You can sift through the racc list archive https://lists.eyrie.org/pipermail/racc/
or you can try google groups racc for these issues of LNH v2.

And we have another Saxon Brenton double header.


First off is LNH v2 #38 an NTB story and an Elwewhirl to boot. John Munlop after a horrible tragedy embarks on a quest to somehow make the entire
Loonited States a much safer place through a magical protection spell
and since this is an Elsewhirl I'm guessing this plan works totally fine --
No problems at all... right?

And then we have LNH v2 #39. Can a sick Fuzzy stop some Injokerz gang
members from releasing some Injoker venom into the Net.ropolis water
supply? And if she can't would that really be such a big deal? I
mean wouldn't everyone in Net.ropolis just go around talking about how
Mr. Paprikia is a Man's pop while speculated what Gamer Boy would think
of that all the while wondering who Captain Killfile's Mom really is?
Sounds like the best of all worlds.

Anyhow, for possible answers to some of those questions read...


_
| | Classic
| | =
| | ____ ____ _ ____ ___
| |__ | [] | | [] | | | | [] | | _ \

|____| \__] \__ | |_| \__/ |_|\_\
||
|_| OF NET.HEROES

ADVENTURES #208


=====================
Legion of Net.Heroes Volume 2 #38-39
=====================








From: Saxon Brenton saxonbrenton at hotmail.com
Date: Sun Jul 25 16:57:08 PDT 2010

[NTB/LNH/ELSEWHIRL/HCC11/M-O-U-S-E-] Legion of Net.Heroes Volume 2 #38

This issue of

[]
[] egion of
[]__ [] [] [] []
[___][ \[]et.[]__[]eroes Volume 2 #38
[]\ ] [ __ ]
[] [] [] []

has *once again* been highjacked to present another of the

MISANTHROPIC TALES
OF THE
NET.TRENCHCOAT BRIGADE

'Are You Feeling Lucky, Punks?'
written by and copyright 2010 Saxon Brenton
for the 11th High Concept Challenge


[Acraphobe content warning: This story is has a Net.Trenchcoat Brigade
label and is therefore implied Acraphobe. It contains mature content.]

[Elsewhirls content warning: Not a dream, not a hoax, not an imaginary
story. It's just not in mainstream continuity, that's all.]


John Munlop was only a year away from his long planned retirement
when he heard about his son's death. It was that piece of news that
sent him over the edge into madness, and that madness from which the
death trap that slaughtered so many emerged more than a decade later.
It happened like this:


The day of Aaron Munlop's death started out much the same as any
other for his father, who was employed in magical research and
development in the Thaumaturgy Department at Net.ropolis University. Specifically in applications of magical defences. John had spent most
of his working life developing the psychic equivalent of bullet-proof
vests and protection from trespassers, and he was good at his job.
Now, it must be said that most of the applications of the various
magical R&D units were low level. As with all things if you wanted
superhuman levels of effect then you either had to put a *lot* of
engineering into it (think of all the purely mundane effort and
organisation needed to sent rockets to the moon) or actually have super-
humans - such as the members of the Legion of Net.Heroes - involved to
give the endeavour extra oomph. There *were* incredibly sophisticated
and powerful magical defences available, but they tended to be expensive
and therefore used by big businesses or government departments like the Pentagon. For small businesses and private homes the price range
involved meant that you were getting the equivalent of a good mundane
security system. They were useful as long as they were installed
properly, used sensibly and not overestimated, but they were hardly a
panacea. The problem was that after decades of having magic depicted
sloppily in popular culture (such as with Harry Potter) or worse, for
comical effect in sitcoms (such as with Bewitched) the general public
had a vastly inflated idea of what magic could do.
(Then again the general public had a vastly inflated idea of what
a car's cruise control could do as well. As was so often the case it
was a problem with the public, not with the product.)
So on that Thursday morning thirteen years ago John Munlop was investigating ways of increasing the effectiveness, or reducing the
costs, or both, for the curse protections of public buildings. There
was a knock on the door, and John looked up to see his supervisor,
Alanna. She looked grim. Behind her were two police officers. "John,
I'm afraid there's some bad news," she said.
And they told him. Officer Aaron Munlop of the Detroit police
force had been called out to what seemed like a domestic dispute and
had been mown down by a militia member wielding an automatic rifle.
Of course, assault weapons were illegal in the state of Mich.sig.an.
This did not stop them from making their way north from states with
more relaxed gun control laws.
After that John Munlop kind of went into shock. The next moment
that he could recall with any sort of clarity was at Aaron's funeral.
At the time he couldn't have told you how many days later it was, but
checking things like the printed schedule of the funeral service
indicated that it was Tuesday. It was a clear and chilly autumn day,
and John was suddenly struck by how *ordinary* it was.
It should have been raining, at least. The heavens should have
opened and wept in a show of grief, even if a full eclipse of the sun
was out of the question. Instead he could hear the distant sounds of
city traffic as people went about their business, as though Aaron's
funeral *didn't matter*. It was at that moment that John Munlop
started to grow mad.
What's that? Why, both meanings of the word 'mad', of course.


