Fish Man Wants IN: The Dysprosians, 1

"I mean, really, Fish Man?" Tom frowned at his fingernails, which needed to be cut.

"Look, Tom..." but at a warning glance, Chet corrected himself. Above all, Higgs had warned him, Tom likes the rules of The Dysprosians.  Especially...and Higgs had paused for dramatic effect... the one about using only code names in the Skylab.

"Look, Whatever's Handyman, I gave a lot of thought to a bunch of different names. Aqua, I thought, and liked that but it's too close to that comic book guy"

**AQUA IS ALSO THE NAME OF A POPULAR BAND THAT SANG THE SONG 'BARBIE GIRL'**

interrupted a blaring voice that echoed around them.  Tom stopped inspecting his fingernails and leaned forward, tapping the touchscreen.

"Soul Destroyer leaves the volume way too loud," he muttered.

"And I thought about Aquarius because that also would fit but it's too hippyish, and I considered a couple others but..."

The silence hung between them in the hot, still air of the Skylab.  Tom leaned forward and turned a knob a little, feeling the vents blow cool air on him.

Outside, the tree branches skriiittched on the roof of the satellite as a squirrel ran along them.

"But what?" Tom sighed.

"But then Anthony looked at my costume and said Fish Man and, well, I don't like to disappoint him, so I decided to go with that."

Tom looked appraisingly at the costume in question.

"It does have fins," he said.

"And scales," he added after a second, still looking.  Then he considered, and asked "Why scales?"

"They're bulletproof," Chet said proudly, and he figured that the interest Tom was showing would keep building.  Just keep him hooked.  "I found this..." Chet paused and kind of chuckled to himself.  Keep him hooked.  Got to remember that.  "I found this place on line, out of Syria, they sell bulletproof metal stuff, and you can buy little plates for it, and so I got it and we cut it into scales and managed to sew each one onto the suit itself."

He struck a pose, a fighting stance somewhere between Muhammad Ali coming out of the corner and Bruce Lee coming out of retirement, and tried to suck in his stomach a little.  "I've been working out," he said.  "At the Y.  I take the Zumba classes and some yoga, and I got this DVD of Tae Bo."

Tom listened to the scales tinkle and clink, and shrugged.

"It's not really up to me."

He tapped a box on the touch screen and it lit up with options.  "Voice control," he said.

**VOICE CONTROL ACTIVATED** came the voice again.

"Computeratrons, Fish Man wants in.  Calculate."

There were no lights flashing, no whirring sounds, no panels of blinking bulbs or anything.  This was 2012.  The touch screen he carried with him linked in wirelessly to the Computeratrons, which were simply two small servers at the back of the only air-conditioned room in the Skylab.

The screen lit up.

"Says here," Tom leaned over so Chet could see, "That your powers provide a compliment to us, and that in at least three recent adventures your presence would have added at 5-10% improvement in the odds of a successful outcome."

"So I'm in?" Chet couldn't believe it -- Anthony would be so happy!

"When Higgs Boson wanted to join, the Computeratrons calculated that he would improve the odds of success by 90-98%, even with the uncontrollable nature of his power.  Neon was 70%.  Soul Destroyer, 100%."

The Skylab grew quiet, and Chet slumped over.  I'm not telling Anthony I didn't make it in.

 "Even Smiley added 20% to our odds of success." Tom said quietly.

Chet put his hands over his face.

"I've got nothing, T... Whatever's Handyman.  Nothing.  I go to work, every day, and I come home every day.  Poor Anthony, he mostly just sits around the house, with our neighbor watching him since Lorrie..."

Tom filled in the words Chet couldn't bring himself to say:  "Tried to reverse the fusion reaction that powers the sun using ordinary household chemicals she had rearranged on an elemental level and then launched using a rocket she unwittingly got your sun to create as part of his Scouts' project, all because she thought you were having an affair with your secretary."

