The Man Who Cried "Space Robot!"

     He lay sprawled across a stainless steel table. Captain Fowler didn't know how the robots abducted him, nor where to, but he knew that someone would find his plane. The whole U.S. Air Force would be looking for him. If these overgrown, metal-mouth, switchboard-brained toaster ovens wanted to start a war, by God, they'd have one on their kludgy, titanium hands faster than they could calculate 2 + 2!

     The sole other occupant of the octagonal room-– android, eight feet tall, body filled with the faint hum of whirring discs and hot plasma converters-– stood aloof over the pilot. Its mechanical fingers opened and closed sinisterly as it spoke. It told the prone pilot, in a voice as evil as it was mechanical, how robots from outer space coerced ancient peoples into building pyramids as beacons to their fleets of planet-destroying spaceships that would return to Earth to enslave all of humanity, stealing human brains to power their...

     A giant gasp from the assembled audience interrupted Fowler's umpteenth recounting of the tale. Loyal followers all, even the true believers had still half-expected to see nothing, yet there came the warbling flash of light that the lecturer and former pilot had predicted. A luminous, crystalline structure-- a real U.F.O., the ones he'd said had really built the pyramids!-- took shape before their eyes, hovering 100 feet in the air and slowly lowering...

     The hundreds gathered all froze, paralyzed by awe and fear in spite of their expectations. Among the previously frenzied mob, not a single alveolus took in oxygen as the alien shuttle touched down. A door slid open slowly, heavy with dire portent.

     It stood imposingly in the open doorway of the ship, exactly as Fowler described the space robots in his book and numerous speeches. Instantly upon seeing it, everyone thought, “My God, it's true, the Mayans, the Egyptians, the ancients of Babylon-- none of them could've done it alone!”

     Only Fowler stepped forward, ready to face it and whatever weird, technological minions might deploy from the ship. He extended open palms and launched into a little speech about how we didn't want a war, that America and Earth are places of peace and freedom, but that, dammit (and here his hands started making fists and lifting as if of their own accord), if they so much as pointed a laser at us we'd fill their tin skulls with bullets, we'd nuke every warship out of orbit, we'd send them--

     “People of Earth: I bring you a message!” the robot's synthesized voice screeched from built-in loudspeakers. It shut up even Fowler. Those still aiming weapons at the android felt their trigger fingers tense even as their ears opened (for they were all especially good at listening; perhaps this, even more than shooting, was their true talent).

     And the robot pronounced the words: “Be more skeptical.”

     A great twisting of eyebrows and scratching of heads ensued.

     “No doubt you believe every word you heard during your visit to be true,” the robot continued. It seemed to be speaking directly to the former Air Force pilot. “Even now, you are too excited about the most fantastic of possibilities, too panicked by your own fancies to notice that you've been had. One of us played the joke, it is true, so I am here to fix it.”

     Fowler's mouth gaped once, twice, fumbling uncontrollably. “B-- you-- all the pyramids...”

     “Nonsense. Demand evidence, human, instead of pointing to its absence. Believe what you can prove. Do you think our cybernetic, spacefaring people could even exist if we still insisted on clinging to every superstition? Your people, likewise, are capable of amazing things-- across all times and across all peoples-- especially in great numbers. Human ingenuity may one day lead you, too, to explore the stars, but you squander your most powerful ability when you use it in baseless judgment, especially of your own. Let this be a lesson to you.”

     A conveyor belt whisked the robot back into its spaceship, which shimmered once and, before the eyes of all present and the cameras among them, disappeared forever.

     Pilot, lecturer, and fool, Fowler's arms and shoulders dropped. Words failed him completely as the shamefaced crowd dispersed.

Do or Die: No Miniatures? How to Make Basic Counters.

Sometimes you want to play D&D on a grid, but you don't have any way of marking positions on the map, a counter. Ideally you'd want a miniature, but they're not always available. With a little preparation and some basic materials, though, you can make your own basic counters.

Things You'll Need

a gluestick

paper

pen (or computer images & printer)

cardboard

scissors

Draw or write something on a piece of paper or print out an image at about 100x100 pixels. Cut the image out along with a sheet of cardboard the same size and glue them together.

Yup, that's it. Dang, I made a bunch o' those. I usually put a character portrait on one side and wrote the character's name, class, and level on the back. I also made some quicker and dirtier versions using two pieces of paper taped to a nickel. The extra weight of the cardboard or nickel is necessary so that pieces don't go flying all over when someone opens up a book or if you turn on a fan or whatever.

