| Summary: | In which a kender is the brains of the operation and the team gets some unexpected help. |
|---|---|
| Source: | "The Smasher" by Spidey3000. |
| Continuum: | Super Smash Bros. |
| Timeline: | Late 2008 or early 2009; months since the end of "Gestalt Therapy." |
| Published: | March 13, 2010. |
| Rating: | PG/K+ - Cartoon violence and kender logic. |
| Beta: | doctorlit. |
| Cameo: | Spidey3000 himself. |
The note taped to the door read as follows:
To whom it may concern,
Hi! Welcome to RC #1110. Please note that I hereby disclaim all responsibility for its condition, livability, and contents. Watch out for spider webs, and good luck with the new job.
~Neshomeh, Archivist
Department of Personnel
Now Agent Derik knew why. One corner of the room was coated in a combination of a strange paint and a nest of equally strange blankets whose function, it appeared, was to not catch fire from the smoldering little creature sitting atop the nest. "Little" in this case was a relative term referring to something roughly the size of Derik's torso.
Another corner of the room—this one at ceiling level—was covered with cobwebs. Nestled within was a very large, furry, eight-legged and eight-eyed crawler. "Large" in this case was a relative term referring to something no bigger than a medium-sized canine.
Derik was very pleased to have his sledgehammer at that moment.
"Wow, the last residents really didn't clean up after themselves, did they?" said Earwig. The kender traipsed inside without a care and planted himself in the middle of the room, looking around avidly. "Look at that spider! It's almost as big as I am. And how about that fiery little demon guy? Did you see the whip? It's made of fire! How wonderful! Do you think he'd let me hold it?"
The mini-Balrog, for that is what he was, growled and clutched his whip tightly to his shadowy chest.
Earwig frowned. "Well, that's not very friendly."
He might have given the mini a good lecture about sharing, but a series of clicks and hissing sounds from above distracted him. The mini-Aragog descended from the ceiling on a silvery strand of spider silk and proceeded to inspect Earwig closely. "Is it a tricksy hobbitses, is it?" it hissed. "Looks like tricksy hobbitses, but doesn't smell like one, does it, Preciousss?" It nommed thoughtfully on Earwig's topknot, much to the kender's dismay.
"Hey! Don't eat that! That's my hair!"
Derik raised his sledgehammer, but the spider disengaged its mandibles and retreated partway up its thread. "Not hobbitses, but then what is it, Preciousss? What is it?"
"My name is Earwig Slugthrower, and I'm a kender," said he, seeming to forgive the spider's enthusiasm in light of his own. "That's Derik behind me. What's your name?"
"Sssevere," hissed the mini. In the other corner, the mini-Balrog grunted insistently. "That'sss Arasgorn," the spider translated. "We lives in thisss resssponse sssenter, we does."
Derik felt compelled to join the conversation at this point. "I think there may be some confusion on that score," he said as evenly as he could manage to a giant bug. "You see, we've been assigned here. So it's our response center. Not yours."
The mini-Aragog hissed and the mini-Balrog growled and raised its whip threateningly. And Earwig whined.
"Aw, can't we keep them? I've always wanted a giant spider! And a little fiery demon thing would be nice to have around, too, don't you think? If it ever gets cold here, we'd have nothing to worry about! And anyway," he added, "they don't look like they'd be very happy to leave their home."
"No, they don't," Derik was forced to agree. "But I still don't think—"
[BEEEEEEEEEP!]
Derik spun around at the noise, but didn't, as the Laws of Narrative Comedy might have you expect, put his hammer through the console. He knew better. Also, he had other things to worry about.
"Oh, wow! That's really loud," Earwig was saying over the noise. He came over to investigate. "Hey, look at all these buttons. That one's flashing. I bet we're supposed to press it, don't you think?"
"Wait—!" Derik started, but it was too late. Earwig happily slapped the flashing red button.