"I don't even have a secretary," Chet added.  Tears filled his eyes.  "And now she's serving 300,000 consecutive life sentences in that Belarussian prison and Anthony misses her.  He doesn't even know what she did.  Every day, I come home and he says where's Mom? and every day I say she's working and we'll go visit her soon and then we eat dinner and we watch some of the movies he likes and he goes to bed and I sit up, drinking and watching Conan O' Brien, of all things, and that's how it was for weeks and weeks and months and months until I realized that there could be more to it than that."

Tom tried not to meet Chet's eye.  Everyone these days tried not to meet Chet's eye.  Granted, Lorrie's plan had not worked but it had come awfully close and while most people in the world didn't hold that against Chet, it also made meeting him awkward.  Tom couldn't imagine how Chet's food cart even stayed in business,  let alone earned enough money to support him and Anthony.

He wondered if Lorrie gave them money.

"The thing is, too, um... Fish Man, how would it look if we let a guy who is still married to one of the world's most notorious criminal masterminds join The Dysprosians?"

"I have to stay married to her.   She's got the health insurance.  And Anthony..."

There was a flicker.

Tom knew the flicker.

Chet did not.

Tom looked down at the touch-screen.

"So he was listening," he whispered.

"Who?" Chet asked.

Tom watched as the touchscreen numbers changed and glanced up at Chet.

"Do you feel different?"

Chet flexed his muscles a little, looked at his hands, rubbed his head where his mask would ordinarily sit. "Maybe a little."

Tom held up the touchscreen, which now was filled with numbers.  Chet couldn't make heads or tails of it.

"It says that you would improve our odds of success by 80% on our most recent three adventures."

"How...?" Chet asked.

"He did it."

"Who?"  Chet looked around.

"I can't tell you yet.  We've got to get you sworn in," Tom said.  He pulled his own mask up over his head, and tapped the touch screen again.  "We'll have to get you your own one of these, too."  Tap-tap-tap, and a bunch of little windows opened, each showing rooms where webcams were looking at people at computers, or empty rooms, or in the case of one window, a television tuned to Jersey Shore.

"Everyone: We've got a swearing-in to do."

A little alert-box popped up on the touchscreen.

CODE YELLOW

it read, and below that:

CLICK HERE FOR DETAILS.

"And we've got to hurry," Tom said.  He frowned at Fish Man.  "Hope your neighbor can stay late.  You're going to see some action, fast."

SUNDAYS SUNDAYS SUNDAYS

SUNDAYS SUNDAYS SUNDAYS is new; each week I'll feature, on all my blogs, the latest post from one of my blogs.

Today's is the latest from Lesbian Zombies Are Taking Over The World!, an ongoing sci-fi/erotic/serial/humor/something/something else/etc. story that follows Rachel, who was just a waitress in New York, kind of, until her Octopus told her to walk South.  There, she fell in love with Brigitte, got attacked by demons from Hell, kidnapped by tiny bubbles, and eventually found out that she might be not only the Queen of The Lesbian Zombies, but also the key to deciding who's going to win in the Battle of 73 Dimensions and open up Heaven.

Your typical story, in other words.  Here's the latest installment:

* * * * *

Part 22D: You know what this story needs? ANOTHER RACHEL.

Things like is Rachel okay and let's get the hell outta here and back to Valhalla go right out of my mind and I stare at the Mosaic, as do the Valkyries and Target A, who has this gray, pale look about him but I don't notice much because seriously, this Mosaic thing talked.

"Free me," it says now, and we all look at each other, Czaranya and me and the other Valkyrie, but Target A is just shaking and drooling and Rachel is lying there woozily.

"From... um... from what?" I ask, taking the lead.

There is a shimmer in the golden squares that make up the Mosaic and it sort of ripples and shudders a little.

"From this wall," it says.

I have been looking more closely at it and I've realized it's made up of little squares and that the squares are chips, like the kind that are put in people.  Not even like the kind that are put in people. They are the kind that are put in people, on Earth, to let them Share, which is sort of like telepathy but not, as I understand it.

"Who are you?" I ask the Mosaic.

"I'm Rachel," it says.

I look down at Rachel, and think another one?  That's kind of a natural thought, maybe, when you are one of perhaps thousands of clones of one woman, and your whole life has been geared towards proving you are the best of those thousands and then the one that you are the clone of shows up suddenly and not only do you not mind that she's there and you might just have become totally irrelevant but you also fall in love with her.

