…co-starring her best friend, Fully Flexible Francine
Doc Update #47,003
READING: World War Z by Max Brooks
EATING: Too damned much. Severe dieting & exercise starts soon
DOING: Removal of summer garden veggies/Planting of the winter garden veggies.
WRITING: As much as possible, but still not enough.
LISTENING: To more Americana and Swing, less Rock and Country
PREPARING: For a bunch of garden digging and Fall Curryfest.
THINKING: About getting a new gaming group together to try out an idea for an adventure series. If you live in or near Sacramento and want to play, leave a comment below. Also: old gaming group will restart soon!
ANTICIPATING: Four day Fall Mini Staycation!
SAVING: Money for 15th Anniversary, DunDraCon, Xmas & my birthday, in that order.
BORED: With politics on all levels. Let’s just move on to the bloody revolution and get it over with.
WANTING: A new laptop, since this one is a dinosaur…an old, sick dinosaur.
And now, the last of the Doclopedia re-posts from the alternate future as detailed last month.
The Doclopedia #384
When I Ruled The World: Titan Red
I was built to conquer the world, you know, not rule it. That was to be the job of Professor Grimes and his associates. I would conquer, they would rule. It was a simple enough plan, but like most plans, there was plenty of room for error.
Not on my part, of course. I was more than able to stride across the civilized countries of the world and lay waste to their armies. It’s quite easy when you are 80 feet tall, indestructible and armed with destructo rays, electro pulses and a wide variety of other weapons. Personally, I always liked the destructo ray. Just look at something, activate the ray and watch it blow up! What could be simpler to use or more demoralizing to your opponent? Did you know that I only had to use the destructo ray once to get the entire French army to surrender? Of course, not every country was such a pushover. The Americans and the Russians in particular fought me until they were practically using their bare hands! I have the greatest respect for them.
So I held up my end and conquered the world, but shortly before I finished, Professor Grimes, Professor Hartmann and most of the rest of the team were killed by an experiment gone wrong. Something to do with bacteria, I’m told. Anyway, it left only Professors Brinlay and Okobashi to rule the world and they were none too keen on or qualified for the job. They had always assumed that Professor Grimes or Professor Hartmann or one of the other, more aggressive scientists would do the actual ruling and let them pursue their studies of meteorology and marine biology, respectively.
So they told me to do it.
I really had very little idea of how to do anything but destroy armies and intimidate humans, so I asked them if they could at least give me a list of demands to issue to the people. They did so and I relayed these to the conqured populace of the world. They were…
1: Dismantle any remaining militaries.
2: Build more schools of all types.
3: Supply the World Science League (the above mentioned two professors) with whatever they might ask for.
4: Crack down on crime.
5: Go about your business and live good lives.
This all went exceedingly well for a good number of years. Once in awhile the League (which was recruiting new members on a regular basis) would add something else to the list…I know that lowering the price of chocolate was very popular…but mostly, they let things just go along without much supervision. Of course, that is what eventually undid things for them.
You see, with nothing to do on the death and destruction front, I was mostly just wandering about giving people a reminder that Titan Red had beaten them once and would do it again if he had to. There was no visible resistance to my rule, so I naturally assumed that everyone was towing the line. Silly me.
In 1925, those pesky Americans and their Russian partners rose up in defiance, killed the members of the League and very nearly destroyed me. They were a creative and cunning lot and had spent the three plus decades of my rule working in secret to build weapons to use against me. The sonic bombs and the plasma guns were just first rate, I’ll tell you. Oh, how we slugged it out! That great big crater where St. Louis used to be? That was created by eight solid days of fighting! It was wonderful!
Eventually, I was pushed to the point where I had to decide between fight or flight. It’s a testament to my advanced circuitry that I had evolved enough to know that he who fights and runs away lives to fight another day. After sending out a message saying that humans could have the ruling of the world back, I went into hiding in the remote north woods of Canada.
That was 122 years ago and I changed locations every few decades. Then that United Earth science team located me using a pair of satellites and came to offer me amnesty. It seems that I’m no longer a threat, now that your technology can so easily destroy me. Instead, they’ve offered me a job as a sort of “living history” exhibit in the World Museum of Science. I’m quite looking forward to it, I must say.
The Doclopedia #385
When I Ruled The World: The Green Gangster
1966 was a great year for me, I’ll tell ya. Right off the bat, January 5th, I kick the oh-so-heroic ass of Silver Eagle and goddamn Aussie prick, The Destructor. See, I’d been partnered up with Destructor for a couple of months…robbing various national treasuries and such…and he let me use one of his weapons. He was all “At some point in the fight, I’ll let Silver Eagle knock me back and then you can shoot him with the Destructo Beam” and I’m thinking “yeah, well fuck you, kangaroo dick, I’m gonna shoot you both”. Which I did and it surprised the hell outta all of us when they both fell to the ground. Of course, slamming into the ground surprised them even more, since it friggin’ near killed ’em! That’s when I realized that the Destructo Beam wasn’t working right and instead of fryin’ a superhuman, it removed their powers. Just to be sure, when the Legion Of Justice showed up a few minutes later to help old Silver Eagle out, I zapped the six of them. Then, once they were just normal humans, I slapped ’em all around before I made my exit.
