ic Take Me To TV Land

[trollthumper]

"I think it's that show with the cannibal," said Temperance. "My roommate is into it. Or... perhaps just into the guy who plays the bad guy. It's weird and more than a little disturbing - the show and that fact." She looked at the group. "If we have our positions, I think I'll stay towards the center and keep my eyes open. If we are looking at an intruder, my senses will be able to pick them up. Think of it as seeing the black bear in the blizzard."

 

The kitchen was both more austere and more regal, like the darkest dreams of people who laid out Williams-Sonoma catalogues. A steel refrigerator with doors the size and thickness of a bank vault, marble counters with nary the scratch of a knife, the air thick with notes of wine and spice and cooked meat. The thoughts Hologram had picked up from the dining room were stronger here, but more like recollections - fond memories of harvest, preparation, and anticipation of the final conquest, once the spoils had been prepared. From the wine cellar next door, however, she could pick up stronger bursts, like somebody who was savoring the taste of a hard-earned meal. 

 

The door to the wine cellar slid open, revealing a figure cutting at meat on a board. From behind, it was clear the figure was wearing an immaculate three-piece plaid suit. The cutting stopped a second later. The figure slowly turned, revealing a woman's features and a distinctive, almost masculine haircut. To Temperance's eyes, the woman was only half-there - a figure not of the material of the spirit world, but something else. She couldn't place the face, but Fast-Forward and Hologram, veterans of Freedom's weirdness, knew it immediately. 

 

"Surprise guests?" said Silver Scream, affecting an accent that placed her somewhere towards the central parts of Europe. "I will have to find seats for you. And that may be tricky. Others will be coming to the feast..."

[Tiffany Korta]

“Oh I know you! You use to appear in all those old horror movie. I use to love watching them during the long night flying through space. Well you know if you could call it night I mean it’s always night in space so you know.â€

She paused and looked thoughtful for a few seconds.

 

“Guests or no guests I suggest you stop all this right now, no more people need to get hurt.â€

[Avenger Assembled]

"Oh my god," said Fast-Forward, looking with horror at the grim sight before them. "Silver Scream, this is totally freakin koozbane!" He held up his hands, keeping his distance. "C'mon, look at you! This is awful, this is...I don't even know." He zipped around her, his eyes wide as he peered over his sunglasses. "You are dressed like someone from the television," he said to the murderous ghost, a look of real concern on his face, even as he spoke with the slow, deliberate care one might used when speaking to someone hard of hearing. "Do you have some kind of problem we can help you with?" he asked seriously. "Did someone _do_ this to you?" Richard knew perfectly well he was speaking to a murderous ghost but he couldn't help but think of the old days, and his mother's stories about the men, women, and other creatures she had known as a teenage speedster at the tail end of Freedom's first age of heroes. The important thing was that he was very good at keeping himself out of danger, and as long as Silver Scream was focused on him, she wasn't paying attention to the other heroes. "You're in color! 

[Electra]

~All right honey, let's not make her too mad,~ Paige reminded Richard, but she was also more than a little surprised to see the venerable villainess done up in modern garb for a modern production. "We definitely weren't expecting to see you here," she agreed aloud, with her long-bladed scissors held down along her leg. "I'm guessing this is some Hannibal Lecter setup, and that's certainly beautifully sinister, but this is a long way from your usual oeuvre. I remember my father talking about you when I was young, he always admired the purity of your approach." 

[TheAbsurdist]

Asad looked worried, it was easy for him to deal with a physical threat, but... this kind of stuff.  "So... can someone explain this in simply language.  Not in mumbo jumbo stuff... I mean, I know who she is... but... I am lost, and I can punch out skyscrapers!"  He tried to inject some levity into this.  He knew who Silver Scream was, he knew there was more to it than her, but he was surrounded by crazy people who spoke magic, and he really didn't have any way to work out what to do.

 

Sure he handled money, and could blast and punch people.  But ghosts?  Magic?  All of that?  Crap...

[trollthumper]

"I've not compromised. Well. Maybe a little." Silver Scream set down the knife on the cutting board and turned to face the group, resting her hands on the counter. "What was it Gloria Swanson said? 'I am big. It's the pictures that got small.'" She turned to Miss Grue. "And I've still got some attention. But you see, I hear the whispers. People want to be unnerved, but they don't want the terror lurking in the background. They want it to leap up and hit them in the face. They want it to reach out into every aspect of their lives, everything that gets them through the day. Did you know the Piedmont is running trailers for some... movie about a ghost that dwells in a phone service for those boxes people write on? They came to see me for an escape, and now they never want to run away - not really. They want horror everywhere? Imagine never being able to trust a simple image because of what may be lurking behind it."

