* * * * * *

LNH "Tsk" Force #2 "Bad Tourists, Part 2 of 2"

Starring: Irony Man, Bandwagon Chick, Mainstream Man, and Contraption Man

Special Guest Villains: Clive and Gary, the Bad Tourists

and continuing the introduction of: No Sense of Direction Man

* * * * * *

The force of the explosion rocked the parking lot, setting off a deafening howl of car alarms. Circling above in the mystical bandwagon, Bandwagon Chick and Mainstream Man were jolted out of their discussion about the early issues of SUICIDE SQUAD, which Bandwagon Chick had been meaning to pick up.

"That was quite a blast," Bandwagon Chick said. "If not for the bandwagon's Conducement Stabilizers, we'd have flipped over."

"Let's get down there and see what's going on," Mainstream Man said.

* * * * * *

"Ow, Ow, Ow, my head," Contraption Man looked around cautiously. The explosion had taken place some twenty meters away, amidst a cluster of minivans and sport utility vehicles, all of which now lay in a twisted mass of steel and plastic. "Okay, no appreciable damage there." He spotted Irony Man and the stranger in the gray suit crouching down behind a popular Swedish sedan. "Man, those ARE safe cars. Now, who's shooting at us? Probably those two guys with the big futuristic gun. Let me just grab my tool kit and I'll -- damn!" His tool kit was well out of reach, on the other side of a burning 4x4. He'd have to leave his cover behind a blackened pile of former minivan to retrieve it. And given the force of the recent explosion, he didn't consider that a very good idea at all.

* * * * * *

"Those are the tourists of whom I spoke earlier," the gray-suited stranger explained to Irony Man. "The ones who have come here to destroy your universe."

"That's what I thought," Irony Man replied. "With their advanced weaponry, they must have missed us on purpose, as a warning shot. That was their mistake, and one I do not intend to emulate." He carefully focused his suit's irony beams on the invaders.

* * * * * *

"Missed!" Gary spat, lowering the weapon in disbelief. "How could I miss? Clive, did you recalibrate this thing?"

His partner shook his head, stunned. "No. It was working fine when we played hyper-golf last Thursday. Maybe they've got some kind of advanced anti-aiming technology."

"That's impossible. We did a complete footprint analysis. There's no way beings from this dimension could have access to that kind of science and still use such primitive footwear."

* * * * * *

Palpable waves of pure irony pulsed forth from Irony Man's outstretched arm, striking a nearby billboard reading "Net.ropolis Loves Tourists*", with a heart symbol in place of the word "Loves" and the expected disclaimer in small type at the bottom. (Oh, all right. It said "*The phrase 'Net.ropolis Loves Tourists' with the distinctive heart symbol in place of the word 'Loves' and the full text of this disclaimer are copyright by the Net.ropolis Tourism Partnership and may not be used or reproduced without express written consent. Net.ropolis loves tourists in a purely abstract and platonic sense. No explicit feelings of affection, nor promise of any specific expressions of affection or affectionate behavior, toward any individual tourist or group of tourists on the part of the City of Net.ropolis, the Net.ropolis Tourism Partnership or any individual or business within the City of Net.ropolis is stated or implied.") The billboard, its supports weakened by the blast and overloaded by its excessive verbiage, toppled over, threatening to crush a group of Eu.rec.pean tourists who were just disembarking their tour bus.

* * * * * *

"Look at that billboard," Mainstream Man called out. "It's going to crush those tourists!"

"I'll get the bandwagon into position," Bandwagon Chick told him. "When I give the word, fire the Gestalt Cannon."

"Fire the what?"

"Just pull that lever next to your head when I say go." She pulled sharply on the reins and the phantasmal horses responded, interposing the bandwagon between the tourists and the plummeting sign. "GO!"

Mainstream Man pulled down hard on the lever. A panel in the front of the bandwagon opened, revealing a black barrel-shaped cannon straight out of an animated cartoon. It belched forth a great cloud of Gestalt, overwhelming the billboard's desire to fall down with the realization that it would be both better for the word at large and more consistent with its role as a billboard if it were to remain upright. "That was close," he said.

Meanwhile, the tour guide wasted no time in capitalizing on the situation. "Yes, ladies and gentlemen," he explained, "we have just been rescued by two of Net.ropolis's most famous superheroes -- Bandwagon Chick and, er . . ." he squinted at Mainstream Man's blue and white costume, barely making out the "MM" logo. "And . . . Macroscopic Moe!" The tourists applauded politely.

"Look at the sign," Mainstream Man said.

"Netropolis Loves Tourists," Bandwagon Chick read. "And it almost crushed those tourists. That would have been . . ."

"Ironic. Exactly. Irony Man must have . . ."