Other Ideas for Quick Counters:

-spare change (good w/ few characters and limited enemy types)

-Go stones (without or without masking tape and Sharpie for names)

-Scrabble or Bananagrams tiles

-if you have enough of particular colors, use dice!

What other things have you resorted to using as counters in a game? If you have any favorites or any stories about counters in general, let me know in the comments.

Crypt Thieves

They came after the age of the Sorim. Many tales of crypt thieves have already been told: of Jabeld, Rizeld, Mylcra, Kleppin, Fedzl-- worst of all Melthin-- and myriad others. These people dwelt on the Surface, but not above the Grand Crypt, for there can be no such thing as being outside a crypt when all the world is one.

These thieves told myths amongst themselves about the bottom of the world, where some discovered elaborate, abandoned catacombs without end. In awed whispers would thieves repeat that greatest wealth hides deepest, for this is what they read down there in cryptic runes. So thither into the world they delved, poking sarcophagi, finding treasures of the past, and witnessing strange, terrible dreams as they would never know in life on the Surface.

When thieves repeat their mantra and imagine jewels, however, they forget that they did not invent the world. They do not know the true cosmology of the Grand Crypt. Only the magick nightmares of ancient warlocks could shape the world with their words. Death gave the ancient magi their power in an age long buried that all life tries to forget. No thief would ever learn or wield this power, yet all who dared to delve deep enough might find what ancient deathwizard lords meant when they spoke of “greatest wealth.”

The Worms of Kurm

Sorim legends speak of a place beneath the Grand Crypt, a wormworld they named Kurm. Before all the world was a crypt (or so the walls say) horrible monsters stole ageless, winged worms from the moon and imprisoned them under all of the world. To necromancers of old, the yearning of worms to return to their home explained why their slimy bodies always slithered up from the soil of graves, why they could be forced to crawl towards light without eyes, and why their feeble, vestigial wings still try to carry them off of this planet.

All life on the Surface is drawn by dreaming and yearns to burrow through the depths of Kurm into unreality. Thin, wilted trees without sun, fed only on the light of distant stars and a wormless moon, reach their branches undergrave to nourish themselves on bone. In growth these branches surpass even their roots, intertwining and becoming them, blooming fruit into life to rot in chambers of the buried dead. Grave willows above conjoin with masses of ivy living weedily atop their own dead and covering over tombstones of others.

Shadows gnaw the corpse of a bird at the base of a tree, its body dissolving into the depths of the wormworld. At the urging of a light rain, the legions of Kurm erupt through dirt and starved ivy and the ground quakes at their great, amassed writhing. Thousands upon thousands up on one wormy foot, flailing and thrashing, break into spurts of aimless, pathetic flight. Wolfkin howl in fear at night when crawling masses in their confusion tangle their misshapen wings, multiplying their force until a great wormwing cloud takes flight over the land, filling it with all-devouring darkness as they fly ever higher...

A rotten fruit falls from another grave-fed tree with a wet thud, splatting its feeble seed into the ground. This, too, is just another feast for worms, drawn ever downward. As any thief is drawn down from a leap by the weight of his own dreaming, as fruits and leaves tumble from branches and all life itches to fall down sleeping or dead, so, too, does doom come to every worm that drops, one-by-one, from hopeful flight. Thereby no worm would ever reach the moon again, though every denizen of Kurm still yearned for it.

On the Fictional Nature of Deities

To me, it is monumentally clear that deities are as fictional as goblins and elves. Clearly I must not understand how I'm supposed to be interpreting [insert whatever clearly immoral, ancient authoritarian master race narrative], says one group of theists or another. But how is it supposed that any deity could be perfect if literally all of their creations are flawed? By what processes are these beings immortal or eternal? By what means do they achieve omniscience (or, that is, how can it be demonstrated that such mythical origins may cause a state of omniscience)? None of these have been answered to satisfaction by any claiming belief in these imaginary, often invisible and extraterrestrial beings.

Give the real ancients some credit for at least trying to make up incredible stories as answers. The modern brand of theists sits too smugly upon their couched assumptions. I would have that ugly sofa ripped out from under them. There is no such thing as eternity, nor has anyone proven any supposed principle of everlasting life or perpetual motion. Magic is not real and no supernatural explanation of a phenomenon has ever been right. No form of life as we know it can surveil the inner thoughts of homo sapiens, nor can even the most far-sighted life as we know it see much beyond some miles at any moment, let alone see all the universe, and it is plainly obvious that none can see unceasingly. What are our pitifully terrestrial abilities on the scale of our solar system, let alone the scale of galaxies and the universe that theists would have us think their wizards and demons also see and affect absolutely?

