Outlaw X Presents: Everything’s Golden

Next

Previous
I’m going to be honest here, I should have written something. The problem is, my domestic life is kind of boring and nobody really cares about my social life outside of the kickass stuff. Everyone wants explosions and fights and wisecracks. Plus, I’ve been downing moonshine like it’s water the past few days. My doctor doesn’t approve, but neither do whole planets, so fuck it. Besides, I take a break once a month anyway. Time to take the latest story off Outlaw X and let y’all enjoy it.

That makes it sound worse than that. There’s some fun stuff there. Who doesn’t enjoy a Mad Waxxer or a person turning out to be an entire gang in a trenchcoat?

**

Rebel Rebel here to yell at ya some more on everyone’s favorite station, Outlaw X. If you don’t like it, tune into some other supervillain English-language radio station. Oh wait, we destroyed them all. Boom!

In more serious news, don’t forget to speak with the Digital Underground. They’re hosting a grey market fundraising special to provide for the family of Shock G. In addition to merchandise, they’re selling their famous Sex Packets, even bringing back some experiences no one’s seen since the original run twenty-one years ago. And let’s not fight over the price. It’s been a long time since three for $10.99 was reasonable.

Moving on from that, I thought it’s time we discussed a hell of a big league attempt. This is the stuff movies are made of, folks. Some of you might have heard of this one. If you were stargazing recently, you saw some of the following.

Here it is from the super-smart horse’s mouth, in a story the same source calls “Everything’s Golden”

**

The day of my triumph was going, of course, triumphantly! I pumped a fist in the air as I walked along the overlook on my orbital satellite spacebase. I beheld the Earth before me, alight in the dark and a beautiful dark blue in the light “At long last, a stage worthy of my final triumph. The whole world is within my grasp, as I have finally come to the one place untainted by naïve communist ideals… space!”

I turned to the deck below me, where two dozen of my finest guards stood with their guns trained on a trio of reinforced transparent aluminum tubes holding the individuals who tried and failed to stop my plants. The French sex bomb secret agent in the fancy tuxedo called out to me, “You’ll never get away with this, Dr. Depletion.”

I could not help but smile. “My dear, my triumph is at least as attributable to my own genius as it is to your failure to know as basic of information as that I am Doctor Pleeshun. Not some cartoonish supervillain.”

I looked down at the remote in my hand, specially built to interface with this method of containment and disposal. There were three buttons, clearly marked “Left, Middle, Right.” I was interrupted before I could press the button to deal with Jacqueline Lien.

“I think it’s aboot time we bust out of here, all of us!” called the man in the skintight black catsuit in the rightmost tube. My soldiers had removed as many hidden gadgets as they could find upon capturing him, but it was an unfortunate fact that he may have kept some hidden somewhere on the curves of his physique. He produced a small black device with a red button on top. “I’m going to shatter your dreams!”

I pressed his button instead. The base of his tube opened and the vacuum of space sucked him and his little device out into space. I turned to wave at him as he floated out past the windows. “Goodbye to you and your little device.” I turned to my second in command and asked, “What was his name again?”

The man took a long drag of his cigarette and adjusted the shiny silver spacesuit he wore as the standard uniform of those on my spacebase. It clashed with his cowboy hat, boots, and the six shooter with the footlong barrel that hung from his belt. He flicked the cigarette away, where one of my technicians ran up to quickly douse it and remove it from my pristine command center. “Nathan Romanofski, pardner. But to those in the special ops community, he was best known by his codename: the Black Beaver as surely as my name is Doyle Money.”

I waited patiently through his eccentric framing and method of speaking. The man doesn’t have a thinker’s mind, but he has important friends who keep him in business and his personal firearms collection is large enough to arm my entire organization. Besides, his simplicity has the advantage of making it trivially easy to uncover and disarm every plot he has enacted against me. I have contingencies to deal with him should he pick an inconvenient time to become a problem. I have contingencies for everything.

