Whew … that’ll be a bitch to edit!

Feels good to finally be done with The Never Ending Battle.  It was one of those that I could have kept going for months and months, playing around with the society of the future and exploring the ins and outs of real life superheroes, but that gets old after a while and it’s well finished.  (I’m kinda pleased with myself for actually tacking on a RAH sort of ending onto the silly thing.  There’s the climax … and now we’ll talk about the days following the climax for a bit, ending with a little bow.)

Still, when I gather it all up into one Word document, I’m not sure if I’m going to expand it further, really explore some of the sub-plots, or hack at it with knifes until it’s only half it’s word count.  Either way, first I’m going to let the silly thing sit and age a bit … not long, just until I can’t remember some of the dialog.

I don’t think I’ll explore anymore superhero stuff, though.  I’ve taken a couple of swings at it and it still eludes me.  Part of the problem is that most of the classic superpowers are silly.  I mean, flight?  What the hell good is flight?  There was a character from the silver age of comics called The Black Condor and his thing was he could fly .. and that was about it.  Same thing with Hawkman, pick a version.  Oh, both of them were good fighters and strong, but neither were particularly fast or super strong or invulnerable.  They basically were strong guys who could fight really good and, oh yeah, they could fly.

Okay … that’s nice.

I still contend that speed is the ultimate power, myself.  Keep your able to leap tall buildings with a single bound, bend steel in your bare hands, and alter the course of mighty rivers.  Speed and invulnerability to friction is enough for me.

Say you only have a few seconds to save the day … what’s a few seconds to someone who exists between pico-seconds?  Time to think, time to plan, even time to rehearse moves.

Enemy stronger than you?  Okay, take a running start at him … nothing fancy, keep it under light speed.  Take a lap around the world for a wind up and then hit him with all that energy.  Hell, you’re superfast … hit him a couple thousand times with all that energy before he can blink.

Enemy smarter than you?  Shift into your top speed and head for a good library.  Read up on his strengths and weaknesses, see what The Art of War has to say about the matter, find out if there’s a gizmo that can take the wind out of his sails; educate yourself in the blink of an eye and return to the battle.

Enemy a more experienced fighter than you?  Cool; combine all the above.   Study his style and find it’s weaknesses, practice what you’re going to do, study his response carefully before reacting, then build up a little mass/energy and bitch slap him with it a couple of dozen times.

Move fast enough and you can catch bullets.  Move really fast and you can not only catch them, but – just to be a smart ass – you can reload your enemies gun for him … with blanks … that make farting noises when fired.  Hell, go all out and catch the bullets, reload his gun with farting blanks, hammer the rounds you caught flat and sculpt a nice goofy face mask for the guy, strip him naked and redress him in a tu-tu and leaderhosen, tie the mask to his face, and then move him – farting gun, tu-tu, leaderhosen, and mask – to the nearest maximum federal prison and dump him in the general population.  Move some of the prisoners around so he ends up in the center of a circle of bad asses – just for the shits and grins of it – pants them all before you leave.

Then go home and wait for the next criminal genius who wants to play.  Make some pop corn while you wait.

Speed … can’t beat it.