2004-10-21 - 12:36 a.m.

An odd thought struck Wheel as he blew a ninja forty feet backwards through the slashing black rain in New Orleans.

"Remember how different things used to be in the '80s?" asked the Psychedelic Illuminate, ratcheting another Hiroshima shell into his gigantic hand cannon.

"Indeed I do, Wheel," remarked the Blazer, tossing a handful of flaming blue stars into the midst of a huddle of vampire nuns. "Hulk Hogan could take on the world, we all loved the Ghostbusters, and you stuck out a lot less with everyone else ALSO wearing neon legwarmers and pastel sweatshirts."

Weaver Black faded out of the shadows of a fire escape landing, looping a silvery cord down around the neck of a chromed mercenary, hauling him up into a twitching hangman's jig. "Also, you did a lot less hallucinogens and you were way into speed. Remember when you stayed up all night drinking Absolut and chopping lines with Gordon Gecko and William Faith and then went screaming out into New York traffic and went missing for two weeks and came back and said you'd run through time?"

"And for some reason you were trying to convince everyone that Hunter Thompson would make a great Secretary of the Treasury, and then you got really into Falco for a while?" grunted the towering cyborg Overdrive as he drove his steel arm like a piledriver through the chest of a cybersamurai.

Crackle chuckled darkly as he hurled a whirling black spike into the forehead of a gangster. "And what was the deal with the glittery eye-makeup and hanging out with those Hungarians?"

"FIRST of all, those legwarmers looked pretty spectacular on me," Wheel grumbled between firing off unlikely rounds from his spectacularly oversized pistol. "Second, I DID run through time, and I have the scars from Rasputin's ceremonial knife to prove it." His lightsaber flipped neatly into his hand and he swung it in a tight arc, slashing through a snarling face. "Third, Falco was extremely underrated," he muttered, dodging at hyperspeed under a flickering barrage of needle rounds. "And fourth, that's none of your damn business."

"So what ARE you yammering about, then, if not your sweaty trysts with overfed Eastern Europeans?" grated Weaver, lunging from a nearby alley and snapping the neck of a possessed policeman.

"Yeah, get to the point. This narrative is getting kind of unwieldy." Overdrive grunted over the warbling hum of his photon cannon as he poured blazing death across the street.

Blazer floated up serenely out of the way of a hail of bullets and unleashed a flurry of Cardiac Overclocker cantrips, causing hearts to explode in curls of flame all around the Irregulars. "If anyone's still reading at this point, I don't think they're the sort to be put off by stilted dialogue structure."

Crackle snorted with amusement as he leapt up and drove a short dark blade into the the skull of a towering flesh golem. "Way to break the fourth wall, dude."

"Break-shmeak, we're the only game in town." Wheel chortled, turning and shooting a supporting character in the head with glee. "Which is why I feel compelled to enter a gimmicky flashback in the hopes of irritating someone else into getting things moving again."

"Clever," murmured Black.

"Not really. So, yes, the 1980s ... ah, things were different for the Invisibles and their assorted affiliates then ..."

New York was lit up brilliantly, and fireworks burst around the towering grace of the Statue of Liberty. New Yorkers and all of America joined together in seemingly arbitrary celebration of the greatness of New York, America, and the Statue of Liberty, releasing thousands of colorful balloons into the sky.

The balloons drifted up among the glittering stars ... and were blotted out by the sudden vicious black wedge of a helicarrier against the full moon! An ominous voice, full of portent, began singing over a harsh synthesizer background:

"Wait, dude, wait." Overdrive paused, holding a squirming ninja up by the neck as he turned to consider Wheel with his squinted bionic eye. "Where'd the theme song come from?"

"Everything had a theme song back then. Remember? It turned out there was a polyneutronic nanite infection breezing across the whole planet that spontaneously generated appropriate music by moving air molecules individually?"

"Oh, yeah," chuckled Weaver Black, "Turned out they were being pumped out by that weird stellarlithia satellite, right? That was a bugger to fix."

"It was all the bloody Reptiloids ..." Wheel murmured darkly.

"Not THAT mishagoss again," Blazer rolled his eyes.

The Spirit of Vengeance tore the screaming soul out of an Anaconda Guardsman who had been irritating him. "Dude, keep going. So they're crashing through the sky?"

"Oh, yeah!"