Immediately, the console shut up and its monitor flickered to life, which startled the visually oriented ex-dragonrider far more than the beep had done. He quickly remembered what he'd been told about the consoles, however, and leaned in for a closer look at the read-out, though he spared a wary glance or two at the minis as he read.
"It says it's a Marty Sam," he reported. "Same as a Gary Stu, I guess. But I have no idea what the rest of this means." He frowned at the unfamiliar terms. SSB? Brawl? What about a brawl?
"Lemme see," Earwig said. He clambered onto the desk chair and read. "Oh, I know about this stuff. I was in a really weird place one time. It was called Erp, or at least I think it was, and they had these little machines that you could play games on." He plunged a hand into one of his many pockets and pulled out a classic, huge, gray Game Boy that by rights shouldn't have fit in there. "Like this, see?" He switched it on and clicked rapidly through a series of screens as Derik looked on, completely mystified. Tinny music emitted from the device as irregularly shaped blocks migrated down the latest screen. "You have to get all the blocks in a row so they disappear. If the space fills up, you lose," Earwig explained. He played furiously for a few minutes while Derik watched.
"So, what does that have to do with anything?" the man asked eventually.
Earwig, lost in concentration, didn't seem to hear him at first. Then, suddenly, he threw his arms in the air as the Game Boy emitted a series of shrill notes. "Shoot, I lost!" He sighed and put it back in his pocket—a different one this time. "Anyway, that's just a small game. There are bigger and better ones, and this story is based on one of them. Only I don't think it had Harry Potter in it." He scratched his head. "And if Master Hand is in charge, Wario wasn't there yet, either."
"Harry Potter. I know him, at least. That must be why we got this as a mission."
Earwig turned a beseeching look on him. "Ooh, Derik, can I set the disguises? I know just what to do!"
Derik, with no clue, had no choice. "I suppose—"
But the kender had already wheeled himself over to the disguise panel and started pushing buttons. "There, I think that's right. We'll find out when we get into the fic." He grinned, a truly frightening sight to behold.
"I have the equipment," said Derik, who was unfamiliar with kender and therefore not nearly as worried as he should have been. "We might as well get on with it. Whatever this world is, it'll be much better less one Gary Stu."
"I think this button opens the portal." Earwig pushed the button, and a big blue portal obediently sprang open. "How exciting! Our first mission together!" He jumped off the chair.
"Earwig!" Derik called, but his partner was already through the portal. " . . . Wait." He sighed and followed after, tote bag slung over one shoulder, sledgehammer slung over the other.
As the agents departed, Severe hissed and clicked to himself in the corner.
On the other side of the portal, the world was entirely gray and nondescript—even moreso than Headquarters. A ridiculously loud voice droned on for a few minutes about things that Derik didn't understand, but both he and Earwig were distracted by their new disguises. Their bodies, clothes and gear included, were now made up entirely of human-shaped frameworks of glowing purple lines supporting a heart in the chest cavity and a red oval crossed by two off-center black lines where the face should have been.
"Neat!" Earwig's voice remarked from the vicinity of the face plate.
Derik took the change far less well. He had expected disguises, but to be turned into something with a see-through body and no face was unnerving, to say the least. He tested his new form with his hands, making sure that it was, in fact, solid. "Earwig? What did you do? What are we?"
"Fighting Wire Frames!" he declared. "Kinda like practice dummies, only they hit back."
"Practice dummies." He wasn't sure how he was talking without a mouth. He decided not to think about it. "I'm setting the disguises next time."
Earwig probably said something cheerful and agreeable, but his voice was lost in a sudden ear-splitting wail.
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Both agents clapped their hands over what would otherwise have been their ears, but the noise stopped just as abruptly as it had started. They spoke at the same time:
"What was that?"
"It's a ghost! Don't worry, I'll take care of it. No ghost has ever withstood the Kender Spoon of Turning! Now, where did I put it?" He rummaged around in his pockets, hampered slightly by the fact that all he could see of them was purple grid-lines.