 

"And the fact that you're rendering TV radioactive?" said Temperance. "That's a fringe benefit?"

 

Silver Scream put her finger to her cheek, opening her mouth in a mockery of surprise. "You know," she said, "I honestly hadn't thought about that." She turned to Hologram and Fast-Forward. "This place talks to me, you know. I know how to listen. You've made quite a showing as the Ripleys of today, so I understand why you might have some stake. But this has been bloodless. I don't intend to crawl out of anyone's TV and give them a heart attack. We could just leave this here. No bloodshed, no ferocity - just a good old-fashioned scare for all the city's citizens. Or, better - I could give you exclusive rights. Imagine being the only thing on the air that doesn't have a beast or a boggart lurking behind it. How does that sound?" 

[Tiffany Korta]

Daphne wasn’t a person who really got angry normally, but something about Silver’s Scream word’s made her upset. She pursed her lips in response, though it made her look cute rather than angry.

 

“You just don’t understand horror do you? It all works because the audience is safe and so can be scared cause they know it only exists on the screen. You need those safe places for other things or it just doesn’t work right.â€

 

She struck what she hoped was a pretty decent stance and tried to sound decisive in this matter.

 

“That’s why we’re going to stop what you're doing.â€

[Electra]

"The time to have made us that offer would've been when we were still villains," Hologram pointed out, sounding faintly amused. "And before we had school-aged children who I would like to be able to watch television occasionally without permanent emotional scarring." She leaned in slightly, dropping her voice to a more confidential level. "Come on, now. You've had your fun for hours, and if it all goes away now, the city has an enduring mystery that will eventually become urban legend but never quite be forgotten, the night when all the televisions went sinister and strange. Leaving it go until the cold light of day does dampen the mystique a little bit, these things are always better in the dead of night when most people don't see, but it's still weird enough to be plenty memorable. Haven't you already gotten what you wanted?" 

[Avenger Assembled]

"We could do a special on you," offered Fast-Forward, his hand idly pressed against the magical text he kept in his jacket pocket. "Silver Scream - The Greatest Villain Of Them All!" he waved a hand in the air. "Put on footage of your classic films, some of your latest crimes..." Leave out all the murder, obviously, he thought in his wife's direction. They had occasionally done profiles of particular supervillains on the show, but they tried not to give publicity to killers like the Golden Age ghost. "With this as the showstopper. You'll be a star; and the audience will love you!" He and Paige were obviously an experienced duo when it came to this sort of con, playing naturally off each other while they let the other heroes in the room do their own thing. That's right, just watch the birdies. With any luck, maybe they'd be able to talk the starlet down before things got even worse. 

[TheAbsurdist]

 

He read, saw what they were doing then, and he nodded a bit to himself, and he moved over to Miss Grue, and he put a hand to her should and urged her to turn to him then.  He pressed a finger to his lips in the gesture for her to be quiet, and then cocking his head back.  He was willing to, more than happy, to have them take to the fore, as he certainly couldn't punch a ghost.  More to the point, he wasn't on her radar, apart from whatever video gossip tabloid things might have stuff on, but he doubted she was invest about it at all.  Temperance seemed magical, so he was all to happy to defer to her this matter as it was.  He didn't pulled Miss Grue, he just knew she was a fun of the formerly larcenous duo and that... could cause a problem.

[Tiffany Korta]

Daphne looked back at Asad but apparently didn’t appear to react in any other way, at least that was on the surface.

 

Hope you don’t mind but we’re unlikely to be overheard this way. JUst think back and I’ll pick it up, don’t worry I’m not going to read you mind.

 

As she carried on one conversation with Asad she carried on a second conversation with Silver Scream, she didn't want there foe to think she was busy talking to someone else.

 

“The retro market is so in right now, you’d do so well right now. Maybe a book deal then the talk shows after, you might even be able to get a movie deal out of it all.”

 

[trollthumper]

Silver Scream locked eyes with Fast-Forward, her fingers stroking her chin in thought. "Hmm... a place on the small screen... a little piece of adulation, on replay... how often?" She shook her head. "It is a tempting offer, dear. But once you've hit the Great White Way, it's not really much comfort to go back to Peoria, now is it?" 

"I hope you realize it's a great deal better than being banished back to whatever part of the gravelands you cool your heels in," said Temperance.