Childrens' tales of St. Nicholas simply are not true-- no such wizards or ghosts or goblins or gods or mystical forces exist with faculties of omnisurveillance and a giant list. They are the invention of racist, authoritarian charlatans from our primitive history who were wrong about the structure of the solar system, wrong about the formation of Earth, wrong about the history of our planet after its formation, wrong about life before us on this planet, wrong about the mechanisms of life, wrong about the structuring of life on the planet, wrong about sex, wrong about what is moral, wrong about women, wrong about the best form of government, who were even wrong about slavery and whom nobody should be asked to listen to with any reverence in the 21st century.

Brief Notes on Why I Am an Enemy of Religion

I consider myself an enemy of religion. Religion is the suppression of scientific thought, and I believe that the greatest of ills we can perform as a society is the continuation of ignorance. Science has ever been our best utility for discovery and betterment-- we have only to look at our progress over the last century for proof, but can cast back much longer if necessary. Jefferson, Darwin, Galileo, Copernicus... these are men of science who stood up against massive ignorance, who had the dignity to say that stupid, primitive stories-- needless vestiges of our prehistory-- were wrought from ignorance and had no evidence or basis in reality.

The sorry thing for the cheap mystery cults that make up the modern body of magical, spiritual, and religious thought is that we live in an age wherein mystery has largely been dispelled. Save for the willful ignorance and suppression of knowledge by these very charlatans and their supposed wizards whose purposes are served by foundations of mystery, bewilderment, and rightly-named dumbfoundedness, we know and can do, and can help each other so much more and we can do it better because of science. We have discovered through patient, falsifiable inquiry and review, many of the foundational mysteries of the various cults of the world and their bogus hocus pocus.

We know the age of the Earth (4.5 billion years... four thousand five hundred MILLION, if that makes the immensity of the number more scrutable to you) and the universe (13.77 billion years). We know the processes by which life reproduces and when and how life becomes viable. We know that two same sex people can love each other and live healthy, safe lives that do not cause hurricanes or anything of the sort. We have been able to explain and consistently reproduce the origins of life since at least the mid-twentieth century. We frequently explore space outside of our planet, by which we know that nothing lives in our upper atmosphere (let alone anything with supernatural powers). That these and other myths persist is, in fact, an evil upon society. That our children would be instructed in such falsehoods by institutions of the public is unconscionable; that our elected Congress should persist in acting under their delusion is unforgivable.

Laserman III: Laserman Vs. Dash Dervish's Hyperquantum Cyclonic Terror & the Countdown of Doom!

Billions of volts exploded in white hot plasma inside a giant, chronochrome-plated hourglass, ready to explode and engulf New Detroit in an unstoppable whirlwind of supersonic, quantum unstabilized lightning. An unused rack of laboratory beakers shook uncontrollably atop a steel console. The air filled with static so that the hair of Dash Dervish (the maniacal meteorologist) stood out on its ends in a wild, white shock. A rush of endorphins forced an uncontrollable laugh from out of the megabrain's mouth. Ultimate control rushed over him, as in a lucid dream.

“Let the countdown begin!”

9:00:00:00

Blaring klaxons meant Laserman had breached level two, where he would undoubtably be defeated by an army of thugs. The first of the Terror's final checks came in all clear. Dash commanded a mutant scientist to open the teleportation pod doors, and sections of man-sized, metal eggs surrounding the cyclone-storming hourglass of the Terror flew open with a steaming, hydraulic whoosh.

The Dervish leapt into the first available pod, lab coat flapping behind. The door whooshed shut with a crunch. Without belting himself in, he shifted the pod interior to zero G and teleported away, still gasping for air from all his laughing. The lights on the pod he used went dim, all used up. The rest still flickered with color against the brilliance of the Hyperquantum Cyclonic Terror.

7:11:05:00

Seven pods for seven mutated scientists. A secondary initiative booted efficiently amongst them. The mutants needn't shout over all the alarms because they communicated telepathically. Their green, suction-cup fingers darted around over a series of computer consoles teeming with buttons. Their uneven eyeball clusters showed no pupils, which were transfixed on an inwardly located, holographic interface within their collective neural net. Between the seven, they might have had close to a hundred eyes yet not one of them looked outside itself at the world around it, focused as they were upon their digital labors.