Meanwhile, Derik, who didn't believe in ghosts, had begun to take notice of their surroundings. They had shifted subtly after the shriek. They were no longer standing in gray nothingness, but enclosed in a black space with the exception of what appeared as a round, concave window displaying gray nothingness beyond it. The space echoed in an odd way with words like "Spidey3000," "the dude that kicks ass online," "pretty cool powers," and "my legend." As Derik strained to catch the words, an image suddenly came into focus through the window. Hands lifted a stack of sealed letters and sorted through them—Derik's hands. He felt drawn to one of the envelopes and dropped the others without a second thought. He knew it was important somehow. It was very plain-looking, but I knew that I had to trust my instincts, because I knew that the compulsion that I felt must have meant that it was very important. So, I opened it, and was shocked, honored and confused.
It said:
"Derik? Hey, Derik! I found it!"
Derik staggered as the shape of Earwig waved a spoon under his nose—his real nose, the one currently transparent and defined by cross-hatching. He shook his head to clear the effects of the fic.
"I think we're inside the Stu's head," he said, amazed. "I was seeing with his eyes. I got trapped in his thoughts." Had he a face, he would have made a very ugly one normally associated with discovering that one has just eaten maggots instead of grain.
"Oh, is that why you were talking funny?" Earwig asked. "You said something about your girlfriend Quistis and being able to use her name because she's from another world."
"Does that make any sense?"
There was a pause in which Earwig was presumably thinking about the question. Then, "No, probably not. You don't have a girlfriend. Er, do you?"
"No. Nor likely to have, either." He rubbed the back of his neck and walked to the window, turned, and came back again. "We need to get out of here. Can we use that blue door betweening-thing? No, we'd just end up back here again, wouldn't we? There must be something!"
"Would this help?" Earwig picked up a soft yellow cube from the floor. It was stamped with the word "Me" and had a pull-cord and the instructions "Do not pull cord until in fic" attached. "I found it while looking for the Kender Spoon of Turning, though I'm not sure where it came from. Somebody must have dropped it. Do you think they'd mind if we use it? Just until the fic is over, of course, and then we'll have to find them and give it back."
Derik took the cube, examined it, and pulled the string.
Abruptly, the agents were thrown backward as the world shrank and then exploded around them. They found themselves on a grassy lawn that Earwig could have told Derik was part of a suburban home on Earth (or "Erp"). He also might have pointed out the fancy limo that drove off with the Stu—now embodied by the "Me" crash dummy—inside it. However, he was distracted by the return of the piercing call from before:
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
"The ghost again!" Earwig cried. "I'll get it this time!" He jumped to his feet, waving the Kender Spoon of Turning in front of him. "Look here, ghost! Behold the Kender Spoon of Turning! Go away! Begone! Avaunt! Or I'll get you, and you won't like it much at all!"
Derik grabbed him by the back of the collar before he could wander too far searching for non-existent ghosts. "It's just a text divider, Earwig. Look at the Words. And the Stu is getting away. He got into that shiny metal . . . moving . . . thing," he finished lamely.
"Oh, right." Earwig slipped out of Derik's grip, though Derik would have sworn he'd never felt a thing. "You shouldn't have distracted me. Let's go."
Derik reached into his bag for the portal generator only to find it missing. For a moment, he panicked. "Uh-oh. It's gone. Earwig, have you seen—?"
There was a black antenna sticking out of the kender's lower left vest pocket. How he contrived to look innocent with no face was a mystery for the ages, but he did.
"Give me that," Derik said in his best Weyrleader voice, which, as a Phantom of the Opera clone, was very impressive.
"What, this? Oh, I guess you left it in the response center. You should be more careful with your things. It's a good thing I grabbed it for you." Completely unfazed, he handed the RA back. Derik stared at him.