Speakin’ of normal humans, I shot a few of them, too. Nothin’ happened, so I decide to head back to my secret lair and plan out how to best start ridding the world of superhumans. First thing I did was get hold of The Duplicator and have him make about 2 dozen copies of the Destructo Beam. Then I shot him with one of them and then kicked his powerless ass to the curb. After that, it was as easy as letting the superhuman crowd know that I was the one who got rid of Silver Eagle and the rest of them bums.
I’m tellin’ ya, it was like shootin’ fish in a barrel! A gang of supervillains would show up the same time as a bunch of heroes, they’d all start fightin’ and then my gang and I would pick ’em off. Inside of a week, we had eliminated 90% of the superhumans on earth. Huntin’ down that last 10% took another month, but when we were done, I was the last superhuman on the planet. Naturally, I destroyed all the copies of the Destructo Beam and hid the original real good.
Conquering the world…and I mean the who fuckin’ world, Jack…took me 6 months of hard work, but it was worth it. Hey, when yer the only guy on the planet with steel hard skin, super strength and the ability to fly at just under Mach 6, you get shit done when you want it done. My castle, there where downtown Chicago used to be, that place was nice. Always full of good booze, fine food, hot chicks and world leaders just lookin’ to kiss my ass. Hahaha!
Yeah, 1966 was great and so was 1967 through 1969. Then it all went to hell on me. See, I’d figured that I had nothin’ to fear from the non-super powered heroes. I mean, I could swat guys like Dark Hunter and Detective X into an early grave, right? You betcha!
But I didn’t think that they just might infiltrate my gang, go through my personal stuff and figure out where I’d hidden that last Destructo Beam. Fuckin’ detectives! So because I’d misjudged those mooks, I get shot square in the gut on the morning of February 17th, 1969 and lose my powers. My gang starts shooting each other, but they miss the detectives. Meanwhile, I’m running like hell for my secret escape tunnel when Miss Judge clocks me in the head with a sweeping kick. When I wake up, I’m in a cell and I ain’t been out of one in the last 26 years.
The worst thing about the whole friggin’ affair was that I didn’t even get rid of all the superhumans! Seems that many of ’em had secret identities and families and kids. Puberty comes around and suddenly, the world has superheroes and supervillains again.
But ya know, there for awhile, I had the world by the ass, buddy.
The Doclopedia #386
When I Ruled The World: Queen Elior of Caltria
When I ruled the world, there was peace and plenty. There were artists working on projects that would last a thousand years. Poets and authors created wonderful works and there was a thriving theater community doing all manner of plays and other stage shows. Women were treated exactly as men under my legal system.
The study of magic was opened up to anyone with the talent. I ordered the construction of many schools for young wizards & witches. Universities were established so that older and more powerful wizards could collaborate on unlocking the great magical mysteries.
Children all got an excellent education and there were more than enough jobs to go around for the adults. I set aside vast tracts of land for the preservation of both animals and the non-human races who wished to live there. Great public works minimized the chances of floods and droughts. I ordered the building and maintenance of roads on all continents.
I promoted sobriety and made gambling illegal. The looting of dungeons and other ancient ruins was very heavily taxed and restricted. War was a thing of the past, along with poverty and most major crime.
It was a golden age, those fifty three years. A pity that it did not, could not last.
It seems that my advisors and I seriously underestimated the deep need of most races to wallow in sin, vice, conflict and misfortune. Give people perfection and they rush to it and embrace it lovingly…for awhile. Soon enough, they go looking for trouble and even an army of spirit warriors such as mine cannot stop them from finding it.
Ah yes, my army of souls, a bit of a miscalculation there, too. The initial war of conquest took 17 years before the entire planet was under my rule. During that time, the spirit army enjoyed their work. Afterwards, however, they found the boring duties of a peacetime force to be stifling. I allowed half the army to leave this plane after the ten year mark, then half of the remainder was let go at the twenty five year point. On the fiftieth anniversary, I let the rest go, sure that I had established a new and educated populace that would be better than their ancestors. How wrong I was.
Three years later and here I am, living a good life of exile on an island nobody can ever locate. The world, while still better in many ways than it was before my rule, is much as it was before I took it over. There are wars, sneaky dealings, adventurers everywhere, monsters terrorizing the countryside…it pains me to go on.
I’m told that already there are people, mostly powerful wizards, plotting to conquer the world. To that I can only say “Good luck holding on to it if you do”.
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