There's a lot of Rachel's, is my point.

"You are not," Czaranya says, and her frown tells me she's been trying to communicate with the thing telepathically but had to speak. Valkyries hate talking.  Czaranya points to the Rachel on the ground, the one I'm kneeling over.  "That is Rachel."

"I am Rachel," the Mosaic says.  Then a shimmery thing happens and it says "I am Sonja."  The shimmer, again, and "I am Darlene."  Shimmer: "Angela." Shimmer: "Doris."

Now I'm backing away a little as the shimmers get faster and the names get faster, each one said in a different voice, each one clearly a different person:  "LisaJenniferRebeccaAlisonBreeAshleyKellyGretchenAlyssaKaren" it is going on and then there is a flash of light from all of them and it says

"I am Rachel" and things seem to calm down.

For the moment.

"What are you?" I ask.

"I am Rachel," it says.

Target A suddenly wails "It's true! They were all trapped and it's true!" and he goes even more pale and makes a gurgle sound and lunges at the cabinet, trying to I think close it up but Czaranya elbows into him and he falls to the side, clutching at the cabinet door.  The cabinet itself starts to fall forward towards Czaranya and she pulls back but it falls down onto her, trapping her halfway underneath it.  It's nothing for her, I'm not worried about her because the cabinet is really light and the fact that it fell on Czaranya means that it didn't fall directly on Rachel, who was just starting to sit up.

Then a bunch of things happen.  Czaranya starts to lift the cabinet off of her, but Target A is trying to get at it, too, and there's a glow of light from underneath it as Czaranya lifts it up and as I start to try to see if Rachel is okay, she's rolling away from the cabinet and towards Czaranya.  Before I realize what's happened, Rachel has grabbed Czaranya's spear and has pulled it towards her, the spear crackling with the energy that's supposed to kill anyone who's not a Valkyrie but dares to touch it, and the energy is dancing all over Rachel's body and making this fierce acrid smoke.

"Rachel!" I yell.  "Let it go!"

But she doesn't, and she turns the spear head towards the Mosaic, touches it, and the energy leaps through the gridwork pattern and crackles around it and there is an explosion.  The cabinet is gone, and standing before us is an identical copy of Rachel, only instead of Rachel, or even me, she's basically this woman that looks like us, exactly, only she's made entirely of gold, and her skin is patterned in a tiny grid of golden squares, all over, making her look like a golden mirror ball that has been stretched into a beautiful woman's shape, and her eyes are dark and hollow, and her hair, somehow, is both golden and flowing and slinky and also made of tiny little squares, too.

"I am Rachel," she says again.

We're all just sort of staring there, and Rachel's still holding the spear, which is going nuts, there are blue and gold bolts of energy just arcing around the entire room, and Target A has to duck for it and crawl away, and the horse is backing out and Czaranya, I see, reaches for the spear but then Rachel-Mosaic raises her hands and says

"ENOUGH!"

and they are gone:

Her,

Rachel,

the spear,

and Czaranya, and the other Valkyrie who I didn't even know her name.

It's just me and Target A.

We stare at each other in the dim light of the workshop for a second, the stench of dead bodies and energy and fighting clouding our senses.

Then, the horse sticks his head in the door and says "I think you better see this."

Want to read more? Click here to go to the story online, at the beginning.

Or click HERE to go to Scribd and download the entire story for free!

The New & Improved Thursday Scramble

... now with 100% more AMPERSANDS!

Thursday Scramble is {now} where I give you snippets of things I post on all my blogs, in hopes of luring you away from the Scylla of the current blog and into the Charybdis of another of my posts.

Aw, rats: I probably shouldn't have compared my posts to fatal traps from Greek mythology.  Oh, well, too late.