"Perhaps... but by degrees." She clicked her fingers, and the shadows of the room grew longer. Shapes swelled up from the shadows, dark as pitch, eventually resolving into images of their own. Three figures manifested out of the darkness -- a withered corpse rimed with frost, a pallid man with a rictus grin, and a skeleton in a spacesuit, surrounded by particles of swirling darkness.

"This is my stage now. And all the players answer to my call. Isn't creative freedom wonderful?"

[Avenger Assembled]

Richard stared at the monsters summoned by Silver Scream, realizing instantly they must be drawn from the depths of television's most horrific creatures. 

I have no idea what any of these things are. 

"Hey, rube!" Fast-Forward called, zipping around the room in a blur of motion. "Yeah you, zombie spaceman!" He punched the guy in the face, hard enough he felt the suit's faceplate crack under his fist. "You look like something Sigourney Weaver fights in a tank-top!" And with that, he zipped around, leaving black and white trails in the air behind him, before kicking the legs out from under the skeleton guy. "Hey, Skeletor! How'd you get so skinny? What happened, man, you stop working out?" 

Zipping around to the rear, he hit the ice zombie from behind, yelling, "And you, I don't know what you are, but," he threw a punch, and then another, and then another, in a blur of thunderous motion before he zipped back to Paige's side, "You're no Kurt Russel!" 

[TheAbsurdist]

 

"This... this part I can do!"  And he leaped into the fray, moving to intercept the assault on Miss Grue.  Only to have the attack focus onto him proper, leaving a rime on his skin.  And then he smiled, confidently, "If that is the best you got pumpkin, I am going to beat you back to Small Wonder!"  And with that he did a mocking Robot dance, before he lunged at the offending creature and he swung with ill intent on the television villain.  "You cheap sweeps week gimmick"  He missed as the frozen zombie was able to move back from his fist.

[trollthumper]

There was chaos in the cramped cellar, but it was chaos on their side. The thing in the spacesuit and the creep in the fine suit were still reeling from Fast-Forward's onslaught, whereas the ice zombie - White Walker, Temperance told herself; her family didn't have HBO, but she did tend to pick up on these things by osmosis - was still on its feet. She willed some water to her hands, ready to unleash an onslaught - when she remembered what happened with the jotunn, and how all that really hadn't done much. She scanned the room, looking for a more suitable target... and found one.

The ice leapt from her hands and managed to collide with the skeleton in the spacesuit, slowly forming into a thick rime. Between the bulky apparatus and the layers of ice, it was having a lot of trouble doing anything. But the shadows seem to be growing thicker around it, as well as... buzzing?

"Well," said Silver Scream, "this should be interesting. I don't quite know what this one does, but I can feel the terror invested in it. Young terror, too. And no screen to provide a barrier..."

[Tiffany Korta]

Daphne was in her element she knew exactly what she was facing. And whilst what Silver Scream was very bad it was a little exciting to see all these monster she’d only seen on her displays.

“There little munchies monster that live in shadows and eat anything that enters the dark, they become a shadow an then... And maybe I really shouldn’t be giving them ideas.”

Whilst she was tempted to wrap the spacesuited bugs up and quip about who turned out the lights, something that she suspected would be lost on the other heroes, instead she shrunk down to tiny size and jumped on the suits shoulder trying to box it’s suited ears, or whatever it had instead of ears.

[trollthumper]

The darkness did reach up around Miss Grue as she swept in, as if it threatened to add her to its menu. However, whatever had been done to it before left the mass of swirling darkness somewhat winded, leaving her capable to dodging it swiftly. Silver Scream frowned as she saw another one of her soldiers take a beating. "Nightmares are ever present these days," she said, "but rarely homespun. You'd think there'd be some quality to monsters."

"You picked them out," said Temperance. "What does that say about you?"

"That I have to do the best with what is given to me, sadly," she said. She grabbed the knife from the cutting board, soaring across the floor with unnatural grace. "I suppose directing isn't my strong suit..."

She took a wild swing at Fast Forward, the phantom knife almost seeming to rend the air in front of her.

"...but I always did my best treading the boards." 

[TheAbsurdist]

 

"I mean, you could have at least chosen something that scares me!  An auditor, or something like that...  So have at this!"  The glow from the containment suit he wore under his glows started to pour forth from his chest in a coruscating blue light, before the forcewave burst from in a shimmer of distortion.  Knocking about the unattended foodstuffs and furniture, though he managed to shape it enough to avoid the people he was here with.  It was a brute force approach, and he didn't care in the slightest. He was just grinning in the face of the White Walker thing.  

"Have you considered branching out into food transport?"

