Topic: Museum of Legion Arts : Spiffany and the Bizarro, Vertigo & Carggite Legions
Set
There's not a word yet, for old friends who've just met.
posted
As their vision cleared, the Legionnaires stared in surprise at the figures that had appeared before them, standing on the ground directly in front of the mysterious machine. Duplicates of five of their number stood, there, surrounded by a dozen pale-green gorilla-like creatures, each clad in tattered version of the stately dress of the dozen Coluan dignitaries who had been standing closest to the Legion when the strange light down upon them.
The only one flying, like the levitating Legionnaires, Dawnstar’s double had pale skin and platinum-blonde hair, with the same angular features, as if made of crystal, and her wings were enormous black-feathered things, flapping as they held her aloft.
Colossal Boy just shook his head, seeing his own double in a costume much like his, with the red and blue colors reversed. The pale angular features didn’t trouble him so much as the solid black eyes, which contained no spark of life.
Chameleon Boy was surprised that his duplicate did not resemble him, or, at least, did not resemble the form he wore when away from Durla for the comfort and peace of mind of static-form sentients. The duplicate’s many tentacles dangled freely from the ragged purple and orange robes covering its bulk, and instead of the typical dark green of a healthy Durlan male, they were almost silver in their pallor, looking less like the limbs of a Durlan, and more like the metallic tentacles dangling from the skull-ship hovering overhead.
Shadow Lass was unimpressed by the appearance of her duplicate, wearing a white costume resembling her own black attire, and having grey skin to match her blue. Staring solid white eyes gave the impression that her double was blind, but she could see that this was not the case as the dead white eyes locked on her own.
Triplicate Girl, on the other hand, cringed to see her duplicate, in electric blue and a dusky golden-yellow, instead of the more aesthetically sensible orange and purple she favored. It looked like something a human would wear.
In the half-second the Legionnaires took to clear their eyes and identify the new arrivals, Triplicate Girl’s doppelganger raised its arm and pointed at Brainiac 5. “We save you, master! Kill all aliens!”
Brainiac 5 noted that there was no duplicate of himself, despite other Coluans present having been counterplaced by the ape-like throwbacks, and realized that the ancient technology had somehow misidentified him as an incarnation of their long-dead creator. His force field came up instinctively as he saw the twisted reflections of his teammates charge into the fray, each attempting to tackle their own mirror image.
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Set
There's not a word yet, for old friends who've just met.
posted
Chameleon Boy watched curiously as the Durlan doppelganger surged forth, curious as to why it wasn’t assuming a faster or more dangerous form. His own body flowed around the lashing tentacles, evading them with ease as he took the form of a Sirlian squid-lizard, attempting to chomp down on the central mass of the duplicate, while countering its metal-colored tentacles with the squid-lizards’ prehensile mandible-tendrils. He was surprised when his jaws clamped down on a body as inflexible as steel, and the tentacles of the faux Durlan burst free of his attempts to grapple them with relentless and unnatural strength. In seconds, he went from having total control of the situation, to being picked up and unceremoniously hurled across the room by the apparently super-strong and invulnerable Durlan!
Colossal Boy’s double ran towards him with his arms raised, shouting, “Grow!” Gim ducked, confused for a second by the sensation that he was involuntarily growing and about to hit his head on the floating ship above him, as the doppelganger seemed to shrink away before him, and only realized as the tiny doppelganger leapt at him that it had indeed shrunk itself, and that he hadn’t changed in size at all! Like a sledgehammer to the chest, the mighty mite struck with both feet first, and Gim felt ribs crack as the tiny figure taunted, “Slow and clumsy, giant people!” The copy not only had retained full human strength at such a tiny size, but seemed, if anything, much, much stronger, and Gim rolled away from the tiny terror and began expanding in size. He might not be able to hit the little brute, but if he didn’t put on some extra mass, those unnaturally powerful blows would tear him apart!
