I, Leaf: Chapter 2

Though no one asked for it.

2. Fight!

There are times in a hero’s life when modesty is in order, and caution advisable. Unfortunately for Steven, this was one of those times. So confident was he in his ability to repel all known manners of attack, that when The IdMaster powered up his IdBlaster and shot off a bolt of orange lightning directly at Steven’s chest, the plainly-dressed superhero didn’t even try to avoid it. Didn’t fly a tad to the left or the right. Didn’t whip out a mirror at the last second and reflect the fiendish beam right back to where it came from. Didn’t do anything at all but hover there in space, like an idiot hot air balloon, waiting for it to hit him. To hit him and bounce off harmlessly into the stratosphere, at which time he planned to swoop towards Iddy, as he’d decided to call him, and administer a second brutal kidney clobbering.

To Steven’s surprise, when the bolt struck him square in his steely man-chest, it actually hurt like hell. It had been so long since unlikely events transformed the once hapless loser into an impervious super-type that he’d actually forgotten what pain felt like. Suddenly though, it all came back to him. A childhood of bruised elbows, grazed knees and bloody noses. That time he climbed a half-built bonfire and stepped on a nail. The headaches he used to get from eating ice cream too quickly. The wasp that flew down the back of his shorts that morning before school, while he was innocently eating breakfast, and stung his bottom like it was Luke Skywalker, and his bum was the Death Star. Every pinch and scrape, every sting and ache, every boo boo and owie he’d every experienced but forgotten until that very moment, well, it all came back to him at once. Ouch.

His shirt in burnt tatters, his chest charred and black, his eyes wide with staggered amazement, Steven floated, uncertainly, for a moment, before fainting dead away. And then he fell. The crowd beneath him, their necks sore from staring up at Steven and Iddy (though no one would ever call him that now), barely had enough time to leap out of the path of the plummeting man before he landed among them with a dull, awful thud, turning the pavement to rubble beneath his now motionless body.

The crowd stood dumbstruck, staring with disbelief at poor, fallen Steven.

A bubble of excitement burst to life in The IdMaster’s stomach, rising up through his chest and filling his pounding heart before bursting every which way, filling his every nook and cranny from the tips of his tingling fingers to the core of his racing brain. The time to celebrate, however, had not yet arrived. So, though he felt strongly encouraged by Steven’s cataleptic status, and did in fact allow himself a moment of quiet self-satisfaction, accompanied by a cautious, internal pat on the back, The IdMaster kept as tight a lid as he could manage on his fizzing, whizzing, frothing emotions. Standing firm on his rooftop perch, he looked down upon the smoking super-zero, and impatiently awaited further developments.

It was then that Steven let out a gasp, like he’d been holding his breath for longer than was comfortable, and if he’d waited any longer it would have been the end of him. With his left hand he clutched at his chest, with his right he slapped at the ground and pushed himself upright. Then he opened his eyes. Only they weren’t his eyes. His had been green and, if not exactly bright, then at least kind. But these were black like a shark’s, like a deep, dark pit with a monster at the bottom. Unsteadily he got to his feet. Looked down at the ground, then up at the IdMaster, around at the crowd and then, finally, he flew up, up and… away.

For a moment, no one knew quite how to react. For the crowd on the ground, Steven’s speedy defeat and subsequent swift departure was something so new, so previously undreamt of, it was as though they were cavemen seeing fire for the first time, or your grandparents when you tried to explain to them how the internet worked. In short, it just didn’t compute. Even The IdMaster, who, as the perpetrator of this game changing event, the man who helped plan it, then execute it, still seemed vaguely dazed by the result. At least momentarily. Before anyone else had a chance to catch up with their thoughts, he quickly snapped to with a triumphant, “YES!

“It works!” Yelled The IdMaster with untamed jubilation.

“It works!” He repeated, with the undiluted glee of a high school jock who’d just scored the winning point at some typically mindless sporting event. Honestly, he could have danced a jig, he was so insanely happy, but he wasn’t out of the woods yet, and he knew it. Though his efforts so far, and for the first time in the history of bad-guyery, had been entirely successful, others were coming, and soon there’d be more blasting to do. Probably a lot more blasting. So he took a deep breath, calmed himself, and, having regained his composure, addressed the shaken spectators.

“There’s more to come, so stay, enjoy!” He cackled like a fiendish ringmaster, without even the slightest trace of weasel, as if his newly-won confidence had transformed him just as dramatically on the inside as his dichromatic threads had reinvented his outsides.

“I suggest you use this interval to follow my earlier instruction and,” he bellowed this last bit: “FILL. THE. SACK.”

A flurry now, from folks who suddenly took The IdMaster seriously, of watches springing from wrists, of wallets, leaping from pockets, of hidden valuables once treasured, now flying through the air towards the damp, enormous sock-sack in their midst.

