Welcome to the world of Edison City, where the never-ending battle against the forces of evil includes everything from the Owl Bandit taking over the subway line downtown to the Antichrist trying to rewrite history aboard the HMS Titanic. Anything and everything is a possibility here, including flying sharks. Especially the sharks.
If you’re new here, catch up with the Edison City Index:
For the previous episode, in which we learned the backstory of the terrifying Behemoth Bob now rampaging in Edison City, go here:
And now, the adventure continues!
After the Alleyway Ambush, the second scenario one is likely to encounter as a patrolling superhero in Edison City is the Slugging Match. Not unlike the Ambush, the setup for this is almost absurdly simple. A Big Monster is on the loose, and so someone flies in and hits them very hard until they fall down and stay down. Super-strength punches are best for this, also energy blasts and lightning bolts. Collateral damage is almost a certainty, so usually a few of the lesser-powered capes try to pitch in with crowd control and first-responder efforts to keep all that to a minimum while the big guns go in and slug it out. It’s big, it’s loud, and it looks great on TV.
As Meg Atomic landed on the rooftop of a midsize hotel with a good sightline of the area, she could see she wasn’t the first one to the party. Titanium-Alloy Guy and the Mauve Mosquito were doing their best to stop Behemoth Bob rampaging through the neighborhoods of Edison City, although it must be said that Titanium-Alloy Guy was doing most of the heavy lifting. As Meg rapidly assessed the situation she heard a rapid clinkclinkclinkclinkboom sound, which meant that Titanium-Alloy Guy had just unloaded another salvo of rockets. “Hey, Meg Atomic, I’m on the field, need any help?” she radioed over, tossing Samuel Superlative the Third an extra comlink as she did so he could hear.
There was a momentary burst of static as the rockets went off and Behemoth Bob disappeared behind roiling fire and smoke. Then the Mauve Mosquito piped in urgently. “Meg, Titanium’s down, repeat, he’s on the ground, the monster guy hit him with his tail or something I don’t know wow this sucker’s big I’m taking cover! Hit him now Meg, hit him now!”
“Stand back,” Meg said to Samuel Superlative the Third. She was already doing impossibly fast probability calculations and the last thing she needed was a newbie in the way. Difficult to assess his full mass. Add a factor for the tail acceleration. Adjust the graviton strength and-
“Wait!” Samuel said abruptly, and shot forward, so fast Meg didn’t have time to stop him. He’d flown right into her target vector which meant either she’d have to recalculate everything or let loose anyway and hope his super-strength could withstand the shock, and even then his intervention meant diverting energy away from Behemoth Bob which meant she’d have to redo the whole graviton calculation- her mouth fell open in shock. Samuel Superlative had landed on the behemoth’s massively furry head, somewhere behind its right ear, and was darting and weaving around in an erratic fashion that reminded her for all the world of videos she’d seen on her friends’ social feeds.
“Samuel!” Meg Atomic said in utter disbelief. “Are you giving the behemoth scritches?”
All at once the monster rolled onto its side with an earth-shaking thud and let out a cavernous rumble of pure contentment. Meg had never imagined she’d witness a behemoth wagging its tail before, or ever, but if that wasn’t what Behemoth Bob was doing right at that moment, she didn’t know what it was.
Then, over her radio, she heard Samuel laughing, almost sobbing. “He’s a big Trar!” he said, “Just like home! Just like-” and there was another burst of static.
Meg’s heart went out to him. She tapped a code on the radio that meant a message would go out to the others but not to Samuel; she didn’t want to embarrass the poor guy. “All clear, everyone, the new guy’s got him down.”
“What’s he doing?” the Mauve Mosquito squeaked.
“I think he’s playing with it,” Meg answered honestly. “Give him a minute and he might get it to go to sleep.”
“The hell he is!” Titanium-Alloy Guy barked. “That thing almost killed me and you think I’m gonna just-”
He was interrupted by an enormous great whuffling sound. Behemoth Bob was snoring.
As the D.E.R.P. rolled in to handle cleanup and relocate the slumbering form of Behemoth Bob to someplace more secure, Meg sought out Samuel Superlative the Third. He was sitting on the ground, his back against a smashed-up car that Behemoth Bob had stepped on before. Meg had several questions, but she asked the first that came to mind. “What’s a Trar?”
Samuel almost, but didn’t quite, smile. “A much, much smaller variation on that creature. Entirely harmless. It sounds mostly like this.” With utter seriousness, he took a breath and gave a loud “Grooooooo.”
“I see,” said Meg, trying very hard not to laugh. “It sounds like what we call cows over here.”
“Are they furry?” Samuel asked.
“No,” Meg said, an image flickering in her mind of a furry cow. “Yaks are, though. Well, woolly, I think. Sheep are that way too. You want fur you’re looking at dogs, more likely. They’re smaller than cows.”
“I think,” Samuel said, “I might want to obtain one of these creatures. Can you, what did you call it, give the scritches to a dog?”
“I haven’t had a dog myself, but I’m pretty sure you can,” Meg said. It was getting more difficult to keep a straight face. “There’s an animal shelter on Fourth, not far from here actually, rumor is they work with the special as well as normal pets.”
“Special?” Samuel considered for a minute, and then he understood. “Ah. Like this one,” he said, waving at the slumbering form of Behemoth Bob, now slowly being rolled away by a platoon of armored flatbed trucks.
Meg snorted, accidentally blowing a small crater in the parking lot nearby. “Yes,” she said, “But smaller. A little smaller.”
“A shame you couldn’t make him smaller,” Samuel said, looking regretfully at the D.E.R.P. convoy. “I liked him.”
A thought crossed Meg’s mind. She dismissed it. Too reckless. Her mother would kill her. After all the chaos with the Malevolent Med-Student, they would be in no mood for her taking any chances now. On the other hand, hadn’t they practically welcomed him with open arms during the even more recent chaos at the hospital? Hadn’t they sat there and fawned over him just because he was all upset over what’s her face, the minion, while Meg sat right there after all he’d done?
On the third hand, he had tried to help with the dome that was cutting off Muldavna from the rest of the world: he’d fired off his Pharma-Death Beams at it and to all the world it looked like he’d done his best to blast through. It wasn’t his fault that he hadn’t done it, right? Or … was it? Had he really tried? He said he had, sure, but how did she know? Didn’t he have some kind of Sugar Plum Bomb or something? He hadn’t used that, had he, he hadn’t used the miniature beams he’d used on her, the ones that put her in the hospital, nooooo, he’d just fired a couple shots with the plain old basic Pharma-Death Beams and then walked right off without even pausing to see if there was anything else he could do because of course he had-
“Meg?” Samuel Superlative said. “Are you all right?”
“Yes,” Meg said, having made her decision there and then. “One sec.” She tapped a few buttons on the radio, opening up a private channel with the Mauve Mosquito. “Hey,” she said. “You don’t still have any of that shrink ray tech, do you?”
Read the Next Episode.
Grooooo