Shadow Lass’s chalky duplicate raised its arms and a light began to shine from its position, along with a brief wave of warmth. Recognizing that the light and heat were only growing in intensity, Tasmia shrouded herself in protective darkness, closed her eyes and lashed out, pivoting smoothly on her hip to put the entire weight of her body into the blow, hoping to bludgeon the copy insensate before it could inflict any serious damage. She heard a loud crack and felt the force of the impact reverberate up her leg as her shin slammed into the creatures gut, and realized from the tingling sensation on her skin that she might have been just in time, as the heat had built up to brutal levels in mere seconds. She opened her eyes to see that the force of her blow had knocked the phony ‘Shadow Lass’ staggering back towards the doors, and into a last group of lingering Coluans, who were being herded towards the door in a fighting retreat by their own ape-like dopplegangers. The faux Talokkian turned and smiled a black-toothed grin, saying, “Me can make shadows, too!” as a pulse of incredible heat and light burst forth from her palms and incinerated both a pair of Coluans and three of their ape-like attackers, leaving behind only soot outlines on the wall. “See, shadows!”
Luornu regarded her garishly-clad copy with trepidation, splitting into three selves as much to draw confidence from the presence of her sisters at her side as for any tactical advantage. The duplicate laughed a guttural laugh as the four women maneuvered around each other, Trips playing ‘keep-away’ until she could figure out what the other woman’s power was. White parried a clumsy strike, only to have the duplicate seize her wrist in an impossibly strong grip and say, “Got ya!” In the blink of an eye, Purple and Orange cried out as one as White was sucked into the doppelganger, whose costume now included an element of white, and whose features were slightly less angular. “Two strong now.” The creature exulted, moving into a trijutsu pose that it hadn’t shown any talent for in their previous jockeying for position. Luornu reeled from the sudden loss of a third of herself, and yet could still feel her presence, somehow trapped within the creature advancing upon her. As she dodged backwards in separate directions, hoping to divide the dopplegangers attention, a green blur got in her way, and she was roughly shoved aside.
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Set
There's not a word yet, for old friends who've just met.
posted
“This is all your fault, Legionnaries!” the Coluan heroine said coldly as she moved with impossible grace past Lu, not even pausing in her motion as her leg whipped out and cracked the false Luornu across her bone-white face with sufficient force to throw the creature back. “These constructs are clearly duplicates of your own so-called heroes, and would not be present if you had not somehow activated the Brainiac artifacts.” Triplicate Girl sourly noted that Augment was apparently able to blather on and engage in impossible feats of athleticism that were the trademark of Timber Wolf, using her self-proclaimed ‘ground-breaking’ cerebral augments to allow her to devote her vast Coluan intellectual resources to enhance her physical capabilities.
The voice of Brainiac 5, amplified through their Legion Flight Rings, interrupted everyone’s thoughts, as he called out, “These are lifeless artificial constructs, and their integrity requires constant maintenance!”
“What?” Colossal Boy said, flustered as he attempted to swat his tiny blue-and-red attacker out of the air.
“Break the machine!” Brainy clarified.
“Why didn’t you say so?” Gim said, with some annoyance, as his massive hand swept across the room and snatched up the offending machine.
As he leaned back to hurl it at a wall, Tasmia’s opponent shouted and leapt with incredible force, flying across the room and striking Colossal Boy in the chest with the force of a thunderbolt, staggering him back. As the machine tumbled from his nerveless fingers, Dawnstars black-winged double streaked across the room, followed a mere instant later by her white-winged predecessor. The pale fingers of the copy brushed it only a breath ahead of the bronzed fingers of the Legionnaire, and in the blink of an eye, the machine was gone!
“Ha ha!” the black-winged angel called out in a crude sing-song voice, “Me am Duskvoid. Me can lose anything!” She turned to the surprised Dawnstar and backhanded her across the room with force, sweeping around to try and strike her from behind, only to be buffeted back by a powerful blow from the Legionnaires wing.
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Set
There's not a word yet, for old friends who've just met.
posted
Chameleon Boy flew back through the air again, allowing his body to turn amorphous as his Flight Ring slowed the force of his impact with the wall. His foe was impossibly strong, and no matter what form he took, he couldn’t seem to inflict any harm on the Durlan imposter. Grey-green tentacles thundered into the wall where he had just been standing, striking hard enough to burrow into the metalloplast walls, and tearing forth huge chunks that soon came flying in his direction like a swarm of meteors. In the form of a hummingbird, Cham dodged and moved with speed that the creature couldn’t match, but the battle seemed the duplicate’s to lose…
“What the hell…” Gim said, staggering back to his feet as the Talokkian doppelganger dropped to the ground near him. He reached down to swap her aside, only to see her brace her feet and place her arms up, as if to match her strength against that of his six-meter tall frame. The impact was like a knife entering his palm, as her comparatively tiny arms budged not an inch, and he pulled her hand back with an exclamation of pain as the pale-skinned duplicate laughed and held up her tiny fist, upon which a tiny band glistened. “Legion Might Ring, make us all stronger than you!”
