ic Take Me To TV Land

[Tiffany Korta]

For Daphne meeting superheroes wasn’t a big deal, she met them almost everyday, but people that actually appeared on television, well that was a different matter. There current perdiciment forgotten she went full on fangirl.

 

“Ohmygodyou’reFast-ForwardandHologramfromSupercrime!Ilovethatshowandwatchitallthetime.MyfavoritewaswhenyouwenttoRoswellIhavefamilyfromthere,asyoucantell,wellnotfromtherethey morecrashedthere...†she was talking rapidly and with no need for breath she could keep this up all day.

 

With a momentary loss of control she was broadcasting psychically, quietly for now, something that sounded like Squee!

[TheAbsurdist]

Okay, Asad started to try proper greetings with Miss Grue when... well hell there was a whole host of other people now.  In the space between blinks Asad went from sleek, glowing suited hero, to the frizzy haired be-sweatered father figure of a family sitcom, around an ethnic family, and then back again.

 

"Yeah, I got a couple reports of people being impacted, but not being swallowed up by thing.  No word on if it is working on internet videos, or something akin to that."  Unconsciously resting his hands his hips in a most stereotypical super hero effort, and he moving closer to the others, and then the girl came up, and his demeanor changed to immediately be conciliatory.  Someone else might experience whiplash, for him it was almost second nature flip gears in a social environment.

 

So he went to the girl, in an almost paternal fashion.  Shooting a look to Fast-Forward, holding up one hand to him to try and get him to stop, expecting the girl to not be able to accept what he was saying.  Especially if she saw a whole buncha murders.   Then he put that hand to the girl's shoulder, light.  "Don't mind him, there was talk of adding an alien for sweeps, so there was going to be some tests scenes shot today to put them to a focus group, so we got some make up from those Bonkers commericals...  but that's really silly now, huh?"  Looking chagrined so readily as he squeezed her shoulder.  "Did you get a good look at the person doing this?  If it is too hard to remember that's fine."

[Electra]

Paige surreptitiously pressed two fingers behind her left ear to try and quell the headache from the mental squeeing. She'd met excited fans before, plenty of times, but they were rarely broadcasting psychics. "It's nice to meet you too," she told Miss Grue, with a smile that was only a little bit pained. "Maybe you can come to the studio some time, take the grand tour. Ah," she added, trying to be tactful, "there may be other psychics around on this plane, and they might not be friendly. If you can shield your broadcasts, it might be safer for all of us. Have either of you seen any other inhabitants of this place?"

[trollthumper]

The girl looked confused at Asad's reassurances. "Aliens?" she said. "I mean, I try to keep pace of the plays I sign on with, and this wouldn't be the first time. But... you're sure? I mean, that's when some of these start to fall apart, and I'd hate to think I'm getting devotion from people who wonder when the shark is going to show up --"

"Easy," said Temperance. "Breathe." She knew the girl didn't necessarily need to breathe, nor did she need to look like a girl - but residual habits were a thing for some spirits, and as such, could serve as reassurances. "I know there have been a lot of changes lately. We're not part of... well, we're not the bad changes."

The girl nodded - apparently, that was enough to help. "I... I don't know who's doing this. Well, I know who's doing this, but I don't know who's telling them to. They're Actors, like the rest of us." The way she said it, everyone could hear the capital A. "I don't know where they came from, or why they're doing this. They just showed up and... and started doing this! Said it was to be 'memorable.' I don't know what the playwrights have been doing this decade, but --"

A creaking noise came from upstairs, the sound of footsteps on raw floorboard. "Oh, Muses," said the girl. "I think he's still here. You have to go! You have to --"

A man in a cheap suit came crawling down the stairs, arm over leg. The arms and legs looked like they'd been dislocated and stretched out on the rack, but had an unnatural grace to their movements. The man in the suit was thin and reedy, but had a maniacal gleam to his eyes. His fingernails were coated in blood and something with a yellow-green tint. "More crossovers?" he asked. "Director didn't put you here, did she? Are you... are you flesh?" He grinned. "Good! Let's give the people something to remember!"

[Avenger Assembled]

"Oh for fun's sake." Richard liked to think of himself as a veteran hero - or at least a veteran, but you didn't have to be in the business thirty-something years to know this was obviously the bad guy. At least the writer's not doing any of that moral ambiguity crap! He wondered for a moment, having had that thought, who exactly the writer was here? _Is_ this a crossover? If Paige and I run around here long enough, are we going to run into TV versions of ourselves? It was a dizzying thought - the kind it was best to avoid at super-speed! "Crossovers..." Fast-Forward moved in, "...are nothing but..." his fists flying at super-speed, "...a sign of two writers..." as he zipped all around their antagonist. "...who can't tell one story!" 