Like programmed automatons, they would not break until the absolute last. Until that final minute, their highest priority would be to ensure the operation of the Terror. After it they would flee to the pods, and woe to anyone still within the city limits then! Woe, okay?

6:22:03:14

The third level breach alarms erupted into siren shrieks and banshee wails.

Laserman burst through a pair of double doors, turned and immediately decked a mutant clicking at a computer mainframe. He grabbed a metal furniture (formerly weighed by the thing in the lab coat writhing on the floor) and blocked the massive doors with its legs, making it a different sort of bar stool. It would only hold for so long if they turned the flamethrower on it, but that was a risk Laserman would have to take. His nostrils flared mightily, lungs stinging but uncaring at the heat and turbulence of the lab's atmosphere in close proximity to a churning plasma vortex, just greedy for air.

Down dropped Blackout― Laserman's loyal, intelligent service cat― from a ceiling tile at the other end of the room (landing, of course, on its feet). The cat's tail had been scorched bare at its tip by Flame― boss of The Dervish's cruel gang of miscreant meteorologists― and his napalmy weapon of choice. An unflappable force of felinity, Blackout sauntered over to its ape descendent partner.

“M-ow?” asked Blackout, or “Are you hurt?”

He certainly looked it. While once he had pressed at the double doors to bolt them shut, now he verily leaned upon them (momentarily, of course, for the clock was still ticking). A bruise had already begun to form along his jaw, where he had taken a punch zooming past the SWAT team and their battle with Dash's minions at level 2. His lower lip was split and numb. Sparks spat out a joint at the left shoulder of his robosuit where it'd been pierced by three wicked projectiles from stormtroopers wielding a weapon against which his armor was not prepared― assault staplers! One leg on each of the giant staples, machine-sharpened to nanopoints, pierced the electromesh plating of his robosuit like arrows through chain mail. The legs that hadn't hit him hung just over his shoulder looking sharp and deadly.

Despite his injuries, Laserman only reached out, scratched under Blackout's chin, and whispered, “Who's a good kitty?”

Blackout knew the answer, but felt reassured at its friend's health rather than patronized.

The mutants, this whole time, kept up their automatonish poking and clicking at consoles with their suckered fingers. Even the one who'd been punched off his stool resumed its work as though nothing had happened. They had a single program, a single mission, a single mind. They weren't made for combat, but Laserman knew that. This wasn't his first encounter with mutated men from XI V.

“We come in peace.” Laserman took a step forward. “Stop this machine now!”

The mutant scientists ignored him entirely. They did hear him in some way, even if (all eyes turned inward) they couldn't see him, but they didn't hear in a human-normal auditory sense. The HQCT had whipped up into such a frenzy by now that anyone with that kind of auditory sense would have a hard time hearing anything other than the thunder of soon-to-explode plasma echoing in its chronochrome hourglass. Instead, the mutants heard Laserman's words reported deep in their neural net. Unfortunately his order conflicted with their current program. So, without their help, shielding his eyes against the scintillations of the whirling, potentially city-vaporizing, giant time bomb in the middle of the room, the Man of Laser and his faithful feline hurriedly scanned the consoles for something, anything, just some way to shut it― or even slow it― down.

5:31:00:20

Our hero's eyes alighted on a conspicuous, red button under a sheath of glass between two of the mutants' consoles. “STOP,” it said in white letters. He wasted no time in smashing the glass open with a hard elbow and slapping at the button.

But nothing happened, except that Laserman cursed and went, “You've got to be kidding!” to nobody in particular.

Mind racing, he smacked the button again. Was it broken? A false abort switch, designed by Dash to torture him with hope? Perhaps he'd activated it the first time, only to shut it off by pressing it again? Or had it really been on and he'd turned it off by pressing it (as Dash would've expected him to, especially since he'd had it sealed so innocently behind glass!) and now his pressing it again had perhaps reactivated it on some sort of timer? Was it all reset? Was it all too late?

While he was busy freaking out, Blackout tapped him on the leg and looked up at him imploringly. The cat's ears had picked out the racket of a modem from one of the consoles surrounding the Terror (in a minor way, our hero's lack of hearing had spared him). Laserman shot out for it and, recognizing the readouts as belonging to the XI V neural net, attempted to force a stack overflow in one of the alien robot mutant scientists.