"We're going to have a talk later. But Duty first." He jabbed the "Home In On Sue" button on the device and ushered Earwig through the resulting portal, then followed behind him.
They emerged inside the limousine with the crash dummy, and though the vehicle was sufficiently large that they could keep their distance, it was an awkward transition from standing still to sitting in a moving vehicle. The ride lasted for a few hours, according to the Words, which gave the agents a chance to regroup and gather the charges they'd missed while stuck in the narrative.
To recap without the many, many tangents of a kender trying to explain things: the Stu, who was called Spidey3000, not-so-coincidentally sharing the author's pen-name, was described as "kind of like a superhero," complete with a secret identity and special abilities, apparently including the ability to single-handedly foil a group of terrorists planning to attack the "Whitehouse," with the implication that Spidey had discovered their plan while playing The Matrix Online. The fic took place about a week after that, during which interval Spidey had decided to get good at online video games, which he claimed he "used to suck at."
Then the letter arrived. A letter from Master Hand, addressed to one Mr. McPelley. So much for the secret identity. In the letter, Spidey was invited to join the Super Smash Bros. with the incentive that Crazy Hand was saying "that he's going to beat you as bad in real life as he did in the videogame, without my help. Not that that should influence your decision (he also said you were a sissy girl)."
After being called a sissy girl a second time, the 'Stu opted to join "Without a second though." Cue limousine ride.
"So this fellow, who supposedly has the resources and the balls to take down a force of armed and trained killers by himself, has just been goaded into joining this organization from a silly game because they called him names?" Derik said.
Earwig glanced over the Words again. "Pretty much, yeah."
"I'd have grounded any of my riders if they had behaved so foolishly," the ex-dragonrider muttered, shaking his head.
For the remainder of the ride, the agents entertained themselves with the limousine's food and wine service. The fic specified nothing except that the wine was "fine wine," so it served up something different each time Earwig pressed the button. A lot of it vanished into his pockets "for later." Some caviar was flicked across the cabin at the crash dummy. The Stu had fallen asleep and didn't notice.
He didn't notice the plothole into which the limo vanished, leaving him standing in "some kind of cargo hold," either, but he did wake up for it. The agents, on the other hand, fell on their asses with loud cries of dismay when their seats vanished from beneath them. Quickly recovering, Derik grabbed Earwig by his collar and dragged him behind "some kind of cargo." The Stu didn't notice them, fortunately. He was busy talking to some kind of anthropomorphic fox and realizing that he had forgotten his weapons when he blindly left his house. The fox, identified by the Words as Fox McCloud, assured him that his weapons had been placed in the limo ahead of time, meaning that something had been in his house without his notice. The Stu felt very stupid for not noticing, and the agents agreed wholeheartedly with his assessment.
"Maybe next time you'll stop to think before answering mysterious summons from fictional beings," Derik muttered. "Though I'm not sure I can talk."
"You have a funny accent, but I can understand you just fine," Earwig assured him. "Let's explore the ship!"
For they were aboard the Great Fox, and they had several hours to kill. The Stu did nothing interesting during the journey, so they were free to go about as they pleased. Derik had to restrain the kender from climbing inside the assault tank, the submarine, and the jet fighters. He didn't know what would happen if Earwig got the strange machines working, but he was sure he didn't want to find out.
The journey was broken up by the arrival of other potential Smashers, despite the Stu's declaration at the beginning of the chapter that "I was the only new Smasher." The first of these was none other than Harry Potter. The agents watched as he was driven aboard the ship in the same sort of robotic limousine that had brought the Stu.
"Now, I know Harry has some tendencies toward rash behavior, but I'm almost positive that he wouldn't abandon his friends to go off and join some kind of fighting club on a whim," Derik said. "And he certainly wouldn't know this guy," he added when it became clear that Harry recognized Spidey somehow. "That's got to be some kind of charge. 'Causing your own ego to span worlds', perhaps."