[Avenger Assembled]

"What does that even mean?" Fast-Forward demanded of Silver Scream as he ran through the crowd of villains she'd summoned, throwing his fists left and right in a blur of super-speed motion. "Are you going to go swimming now, like you're Esther Williams? Are there gonna be a whole lot of little yous all doing a synchronized dive into some kind of ghost pool while ghost music plays?!" He looked to the others as he ran, trying to see if they had any idea what the ghost was talking about. "And what are you doing trying to stab me, Ms. Bette Davis Eyes? I was the one who was gonna give you a show! But no, now you're just gonna have to go to the place where we send shows too old to make it. Nick at Nite!" 

[trollthumper]

"Please," said Silver Scream, "like a stabbing is the worst you've received. It's called selling the act, dear - and if you'd focus on putting more conviction in those words than just rattling them off like a typewriter on cocaine --"

"Then we might also create a gigantic spectacle that's scary for a distance but a complete waste up close," said Temperance. As if to underscore her point, she conjured up an array of frozen orbs; they flew out in a volley, catching the skeleton in a spacesuit right in the gut. It doubled over for a second - an impressive thing for something that didn't technically have a nervous system - and a few of the black buzzing things surrounding it started to wilt. "It's a little bit cheap, isn't it?"

Silver Scream turned to her. "It's the medium," she said, her voice rimed with ice. "Tell me, little girl... would you like the real thing?"

 

[Tiffany Korta]

Daphne had one advantage over Silver Scream it seemed she had been literally raised by Television and understood it on an almost subconscious level. She knew the tropes of the media, and movies as well, as a second language. And Silver scream had missed one really important detail.

“Thats because Ms Scream baddies can be to tough cause in the end they get beaten, it’s how the stories go. And I don’t see this one going any different.”

She neglected to mention that they normally survived for a sequel, Silver Scream didn’t need to know that.

[Electra]

"You're not even a season-ender," Paige agreed derisively."You're the old villain who gets trotted out once just to finish them off once and for all, to make sure the audience is nice and hyped up for when sweeps start. God knows you couldn't carry a movie with a bucket. We tried to be nice, tried to take your age and senility into account, but good god, woman. You are so incredibly washed up, it's a miracle you aren't on TV at 3am with some Billy Mays wannabe shilling the soap he used. You will never, ever, ever be anybody important again." With that, she unleashed a blast of psychic power, not to control this time, but just to wound. Nobody else got to brandish knives at Paige Cline's husband and get away with it. 

[Avenger Assembled]

Richard smiled with pride at the fire in Paige's voice, and decided to return it in kind. 

"Hey, I recognize you!" Surging forward, he punched the ice zombie through the wall. "You're from that-" 

He ran, blurring with impossible speed, and followed the zombie outside before it had so much as touched the ground. With a single devastating punch, he stopped it, mid-flight, and kicked it back inside with the sound of cracking bone and ice. "show Hologram likes, with the-" 

He flash-stepped again, zipping back inside in a blur of motion to drive his fists through the zombie's mid-section, making it shatter with an explosion like a dropped vessel of spun foul-smelling sugar. "naked people and all the murders! See, I get pop culture references," he declared to his wife with a wink.  

[TheAbsurdist]

 

"Would you mind slowing down a little Ef-Ef, you are making me a little dizzy.  Hey, Zombie-sicle, heads up!"  And then he held up a hand and a burst of force lanced out, though the thing was able to evade it, before it slammed like a runaway train against the wall behind it.  The space tight, and it seemed like everyone was quicker than him, and that was annoying.  Really, really annoying, but it was something he had to contend with, feeling a little useless, but then like everyone else he always did kind of want to be in pictures.

[trollthumper]

Temperance tried to focus on the things she could actually hit. Silver Scream was just floating there, but while Temperance was of spirit, she wasn't a master of it. The ghost had made far more of this place than she could, and she knew that her projectiles had a certain reality to them - but that didn't mean much when the target was more unreal than was standard. She then realized she was getting metaphysical, which was bad practice for a fight. 

"Nightmares always have to end," she said. "Everyone wants a scare, but they have to wake up eventually. I don't suppose you ever learned that. Might be the story of your life." She sent the ice flying forth again towards the skeleton in the spacesuit - but with a grace unnatural to its bulk, the thing twisted, avoiding the barrage. 

"It's all fleeting, dear," Silver Scream said. "I learned that the hard way. It all goes, eventually. But oh... don't tell me you've never had a nightmare linger. Lurking in your head while you're awake, waiting to greet you again when you go to sleep. That kind of persistence has power..."