John made it through the funeral and through the flight back to Net.ropolis on automatic. He returned to the empty house that had been
too big for him ever since his wife had died of cancer some years back.
And he thought, .oO( This is *not* right. )
A few days later he took some of his accumulated sick leave, and his co-workers as the Thaumaturgy Dept thought nothing of it. He must be
under a lot of strain at the moment, they said to each other. Everybody
goes through the five stages of grieving in their own order and in their
own way. Best not to push him forward before he's ready.
Then he returned to work and made some very impressive discoveries,
almost as if he was driven. And this too made sense, and his co-workers
sadly noted the irony that some of the best work being done for the
benefit of humanity was being fuelled by grief.
Then John retired right on schedule and by rights that should have
been the end of things. It wasn't.
Truth be known, after his retirement it was a very long time before
John Munlop would get out much at all. It was one of the reasons he was
able to keep the family home that was too big for him. You don't have
a particularly expensive lifestyle when you don't go out much, instead
staying indoors working on your hobby/obsession/psychosis. His biggest
expense was continuing his subscription to a number of professional
journals on applied magic, and even that did not amount to much.
The object of his research was a way to make use of the magical
truism 'malice rebounds on the caster sevenfold'. Also, how to make
the rebound effect work on purely kinetic force. And how to make the
defensive warding big.
How big? Well, you're aware that the continental Usenetted States
sort of shaped like a block some 4-and-a-half thousand kilometres long
east to west and 2-and-a-half thousand kilometres tall north to south?
Yes. That big.


In the end he couldn't do it.
Even with years of preparation he found that he couldn't thaumat- urgically engineer a magical lever powerful enough to run a ward that
would protect an entire continent. Not even using the truism of malice rebounding, plus material and verbal and somatic components, and phases
of the moon, and making use of the power of ley lines, and crap only
knew what else. So, after nearly six years of research he scrapped the
lot and started working on something smaller in scale.