* * * * * *

"Missed!" Irony Man couldn't believe his eyes. "I know I was aiming right at those Bad Tourists! If Mainstream Man and Bandwagon Chick hadn't reacted in time, I'd have killed all those people!"

"Hey, Irony Man!" Contraption Man yelled, still not daring to leave the relative safety of his hiding place. "If I had my tool kit I bet I could whip up something to neutralize their weapon."

"Where is it?" Irony Man called back.

"Over there, to the left of the 4x4."

"To the what?" the gray-suited man asked.

"To the LEFT! The LEFT!" Contraption Man yelled, thinking the stranger hadn't heard properly. The blank look on the man's face told Contraption Man that their new acquaintance had heard him well enough, but didn't know the word "left." "It's that thing there," he said, pointing to it.

"I can get it," the man said, and before Irony Man could object to an armorless and apparently powerless civilian endangering himself, took a single step toward the tool kit . . .

. . . And suddenly appeared next to it. He picked it up and looked around, with a very confused expression on his face.

"Over here! Over here!" Contraption Man called. The stranger spotted him and smiled. He took a single step toward Contraption Man and suddenly appeared right next to him. Contraption Man took the kit and began rummaging through it. "Thanks. How'd you do that, anyway?"

"I don't know. I'm not from your place . . . sorry, your dimension. My own dimension . . . works differently from yours. Maybe that explains it."

* * * * * *

"Did you see that, Clive?"

"What, the teleporting one in the gray suit?"

"Yeah. Doesn't he look like those guys from that dimension we were in the other day . . . that Escheria?"

Clive thought about it for a minute. "Yeah, now that you mention it. Hey! That noise I heard. Maybe this joker wandered into the cargo hold when you backed into that building."

"It wasn't my fault," Gary protested. "Directions were all screwed up in that place. Left, right, up, down -- it's like it was all the same."

"That's it," Clive said. "That's why you missed. You were shooting at the Confuse-o-verse guy and it hosed your aim."

"If that's true," Gary said, " Then I should be able to toast the armored one now that the Escherian isn't standing by him any more." He quickly ran through the pre-firing sequence on his ionic nine-iron, aiming carefully at the eye-slit in Irony Man's mask.

* * * * * *

"Let's see," Contraption Man muttered, turning the combination lock on his tool kit. "Three left, then nine left, then fourteen left. Wait, that can't be right. Right. Right. That's it. Three right, then nine right, then -- damn." He looked at his new companion and held up a hand. "Is this my left or right hand?"

"Your what or what?" The man in gray was utterly confused.

"I have an idea. Can you go stand over there for a second?" He indicated a spot on the other side of the burning wreckage.

"Sure." Once again, the strange visitor from another dimension covered an impossible distance in a single step.

Once he was gone, Contraption Man quickly opened his case and began assembling parts.

* * * * * *

Bandwagon Chick and Mainstream Man continued circling the parking lot-cum-battlefield, trying to keep innocent bystanders from wandering into the crossfire. While they were engaged in this pursuit, Mainstream Man saw the Bad Tourists aiming their fiendish device at Irony Man. "Irony Man!" he called out, "Incoming!"

* * * * * *

Irony Man heard Mainstream Man's warning just in time to see the very imposing sight of Gary Spode'Plimp throwing down on him with an ionic nine-iron. Instinctively, he fired his irony beams, still on full strength, directly at his assailant, just as Gary pressed the fire button.

The wave of pure irony met the wave of pure ions halfway between the two warriors. The ultimate battle: art vs. science. Well, a literary device vs. comic-book pseudoscience, anyway. And as you'd expect in the rec.arts hierarchy, literature proved the stronger of the two. The ionic blast was deflected harmlessly away.

Okay, "harmlessly" probably isn't the word Clive or Gary would have used, considering that the beam actually hit their sampling machine, destroying it utterly. The force of the explosion knocked the Bad Tourists off their feet and also cracked the eye-piece on the ionic nine-iron.

Meanwhile, Contraption Man had slapped together a crude device, about the size and shape of a smoke detector, with an adhesive panel on one side. He got the Escherian's attention. "Hey, new guy. Come here." The stranger complied, in the now-familiar manner of traversing the distance in a single step. "See if you can stick this underneath the Bad Tourists' vehicle."

"What is it?"

"It's a time-delayed etheric bomb. It should shut down their dimensional navigation systems."

"I don't know what that means, but it sounds good." The gray-suited stranger stepped over to the Tourists' Space Utility Vehicle and affixed the bomb to the underside.

"Stay there for a second," Contraption Man called out. "I have another idea. Irony Man, tell the Bad Tourists that you'll let them leave in peace if they promise never to come back."

Irony Man switched his communicator to public-address mode. "Attention, Dimensional Invaders! This is Irony Man. We will spare your lives if you go to your vehicle and leave this dimension, never to return!"