“That’s quite enough of that,” came a stern, commanding voice from somewhere in the air behind The IdMaster. The villain whirled around, his magnificent IdBlaster charged and ready to go. Floating before him, maybe thirty metres away, was the superhero known as Law. Decked out like an old English judge, with flowing scarlet robes, a curly, white, wooly wig and a heavy iron hammer that was twice the size of a regular judge’s gavel and imbued with magical, clobbering powers, Law possessed considerably more gravitas than poor, departed Steven.

“I was wondering who’d be next,” said The IdMaster, entirely unshaken by the new arrival.

“Silence in court!” Countered Law, who, serious though he was, couldn’t resist an appropriate catchphrase.

“You know what Law?” Asked The IdMaster hypothetically. “I’ve never been amused by your legal shtick. But just this once I’m going to play along-”

A huffing, puffing noise interrupted The IdMaster in mid-flow. He glanced over his shoulder to see a man dressed mostly in earthy brown tones, with a white poppy logo on his chest, the word ‘Shalom’ emblazoned on an otherwise undistinguished mask, and a medium-sized olive branch that appeared to be growing from the top of his head. It was Peace, Law’s sidekick, and he had climbed several flights of stairs to the roof because he didn’t have any powers to get him there faster or by more unusual means. By all accounts, even for a regular person, he seemed quite out of shape, and, as he collapsed through the door that opened from the stairwell onto the roof, he appeared ready to drop, right there, right then.

Peace was a distraction. Nothing more. In the two seconds that the IdMaster had wasted peering around at him, Law had started a diving descent, his face a portrait of grim determination, his gavel aimed squarely at the back of the black-and-white bad guy’s head. The villain reacted swiftly, deftly spinning around and dropping to his knees, quickly flicking a switch on the IdBlaster’s controls and squeezing off a much wider beam than he’d used on Steven, illuminating Law, and the air all around him, with a hazy orange glow. The effect, however, was much the same.

Unable to stop, steer or even to slow his hurtling decent, and with a look of agonised panic beneath his now-flaming, wooly wig, Law crashed head-first through the rooftop of Stuff the Animals, demolishing much of the top floor, home of the Get Stuffed Café, ultimately coming to a comatose conclusion in a heap of souvenir hoodies in sartorial stall The Stuffed Shirt.

“Court’s adjourned,” quipped The IdMaster, rising to face a dumbstruck Peace. With a scornful baring of his jagged ivories, the villain sent the sidekick tumbling back down the stairs that he’d barely managed to climb in the first place, his olive branch snapped in several places by the crackling orange beam.

Round two complete. Three-nil to Evil. The crowd below, having filled the heaving sack-sock so far beyond capacity that it had long-since been buried beneath a pile of precious things, didn’t whisper a word or move a solitary muscle. Barely dared to breath, even, as the villain above them blasted his wicked way into Orthonian history.

“Next!”

No villain had ever enjoyed himself more, or experienced greater success, than The IdMaster had over the previous few minutes. Suddenly anything was possible. No hero was unbeatable. No item unstealable. No act too darn hissable. Orth was his oyster, the IdBlaster his shucker and heroes were mere barnacles to be scraped away, a job requiring little more effort than the blowing of a runny nose.

More barnacles now, minor-to-medium-league do-gooders who believed that together they might stand. That together, though two of their greatest champions had already been defeated, they might somehow be triumphant. If they believed. If they worked as a team and attacked as one. And if the Lords of Earth, Orth and Dimension B were on their side.

A massive joint effort, then, for round number three. Attacking from below, taking the stairs and rushing The IdMaster all at once, were The Chew Crew, a food-themed trio consisting of The Scrambler, who could beat an egg but not much else, Corporal Club, master of sandwiches, and The Green Gobbler, who saved kids from beans and brussels, and as such was rather a windy fellow. These poor, unfortunates were the decoys, and they knew it. Good on them, though, for being a part of the day.

Attacking from the sides were one-man armies Sheriff, a western-type who threw pointy Marshal badges like ninja stars and rode a flying robot horse called Twinkle, and The Truth Titan, a soaring colossus of scrupulous honesty, ten feet tall with fists the size of hams, toes the size of fists and nose-hair the size of toes.

From above came Captain Smashy, a near-invincible juggernaut of demolishing fury who had jumped from a plane a thousand feet above The IdMaster, curled herself into a tight little ball, and now plummeted towards the IdBlasting maniac with all of the fury, but sadly the same inability to correct her course, as a flaming, Earth-bound meteorite.

Finally, from below, pouncing out from behind the rubble that once was The Get Stuffed Café, came General Good, a champion of minor-league helpfulness. Like, say you were sitting an exam, and your only pen ran out of ink. Or you were hosting a barbecue and there were more burgers than buns. Well, it would be General Good who’d tap you lightly on the shoulder and hand you an unchewed ballpoint. Or swing by the house at precisely the moment that your patties were crying out for pre-sliced, sesame-seeded housing.