"I knew a guy like that once," Earwig remarked. "He was—"
The kender was cut off when the whole environment distorted as time suddenly sped up, bringing three more new Smashers on board and the ship to its destination in the space of one paragraph. Everyone seemed to be moving about very quickly and jerkily, and their voices were reduced to incomprehensible squeals. The agents, feeling horribly compressed, could only watch until the Great Fox landed at its final destination. Everyone on board was spat from the ship into a room in what was probably a large mansion, and a giant white glove popped into existence—none of this with any transition or explanation.
Derik retched in a corner while Earwig, who found the ordeal very interesting but didn't feel the need to experience it again, listened to the dialogue.
"To join the smashers, you will have to last five minutes in the simulator with one of the veteran smashers. Any questions?" Master Hand asked. "Will we get to choose our opponents?" asked Harry,"cause if we do I call Jigglypuff!" Damn it, I was going to call Jigglypuff! Why does he get the easiest opponent? I thought. "No, and...no." That was the only question that was asked.
The kender tilted his head. "I thought Spidey was a tough guy out to prove himself. If I were him, I would fight the toughest opponent I could, not the easiest. Derik, you might want to get off the floor. Everyone is leaving."
"I didn't know a purple wire thing could vomit," the man groaned, making no effort to pick himself up. "Why don't people learn to write? The Harper Hall would never allow this on Pern."
"Well, I don't know about Pern, but since we were able to eat things before I guess it makes sense for stuff to come back up," Earwig said helpfully. "Plus, it's just a disguise. We still have stomachs underneath, even if we can't see them. Oooh, I wonder what it would be like to see my stomach?" He looked down at himself as though a window to his insides might magically appear.
"Please stop talking about it," said Derik, whose wire-frame disguise had turned slightly gray. "Let's go watch the fights. They can't be worse than what's happened already."
In a sense, he was right: nothing horrible happened to the agents. They made their way to the simulation room, where a television displayed what was going on inside the simulation. The Stu was sitting in a chair and, without any apparent mechanism, was plugged into the simulator.
His fight with Wario, set in the Pokémon Stadium area, began with some clichéd verbal abuse and proceeded into a clichéd exchange of blows. The Stu used a sword called Wasp, which he claimed he hadn't named.
"I wonder why he would say that?" Earwig said. "I think it's a great name for a sword! Like Rabbit-slayer, which belonged to my Great Uncle Tasslehoff."
"I don't know why anyone would name a weapon in the first place," Derik said. "I'm not about to name my sledgehammer. It's a hammer. It's for hitting things. End of story."
Earwig opened his mouth to explain, but both agents were distracted by a shout and bright flash of light from the T.V.
"Blizzaga's a Final Fantasy spell," Earwig said with a frown. "And so is Ultima. How does he know how to do that?"
"He did say he had special powers," Derik said, adding it to the charge list.
While Wario was incapacitated by the explosion of magic, the Stu collected Pokéballs from around the arena and threw them at his opponent, whose ass was summarily kicked by the barrage of attacks from the little monsters within.
"I don't think Mew does psychic pimp-slaps or atomic wedgies," Earwig pointed out. "He . . . doesn't do much at all, actually. Except that one time in the movie."
"It's rather fascinating that Spidey claims this as a victory for himself when those little critters actually finished the job," said Derik. "I'd call that cheating."
"Well, the Pokéballs are a legitimate weapon in Super Smash Bros. It's up to the players to use them effectively, which he did."
"I suppose."
After a brief stumble into the next chapter, they watched Harry's fight with Mewtwo.
"Now, Mewtwo is dangerous," Earwig told Derik. "Though I don't really think he does atomic wedgies, either."
Derik winced sympathetically as Harry was tossed around like a wet rag by the powerful psychic creature. "You know, much as I hate to admit it, this might be accurate. Harry isn't as powerful as some people like to think he is—he's just lucky most of the time, and he gets a lot of help from his friends. And this is well outside his ken."