Here's this week's smattering of original (?) thought (?):

... also wishing that you could, instead of being at work, be walking along a path through a little forest, holding your two-year-old's hand in one hand and an ice cream cone in the other, and taking the time to point out interesting things:

"That's a tree," you want to be saying. "And that's a stream. I wonder if there's fish in there." And you'd know that your two-year-old probably wasn't getting the whole gist of what you would be saying, but it wouldn't matter because that's not the important part, anyway; the important part is the part about just being walking through the woods, with ice cream, etc.... click here to read more of this.

* * * * * 

What will be the ramifications of a ruling made ostensibly for one purpose but potentially for another?  What will be the outcome of not confronting the question before the Court head-on, so to speak, and instead allowing the Court to slightly twist the law and give itself a little more power?  ... click here to read more of this.

*****

Did anyone actually wonder about that? Is there anyone that watched all those Star Trek episodes and movies and thought "I wonder how Kirk and Spock ever met up?" Because I've never wondered that. I just assumed they happened to be assigned to the same military unit, as happens over and over and over again in the military.... click here to read more of this.

* * * * *


This was, I knew, never the plan.  While there were lots of Rachel clones, they weren't all created equal, so to speak, and I was one of the better ones and was in sort of the higher echelon of the clones, the ones that were privy to most of the secret plans.  I say most because I don't suspect that anyone anywhere knows all the plans everyone had for Rachel and her army of Lesbian Zombies, an army that was almost mine.... click here to read more of this.

* * * * *

I think the Colts got rid of everyone else, too, except maybe Curtis Painter, who lingers around Indianapolis the way that fat kid with the rat, Neville, lingered around Hogwarts.  I was never quite sure how Neville was going to fit in, whether he would be comic relief or a serious character, and having read all the books and watched one of the movies, I'm still not sure what the deal was with Neville.... click here to read more of this.

* * * * *

... And her eyes popped open.  There was a bing sounding in the background, the one she knew meant everything was acceptable, biologically.

There were a few techs around her.  They looked at her questioningly and she waited for the knowledge, the news, to fill her mind.

It came into her consciousness slowly.

Her face grew pale.

"Is everything all right?" asked one of the techs.

She didn't know what to tell him -- either about the hole in the ocean, or about her.

.... click here to read more of this.

NOT MUCH ON READING?  Well, if you're the "I like pictures" type of person, then have you considered liking pictures with titles that make no sense?

Odds are, you'll love 'em -- so check out Briane Pagel: PWNST.  Here's a sample of what you'll get:

The title to this picture is

What if you took all the shark DNA and combined them into some sort of superhyperdimensional shark, a Shark-cubed, as it were? That would be like the bacon of sharks.

Briane Pagel on Staree

Part 3E: Kendra and the Angels, continued.

View more photos like this on BRIANE PAGEL: PWNST

And all sounds stopped as suddenly every Angel in the area looked at her.

Kendra shrank back from their attention and huddled closer into herself.  She briefly wondered how long she had been here; shouldn't they be bringing her back, by now?

They couldn't leave her dead for too long...

The Angels moved towards her, purposefully, the silence unbroken by the movement.  She could see them moving, could sense that ordinarily, there should be sound associated with that but in this place there was no sound when they walked, or whatever it was they did.

"Stop..." she said as they crowded around her, two, three deep, and one reached out his hand to her.

She put her own hands under her arms to avoid touching it.

It reached for her more insistently and then put its... hand? -- it was a hand, it was a hand, she thought, grateful suddenly that it was not something else-- under her chin.

It buzzed and garbled and argued at her, and held her chin, looking at her.  It seemed to be... she thought... considering.

By now, more were touching her, but only the one that had her face was speaking (if it could be called that).  The others simply put their hands on her, as well, gripping her and touching her with one or two fingers and patting her.

Then they all stopped, and backed away.

The first one, the one she now thought of as the main one, looked at her, its head, or the shape, things were blurry and hazy as if she was looking at them through a fogged glass window, of where its head should be.  Its eyes glowed a bright red, getting brighter as she watched.

Then it nodded, the first intelligible communication she'd had from it the entire time.  

... And her eyes popped open.  There was a bing sounding in the background, the one she knew meant everything was acceptable, biologically.

There were a few techs around her.  They looked at her questioningly and she waited for the knowledge, the news, to fill her mind.