More time passed.
Just before the eleventh anniversary of Aaron's death John realised
that his spell crafting would soon be ready for casting (for a given
value of 'soon') and that as part of the price for getting his project
up and running he would need to get fit. It would not be an easy task
for a man in his early seventies to walk back and forth across Ame.rec.a.
True, there were certain potions and philtres that could imbue stamina
(mainly magical equivalents of Viagra(tm), actually; yes, some things
never change), but John had enough practical knowledge of magic to know
that it would be best to actually have some fitness to start with.
So he started exercising. Going on walks. His neighbours, who had
long since relegated the figure of John Munlop to that of an eccentric
recluse, began to see more of him about the streets - although this did
not extend to actually becoming properly sociable, since he always
politely but firmly turned down any requests to become reinvolved with
parents and citizens associations, church charity raffles, or
neighbourhood watch.
Then, two years later, John Munlop set out on his hiking tour. He
had an itinerary of the country, where he wanted to go and what he
wanted to see, carefully mapped out so that he would be walking a
gigantic grid of triangles just over 500 kilometres along each side.
He started out in Troughton, Virgi.net.a, by performing a small
ritual for the starting node. Then he walked over 500 kilometres up the
coast to Load Island. At Load Island he performed another small ritual,
before heading northwest to Buffa.load in upstate Net.York and repeating
the procedure. Finally he hiked back to his starting node in Troughton
and performed the ritual of closing. All up it took him several months
to set up all the nodes. He was bone tired, but his zeal for his project
was undiminished. As he did every evening he checked himself into a
reasonable hotel - neither a dump nor an overpriced tourist trap - and
watched the evening news.
John Munlop was no longer given to exhibiting strong emotions. Nevertheless he was quite pleased, in a cold and detached way, that his
ward had kicked in and started doing its work immediately. The news was
full of the epidemic of peoples' heads exploding.
All over the eastern seaboard there were reports of people who had attacked other people with guns, whereupon the kinetic force had bounced
back upon them, causing their heads to detonate, laminating their brains
across nearby walls and peppering the area with high velocity bone
shrapnel. And there were scores of them! Even within the few short
hours since late afternoon when John had completed the closing ritual
for the first triangle.
The deaths did not worry him. For every action there was a
reaction, and this was the new consequence for using firearms for
criminal assault. He was still unworried an hour later when he saw a
report of two police who became involved in a shootout with drug gangs
and who had also had their heads to detonate, laminating their brains
across nearby walls and peppering the area with high velocity bone
shrapnel. Nor the demise of the Legionnaire MasterBlaster, who had
been in life or death struggle with the Injoker when his head had also detonated, laminating his brains across nearby walls and peppering the
area with high velocity bone shrapnel as well.
Or perhaps not so life and death. Among all the hysteria being put
out by the talking heads about what impact this might have on their
second amendment right to bear arms, no one seemed to have noticed that
it was only affecting those who were attacking other humans. Not those
who were defending themselves. Nor those who were killing animals.
Malice rebounds sevenfold.
This did not surprise Munlop. As was so often the case it was a
problem with the public, not with the product, and the ones making the
loudest noise were the ones who treated their right to firearms as a
fetish rather than as a responsibility.
What changes would this bring about?, he wondered as he stared at
his map. He didn't know, but was willing to admit that the results
might surprise him. Up until a few years ago he would have said that
the first amendment rights would have remained inviolate thanks to the
noise made by free speech fetishists. But then the Westbo.org Baptist
Church had made themselves so obnoxious that the government had passed
laws prohibiting protests at military funerals. And a conservative administration at that.
What Munlop was prepared to bet on was that the most hysterical
fringe of the gun rights lobby were going to die, en masse. They would
not be able to understand, let alone accept, that this was a trap that
they couldn't fight or scream their way out of. They would walk into
the trap of their own free will, blinded to the danger they were in by
their own self-righteousness. Then they'd try to use their phallic
symbol substitutes in a way that was no longer permitted, at which point
they would inevitably became eligible for the Darwin Awards... Which
was to say their heads would detonate, laminating his brains across
nearby walls and peppering the area with high velocity bone shrapnel.
Munlop traced his finger across the map, contemplating his next
journey out to Charleston and before hiking back to Buffa.load. Now
that he only had to complete two sides to a triangle in order to set up
the nodes, things would proceed more quickly. Still, he had a lot of
walking ahead of him, and a nagging doubt returned as to whether he
would live long enough to complete his mission. He put on his night
clothes and retired to bed early. He had another long walk ahead of
him tomorrow.


==========


Author's note:
Written for the 11th High Concept Challenge: death traps.
You know, one of these days I should probably just create a
sibling anthology title to _LNHv2_ called _Misanthropic Tales of the Net.Trenchcoat Brigade_ and be done with it. This is the third time an
NTB story has shouldered its way into this LNH series. On the other
hand, not only is it funnier to have the running joke where they do that,
but its thematically appropriate for those disreputable Trenchcoaters
to take what they need from the Legion as circumstances dictate.
The 500 kilometres to a side triangle pattern is ripped off from
the old Torg roleplaying game - although I only used Baruk Kaah's stelae pattern as a rough guideline, shifting locations and making up the name
of one of the towns.
I procrastinated with getting this written up until the last few
days, and then caught the flu. And just like George Orwell writing
_Animal Farm_ while suffering from cancer - only, you know, on a much
lesser scale - I find that writing while in pain is a wonderful incentive
for composing snarky text.


