Hooligan Scribbles

Back to the grind with the LAPD. It had been awhile since the gits in blue had dragooned me for one of their little spills they couldn’t clean, and this one is a doozy.

Some freaked out serial killer has started picking off young attractive ladies in the L.A. area, and frankly, the Po-Po (I think that’s what Brother Hood calls them) won’t stand for attractive, young, dead white girls. I’m not a terribly big fan of them being dead myself, so I guess I have no real objection to lending a hand.

I’d just picked up some very preliminary info on the cases and was headed back to the SkyBox when I met the team rushing out. I hitched a ride to…where in the blue hell were we headed, anyway?

My questions were met with repeated answers of “YOU CAN’T KILL ANYONE!” Ugh. This shite again. I should have known. The Freedom League wants their victims alive, presumably so they can escape custody and ensure the League never goes out of business. I mean, I’m all for secure employment, but this is ridiculous!

The sketchy details I was provided were these: we’re on our way to a VIPER nest, our job being to scare them into dumping the data contents of their computers to another server far, far away. Apparently, someone was then going to make sure that info got into the right hands. Our hands? Whatever.

So we charged. I’ve elected to employ a new wait-and-see policy in combat, hopefully granting me more time awake and less time asleep. Flea convinced me it was worth a shot…Flea. Sigh. I hope he pulls through. He’s a good kid. A little naïve, but his heart’s in the right place. If I get my hands on the thugs…you know, maybe I’d better let the team handle it. Can’t have people dying on us. Wouldn’t be prudent. Isn’t that was President Bush used to say? The older one. Not this one. (Why is it that my opinion on this administration changes depending on which ID I’m sporting? Sometimes I love that Rumsfeld fellow.)

I digress.

My wait-and-see approach allowed to me to do considerable damage against the mooks and thugs that met us in the parking lot. One fellow in particular might have been too in the way of a soccer ball, but I think Lifeline attended to him. It gets tiresome to hear the groans of my teammates whenever I hit someone hard. They can splatter someone from hear to Nevada, claim accident, and the rest of the team consoles them. I actually do try to leave them in one piece, hit them a little harder than I’d like, and I’m a loose cannon out for blood. Utter shite.

We made it into the building – some sort of studio lot, it appears – and found more VIPER agents. We also found Phase, a right angering bastard if I’ve ever met one. What hits him? What doesn’t? When to swing? When not to swing? At least he seemed as pissed as I, and eventually we did away with him and with Damage, his little friend who ran ran ran. Mindwipe, on the other hand…a floating hippie? I moved from the bosom of Mother Scotland to find myself fighting a floating hippie?

We blasted him down the stairs in short order. Man, this fighting like a team…assuming that Starburst, Black Phantom, Lifeline, and whoever the new guy (Major Dick? Captain Falcon? I assume intros will be forthcoming after the brawl) are on our side…this fighting like a team thing could work. (It’s possible that in the heat of battle and fog of war I might have given Crusader the ol’ Headbutt of Justice. Despite what my ‘friends’ probably think, I feel just awful about the whole thing. At least there was no hugging involved.)

Making our team stronger was the unexpected appearance of Trauma’s girlfriend, Black Diamond. Oh, sure, she robs and steals and plunders and loots and is in fact a super villain, but hey – he likes her, so she gets a pass. (Are you effing kidding me? The team doesn’t like Brother Hood because of his ‘methods’, but Trauma’s allowed to bring villains to the base and blab our plans to them? WHY ISN’T SHE IN JAIL?!? Oh, right – Trauma is going to ‘rehabilitate’ her. Apparently, he has license to do that now. I’m sure he’ll produce the paperwork giving him just such authority Real Soon Now^TM.)

I followed Starburst down the stairs to help restrain Mindwipe, committing not one but two errors in the process. First, I assumed either Starburst had put him out for the long haul, or the fall had done it for him (NOTE TO SELF – Please stop assuming your friends will kick a man when he’s down, no matter how necessary that may be). Secondly, in my haste to keep the mentalist from doing any more harm, I failed to notice that the stairs opened up into a room full of elite VIPER agents and supers.

Hammerhead took the brunt of one of my soccer balls, but didn’t seem to notice. He fired a photon blast at poor old Sunburst, putting him down for the count. I elected to retreat down a side hallway and take my chances with one or two opponents until the rest of the League arrived, but those two opponents turned out to be Scattershot and Damage. Whoops.

I put everything I had into a soccer ball on each of them, and did some hurtin’, but I knew two on one it was just a matter of time. That shotgun hurts. A lot. My teammates are here!

Scattershot’s shotgun is here. Again.

Hooligan go sleepy now.