It came into her consciousness slowly.

Her face grew pale.

"Is everything all right?" asked one of the techs.

She didn't know what to tell him -- either about the hole in the ocean, or about her.

Thursday Scramble!

Thursday Scramble! is when I take one post from one blog and put it on all my blogs.  This appeared first on Publicus Proventus, where I talk about politics and the Federalist Papers and why Citizens United wasn't such a bad thing, and the like:

Recall Walker! And meet the supporters who want him to increase taxes to fund billionaires' hobbies.

Pictured: Scott Walker Campaign HQ

I said yesterday I'd do anything I legally could do to try to Recall Scott ("Patsy") Walker, and I'm going to do my part.


So first, Jenni Dye, who most people know as @legaleagle, is asking people to make at least 10 phone calls from the online phone banks, reminding people to Vote for Barrett in the recall election. Find her post here, with links to the phone banks.


Second, as I did for autism research, we can speak directly to people who follow Gov. Patsy online; his ScottKWalker twitter feed has some 18,000 followers; tweeting to them about problems Gov. Patsy has may help the effort, too.  Education never hurts, and it's possible to educate people even at this late date.


Third, I'm going to post what I can to help that education, like today's post on Walker's meeting (?) with Joe Ricketts.  The Ed Show site reports, via John Nichols of The Nation and The Capitol Times, that Joe Ricketts gave $100,000 to Walker after a personal meeting with him.


I'm not in favor of campaign finance limits; I don't care if Ricketts gave $100,000,000 or more.  I'm in favor of information, though, about who's giving what, so here's some information about Ricketts, who wants Gov. Patsy to stay in power.


Ricketts made his money as the founder and CEO of Ameritrade, an online discount brokerage.  He also sold Bison meat and produced films, and eventually bought the Chicago Cubs.  Ricketts retired from Ameritrade in 2011 to be a "philanthropist," and the two highest-profile moves he's made in that regard so far were funding a Nebraska candidate in a Republican primary and a recently-announced campaign to spend millions to try to link Obama to Jeremiah Wright.  Ricketts had to distance himself from that latter campaign almost immediately. It's not clear whether the plan will still be tried.  It was commissioned by Rickett's group but apparently rejected.


Rickett also wants government money to pay 1/2 the cost -- or $150,000,000 -- for a new stadium for his Chicago Cubs, and part of his proposal for that payment is that the "amusement tax" he would increase would be shared, in perpetuity, with Rickett.


That is: A billionaire who owns a sports team and has money to spend on hateful campaigns wants a cut of government tax revenue.

I wonder what Gov. Patsy thinks about increasing taxes and giving some of the swag to billionaires? Has anyone asked him?

I wonder, too, what Rickett would do with the extra money he siphons off from increased government taxes to fund his hobbies? Probably not pay the Cubs' debts -- he's been noted by Major League Baseball to be in violation of league rules regarding debts, and that's true even though the Cubs had the highest average ticket price in baseball in 2010.  (Does Rickett, who is worth more than $1,000,000,000, enjoy soaking the middle class to fund his lifestyle? Only he knows!)

Thursday Scramble!

On Thursday Scramble! I take a post from one of my blogs and put it on all of them.  This post appeared this week on Nonsportsmanlike Conduct!, the sports blog for people who like sports but hate sports blogs.

I Dreamt Of Pole Vaulting is a new idea I'm trying out here:  essays about my own personal experiences with sports, whether as a fan or participant.  We'll see if it lasts.  Don't get too attached -- like avocados and fate, I can be fickle.)

I have always wanted to be a pole-vaulter.

Honestly.

Well, okay, maybe not always.  There was a time when I didn't dream of pole-vaulting, at all, but that time was when I was very young and had other dreams, like the dream of becoming an oceanographer.

Admittedly, I was not the coolest of little kids.