The door jolted against its hinges. The stool's metal legs held, but bent. Twice.

?:X-:12:00

Laserman cursed again. It might be stressed that normally Laserman was politely spoken (as any Michigander) but his life, his cat, and all of Detroit could be blown up in mere minutes. Just how many minutes was now impossible to tell, as the countdown flickered wildly between inscrutable, unreliable symbols and a blinking twelve. Was it four minutes? Three? One?

Suddenly, a six-and-a-half foot tall, eye patch-wearing minotaur of a dude materialized at close quarters to Laserman wielding an Uzi. This happened even though the door never opened because this man-mountain― The Dervish's chief lieutenant, Flame!― wore a phase displacement headband, clearly visible without his protective welding mask. He didn't need the welding mask because he didn't have his signature weapon. Phase/displace-materializing in close proximity to a doomsday device is dangerous, true, but shooting a flamethrower around one would be an idiotic guarantee of disaster. Bullets, though, can't penetrate the chronochrome plating of the Hyperquantum Cyclonic Terror― and so Flame planned to assassinate his rival once and for all!

In the split-second while Flame's body still coalesced into substantiality, our hero grasped and controlled the beefy wrist of his opponent, twisting it away and down. Laser speed and cybernetic strength saved our hero and the seven XI V from spraying, deadly hot lead. Flame had only enough time to roar, “I'll kill you!” before Laserman disarmed and tripped him. The fiendish forecaster had a bind on Laserman's cannon arm, though, and forced it outward, pulling him to the floor.

They wrestled for like two minutes. Blackout leapt at Flame in defiance, but he batted the cat across the lab with his boot. Only then (with Laserman pinned under him) did Flame see the glitched-out timer.

He knew he'd blown his one opportunity to personally avenge himself against the man who'd blinded his eye. The course of their punching, crawling, dragging, strangling combat had taken them to the other end of the room, so that he'd have to leap to the other end to recover his gun, completely exposing himself to a laser blast. The teleportation pods, and escape, were his only possibility if the flamethrowerless man-mountain wished to survive the death of his enemy.

Flame pummeled his foe about the shoulders and back, where old burns still scarred him, and jumped off him into the nearest teleporter. A burst of blue light shimmered out from the pod and its lights went dead. Then the giant was nowhere to be seen.

Part of Laserman― the part crumpled up in a heap of old, throbbing scars on the floor― hurt and despaired so much that he just wanted to curl into a ball.

*:\!:12:00

A powerful surge from the robosuit's concentration chip brought our hero's vision and determination back into laser focus. His hand shot up to one of the Terror's consoles― with all his code still typed in― and pressed a button to upload.

In that same microsecond, the mutant scientist robots' final command kicked in. Blast shields fell down over all the consoles. The mutants all piled into their respective teleporters and zapped away to safety before Laserman could find his feet again. All of them, that is, except for one.

This one sci-mutoid, codename Xolglox, plopped in front of a blank console in the teleporter used up by Flame. Android-like, it'd depressed the system initiator. Nothing happened. It sat there for a second, either expecting to teleport or awaiting new commands from its collective, until Laserman's forced stack overflow error finally hit home, disrupting its internal connector program and jogging it out of its neural net. Xolglox realized it was all alone and was going to die that way very quickly when the Terror blew up, without any time to process either of those really quite dire feelings.

“Help us!” The Man of Laser yelled at it. “We've got to stop this thing.”

So the alien stuck its sucker-ended fingers into Laserman's ears and transmitted a mental blueprint of the Hyperquantum Cyclonic Terror via infomeld, highlighting its weakest points.

“Cross the circuits...” it croaked.

That message might have been cryptic if not for the simultaneous, red blinking of a series of parallel mirror circuits in the mental blueprint image of the Hyperquantum Cyclonic Terror. A single laser beam entering through a pinhole-gap (accidentally introduced to the chronochrome shell by all the freakish, rumbling instability of the HQCT) charged to incredible intensity and aimed at just the right angle might connect two primary mirror configurations made never to touch, and thereby short out the entire doomsday device.

But could Laserman do it? Did he have enough time left to charge a laser blast to such incredible power? Could he avoid hitting any of the other vital parts that might just make it explode catastrophically, spewing plasma and evaporating all life for miles? Could he fire off a beam in the absolute nick of time with such superhuman― one might even say laser― precision?

… actually, never mind. This was kinda his thing.