* * * * * *

Clive turned to Gary. "Listen to that. What a buffoon."

Gary smiled. "They're going to 'let' us do what we were going to do anyway. Let's go." The pair quickly made their way back to their Space Utility Vehicle, under the watchful eyes of Irony Man and Bandwagon Chick, who had Mainstream Man standing by on the Gestalt Cannon.

"And now, we just transmit our location to the invasion fleet and this dimension is history." Gary reached for the map while Clive fired up the hyperspace radio.

"Attention Dimensional Invasion Fleet. This is Advance Unit Pluto. We have completed our mission. The invasion directions are as follows: From trans-dimensional beacon Alpha Nineteen Prime, go upply-down -- I mean turn up the funk -- no, wait, go back to the place by the stuff, then -- no, go PAST the place by the stuff -- I think there was a Denny's?"

"We're still too close to that Escherian. He's interfering with your sense of direction," Gary told him. "Let's get off-planet and radio from there."

* * * * * *

Waiting in the bandwagon, Contraption Man had been monitoring the broadcast with his makeshift hyperspace radio monitor. When he heard the garbled invasion instructions, he waved to the Escherian, who stepped up to the hovering bandwagon. Contraption Man pressed a switch on a remote control, activating the timer on the etheric bomb just before the SUV popped out of existence. If the device worked properly, when the Bad Tourists' ship rematerialized again, they'd have no idea where there were, nor of how to get back.

Contraption Man checked the range finder he'd just fitted to the back of the remote control. "Okay, they're flying farther away. No! Damn, they're coming back. No, wait. They're going in a big circle . . . well, it's not a circle, it's more like a five-dimensional ellipse, I think. Here, I'll rig up a plotter to the output and --"

Bandwagon Chick cut him off. "Contraption Man. Take a breath."

He looked at her.

"Are they coming back?" she asked calmly.

"No. I don't think so, no," he said in a quieter tone.

"Okay. So it doesn't really matter exactly what shape their path is, does it?"

"I guess not. I suppose I can just make a note of the radio signature of their ship and we can routinely scan for it from the LNHQ," Contraption Man said.

"So it's over, yeah?" Mainstream Man asked.

"Well, that went better than I'd have expected," Irony Man told his team. "Thanks to our new friend, um, we never did catch your name."

"I'm sorry. In all the confusion, there wasn't time. I am called A'l'a'n S'm'i't'h'e'e."

"A'l'a -- hrk, gaff," Mainstream Man tried to repeat the name.

"Don't feel bad. I can't really pronounce it either. You can just call me, uh, Alan Smithee."

"Well, Alan," Irony Man went on. "We certainly couldn't have defeated those Bad Tourists without your help. If there's any way we can help get you back to your own dimension, we'll do it. We actually know quite a few characters with cosmic powers."

"Thank you very much for your concern," Alan replied, "but I can never return to Escheria. By my calculation, I've been gone for over seventeen of your Earth micropinks."

"I'm sorry. Our Earth what?" Bandwagon Chick asked.

"You don't measure time in micropinks?"

"No."

"Oh, well what do you call it when the sky is black, and then it's white, and then it's black again?"

"A day?"

"Hey, that's what we call it, too. Anyway, I've been gone for over seventeen days. I can't go back; somebody's already pregnant."

"Explain it to us later," Contraption Man said.

"Well, if you're going to be living in our dimension, you're going to need a place to stay," Irony Man said. "And with your, um, with your unique --"

"You mean because I don't understand how space and distance work here?" Alan asked, helpfully.

"Exactly. You're going to need some help in basic day-to-day living, at least at first. And, well, this isn't official or anything, but I'd like to invite you to join the Legion."

"I'd be honored," Alan replied. "Even in our isolated dimension of Escheria we have heard tales of the Amalgamated Legion of Secret Avenging Justice, who saved their Pluperfectverse from the horror known only as the Cosmic Blind Date."

"That's, uh, that's not where we are," Irony Man replied.

"It's not?"

"No. This isn't the Pluperfectverse. It's the Looniverse."

"And we're not the Amalgamated Legion of Secret Avenging Justice," Mainstream Man added. "We're the Legion of net.Heroes."

"Oh, well I'm sure you're very good too. I'm still quite honored," Alan told them.

"With your powers, I think we'll call you No Sense of Direction Man," Irony Man announced.

"That's not bad. I like it," Alan decided.

"Could you do me just one little favor, Alan?" Bandwagon Chick asked.

"Of course, Bandwagon Chick. What is it?"

"Could you go stand in the very back of the bandwagon? I need to steer."

* * * * * *

Copyright 1998, Steven Howard

Bandwagon Chick created by Sue Clark.

Contraption Man, Irony Man and Mainstream Man created by person or persons unknown.

Used without permission.