The dream of pole-vaulting first came to me sometime in the beginning stages of high school.  High school, and pole-vaulting for that matter, were not things that I was suited for.  As far as I can tell in my life, I am more or less perfectly suited to be a middle-aged man, in that the things I do either seem normal for a middle-aged man to do (reading The New Yorker, not even just for the cartoons, having a receding hair line) or are things about which I no longer care if society approves of (wearing blue Crocs in public, writing sentences like "about which I no longer care").  But I was not suited for high school, where sustained happiness can be hard to come by if you are not rich, good-looking, or both.  Of the two, rich is better:  You could be, in my high school, rich and not good-looking, and still be part of the popular crowd, while there were good-looking people (some, anyway) who were not part of the popular crowd because they could not keep up, clothing- and car-having-wise.

(There were only a few of the good-looking who were not also popular, because part of what makes you good-looking is being popular; once you are popular people judge others' looks by you, or so I assume, having never been popular.)

And once you were popular, everything was open to you:  girls, parties, girls, and I'm sure there were other things that people cared about in high school.

In actuality, everything really was open to you once you were popular, while nothing was open to you if you were not popular, and that includes sports, but not just sports.  Unlike many high schools*

*Note: I only attended one high school and have no information about other real high schools, because my own kids limited the amount of information they shared about their own high school experiences to three categories:  1: How much their teachers hated students, in general, 2: How much their teachers hated them in particular which was why they were getting such bad grades, and 3: a category I can only refer to as "I don't want to talk about it," which was their answer to every other question I asked, including questions like "Do you think your teacher would like you more if you turned in the homework when it was due, rather than long after?"  The point is, my information about high schools in general comes from watching John Hughes movies.  Picture Ally Sheedy liberally throughout this story.  She was kind of hot, back then.

my own high school did not break into cliques based on activities, so much.  Instead, activities were the province of the popular kids who got to choose what they would do and whether the unpopular or barely-noticed (I was more of the latter than the former) would get to take part at all.

So Student Council, which is only supposed to be a kind-of popularity based thing: reserved for popular kids like Dave Weber, who ran for student council president against me and who won and who then organized a boycott of the hot lunches.  Student newspaper: even though nominally run by the journalism class, which I took, was reserved for popular kids.  Unpopulars got to write things like "movie reviews," which never got published.

Even the plays and Swing Choir were reserved for the popular, something that makes me snicker when I watch Glee, which I never do anymore because honestly that musical gimmick gets old after a while.  I'm as fond of fake high schoolers singing covers of songs I never heard of as the next guy is, which is not very.  In our high school, the glee club was called swing choir and you could only get on it if you were already popular, as I found out the time I tried out for it by singing a version of Wake Me Up Before You Go Go (this was 1986, after all) and never got a call back.

"Trying standing still while you're singing it," the choir director told me, because apparently I had shifted my feet.  I didn't make the cut.  They must not have needed a fat guy with a lazy eye and a vocal range of three notes.  But I wouldn't have made it anyway even if I was a better singer, because we were not rich and I was not popular. (See, e.g., "lazy eye," and "fat.")(Also, I played Dungeons and Dragons.)

The really odd thing is that sports were reserved (mostly) for the popular at my high school, too, a weird twist on the traditional route to popularity -- get good at sports, movies and TV shows and books tell us -- and you can become popular, or at least accepted.  Or so I've gathered from my muddled memories of sports in pop culture.  Didn't that dirtbike-riding kid in The Bad News Bears become popular because he could play baseball?  Didn't people like Englebert after he could play baseball, too, in that same movie?  Didn't they make any other movies about kids playing sports besides The Bad News Bears?

All good questions that deserve investigation.

At our school, football and baseball and soccer and basketball were the province of the cool, and you tried out for them at your peril, literally:  I tried out for the baseball team and I was actually pretty good in the tryouts: my lazy eye made me terrible as a fielder but I was okay as a batter and the kid who was trying out for pitcher wasn't very good at all, so in batting practice on day one I was up to bat and got about 7 hits in a row, hitting them pretty well out to the outfield, too.

That should have at least gotten me a shout-out from the coach and maybe one or two potential teammates, because who doesn't want a good hitter on their team?  But the practice was really quiet as pitch number 8 came in and I hit that one, too.

Then pitch number 9 came straight at my head.  Straight. At. It.