-----
Saxon Brenton University of Technology, city library, Sydney Australia
saxon.brenton at uts.edu.au saxonbrenton at hotmail.com
"These 'no-nonsense' solutions of yours just don't hold water in a complex world of jet-powered apes and time-travel." - Superman, JLA Classified #3

From: Saxon Brenton saxonbrenton at hotmail.com
Date: Mon Aug 30 09:57:25 PDT 2010

[LNH/HCC12] Legion of Net.Heroes Volume 2 #39


___ ___________________________
| |-| \
| |-| [] / #39
| | | [] egion of \ 'Hack and Cough'
| | | []__ [] [] [] [] / (Part of High Concept Challenge #12)
| | | [___][ \[]et.[]__[]eroes \
| | | []\ ] [ __ ] / written by and copyright 2010
| |-| [] [] [] [] \ Saxon Brenton
| |-|___________________________/
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
|_|


[A Silver Age-style roster of characters in the form of a series of mug
shots in little circles runs down the side of the title page. There is
only one for this issue:]

Roll call for this issue:
o Fuzzy!

This is just one of the super-powered do-gooders who belong to an
organisation that thinks that running around with your underwear on
the outside is acceptable as a fashion statement. They are: the
Legion of Net.Heroes!

@%%%%%%%%%%@

"Ahh, ahh, ahh-CHOO!"
Fuzzy hated being sick.
The problem wasn't that snot got everywhere. I mean, snot *did*
get everywhere - but that was a perfectly ordinary situation that anyone
would have to put up with.
The problem as Fuzzy saw it was that while it may well be that Time
waits for no man, it was definitely the case the Crime waits for no
superhero. There was always a crisis of some sort going, and they *had*
to be dealt with otherwise Bad Things would happen. In this case it
would be that the Injokerz street gang would release a sample on Injoker
venom into the city's water supply.
The net.heroine wiped her nose (fortunately she had the advantage
of usually not needing to wear a mask of any sort) and gazed down at
old water treatment works with a pair of mini binoculars. The building
had been abandoned decades ago when new infrastructure had been created.
But significantly it hadn't been torn down. It was a lot like the
abandoned warehouse district in that regard.
She scanned along each side of the building, looking for signs of
an Injokerz presence. They weren't in their usual haunts, but this was
only one of several thematically appropriate... Wait. There. Guards
with Injokerz gang colours. Which meant suits in wildly different
colours, faces done out in pale makeup, and hair dyed in equally insane
rainbow hues. Right, it was time to deal with them... unambiguously.
Fuzzy moved across the roof to a side that faced away from the
derelict water treatment plant and leapt from the edge of the parapet,
making her way to the ground with a series of acrobatic leaps that would
have made the average parkour enthusiast green with envy. Splash page
montage of her descent: the side of the building is shown in full, and
along the way are inset panels of her grabbing railings and swinging
downwards, using her momentum to somersault between fire stairs and
downpipes, until she lands, crouching on the balls of her feet with one outstretched to steady herself and the other arm in a defensive
position ready to do battle with any lurking gang members. It looks so
cool that for a moment the reader forgets to ask: now hold up a second,
with her powers of ambiguity how come I can even see her at all?
To which the obvious answer is: her powers are playing up. This is
why she hates being sick.
And so Fuzzy made use of shadows as she quickly headed for the old treatment works. That stunt had been risky - gymnasting down the side
of a building like that while sick and when any fumble could have meant
serious injury or death. But not to do so was almost as bad. This
world was one of action and drama, and it required constant narrative
impulse. Movement, movement movement! Keep moving, don't stop, don't
let the momentum run down. It was part of the cost of living in a
fictional world that ran on narrative principles.
She arrived at the entrance. Two Injokerz were standing guard.
With a ruthless efficiency she took them down. First a chop to the
solar plexus of one of them, knocking him unconscious. The other
ganger wasn't quite so easy, having quick reactions and taking aim with
a gun. Fuzzy disabled him with a leg sweep, then as he was still