But then, as it seemed Harry was done for, he got off one last spell.
"Let's see you block the spell that made Voldemort crumble!" he yelled as he sat up. "Arvadak Adava"
There was a beat, and then both agents burst out laughing. The spell had successfully defeated Mewtwo, but it had a lot more to do with the glowing agave-colored aardvark clinging to Mewtwo's face than the beam of light accompanying it.
"And all the drama vanishes between," Derik chuckled. But his laughter died abruptly, and he returned to the charge list. "I think this is probably enough to convict him as a Gary Stu. He joined the Smashers and forced a well-known canon character to do the same, and neither of them has any business doing so. That's about as serious a canon breach as we're going to get."
Earwig scratched his head. "I dunno. There was something fishy about those other guys, but I can't put my finger on it. They're in the next chapter. I kinda want to see what happens."
Derik stared at him. "Are you serious?"
"I'm curious," Earwig said. "Please, can we watch the next chapter? Pleeeeze?"
"Augh, stop that! You pronounced that with a Z, didn't you? I can hear that!"
By this time, of course, the next chapter had already started. Derik shrugged in defeat and Earwig happily turned to the scene.
This time, two of the three other potential Smashers were plugged into the simulation. They were described at an earlier point in the fic as "a big muscular guy that wasn't too smart named Lenny and another guy named George who was [a] midgit, I mean...little person, riding on his shoulders who was alot smarter." They were fighting Kirby as a team, which seemed unfair to Derik until Earwig told him about the Ice Climbers, a set of twins who always worked in tandem in the game.
Derik set aside the charge list and his hammer in order to take out the Character Analysis Device. The first reading was not promising:
[Lenny and George. Big dumb guy/smart little guy. Non-canon. Blatant cliché.]
After hitting it a few times, Derik got better results:
[Lenny J. Williams. Human male. Non-canon. Son of Ashley J. Williams.]
[George Belmont. Human male. Non-canon. ??? of Ashley J. WilliamsCastlevaniaWTFboomsticksquibblemeep.]
Derik turned it off as it started to heat up alarmingly. He looked at his partner. "Did that mean anything to you?"
"Sure did! It's talking about Ash from the Evil Dead series! Which would be cool if Lenny were anything like Ash, but he isn't. And there's no way Ash is related to anybody from Castlevania, since it's a completely different universe."
"Hey, hush a second." Derik waved Earwig silent as Lenny started talking.
"My name is Lenny J. Williams, cousin to the George, and son of Ashley J. Williams, who mama says got hit by a train,"
Derik chuckled. "'The George'? He's the genuine article!"
Earwig was less amused. "Ash never got hit by a train! He was too busy destroying the undead! And he wasn't married, either, though I think he had a couple of girlfriends."
"Whatever. I've had enough of this. Are you satisfied?"
"Yeah. Ooh, can I read the charge list? Huh?"
"Sure. Here." Derik handed it off. Earwig squinted at it for a minute, deciphering Derik's variation on what he knew as Common. Meanwhile, Derik picked up his sledgehammer and, as Lenny, George, and Kirby exited the simulation, smashed the T.V. screen. He immediately had everyone's attention.
"Right, listen up!" he shouted. "This is not a drill! It is our duty to inform you that you are all guilty of crimes against the plot continuum. I refer in particular to you, Spidey3000, and my partner will now charge you with your crimes."
"What?" Spidey interrupted. "Is this another test? 'Cause I'll kick you wire frames from here to next week. And what the hell is up with the midget wire frame, anyway?"