Though he’d never saved a life, foiled a bank heist or defended Orth from alien invaders, the General was timely, useful and kind. People liked him. Unfortunately, popularity offers little protection from cataclysmic, 360-degree blasts of hero-thwarting orange. And so he fell. Because The IdBlaster had a third setting, and it was a doozy.

For those of you unfamiliar with the word doozy, feel free to replace it with crackerjack or humdinger. For those of you unfamiliar with the words doozy, crackerjack or humdinger, feel free to travel back in time to the roaring 1920s, a glorious decade full of flappers, flatfoots and slippery eels, any one of whom could explain to you the meaning of doozy, crackerjack, humdinger, flapper, flatfoot and/or slippery eel. For those of you incapable of time travel and beyond easy reach of a decent dictionary, but still valiantly reading this particular paragraph, congratulations on making it this far: the meaning of doozy falls somewhere between larger than usual, because the IdBlaster’s third setting was epically devastating, and big trouble, as The Scrambler, Corporal Club, The Green Gobbler, Sheriff and Twinkle, The Truth Titan, Captain Smashy and General Good were all, now, pretty much done for.

An enormous ball of dark, sparkling orange surrounded The IdMaster, illuminating and overwhelming the heroes of round number three. The villain alone was safe from the blast, cocooned in the eye of the storm by a pulsing, personal force field that radiated from a glowing, mushroom-shaped knob on the side of his ingenious, game-changing weapon. Surveying the scene with malevolent pride, his eyes positively gleaming with the knowledge of what he’d just achieved, the scoundrel formerly known as OddSox attempted to absorb every moment of every detail around him. These were cherished memories in the making, and he didn’t want to miss a single, terrible moment.

This is what happened then, in just two or three blinks of an eye, though for the crime-fighters involved, and the spectators below, it was a ghastly, slow motion spectacle…

Swept off their feet by the force of the explosion, The Chew Crew blew through the air like cows in a twister, landing with a crumpling bump, thump and thud on the rooftop of neighbouring superstore Things! Things! Things!

Their furious flying charge towards The IdMaster suddenly derailed, The Truth Titan’s nose hairs ablaze with the same eerie orange flame that roasted the Sheriff’s stetson, the airborne yet barely conscious heroes collided with an earth-shattering KABOOM, poor Twinkle in the middle, squashed half flat with sparks pouring from its ears and bottom. Two unstoppable forces, and one poor robot horse, stopped, dropped and out for the count, lying broken and beaten in the street below.

Captain Smashy, likewise, dead to the world, a brainless orb of plunging flesh, fell way off target, blindly descending at breakneck speed towards nearby shopping village The Spendorium. Bouncing from store to store like the Devil’s pinball, she first demolished The Pickle Palace, The Wordery and the Dock Your Buttocks sofa warehouse, ploughing through the Wheely Good car dealership and the That’s all Folks! funeral home before finally coming to a tangled and broken, but at least conveniently situated end, in the emergency parking bay of the Patch ‘n’ Pray Budget Hospital.

Last and least, though General Good failed to even make it to the roof before the orange hit, when a ceiling segment crumbled above the Get Stuffed Café’s prize-winning condiment counter, he was at least able to throw himself in the path of the rubble before blacking out, saving an estimated 74 sachets of mayonnaise.

Outside, smoke and dust filled the air. Fires raged everywhere. The streets were trashed. The buildings lay battered and broken. But bad as they were, things were about to get slightly worse.

Decorated by miniature herds of recently cracked and dented bronze animals, the large double doors of Stuff the Animals crashed open. Staggering out, heavily toasted, came Law, his eyes as black and empty as Steven’s had been at the end, his right hand clutching the ankle of tenderised lickspittle Peace. Still out cold, Law’s inconsequential sidekick was now being dragged like a sack of steaming potatoes from what, just a few minutes earlier, had been a jolly good toy shop. Two seconds later, Law was back in the air, dangling Peace above the heads of the crowd as he, like Steven before him, abandoned them to their fate, soaring away so terribly fast, the resulting sonic boom shattered countless windows around town.

Where Steven had led, and Law had followed, the others soon followed suit. One by one, they regained consciousness. The Chew Crew. The Sheriff. The Truth Titan. Captain Smashy. Each of them gazing upon the carnage through cold, black eyes. Even Twinkle didn’t seem herself. And when General Good stumbled from the wreckage in to the street, covered in the ketchup that he’d failed to save, and he strode straight past a child who was sitting on a bike with a squeaky wheel that kind of needed oiling, and he did absolutely nothing to help, a terrible truth spread through the crowd like pinkeye in a primary school:

Their champions had been defeated, from the least to the best of them, and there was no one left to save the day. Marvel City lay in ruins. All hope was lost.

Say what you will, but chapter 3 is coming next week.