Gim was startled to hear a ‘thud’ next to his head, and turned to see Brainiac 5 floating right next to his head, having just intercepted another brutal assault from his own tiny blue-and-red clad doppelganger, using his force shield to run interference and block its attack.
Brainy’s voice rang out again, “Dawnstar, we need the machine!” and the First Nations tracker stopped moving for a moment, floating in mid-air as her attacker overshot her position, lacking a Flight Ring of her own and unable to correct her movement as gracefully. “It’s no longer in this system…” and then she was gone, the thunder of displaced air in her wake, and an instant later, her black-winged doppelganger took off after her.
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Set
There's not a word yet, for old friends who've just met.
posted
Recognizing the pointlessness of their current strategy, Cham’s voice also came over the ring, “Switch targets people!” as he streaked into the air to avoid his ground-bound opponent, and lashed out with an elongated limb to seize the phony Shadow Lass by the cape and toss her into the ceiling with a crash. The phony Talokkian flailed out to try and grab his arm, but to no avail as Cham’s limb moved like a serpent out of her grasp, and gravity brought her the eight meters back to the floor with a brutal crash.
Tasmia turned and threw a field of darkness around the indestructible Durlan doppelganger, and Colossal Boy took advantage of its blindness to seize a handful of the shattered wall and use it as an impromptu broom to sweep the writhing mass of tentacles into a corner and pin it in place. Steel-hard tentacles came piercing through the wall moments later, as the creature regained its bearings, but Gim had already pulled his hand out of the way.
The Coluan heroine, Augment, moved like with cold machine-like efficiency, and Trips was afraid to get in her way, focusing instead on trying to call upon herself. With a burning sensation, as if she’d just been pulled through a grater, Luornu managed to wrest her third self away from the duplicate, which shrieked and collapsed as Luornu saw her white-clad self tear itself free and stagger back into the waiting arms of her sisters. Augment slowed for a fatal instant, seeing her opponent collapse, only to shriek out an incomprensible squeal of numbers as the bizarre creation lashed out and seized her foot. In a second, she was gone, pulled into the pale construct, which now had pale green skin and whirring violet eyes. “We are so much more, now…” The construct said, beginning to move forward with the deadly mechanical precision of the Coluan heroine.
Tasmia turned to focus darkness upon this new threat, only to fly into a wall with bruising force, as a tiny blue and red figure seized her cloak and flung her aside like a rag doll. Gim winced as he could just make out a diminutive thumb being raised in his direction and heard a taunting reedy voice, “Good idea, big dumb giant!”
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Set
There's not a word yet, for old friends who've just met.
posted
The pale copy of Shadow Lass was finally stirring from her own misadventures, and Brainy could tell that her next discharge of energy was going to fry everyone in the room if it wasn’t contained. He descended upon her position, unbuckling his force shield belt and reversing its polarity before tossing it onto her just as the brightness grew too intense to bear. A muffled ‘whump’ sound was followed by a blistering wave of heat washing over him, but he opened his eyes to see that the vast majority of the near solar-intensity blast had been contained, destroying his force shield belt, but also turning the fake Shadow Lass into a crumbling statue of ash, as the entirety of its power had been turned on itself, unable to escape.
Another rush of warmth and air caused him to recoil defensively, but it was only Dawnstar, returning from some unfathomably far place with the machine clutched tightly to her chest. He could see that Colossal Boy was just barely containing the faux Durlan, but that the tiny version of Colossal Boy had Shadow Lass at its mercy. He quickly took the device and pointed it at the miniscule menace, pushing what seemed to be the intuitive and appropriate set of buttons before he heard a small pleading voice say, “Noooo… I was winning!” before it faded from existence in a tiny plume of dark grey smoke. Not turning from his task, he asked Dawnstar, “What of your duplicate?” as he pointed the machine at the false Durlan and again keyed in the sequence. “It seems to have gotten lost,” Dawnstar said enigmatically, “Which, as I understand it, was its power.” Within seconds, a larger cloud of thick smoke was all that remained of the faux Durlan.