Lasers exploded everywhere in shockwaves throughout the Hyperquantum Cyclonic Terror, but outside nothing so much as crackled. Outwardly all that happened was all the lights went out and the machine whirred to a stop. Then it was suddenly eerily quiet and still.

So suddenly, in fact, that Laserman wondered aloud. “Was that it?” He touched his robosuit, sought out a fleshy spot of his neck. “Am I dead?”

“Meow,” said Blackout. The cat's claws scratched at the door, pawing underneath it at a moving light. From the other side, someone giggled.

Our hero thought maybe this was one of Dash's minions. He approached with caution, guiding himself to the barred entry with a laser point. “Excuse me,” he said. Whoever was on the other side didn't seem to hear him, so he repeated himself.

“Oh hey, guy?” came a voice from the other side. “Are you in there?”

“Who do you work for?”

“Huh? I'm Deputy Frank... NDPD!”

Laserman pulled the bar stool out of the door handles (a bit of a trick in the dark) and opened the door. On the other side― holding one of those squarish, emergency flashlights with the handle on the top― stood an unathletically large, smiley fellow in a police uniform. One of his eyes didn't move much, and seemed permanently fascinated with his own nose. Atop his police badge he wore a nametag sticker with “Frank” written on it in permanent marker.

“Hey, I know you!” said Frank.

“You do?”

“Yeah. I saw you at the bank today.” Frank looked very proud at having remembered this, even though he didn't want to show it.

“I didn't―” Laserman was about to finish with how he hadn't been at the bank when he recalled his predicament.¹ Frank must have seen the fake footage on TV.

Immediately, Laserman switched tactics. Getting past the SWAT team during the assault stapler distraction was one thing, but getting out while the whole police force processed the scene from top-to-bottom would be a totally different matter. Practically impossible. So he asked, “How would you like to be famous, Frank?”

The policeman's eyes widened, glowing. “Famous?”

“How did you get down here?” Laserman uprighted a fallen furniture and invited Frank to sit on it. “Are other officers coming?”

Frank frowned sheepishly. “I... aw, shucks, I got lost. I'm sorry, guy.”

“That's okay, Frank, that's okay. You're doing fine. Please, take a seat.”

He did.

A laser dot traced spirals in the ceiling, bored-like. “I see you've met my cat, Blackout.”

“Is this your cat?” Blackout was busy rubbing its ears on the stool legs. Frank reached down to pet it. “Wow, what a nice cat. You've probably got the nicest, best cat I've ever met. I really mean it.”

“Thank you.”

“Hey,” said Frank. “We're friends, right?”

“Of course we are, Frank.” Laserman saw no reason to say this with anything but sincerity. “Hey, do you like games?”

Frank nodded, saying he was really good at games, and so the Man of Laser proposed a couple of rules for theirs. The first was that Frank had to show him where he got lost. The second was that he couldn't let anyone else know that some guy named Laserman was down there― or the cat, for that matter, or this alien― even though they're good guys. And, lastly, Frank had to say that he pushed this button― a big, shiny red one that said “STOP.”

“You know what?” said Frank. “Y'know, I would give you a million dollars.”

“Thank you.” Laserman swapped a lens function or two in or out from his laser cannon to produce an exact 3D scale model of the Hyperquantum Cyclonic Terror's lair. He pointed to exactly where they stood. The deputy nodded his understanding and pointed to where he must've come in― of course! Police or villain, no-one would think to patrol the tertiary dredge control conduit exit.

The black cat jumped up into the crook of Laserman's waiting arm and they headed out the door, followed by a scared-looking alien in a lab coat. Laserman paused at the door. “Frank... we're friends, right?”

“Friends forever, I think,” Frank answered.

Laserman shook on it. “Friends forever.”

Frank hardly knew what to say. “You know what? Wow, you deserve a raise, guy. I mean it!”

And then they were all out the double doors back to the safety of wherever it is Laserman goes off to. Probably back home. The mutant might get a look or two in the elevator, but for real it would take more than some slightly rearranged facial organs to disturb your typical New Detroiter.

Meanwhile, the deputy stood diligently on guard, lighting the dark of the disabled doomsday lab with his flashlight. He circled around the room a few times, patrolling and whistling the theme from The Great Escape. The timer's display flickered back on, frozen dead in defeat.

0:00:00:00000000033564095

But that didn't mean a whole lot to Frank.

1[In episode 2, Dash Dervish framed Laserman for bank robbery using the magic of green screen technology! -db]