I tried to duck away but not in time and got caught on the temple, just at the edge of the helmet, and it didn't do much other than really rattle me and make my head ache just a bit because it made the helmet hit my head hard.  So I stepped out of the box for a second, and the coach said "Get back in there!" and I had to step back in and before I even raised my bat the pitch number 10 hit me in the leg.

"Next batter!" the coach yelled.  I waited for him to tell me where to go stand in the field, to shag flies, but he didn't say anything.

"Where should I go?" I asked.

"Better shake off those pitches," he said.

The pitcher looked at me and shook his head.  I sat around until tryouts ended and didn't go back the next day.

I can't prove that it was all intentional and done because I wasn't cool but I can't not prove it, either, and that's more or less the same thing, right?

The exception to the coolness requirement in sports was track: you could get on the track team even if you weren't cool, because nobody much wanted to be on the track team and also the track team needed lots of people and so if you were on the track team you were not taking a spot away from a cool kid, you were just on the team.  I'm sure that if you were not cool and you were on the track team and you beat a cool kid, there might be repercussions, but I never found out what those were as there was no chance that I might beat a cool kid.

That accessibility might have been part of why I wanted to be a pole vaulter, but only part.  I wanted to be an athlete in high school, for obvious reasons: athletes are cool.  Even for a kid like me, who read comic books and Doonesbury and listened to the Violent Femmes and wrote short stories and liked the book Childhood's End when we read it in high school and once got a 108 on his British Literature essay exam, getting 8 points' extra credit when he hadn't even done the homework, even for that kid, sports held the allure of society's adulation and accomplishment.  Already, by ninth grade I'd been inculcated with how much people love athletes and how little they care for oceanographers: I'd seen my Mom, who hates sports, watching the Super Bowl, and we'd been dragged to the Little League All Star Game the year my older brother played in it, under the lights on the big baseball diamond at Nixon Park in Hartland, and all the kids played T-ball, even me, and the T-ball and Little League teams marched in the 4th of July parade, and our middle-school gym teacher, Mr Fry, was rumored to have once gotten a tryout as a kicker for the Denver Broncos, a legend that I was never able to verify but which shows just how little athletic accomplishment is necessary to elevate you above the pack.  I look back now and think:  Tryout? I think:  Kicker?  I think: DENVER BRONCOS? and I wonder why that was even worth repeating but repeated it was, year after year, as kids passed on the all-important information.

Sports trophies are displayed front and center in high schools.  You drive into towns and the Welcome signs have the local accomplishments on them, and those local accomplishments are always "Girls Volleyball Champions, 1991", and they never put on there "Three State Senators and a guy who started his own veterinary supply business lived here, back in the day."  The other day, listening to a story about some kids who took place in Mock Federal Reserve competition, which apparently is a thing, I heard the winner talk about the trophy they got to take back to their high school.  It would be displayed in the economics room, she said, because nobody else would probably care.

Imagine if you saw a sign that said Welcome to Middleton, Wisconsin -- home of the 2012 Mock Federal Reserve Champions!  You'd probably turn around.  The only thing that's not athletic at all but which regularly gets attention in a sort-of-comparable way to athletics is the spelling bee, which ESPN televises, now, but ESPN will put anything on the air to give the Sportscenter hosts a break to try to think up more stupid synonyms for home run ("Ryan Braun of the Brewers hits his third humdinger of the week, giving him 14 gnocchi-makers on the season and putting him on a pace to beat Hank Aaron's record for lifetime Breakin'2 Electric Boogaloos").

Study hard and get good grades, we're told as kids.  Brush your teeth and eat your vegetables, we're reminded.  But nobody gets put in the 4th of July parade for having finished off their broccoli and Hartland Meats, my old T-ball team, didn't sponsor kids' flossing.  Sports is where it's at, and especially when I was a kid, you were expected to be in sports.

Which, again: lazy eye.  Fat.  Comic books.  See where the problem might lie?

Which leads me to pole vaulting, and specifically how it fits into my life of sports, or sports attempts.  To reiterate:  the track team was at least potentially accessible to me, as a high school student -- I could try out for track without worrying about sustaining brain damage, or having to run against Dave Weber, or even having to think about not moving while I sang a song.