falling grabbed him by the head and rammed his face hard against the
brick of the wall. He fell to the floor, his nose broken and bleeding.
Then she was off again.
Now, in a sensible world - a world running purely on the laws of
physics, and governed by mundane cause and effect - there wouldn't be
a demand for constant heroic endeavours to keep the world on an even
keel. But in a world like that there was also no guarantee of
dramatic last minute saves from disaster.
So, yeah. With the prospect of millions of people being infected
with Injoker venom, and then the resulting deaths either directly from
the venom or indirectly from the chaos caused by mass psychosis? She
needed to take the risk, keep her moves fast and funky, and hope like
blue blazes that the Rule of Cool would make up any shortfalls if she
fumbled because of ill health.
Inside were more guards. She disposed of them as well. There
were also signs of hasty engineering work being done. There were
flickering lights from an arc welder being used downstairs. Down where
the pipes connecting this disused treatment plant to the rest of the
city water supply system were. Pipes, which like this entire building,
should have been fully disconnected and torn down. It didn't make any
sort of economic sense in an urban area where land near the city centre
was at a premium.
But it did make narrative sense: cities with superheroes needed
abandoned buildings for the supervillains to lair in. Or the super-
villain groupies, in the case of the Injokerz.
She snuck further in and down. From the shadows she saw this:
there were four Injokerz standing around, watching someone not dressed
like a gang member, with a welding mask and welder, working on the
pipes. This man paused and raised the mask. One of the Injokerz - Ramon
Yont, Fuzzy recognised, one of the gang leaders but not the overall
Injokerz head - said, "No slacking off, now."
"It's done," replied the engineer, wearily.
"Well now, that's different," Yont drawled, walking over with an anticipatory glee. "All set and ready to go, then?"
"Yeah. This pipe, straight through to the 42 Avenue junction.
But, look, if you do that you'll kill thousands of people."
"Aw, come on," said Yont in a sing-song voice. "It's just a joke."
he patted the engineer patronisingly on the face. "Can't you take a joke?"
And the engineer began to gasp and choke. Fuzzy's eyes narrowed
and went flinty. Even before the man finished collapsing onto the
floor, dead with his face stretched into a hideous rictus grin, she
knew what was happening. Ring poisoned with concentrated Injoker
venom, with a small poisoned spike that broken the victim's skin when
Yont had patted his face.
Fuzzy picked up a half brick and lobbed it back upstairs, where it
landed with a clatter. The noise attracted the Injokerz' attentions,
but not their immediate suspicion.
Yont called upstairs, "Soup, Parker, we're ready to go down here."
When no reply came Yont yelled again, "You'd better not be goofing off
up there!" Still no reply. Yont nodded to one of the other Injokerz
with him down by the pipes and said, "Go and find those two idiots."
The Injokerz ganger mumbled, "Sure thing, boss," and moved off.
Fuzzy followed him, and with perhaps a little too much relish
thought .oO( 'Vagueness and ambiguity that confound my enemies.' ) before ambushing and knocking the ganger unconscious as quickly as she could.
So, now she only outnumbered them one to three.
She returned downstairs. She doubted she had much time left to
play around with picking off the gang one at a time. Then, just as she
was about to make her move she was struck with a wracking cough. Damn!
The equivalent of a character in a _Scooby Doo_ cartoon sneezing at just
the moment when it would give away their hiding place to the not-really- a-monster-but-a-guy-in-a-rubber-mask who was chasing them.
"A net.hero! Get them!" came the predictable cry as she was
suddenly revealed. Two of the remaining Injokerz started shooting at
her. Fuzzy dodged, since she wasn't completely sure that her weakened
powers of ambiguity would be enough to keep them from getting a bead on
her if she stood still. Nevertheless she didn't go to the lengths of
fully ducking behind cover. Past experience and testing when she'd
been sick before suggested that as long as she kept moving then the
people attacking wouldn't be able to target her properly. They'd lag
behind, aiming at where she had been, rather than where should actually
