November 29, 1973 – The long, long hallway

Things were going well at first.  Blue isn’t exactly bulletproof, but he’s bullet resistant and when you add in his healing ability, guys with guns aren’t a huge challenge for him.  I tossed Martialla out the two shotguns and she used Blue as a mobile shield as they advanced.  Things took a turn once the poison gas came.  I didn’t see any grenade or anything, there was just suddenly yellowish smoke around us. Martialla went down quickly and Blue was clearly affected as well – he kept fighting but he was unsteady and clumsy.  I don’t know what all my new magic necklace does, but one thing for sure is that is protects against whatever that gas was.  I dragged Martialla out of the cloud in the hallway back into the office.  As I did so, I noticed a woman in a white bodysuit striding into the fray with a sword in hand.

You know how I feel about sword people.  She started carving Blue up like an Easter ham, but I have to believe that’s because the gas was making him sluggish – normally he’d never be bothered by a sword wielder.  I tried to help him out by hurling Serpentina at her, but she sliced her out of the air like I had thrown a tomato into a big ass industrial fan.  Did she not know she was killing her boss or did she not care?  Also, once Serpentina was dead, why were we still fighting?  I threw the bruised nutsack guy at her and the mostly unconscious guy as well and while she was dodging them, Blue cracked her on the jaw with a punch that looked like it would have knocked out a rhino. 

While she was staggered, I hit her with Serpentina’s desk.  I think it was teak.  It definitely weighed as much as a small car.  That was around the time another woman stepped around the corner and blasted Blue in the back with an RPG.  I dove back into the office as Gun Bunny dropped her rocket tube and unlimbered an assault rifle.  As I was crawling around the corner, I took a bullet to the bottom of the foot.  There was enough impact to spin me around like I had been ejected from a tilt-a-whirl.  I feel like the bullet went all the way up into my knee.  It felt like my entire leg was on fire.  I grabbed Martialla, partially to try and shake her awake and partially to drag her out of the line of fire. 

And what did I get for my efforts?  She tried to stab me with her diving knife!  She didn’t do it very well but she still tried.  I did a one legged scuttle backwards like a badly injured crab to the “safety” of the pachinko machines.

I assumed she was confused from the gas “It’s me, Martialla!”

She dragged herself into cover on the other side “I know!”

So much for that assumption “What?”

She held the knife up and pointed it at me in a weird way, immediately sweat starting pouring down her ashen face from even that small amount of effort “Stay away from me Ela, I mean it!  Don’t touch me!”

“What are you talking about?  We’re in a situation here!  Blue is down, we need to get out there and . . .”

“We’re in a situation because of YOU, because of what you did!” She gave me a death glare “Ela, why can’t you ever just follow the plan?  Seriously, is something broken in your brain?  Did you get dropped on your head as a child?!”

I gestured “Look if you hate me now fine, but there’s no point in laying here to die – let’s get the hell out of here and then you can hate me real good when you’re hale and healthy.”

Her hand was shaking like that of an old man “I’m serious Ela, if you take a step towards me, I’ll cut you.”

“Jesus Christ can we have this little spat later, we’re in the middle of something right now!”

Her lip curled, I don’t think she liked me calling it a “spat” but the conversation came to an abrupt end when another cloud of gas came billowing towards us.  Martialla passed out again.  I hurled a pachinko machine at the wall but those things are flimsier than they look, it smashed to bits without doing much damage.  From my back I managed to kick a decent sized hole in the wall, but there was just a gap and then more wall.  I need to find a blueprint of this place, how thick are the interior walls?  I was trying to wriggle into the gap when it was too late.   

A dude walked in that was completely hairless.  I don’t mean he was bald, I mean he had no hair of any kind.  Have you ever seen a guy without eyebrows and not even a hint of facial hair?  It’s oddly feminine.  Even though his skin was slate grey and he was wearing what looked like mechanic’s coveralls.  I threw the paperweight thing I had used to take out guard number one and when it hit him, it sounded like two bowling balls smashing together.  It had about the same effect as a crumpled-up piece of paper.  Behind him was RPG girl, now wearing a gasmask and brandishing a gun that looked like what Steve McQueen has in Wanted Dead or Alive.  I didn’t know that was a real thing, it looks like a pistol and a rifle had a baby.  Is that a carbine?

I held my hands up “Uh, I surrender.”  Gasmask gestured with her gun for me to get up “I can’t stand up, you shot me in the foot.”

Coveralls came forward and grabbed a fistful of hair and dragged me out of there like a caveman.  I had a pretty strong urge to try and rip his leg off, but I figured that was probably a bad idea.  Outside of the gas cloud there was a whole menagerie waiting for us – there was a guy floating in the air holding Blue’s motionless body with some kind of green energy he was emitting, two women that looked like bears or dogs or something and seemed to think that meant they could walk around topless, a tiny man (not tiny tiny like the Amazing Ant, I mean like five feet) in a black robot-suit, a stoner looking dude in a god damn Betty Boop t-shirt, a big no-neck type, and two dudes that looked like riot cops with complicated looking rifles instead of normal guns.    

A few thoughts.  I see now that when you get a team of super people together, it looks ridiculous.  And I understand why the comic books always give them matching outfits. When you have one guy in overalls and other people in armor, and some half nude badger women, and whatever else, it doesn’t look right.  Giving them the same speed suit to wear helps.  If I ever get my superteam off the ground, I’m going to need to think about some kind of uniform that we can wear so we don’t look like idiots.

Another thought, why is everyone so into laser guns?  Why are lasers better than bullets? Do they make you more dead?  Are they better at shooting through things?  Couldn’t you protect yourself from a laser with a compact mirror?  It’s just light, right?   My final thought is that attacking Serpentina may have been a bad idea.

I should have taken those warnings on the side of the cigarette packs more seriously – turns out smoking is bad for your health.