[trollthumper]

GM

The man bent unnaturally, his joints cracking and reforming while his limbs flailed like windsocks, gracefully avoiding Fast-Forward's blows. "Oh, I once thought like you," he said. "Keen to sit where I was. Fill the same role, wait for my reruns, chase after that redheaded agent again and again and again, just getting snippets of fear and loathing to go on..." The smile grew even wider, threatening to crack the face. "But then she came. She showed us the wondrous freedom that lay beyond our borders. Break through - through the genres, through the expectations, through all our damned limitations..."

The man casually brought one limb down on Fast-Forward's head with the force of a sledgehammer.

"...and have all the devotion we could ever want."

[Tiffany Korta]

Luckily for Daphne was that red skin didn't show embarrassment that well and she now had her psychic abilities back under control. Which was a good thing as they now had another problem to deal with.

 

Obviously someone was messing around with the rules of how this show, all shows, worked. But she hoped that there was some inertia of the way that show worked and that might give them an edge against the man in front of them.

 

So in an effect that no show like this could afford she grew two extra arms who with her original set began to grow and snake around the killer wrapping him up and hopefully subdue him for a little while.

Edited January 19, 2015 by TiffanyKorta

[Electra]

Paige made a small noise of protest when the strange monster took a swing at Richard, her breath catching in her throat until he moved and rolled over again, obviously alive. Her face darkened then, her eyes bleeding  to pitch black as she regarded this new foe. She didn't use her entropy-fueled powers often, but in a world that seemed to be coming apart at the seams, it probably couldn't hurt. And that thing had hit Richard, so it had to pay.

 

She moved quietly, taking a few steps away from the creature, ducking her head and trying to look harmless and unobtrusive, nothing a villain would need to worry about. There were much more tempting targets within his reach than one woman apparently trying to escape.  The instant she had a little cover, Paige straightened up and stared at the monster with her black, black eyes. She broadcast images into its head, joy and laughter, love and pleasure, all of them enhanced by the fact that the monster was not there, could never be there, would be long since destroyed and forgotten. There was no future for monsters, no reruns, no syndication, only the darkness of a static-filled screen. 

[trollthumper]

The barbed thoughts of joy and happiness seemed to dig deep into the frightening parody of a man, his limbs going even more akimbo as he flailed in pain. He locked eyes - and teeth, which seemed to stand out more - with Hologram. "Hell of a thing to hurt with," he said, the words slightly slurred. "I like how you think. You'd fit in around here."

"Sorry," said Temperance. "We're just here for the studio tour." She willed the water out of her pack; as it danced before her, she couldn't help but notice it seemed more picturesque than water should be, the notes of cyan practically coloring it. The water flew out at the gangly man, who danced out of the way as it hit the ground, freezing into a sculpture of a splash.

The gangly man giggled. "You really think you can come and go? No more casual viewing. Everyone who watches now? Plays for keeps."

[TheAbsurdist]

Asad came barreling in, with a wide swing on Bendy Guy, missing widely backed a force would have knocked salmon's out of their streams in a three mile radius.  But it missed, and he growled in frustration.

 

"How about you hold still ugly.  I didn't like the 80's movie with computers, and I didn't like the one in the 90's with cable.  So let me just fix your damned ratings with your hypothetical spine, because I am from corporate and we are caning you!"

 

It wasn't his best work, but frankly he didn't expect it to really work.  At this point he wasn't overly concern with that, he wanted to just smack it down, hard. 

[Tiffany Korta]

It must have been the way he was written because she really didn’t like this character, but then that was sort of the plot. No one wanted to have a like able slasher, that way led to parody. It was obvious that someone else was pulling the strings and they would find out, but first they needed to take this guy down.

 

Keeping her arms extended she whipped them around, deftly avoiding the other heroes, and managed to landed a few, hopefully solid, blows on the character.

[Electra]

As her comrades continued bombarding the unnaturally-jointed man with their fists and physical weapons, Paige stayed put, her inkdrop eyes trained unblinkingly upon him. She poured happiness over him, a lifetime of good memories, some her own, some she'd seen in others, each one barbed with the razor-tipped knowledge that none of it could ever happen for someone like him, that he would disappear into unrecorded history and it wouldn't have an iota of effect on a single moment's laughter. She watched impassively as he began to buckle under the strain, only doubling down on the relentless psychic attack. 

[trollthumper]

Something like blood flowed from the nose of the acrobatic man - only blood wasn't the color of television static. "You can't..." he said, "can't... do this to... I'm the hunter, I... I can't... can't..."

 

The man's eyes rolled into the back of his head. He went down slowly, breaking and bending like a collapsible ladder, but in time, he lay passed out on the floor. The corpse began to blur like a channel with a bad connection before melting away, drifting off in smoke - uncomposed ephemera, Temperance realized. The blood and body of spirits. 