was.
Meanwhile she'd already pulled out her own gun and gotten off some
clear shots that downed one of the two Injokerz, and if anything caused
the other one to panic and fire wild. She closed in on him, weaving
about slightly to keep him from being able to proper aim, then grabbed
a chair and smashed it over his head.
And that left one.
Crap. Now was going to be the tricky bit. Final foe. Big climax.
And again she was hit by a wracking cough, which was exactly the
opening that Yont had been looking for. Fuzzy heard the brokes-no-
nonsense click as Yont primed his gun and took careful aim at Fuzzy - and
she knew, just *knew*, that now that the two of them had reached the big
climax that Yont's aim would not be thrown off no matter how well her
powers of ambiguity were working. If Yont fired that gun, then he would
hit her, and Fuzzy would die.
Time for one last superhero trick.
Fuzzy coughed again. She didn't bother to try to cover her mouth,
not while she was keeping her hands out in the open where he could see
them.
"Feeling a bit under the weather, hey hero?" taunted Yont.
Fuzzy grinned. "I've had the flu all week, I feel like hell, but
I've still more than tough enough to take you down, Yont." She coughed
again.
"Big talk for someone hacking their guts up," smirked Yont. "Now
I think it's time for you to take a dirt nap so I can get on with the
big picture of making the whole of Net.ropolis smile."
Cough. "By dumping Injoker venom into the water supply."
"You got it sister."
"Thousands of people will die if you do that."
"But they'll die with smiles on their faces."
"I don't think you're going to do that."
"And who's going to stop me? You?"
Cough. "Oh yeah. Me and my flu germs." Cough. "I've been busy breathing all over you."
Yont sneered with a you-do-you-think-you're-trying-to-kid? look
and fired. But it was too late. His vision was starting to go blurry
and his aim was off, and Fuzzy didn't even need to dodge. (Although
she did, after she heard the retort of the gun, because even though she
knew intellectually that her plan was sound most people's reaction to
gunfire was to flinch and duck.)
She punched him in the face and sent him sprawling. The gun fell
from his hand and he scrabbled to reach it, but she simply stamped
down on his wrist.
"You see Yont," she said in a conversational tone of voice,
"Superhumans tend to have superhuman constitutions. We're usually
resistant to disease except as plot point. But when we do catch
something, anything strong enough to make us sick is going to work
even faster and harder on a non-super."
Yont's eyes were wide with adrenaline rush and frustration at
having been beaten. "You bitch! You went and deliberately got me sick.
I oughta sue!"
"Tell it to the marines," said Fuzzy as she reached for her LNH comm.thingy. "You've done more than enough damage for one evening."


==========

Character credits:
Fuzzy created by Connie Hirsch.

Author's notes:
Written for the 12th high Concept Challenge: under the weather.
I dithered while deciding on exactly what story to write for this.
This story starring Fuzzy is basically one of my fourth wall breaking examinations of how genre mechanics work. Partly because it's in an established superhero setting and mainly because it's in a style I find
fun it was quick and easy to write once I actually started.
The other story examined the idea of people developing powers after getting sick, along the lines of the Wild Card virus from the _Wild Card_ series of mosaic novels. It would have been set in Moscow and featured
the choking smoke from the summer fires killing people (just like current
real life events) being used as a plague vector by a necromancer to raise
an army of undead but also causing some Russians to develop superpowers
as an antibody reaction to the necrotic plague. Unfortunately that story
would have required more time and effort to write in order to do it justice.

-----
Saxon Brenton University of Technology, city library, Sydney Australia
saxon.brenton at uts.edu.au saxonbrenton at hotmail.com
"These 'no-nonsense' solutions of yours just don't hold water in a complex world of jet-powered apes and time-travel." - Superman, JLA Classified #3



==========
Next Week: Possibly More LNH v2 issues!
==========

Arthur "Same Classic Channel. But Same Time? Probably not." Spitzer

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)