“He was a patriot!” yelled a buff Chinese commando from the left tube. His bloodstained tanktop and bandana did nothing to hide the scars covering his body from a lifetime of military service. He looked like he could handle a light machinegun by himself, but my men caught him after an intense game of cat and mouse in a forest with a bow and arrow. He used the bow and arrow; my men blew up the forest.

“Patriotism…” I mused. “So backwards, to prostrate yourself to a country that asks your life from you. Every day, around the world, governments send innocent people to kill other innocent people or die trying. They grow fearful of those who are different and make laws to harm them, laws enforced by peace officers who murder their own citizens in the streets. Even those who dream otherwise merely want to create a corporation with the power and authority of government. Patriotism is a blindfold that keeps you from seeing your own self-interest. No one follows me because I threatened to kill or imprison them. They do it because, in all of the world, I help them better than your nation-states ever could.”

He opened his mouth to object, but why bother? The marketplace of ideas is as bankrupt a concept as supply-side economics, and for the same reason: they are thin and dishonest covers for parties to push their own self-interest in the guise of alternative but ultimately incorrect intellectual concepts. I pushed a button and he was sucked into space. He tried to hold on, but his grip relaxed after his breath ran out.

“Did you really mean all that stuff you said to Liu Bo?” Doyle asked.

“You know what we’re here to do, Doyle. Don’t pretend you love your country when you wear that in my presence,” I indicated the Confederate buckle on his gunbelt. Doyle looked down at it, shuffling his boots, but silenced his objections for the time being.

“Everyone is interrupting today,” I joked, turning toward the dashing secret agent I still held. “I am sorry we have had such little time to discuss your own incredible reasons for risking your life to stop me, but-”

“Don’t you want to at least gloat, Dr. Pleeshun? I can’t escape anyway,” Agent Lien pleaded.

I shrugged and pressed the button, then said, “No,” while she was dumped into space. Alarms activated as a hole that the agent must have created began to draw the spacebase’s atmosphere out of it. One of my most trusted guards ran up and pressed and sealed it with a patch torn off his uniform. A technician jogged up and pressed a button to activate the emergency shutter, pulling off the patch and handing it back to the guard. Another technician reset the alarm.

“Now that that’s out of the way, prepare the satellite to fire the Auruminator.”

Doyle rubbed his hands together. “Oceans of gold. It’ll exterminate all fiat currency and make us rich, pardner, rich!” He clapped a hand down on my shoulder.

“Indeed it shall-” I began to join in his celebratory mood, but the alarms went off again. I looked to the nearest tech. “Report!”

He watched a tablet. “There’s been a breach. Superheroes have broken through the atrium.”

I gritted my teeth. “Can we detach that module?”

He shook his head. “They’re already out. There are breaches in multiple sections.”

Doyle pulled his long Buntline revolver free of his belt. “I’ll handle this.”

I ignored him. “Fire the Auruminator as soon as possible. The only thing thing my gunners should take their time on is firing at the precise coordinates I gave and no more. We do not want freshwater affected. Have crews ready the lifeboats for evacuation. The station won’t be able to withstand a firing without proper preparation.”

I, of course, left first. If I am to be known as Dr. Depletion to these small-minded nincompoops, I shall do better than other masterminds and leave before I could possible be arrested. I brought the technician with me to help guide Doyle and I through the safest corridors toward my executive lifeyacht. It was bound to take awhile as one such contingency, the standard-issue magnetic boots, slowed our journey.

Unfortunately, even the closest route took us far too close to a point where my guards were pinning down a man in blocky metal power armor wielding a five-foot long broadsword. He started toward me when he saw me, but my finest guard stepped up with his personal flamethrower. We lost track of that battle and my best man behind a wall of flames.

We made it to the window-lined final corridor, an affectation created for my own enjoyment of the view into space, when I heard the sound of high-tension cable being released and Doyle gasping in pain. I turned to see the Texan holding his left shoulder from which protruded a crossbow bolt while he aimed his Buntline revolver. He fired, the shot going wild but still causing the woman in the red leather costume to flinch and the second shot from her quad-barrelled crossbow to go wild.