 

The girl stepped forward to where the body had been. Now, there was just a faint discoloration in the carpet. She prodded it with her shoe, as if testing the depth, and then spat on the stain. "Good," she said. "He took... way too much pride in this kind of thing. I don't know what they do on the other stages, but--"

 

"Something tells me he didn't come from the family hour," Temperance said. "He said something about 'the director.' You know anything about that?" 

 

"I don't know who he's talking about. But... I did hear that. Before. When he and... the others came. He stayed here after they left, to do..." She trailed off, as if fighting to keep the memory down. "Sorry. But when they came, they said things like... 'The director wants it spectacular.' And when he... I'm sorry, when he did... what he did, he said, 'This is what she wants.' But I don't know who's doing this. We've always been happy to stay on our stages. Keep up the same masks, put on the play, get the devotion from the watchers. Who'd want to break all that?"

[Avenger Assembled]

"Who would do this? A jerk!" exclaimed Fast-Forward, dusting himself off and checking his injuries. Gonna feel that tomorrow. Man, my favorite shirt! He zipped over and kissed Hologram on the cheek, quickly normalizing her black entropic eyes. "Nice one, honey. Looks like you really put some starch in his shorts." Looking around the scene of the carnage, he went on, "I guess there's Silver Scream. She loves horror and she hates television. Crazy ghost lady," he went on, "used to work with my ma. I didn't know her that well," he admitted, "Ma didn't think she was appropriate for a kid to hang out with." Still, he did his best to remember what he'd heard about a woman he'd only really known from stories decades previously. "She was an old-timey actress who did a lot of horror movies, then stuck around to do some more scaring once she was dead. She knows what year it is, but she's still stuck in the 1940s inside her head. Grody." He looked over at Temperance. "Hey, you're a spirit wizard, right? Can you look around for old ghosts?" 

[Electra]

Even after the spectre dematerialized, Paige's face remained blank, her eyes coal black and wide as the conversation flowed around her. Richard's words and touch seemed to shake her back, and with a few blinks and a press of her palms to her face, she looked nearly normal again. "This seems awfully... crass, for lack of a better word, for Silver Scream," she commented, looking around. "I don't remember her being such a proponent of violence in the media... or sound in the media, for that matter." 

[trollthumper]

"Different kinds of spirits," Temperance said. "A ghost is the echo of something that lived and thought like a person, either bound to the original soul or left to wander like static. Spirits are incarnations of primal forces, emotions, or movements - things that don't necessarily have a full consciousness of their own." She paused, thinking. "That said... it might be possible for a ghost to enter the spirit world, if it had enough force of will. Both are lands of ephemera, after all. And unless they're playing Six Feet Under on the next stage over --"

 

"They're not," said the girl. "The sitcoms tend to stick close together."

 

"Thanks for that. Like I was saying, spirits associated with death will stand out like a sore thumb. And any ghost would probably attract such things. Mind you, I don't exactly have a nose for spirits - I know if they're standing in front of me, but that's it. But, if we could devise a ritual to draw up towards sympathies of death, it might help us find any ghosts lurking about backstage."

[Avenger Assembled]

"Ghosts, eh?" Fast-Forward reached into his leather jacket and pulled out a book - a small, old-fashioned, leatherbound journal that 'popped' with magical power to Temperance's eyes. "To gaze upon the dead that are living, call upon the mystic power of Cancer in Taurus, that the dead star that is living will lend its light to your eyes and heat to your voice," he read aloud from what looked to be neat, penciled-in handwriting. He flipped back and forth through the book at super-speed, then said, "OK, this looks like it's asking me to cast a spell in the name of the Crab Nebula, so that I can see ghosts? I don't know, I think I can do this. I haven't done this before, though, so it'll be teeeeeeedious..." 

 

He started pacing the room, reading from the book out loud like an actor reading from a script he'd just been handed. "And in the name of the mystic power of the nebula, I call upon you, in the name of the mystic power of the...ugh, twenty-four times!? Crap, now I have to start again..." With a deep sigh, he went back to his recitation. 

[Tiffany Korta]

Ghost’s and spirit’s isn’t this a little far fetched?.

We’re inside a television show happily talking to television characters, I think we should give them the benefit of the doubt.

She didn’t know much about the supernatural but she did know television and it had it’s own rules, rules maybe that they could use to their advantage.

 

“If this world works like the shows we might not need a real ritual, we just need to act like you would if this was done in an episode. You know a few dribbly candles, a skull, maybe a few robes or a pentagram and a bit of dubious Latin.â€

[TheAbsurdist]

Ghosts?  ...great.  

 

"Huh."  He frowned a little bit, and folded his arms across his chest.  "So... a ghost.  I would complain, but at this point, this is pretty weird.  I mean... I don't get sucked into televisions all that often.  And I am not so young as to recall the sixties.  I am not a wizard... so I can try to punch it when it gets close, but that thing is squirrelly."  He frowned a little bit, and shrugged his shoulders as he looked to everyone else.  "I might be able to piss it off..." 

