."
     Kid Karaoke eeped. o/~ Lucy in the skyyyyy with diiiiiiiamonds... o/~
     Gina winced, but struggled towards him, finally laying a hand on the
Karaoke Machine Of Doom. "Hah!"
     "Hey!"
     Almost immediately, smoke began pouring from the device, and the
music shuddered to a halt.
     "You... but... you..." Kid Karaoke sputtered.
     "Ahem," Kasumi said, slipping up behind him. "You just made my day,
you realize. Because now, we're going to hurt you very, very badly."
     "Heh-heh-heh," Ben said, cracking his knuckles.
     "But... but... this is a family oriented post! You can't do that on
camera!" Kid Karaoke protested.
     "You're right. We can't," Kasumi said, then grinned and leaned close,
"But... we CAN do it... -off- camera."
     "...poopie."

<----->

     "You realize," Joe said, as Kasumi and Ben bound up the hapless
Kid Karaoke, "This has not done a great deal to re-affirm my faith in
the world."
     "Eh," Kasumi said, shrugging. "Life's weird. Live with it."
     "Actually, I was thinking of going back to my apartment and passing
out," Joe said, sagely. "Next time something like this comes up... do me
a favor and don't call."
     "...right. Bye, Joe..." Kasumi sighed and waved as Joe wandered off,
muttering.
     "I still don't understand why your car didn't blow up..." Gina
said, quietly, leaning against it. "I mean... things I touch blow up. It's
just what I do."
     "Eh. Maybe this one's special," Kasumi replied, grinning. "I mean,
it's survived this long, after all."
     "Er..." Ben said, noticing the smoke curling from inside the car.
     "I guess so..." Gina said, sighing. "Um... do you smell smoke?"
     Kasumi blinked. "My... car..." she said, slowly turning. The car
began to shake, as if something was twisting it apart. "RUN!!!"
     *WHOOM*
     Gina sighed. "I thought so."
     Weston wandered back up, happily. "Hey, anyone seen my powerbook?
I think I left it in... Kas...umi's... car... what happened to your car,
Kasumi?"
     "It faw down, go boom," Ben explained.
     "My dad's powerbook. Oh hell(tm)." Weston slowly wandered over and
began beating his head against the side of the school.
     "So -that's- what that little secondary boom was..." Ben said,
thoughtfully.
     "You're NOT helping!!" Weston yelled.
     "I'm... sorry," Gina tried.
     "I'm dead. Dead, dead, dead. Way dead. Dead. If I was a talk show host, I
could join SNUCCI, I'm so dead. Dead. Deeeeeeead." Weston started giggling.
"Dead!"
     "Weston's gone bye-bye, Ben," Kasumi said, blinking. "What do you have
left?"
     "Dead!" Weston exclaimed.

<----->

     Elsewhere, a monitor screen displaying the picture of the group
flickered and went dead, its watcher's attention being directed
elsewhere. "So..." a soft, thoughtful, oddly mechanical voice said
to itself. "There are superheroes in this town after all, albeit
really pathetic ones." The voice chuckled softly to itself. "I doubt
they'll be any match... for the Red Bandit!"

<----->

     Still elsewhere, a dark figure (yeah, we get a lot of them around.
go fig, huh?) slipped into a closet down underneath Jordan High, and
fished around until he found what he was looking for. Lifting the old
rubber boot to his face, he began quietly speaking into the heel. "The
Key we need has arrived... She will be ready when the time comes."
Satisfied that his message had gotten through, he thumped the boot once
on the wall to hang it up, then tossed it back into its hiding place.
     He managed to keep his utterly calm, cool complexion for at least
ten seconds, which was how long it took him to figure out that the closet
door had closed on him, and he was stuck.

WHO WAS THAT DARK FIGURE???
WHAT'S THE RED BANDIT DOING IN DURHAM???
WHAT'S CRASH DOING IN DURHAM???
ISN'T SHE SUPPOSED TO BE IN ANOTHER SERIES???
WHAT'S UP WITH JOE???
IS WESTON DEAD???

SUPERGUY.