"Excuse me, but I'm a kender, not a midget!" Earwig said. "And anyway, you shouldn't insult people about their height. It's very rude." He cleared his throat dramatically. "Spidey3000, I hereby charge you with definitely being a author-insert and a Gary Stu, and I further charge you with crimes against the Super Smash Bros. continuum. Specifically, with employing silly text dividers that sound like ghosts; with lots and lots of spelling, punctuation, and grammar errors; with using bad logic on several counts; with causing time-space compression and making my partner be sick; with giving yourself special powers that you shouldn't be able to have, claiming to be a legend without any real justification, and having an ego that spans worlds; with throwing pretty much everyone from SSB so out of character that our CAD would probably explode if we tried to use it on them; with abducting canon characters from other universes, such as Harry Potter; and with making up uncanonical offspring of canon characters, meaning Larry and George there. And I don't even know about that other guy you mentioned, because he didn't do anything."
Both Spidey and Derik stared at him. Derik spoke first. "That is not the charge list I wrote."
Earwig shrugged. "I couldn't read your writing, so I made it up. Did I miss anything important?"
"Well, my list was more specific, but . . . no, I guess that's good enough. Anyway, Spidey, you stand accused of the aforementioned crimes, for which the penalty is death. Do you have any last words?"
"This is my story!" the Stu shouted. "It's about ME, dammit! I can do what I want! I'm—!"
At that moment, there was a gunshot, and the back of the Stu's head exploded.
The agents turned around to see where the shot had come from.
"Sorry for the trouble," said a redhead somewhere in his twenties, holding a smoking rifle. "I should have done that years ago."
"Who are you?" Derik demanded.
"The author," the young man said simply, and then vanished.
The agents' jaws would probably have dropped, if they'd had them.
"Oh," said Derik.
"Nice shot," Earwig added. The crash dummy, now devoid of the Stu's persona, lay lifeless on the floor with stuffing arrayed behind its head. Well, what was left of its head. As the agents watched, the dummy deflated and shrank back to something resembling its original cube shape.
"Where did you get that again?"
"My pocket," Earwig said, sounding as though he thought Derik were a bit daft.
"I meant before that," Derik growled. "Never mind. Let's just get out of here. This place is starting to dissolve at the edges."
"What about Harry and Lenny and George?" The three characters were just standing there, staring blankly into space. Lenny and George were turning gray and translucent as the world faded away, but Harry remained.
"Those two will be gone without the Stu's will to keep them alive. We'll have to take Harry to FicPsych. Unless you've got a neuralyzer in your pocket, too." Derik folded his arms.
"I might," said Earwig. "But since you've taken that tone I don't know if I would share it with you. . . . What's a neuro-thingy?"
"Forget it. Grab Harry while I open the portal."
After a moment of trepidation in which Derik thought he'd "lost" the portal device again, he found it and opened the gateway to Headquarters. Earwig dragged Harry through by one hand, and Derik followed after them. Behind them, the Word World faded to gray and finally vanished entirely.
Back in their response center, the agents were greeted enthusiastically by Arasgorn and Severe. In Arasgorn's case this amounted to a sniffing-over of everything, like a big, fiery watchdog checking for illegal substances. Or food. Whichever. After squinting and grunting once at Harry, he gave all of his attention over to Earwig, who was absolutely delighted and dug some of the purloined limousine food out of his pockets to share.
Severe, on the other hand, dropped down onto Derik's shoulders and refused to budge until the agent had taken Harry to FicPsych. By the time he made it back to the RC, he was wound about with webbing and had to be cut loose by Earwig. And just as soon as he was free . . . .
[BEEEEEEEEEP!]
"The Smasher" by Spidey3000 was the first fic submitted to me using the form linked from the main page, so even though video games aren't really my area of expertise, I thought I should take it in order to set a precedent. So, here it is!
For future reference: always read the author's story summary. In this case, doing so led me to discover that the author of the badfic had already seen the error of his ways and fully supported a PPC sporking of it. This mission has taken place with his approval, and in fact, I invited him to appear as himself to kill the Stu, and so he did. Those particular lines are his, not mine, and the agents greatly appreciated the help. {= )
Thanks to my beta-reader, doctorlit.