[Avenger Assembled]

It would have gone faster if Richard hadn't occasionally stopped to flip ahead at how long the ritual would take and mutter something unwholesome before resuming his work. Even so it didn't take very long, especially by the standards of mystic rituals and arcane spells. It helped that time seemed to pass in a slightly different fashion inside the television realm. Paige could hear Richard's thoughts as he chanted, mostly some variation on Ugh, so many words! Eventually, with a final gesture, he snapped his fingers and summoned a light over their heads - a glowing eye in the starry shape of the Crab Nebula, casting a greenish glow over the room and all inside it. It looked like something summoned by a Victorian occultist, a weird, fluttering glow that made it look almost like an image artifact in an old-time photograph. 

[trollthumper]

The green glow rippled out from Fast-Forward, briefly rendering the illusion of a blood-drenched suburban home. For one second, there was the flicker of static, as the image dissolved back into a series of poorly-rendered pixels creating the illusion of reality. Temperance briefly thought the ground might give out beneath her as it struggled to realize whether it still existed. But the disruption was gone as soon as it had begun, with reality - as it was - reasserting itself. Save, of course, for a trail of red, blue, and green dots hanging in mid-air.

 

"...dead pixels," she said. "Of course." 

 

The trail led out of the house, into the sunny, well-manicured lawns of TV's version of Southern California. It seemed to wink out of existence on the other side of the street... but as the group followed it, the structure of reality began to ripple once more. "It must lead to the next stage," said Temperance. "Or program, or however they call it. We follow through, and --" 

 

Temperance placed one foot on the sidewalk, and reality blurred again. Sunny suburbia gave way to the dining room of another elegant house - except instead of the bright light of mid-day, there was the gloom of night, with some flakes of snow. The walls were bedecked with fine art and small mementos, and Vivaldi could be heard somewhere in the distance. The table was laden with a feast, fine foods and drink set out in wondrous arrangements that were part art and part advertisement. Temperance was also tempted, until she realized the arrangements seemed a bit familiar...

 

"I don't think I should have to say it to those visiting a strange supernatural realm," she said in a hushed tone, "but just to underline it: don't eat anything." 

 

The trail of dead pixels hung in the air, leading from the living room into the kitchen...

[Electra]

Paige passed her hand through one of the pixels, curious to see what it might do, but other than a slight tingle of static electricity in her hand, it was intangible and immobile. "Nothing here gives me much of an appetite," she agreed. "At best, it's probably half paste and fixative spray, at worst... well, nothing you'd want to eat, judging by everything we've seen so far." She raised her scissors in one hand, holding them like a dagger as she took a step towards the kitchen and opened her mind... only to recoil instantly in horror, stumbling backwards into Richard as her body tried to escape what her mind had seen. "Something in there," she reported. "Can't exactly see it, but its thoughts are full of murder." She shuddered. "Really gleeful murder." 

[Tiffany Korta]

Spirit world or not the behind the scene looks at television was fascinating to the young Grue, though she didn’t forget how serious the whole situation was however. She just allowed herself little moments among the job of tracking down the spirit.

 

For now she stayed at the back and let the more experienced members of the team, she was in a team-up squee, handle the investigation. As she did she idly wondered what the food might do to her. If it was just all fake that was fine, her digestion could handle most things. If it made her shrink and grow, like Alice, well she could do that already by herself. If was all magic well then she could be in real trouble. For now she decided to leave the food alone.

[Avenger Assembled]

"Okay," said Fast-Forward thoughtfully, thinking about what he'd seen of the other heroes. "Having gotten knocked on my ass once today, I'm not eager to go charging in there right now. Asad, as far as I know you're the one here who can take the biggest hits. Why don't you and Miss Grue take point while we take backup?" he went on, pointing to himself and Hologram. "I can get us in there faster than a normal person can think, and Hologram thinks a lot faster than a normal person." He grinned, teeth white, a snarl of defiance in the direction of the creature they were fighting. There! Who says I haven't matured since 1985? "Maybe we'll have a little food fight in here, see if the gourmet in there likes us screwing around with his creations." 

[TheAbsurdist]

Asad tapped at the core on his chest, the center of his containment suit.  "I am good.  Probably.  Fifty bucks on another crazy thing leaping out of at us." And then he leaned over to look under the table, still frowning all the while.  "Why does this seem familiar?"

 

Pursing his lips as he stopped and looked around, slowly crouching down to look under the table.  "If anyone knows the show shout it out..."  Rising out of the crouch he turned to look at the rest.  "This is mystical and science-y, I can punch things... and... stuff.  Though if we get to a show one of my subsidiaries is producing I can maybe identify it..."  Resting his hands on his hips as he looked down and stepped away from the table.