And I had three friends on the track team:  Fred, Bob, and Eric, all skinny guys who were able to run, and so run they did: sprints and longer runs, and I think even hurdles, and Fred and Bob and Eric bonded over their track events, taking the bus to track meets and talking about practice and, I don't know, being skinny, which was a big allure for me, too, and so I decided that I would try out for the track team.

And I hit on pole vaulting as my event.

To this day, I can't exactly describe why pole vaulting.  Here is what I think of when I think of pole vaulting:  I imagine me, in track shorts and a tank top and cool track shoes and wristbands and a headband, holding a pole.

That song from Chariots of Fire starts.  (I think it's called Chariots of Fire.)

I grimace.  I know what a grimace is because (a) I looked up once why the Grimace was called the Grimace and (b) I wanted to grimace in this imagining, but I wasn't sure what to call it.

After grimacing, I begin to run.  (That music is still playing.)

I run for a really long time, pole in hand, probably in slow motion.  This entire time, you are looking at me from the front, head-on, and I am determined.  Also, I look really cool in that headband, so shut up.

The pole plants, at a part where the music is dramatic. (I don't actually remember the song Chariots of Fire all that well and sometimes get it confused with Music Box Dancer.)

Then you see me from below, and I am soaring, rising up and over the pole, which in my imagination is something like 30 feet in the air.  I let go of the pole. (Music Box Dancer gets more dramatic, still, probably with a tympani).

I fall into the big mat, and people cheer.  Do people cheer pole vaulting? They do when a suddenly-skinny guy with lazy eye sets a world record and brings it, probably saving the town from an oil baron or something.

Then I get a date for the prom, too.

So I decided to try out for the track team.

3D: Kendra and the angels.

IO17 is a serialized story; Table of contents for this story here.

 

"Why do I have to die to talk to you?" Kendra heard herself saying.  

 

The Angels were paying no attention to her; they spoke among themselves and she had been here for what felt like hours, her body feeling heavier and heavier and her mind feeling more and more sluggish.  She had sat quietly for some time, and then had stood up to try to get their attention, noting how her legs had felt like they were unable to lift her, and then how they felt like they might never bend again once she was standing.

 

She worried about that.

 

She couldn't leave until the crew brought her back, and she knew they were monitoring her and were ready to pull her out of it before any permanent damage set in, but this was the longest she'd ever remembered coming here.

 

Then again, she hadn't been here that often and she had no way of telling time.  Maybe it had only been a minute or two, in her life.

 

Her fingers were growing cold.

She had waited what felt like hours before speaking, and then had asked a simple question:

"Do you have anything to tell me?"

They hadn't paid any attention to her.  There seemed to be, maybe, more of them, their weird buzzing guttural language and the way they were shrouded all scaring her.  As time went on and they paid no attention to her she'd asked again, a few times, and then had said:

"Is it because I'm me and not Lisa that you won't talk to me?"

Nothing.

Now she was questioning them directly -- albeit politely.  She'd asked what they were, where they were from, and why they wouldn't talk her language, and they'd ignored her, just as they'd ignored her question about having to die.

She hugged herself and tried to warm herself up.  She felt like she could see her breath, if she were to breath, and then for the first time realized she was not breathing.

"We need information," she said to herself, and tried to catch the ... eye?  of the Angel nearest her.

It paid no attention to her.

The talking, if that was what it was, grew louder and more varied, frenetic.  She thought perhaps they were arguing.

Her eyes seemed kind of glazed to her -- her vision fogging.  She waved her hands in front of them and wondered whether that was her imagination.

How long had she been here?

 

She could not get her courage up enough to go any closer to the Angels.

When will they revive me? she wondered.

"Hello?" she whispered -- trying to send the signal not to the Angels but to her actual brain in her actual body somewhere out there, waiting to wake up.  She wanted to cause it to flicker, to spike, to move, to make them get her out of here.

 

"I hate coming here," she said.

And all sounds stopped as suddenly every Angel in the area looked at her.