*KRAKRASKLESHHH!*

There was a loud shattering roar as Wheel blew the animate gargantuan glass pitcher that had burst through the wall into twirling shards. The Irregulars, vampires, ninjas, men in black, zombies, robots, monsters, extradimensionals, mages, and cyborg mercenaries all paused for a moment as the sound died away.

"Anyway," Wheel said.

Aboard the helicarrier were some of the most notoriously evil beings ever to gather together for purposes of notorious evil. Commander Oblivion stood tall, in his black-mirrored mask and Nazi helmet, clad in a black leather boiler suit and cape, rasping commands in his high-pitched, howling voice, the result of a sharp blow to the throat taken during a pick-up basketball game. Standing at his shoulder, arms crossed imposingly, was a man who worked with Cobra only on his own terms, a man with own formidable organization; Curarestro, who for some reason was wearing a metal mask that covered his entire head.

"Wait a minute ... Curarestro?"

"Sure. It was the '80s. Shut up."

"And why were they called Cobra?"

"It was SYMBOLISM. They were EVIL."

The luscious Baroness Circe stood in her leather catsuit, her long black hair flowing as she needlessly polished her Luger and practiced her Slavic accent. Standing near her were the Dreadnoks, brainless muscleheads all, save for the pink-haired Kaizana and the muscled Zartan's Pet.

"Dude, you're reaching."

"Your head's a canoe if you interrupt me again."

The armies of Cobra came hurling from the helicarrier in waves, their snappy blue uniforms glimmering in the city lights, parachuting down in droves amongst the clouds of balloons and showers of fireworks to land on Ellis Island amidst screaming tourists!

A tall Anaconda Viper punched a hapless cameraman like Sean Penn on a bender while the incredibly doltish Major Beatrix Blood went swinging by on her hanglider above the torch of the Statue of Liberty.

She was blown out of the sky in a hail of red laser fire, landing miraculously unharmed hundreds of feet below. Suddenly a handful of tall, proud figures were visible against the railing of the torch.

General Actionhawk shouted "YO, JOE!" and leapt over the railing, his floor-length bomber jacket flaring out as his jet pack kicked in, his two .45 laser-firing handguns blazing, miraculously never hitting anything but machinery. He was joined by a stream of others: Snake Lochs, the silent ninja; Roadjax, the burly rhyme-speaking machine-gunner; Heflintus Gryphon and Lady JayeGray, the well-appointed Caucasian military couple.

Wheel launched a grappling hook from his hand cannon and caught on to a flying Trouble Bubble, punching through the canopy and hurling the pilot to a grisly non-death far below. The Vipers already on the ground were met by the surging Irregular Joes, led by Weaver Shipwreck and Gunghoverdrive.

"Gunghoverdrive? Oh, fuck you, dude." Overdrive swiveled and caught a charging ninja with a swinging overhand blow, shattering the hapless fellow's skull.

"Yeah, this is weak sauce. I've NEVER been called Weaver Shipwreck. And if anyone ever did call me that, I'd rip that their god-damn eyes out." Black growled, pouncing on the back of an ED-209 combat drone and disabling its servos.

"And why were you just called Wheel?" inquired Crackle, blading a Hell's Angel in the throat and neatly bamfing clear of the spray of gore.

"LOOK, monkey-boys." Wheel kicked a Yakuza in the chest with his speedsole set to Warp 8 and accelerated the tattooed man backwards through a brick wall, leaving a comical hole and a great deal of blood. "Who's telling this multi-media flashback?"

"Looks like text to me," Blazer muttered, casting a shield that blocked a flurry of black rays from the agents of the Interest.

"You've probably got the gag by now," Wheel shrugged and slammed his lightsaber through the gaping face of a lost Chicago musician of middling talent who had wandered somewhere he didn't belong.

"Got it about twelve paragraphs ago, really." whispered Weaver Black.

Overdrive blasted dozens of faceless background characters into special effects cinders. "How long were you planning this debacle, anyway?"

"Way too damn long."

Blazer caught Crackle out of the way of a charging Mad Max cart and somersaulted him over next to the other three.

"Well, it's the sillest sketch I've ever been in," opined the roughly-drawn Spirit of Vengeance.

Blazer glanced from side to side at the vast chaos he had almost singlehandedly created. "Do you think we should just stop?"

Wheel shrugged serenely. "Yeah, all right."

*****

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