Recognizing that Triplicate Girl’s duplicate would require some consideration, Brainy turned the machine towards dispersing the ape-like creatures, who had routed the remaining Coluan dignitaries, and were at the entrances, hurling debris at arriving security forces.
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Set
There's not a word yet, for old friends who've just met.
posted
Finally, out of other targets and able to put it off no longer, Brainy took a deep breath as Trips danced around her foe, staying out of reach of its absorbing touch. He knew that the Coluan heroine was still contained within this creature, and if he caused it to decorporealize, he was unsure if Augment would be free, or destroyed. “Triplicate Girl, can you go back in there and try to get her out?”
Trips looked stricken, and pulled back into the air as she regrouped. “Brainy…. I… I don’t think so. Not again.” She hated herself for sounding weak, but she’d barely gotten out the first time, and it had taken everything she had. She was well past her second wind and felt on the verge of collapse.
“Understood,” came Brainy’s expressionless voice, and as Chameleon Boy said, “Wait…” Brainy decisively switched on the machine, unwilling to risk any more lives on what might be an impossible task.
Two screams at once came from the throat of the construct, and as it wavered out of existence, it seemed to be attempting to tear itself in half. For all his apparent confidence, Brainy muttered under his breath to the arrogant Coluan heroine, “Fight, damn you.”
Long seconds passed until the dual echoing screams were suddenly cut off. Smoke obscured the scene for a moment longer, before a figure staggered forth, dropping to its knees, coughing. Shadow Lass, her cloak removed and rubbing her bruised throat, stepped forward first and offered her a hand up, only to step back warily as the figure stood up.
The figure was Augment, but not Augment, still retaining some characteristics of the bizarre Triplicate construct, with skin halfway between green and gray, and the Carggites’ brown hair adorning her formerly bald head, interrupted only by the metallic pathways of her data-ports. The silver traceries of her original black costume had become gold, with blue panels replacing the black, remaining in the patterns of her own costume, but in the colors of the Luornu’s duplicate.
As the Legionnaires approached warily, she held up a hand. “I am myself, Querl Dox. And, yet, somehow more.” Reaching down to a fallen bit of rubble, she weighed it in her hand for a moment, “Plasteel, Mohs hardness scale, 11, 14.6 kilograms.” The chunk of debris melted into her hand, and her skin rippled and changed color to match it. Experimentally, she tapped one hand against another, producing the clank of metal on metal. She turned her hand over again and the chunk of debris reappeared, and then dropped to the ground, as her skin shimmered and revered to its gray-green hue. “I retain the constructs capacity to absorb the properties of other things.” She said in a wondering tone. “I have become Implicate.”
The end! or is it?
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posted
I like the story, Set, and your take on the Bizarros. Augment/Implicate is an interesting character.
-------------------- 'In the twinkling of an eye' I'll be dancing in the sky!
Come, join me!
From: Salem, Oregon USA | Registered: Aug 2003
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Set
There's not a word yet, for old friends who've just met.
posted
quote:Originally posted by Candle: I like the story, Set, and your take on the Bizarros.
Thanks! I wanted to mix things up and 'reverse' the characters powers, sort of. The 'Legion Might Rings' were just pure silly.
quote: Augment/Implicate is an interesting character.
She was just a random thought I had upon reading Deathstroke bragging about using 90% of his brain and how a Coluan would react to that, considering that 90% of a human brain would be, like, 90% of a gnat's brain to a Coluan.
Mixing her up with the reverse-Carggite, able to absorb others and make them a part of herself, was just a whacky notion.
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posted
Legion 'Might Rings' fit right in with the just general silliness of the Bizarro concept.
And unless Coluan's have brains all over their bodies, their skulls don't look any bigger than ours.
I liked the idea in one of the boots (reboot?) of the Coluans being so smart because their computer world hooks them minds altogether into one hive type thinking ability.
quote:Originally posted by Candle: That last story about Tiffany, Michael, ended sort of in the beginning!
What I've been posting are excerpts from MATTER-EATER LAD: THE SERIES scripts, 20 issues written by myself and EDE.
Check the whole enchilada out HERE: MEL:TS 1-20. Be warned, it takes until about the 4th page of the thread before the issue # 1 script really gets rolling along. After that, we pretty much knock 'em out fast and furious.
Hyperpath: Email this page to someone!
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