Hey Kids! COMICS! … 2

"Did you have fun crashing the pitch meeting?"

Robert slammed the door behind him and let his apparent elderly persona burn away in his suppressed furry. The door survived only because it was designed to do so years ago. It also gentled the slamming so that the noise of it was merely satisfying rather than deafening.

"They," the rabbit growled, "were going to have little Timmy Taurpin shot by a police officer at a traffic stop."

His two team-mates looked up with equally surprised and appalled expressions. "That would be a terrible mistake," Allie said quietly. "Thank the stars you decided to show up."

"Why the hell would they do that in a children's book?" Sam screeched, the eagle's version of a growl.

"They said they were trying to make it topical." The rabbit said, grabbing a twisted rebar sculpture off his bookshelf. He began bending it, absent-absentmindedly. "All this Pale Umber Nonsense is trending, they said. They wanted to do a racism story, they said."

Allie strolled over and put her hand on his shoulder. By this point, he'd filled out his suit. "Pale Umber is not nonsense," she insisted softly. "Its the rising Tide of Change."

The Lapine stopped with the bar all straightened out in his hand. It gave off a slight bit of heat. He looked down on from his now taller stature. "I know, he isn't. I know what happened isn't." He crumbled the bar again. "But the commercials and the Internet campaigns and those movements... I've seen major civil unrest in my years and the shit that perpetuates it all just nonsense when you get right down to it. I won't allow this company to feed into it... because it's only a matter of time before someone uses that unrest."

Sam added, "Not to mention the fact that it's too damn close to what happened in real life."

"Not to mention it, no." Robert paced and tossed the twisted metal back onto the shelf where it clanged in an almost satisfying way. "I mean, there were differences. Timmy was at a traffic stop for going too slow. The officer made him get out of the car and gets him to recite the alphabet backwards, but he does it too slow for the officer. And then he does it too fast. So the officer's suspicious and makes him walk a straight line, which is hard for a hard shell, right? But Timmy does it, and as he does it, he sees an accident about to happen and Timmy runs back and forth, being in two places at one time... y'know, the speedster thing... and the cop takes this as an aggressive move."

Allie blinked, that was way to close to what happened. "You were able to stop them, right? Gave them all little brain farts?"

The pacing rabbit shook his head. "They already had art commissioned and the artist just happens to be a Big Name... so, I got them to move it the Annual... that'll push it back six months and maybe we will have swept back the Tide by then."

Allie shot him a look of dubiousness usually reserved for married couples. "Uh-huh." She said in such a way that made him meet her eyes. "Pale Umber isn't just a martyr... he's the Mystical Heroic Martyr of this Generation." She said, "That's just not something you can turn off. He IS a Force, a Catalyst, of Change; a Dead Incarnation..."

"In six months," Robert said, "It will either make a positive difference or the image of an Unarmed Rept getting shot by a cop will be too hot for a comic book. I had them write something with the hooved critters instead."

In the funny comic books, almost all animals talked and walked on two legs, not just the 100 or so species the Creator threw down when the Tower of Babel fell. It tickled the children to see horses and cows running the farms, pelicans running fishing boats, storks delivering babies in the hospitals, or anything patently impossible dressed up as the mundane, workaday images. It harked back to the tales of Aesop's Allegories.

"I didn't even have to whammy them all that hard." Robert looked out the window and then smiled at Allie. "I told them we'd call it 'The Hooved and the Hooved Not. Practically wrote itself."

Sam shook his head. "If it is happening here, Follywood must be gearing up a dozen movies."

Allie nodded. "Civil unrest is the least of our problems, if we don't get a new Champion to channel all this energy."

"Dammit, I've already lived through two Weird Wars. We have to do everything to prevent another." Robert sat down in his big leather chair. "Can't you just point your magic wand and zap the next candidate into a hero?"

"You know the answer to that. Engineering a Origin leads to Monsters."

"Waldo..." Robert offered, but didn't get very far.

"Waldo a cursed monster and it's only love that makes him a hero."

Sam blinked. "Some love... he ate his boyfriend."

"Just his face," Robert corrected lamely.

"That's MY point. When you create an Origin, you create a Victim, not a Hero, and when the universe teeters on a cosmic tipping, that's a very important difference."

"Then how is Yankee Poodle a Hero? Sam engineered her Origin."

Sam whined to be left out of this, but they ignored him. As he knew they would.

"They fell into an alternate dimension where time was chaotic, not orderly. He saved her and gave her tools to survive. She could turn them off and walk away, never use them again. She's fundamentally unchanged."

"I increased her temporal chromatic footprint." Sam pointed out, as if that would clarify anything. "Pan-dimensional training wheels."

"Sam, I can never tell if you're serious about this 'Pater-Physics or if you are just humoring us because we don't understand your flavor of metaphysics." Allie snapped.

Sam shrugged. "I spent years in an alternate universe with insane dimensional issues waiting to rescue someone who fell into a hole seconds before I did. And for all I know, I'm still really there, so... I don't know why it can't be both."

Allie and Robert blinked. "You need some sleep," the rabbit said. Sam only talked like that when he was exhausted and could no longer ignore that his homeworld felt alien to him.

"I can sleep when we save the world. Or at least BrookLion."

"No Sleep Til BrookLion," Robert said. "That's a song, right?"

Allie rolled her eyes at both of them. Honestly, keeping them on track was like herding flies. "Listen, Hoppy, while you were in your meeting, I got a message from Trish. She went down to Mexico to see if she could get a line on something involving that oil rig where we lost the Golem."

"Cripes," the Lapine grumbled. "Did Vogt ask her to go or something? Because he said he had recovery well in hand."

"Not Vogt. I think some intelligence crossed her desk and she wanted to make an onsite look-see. Just to be sure."

"We can't just go running off willy-nilly trying to solve crimes when the fate of the world is at stake. With Pig Iron and the lycanthrope down until whenever," Meaning, that Waldo would not be leaving his pig's side until he was well enough to chase his mate away. "We have to cover the world."

The rabbit punched his desk. Gently. The pencils popped up in the air, shaking off their dust. Sam reached over and straightened a falling picture frame. The desk remained standing.

"We don't need to be there for every possible Origin. We can't try to control everything." Allie soothed. Although, she too, wished they cover every possible angle. Sometimes Heroes could be very, very wrong. "Maybe we can have Feral help us out?"

"What do we tell Vogt?" Robert asked. "He's not going to buy all this touchy-touchy the world feels wrong stuff. I believe in you and even I have trouble buying it."

Allie shrugged but Sam cleared his throat. "We're going to tell him the truth. We want to teach him recon and surveillance. It's not a skill his other two meta-pets have."