“Excuse me,” said a voice from the direction of my lifeyacht. I whirled in place and found a large-chinned man made of water in front of me. He stood over the body of my technician, who still breathed. “What my friend Sinhunter means to say is, you’re under arrest for doing a lot of crazy mumbojumbo like turning the water Earth’s oceans into gold. And it’s all thanks to me, Liquiman. Did you think this hare-brained scheme was going to make you rich?”

I held up my hands, the hidden one-shot guns in each sleeve useless at that angle. I began to lower them slowly as I spoke. “Indeed it would.” Behind me, Doyle lowered his gun while the woman, Sinhunter, approached warily.

This Liquiman scoffed at me. “That much gold would make it worthless.”

I nodded. “Yes, when you’ve spend years secretly buying up the water rights to aquifers, rivers, lakes, and other sources of freshwater. Taint the oceans and water itself becomes more valuable than platinum.”

“You’re crazy,” Liquiman said. He pulled a fist back. “I oughta sock you one just to make me happy. Any last words as a free man?”

“Yes. Magnetic boots.” I fired from each sleeve. It was a shock to my ears and burned my arms, but the high-caliber bullets penetrated the observation windows. The cracks immediately splintered and those window sections broke fully open. The decompression slurped Liquiman into space. Sinhunter went with him, leaving behind a bolt embedded in the walkway and trailing a cable. Doyle raised his gun to take a shot at it, then lost it when he scrambled to catch the pack of cigarettes that escaped his front shirt pocket into space. He did catch grab our guide, the man’s body stuck to the floor by his boots even as he lay unconscious. I nodded to Doyle and mouthed. “Bring him with us.”

The far end of the corridor that we had come from began to close. We had little time to make our escape, but the lifeboat sections had been designed so that their access could not be entirely sealed. We were not cut off from escape. My keycard activated its systems the moment I used it to lock the door behind us. It separated before we could find our seats and began accelerating, unnoticed by us, by the time we had out buttocks firmly planted and strapped in. By that point, the technician was finally coming around.

“Easy pardner, you caught an ass-whoopin’,” Doyle told the man. We were seated in three of the four seats surrounding a round table in the control module of the lifeyacht, a monitor providing us the feed of different cameras mounted on the outside of the lifeyacht.

“My head feels like hell,” the tech said. I leaned under the table to the cabinet built into the base of it that had been stocked with bottled water, nutrition bars, and first-aid supplies. I came up with a bottle of water and a couple of pain relievers in the other.

Doyle sat there with a two-shot holdout pistol aimed at my heart. “Must scare the Dickens out of ya, but I don’t think I want my good name dragged through the mud when they come for ya. Nothin’ personal, you understand?”

I nodded. “Yes, I understand. By the by, your aim has gotten shaky. When is the last time you had a smoke? This may be the longest you have ever gone without in my presence.”

Doyle used his free hand to slap at his pockets, trying to find a cigarette. He began to cough, but held the gun even closer to me. “Don’t!” The coughing and shaking turned worse, the gun dropping out of his hands.

I set the bottle and pills in front of the frightened tech before grabbing the gun and holding it on Doyle. “One wonder my Science Division came up with was a tasteless, odorless poison I administered to you weeks ago and an equally-undetectable antidote to keep it in check, administered while you slept or hidden in your cigarettes. You were fated to turn on me this day, the day of my great triumph. And you are now dead.”

He leaned back in his chair, chest no longer moving, mouth foaming, pants defecated in. The technician was safe, but now freaked out at the death in front of his eyes. “I just want to go home,” he said.

To our side, the monitor showed the dish of my Auruminator charging its gleaming, flaxen weapon, then exploding before it could complete its mission. I checked the cabinet again and brought out a bottle of bourbon and a pair of shot glasses. “It seems we both are going home. For now.”

Yes, for now. But the world has not seen the last of Dr. Pleeshun. If the Auruminator is no longer available to me, I shall be forced to move onto my next plan.

The world would be a better place if something were to transform all but the diamonds kept in my vaults into coal.

Next

Previous

Advertisement