by Blackwolf247, T Campbell, Comickook and Cassie Foxx
“Wudchuck Kudchuk here, reporting live from New Yak City. The news has taken a strange turn today following the recent outbreaks of giantism. We know now that, while the Zoo Crew are elsewhere, this great nation of ours seems to have a new band of heroes out to look after us in our time of need! And that’s a good thing, considering that several reports have crossed our news desk of perfectly normal animals all suddenly becoming psychotic, crazed freaks with names like Kill-Bunny, Disaster Duck, and, yes, even Antidisestablishmentarianism Anteater! Try saying that five times really fast! And now, a weary and frightened nation asks, ‘Where are the heroes?’ Now to Becky Bunny with the weather…”
***
Meanwhile, the public access channel was playing a user-submitted video.
“Way I see it, Buck, is it’s up to critters like us to find out who’s behind this here psycho outbreak, even if these new heroes are on the case.” Bull Toro picked up a huge rifle. He looked at his equally cameo-clad pal Buck Wheet, a white-tail stag with a tendency for violence.
“Yep,” said Buck, hefting his own piece of firepower. “Time for the average critter to face front.” He turned to the camera and added, “We’re sending this out to several groups in hopes some of you is animal enough to stand up for yourselves. Arise! Arise, we say! Strike back against these monsters!”
The camera-armadillo’s paw suddenly appeared close-up on the screen, giving a thumbs-up gesture in hearty agreement before Bull Toro began trying to hit up the viewers for donations.
***
Meanwhile, somewhere in a dark and sinister building, a dark and sinister figure laughed sinisterly at all that had transpired to advance this dark and sinister plan of dark and sinister proportions, so dark and sinister was it.
No doubt this dark and sinister figure was left-handed, what with all these sinisters floating around.
***
Meanwhile, in a popular nightclub, a talented songstress was belting out her new song when something odd occurred to a waiter. The big-eared donkey could have sworn he had just spotted two people who looked exactly like characters from that issue of World’s Furriest Comics he had been reading earlier. And if someone was imitating the Porker, then there could be a real problem here.
The waiter looked back to see that the two dead ringers for Lex Lemur and the Porker were in the middle of an argument over their two favorite subjects: their arch-enemies.
“That’s not fair, Porker, and you know it,” said Lemur. “We agreed at the beginning that I’d only eliminate Batmouse from your hometown after we eliminated Super-Squirrel from Muttropolis.”
The Porker giggled.
Lemur sighed and said, “All right, what’s so funny? The notion that I’d expect you to hew to an agreement?”
“No-o-o… hee-hee-hee…”
“The notion that such a brilliant criminal mind as myself should even need a worthless hamhock like you, who only excels at being insane?”
“No, no, no, Lexie-poo,” said the Porker. “It’s… it’s the name…”
Lemur frowned. “Super-Squirrel? … Batmouse? …” He paused. “…Muttropolis?”
The Porker suddenly began to guffaw madly.
“Oh, for — you probably think The Three Stoolpigeons are hysterical,” grumbled Lemur. “Now, Woodsy Owllen movies — that is comedy.”
“‘The Three Stoolpigeons‘! ‘Woodsy Owllen’! It’s all so cute and… punny! Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!”
A few moments passed as the criminal scientist impatiently waited for the Porker to finish laughing and then wipe the tears of laughter from his face. “Are you done?” he finally said. By this time, other club-goers had begun glaring at them for being so noisy during a musical act, so the two super-villains became quiet to avoid blowing their cover too soon.
“Lexie, ol’ lemur, I never thought of you as the nightclub sort,” the Porker finally whispered.
“Well, even I have interests beyond developing fantastic crime gadgets and trying to stay one step or more ahead of Super-Squirrel, you know,” admitted Lemur with a whisper. “I have a soft spot for music… especially, for some reason, the funk.”
“Well, I can’t believe you made me keep our weapons in the trunk of the Porkermobile,” the sadistic, slapstick-loving swine groaned.
“First off, the nature of our weapons would call too much premature attention to us,” the balding scientist retorted. “Secondly, the vehicle is triple-armored, the doors and trunk are locked, and the vehicle has been further equipped with an electro-shock device and a hypersonic wave generator, which are both designed to go off instantly if anybody other than us gets within one inch of the vehicle, so the odds of the vehicle getting stolen are highly unlikely. Thirdly and finally, the vehicle and our weapons have voice-recognition devices sensitive enough to pick up our voices within a range of five miles, and, at present, we are a mere hundred feet or so from our vehicle hidden safely beneath a tarp in the parking lot. If we need our weapons in a hurry, all we have to do is provide the correct voice code to unlock the trunk and call our weapons to us. If we need to make a quick getaway, our vehicle will unlock its doors and come to us, after we simply provide the correct voice code.”
Meanwhile, the waiter who had recognized the two aging but still very dangerous super-villains had been speaking with the manager. The obese manager, a toad, said to the donkey waiter, “Mr. Asston, as long as our guests are wearing formal attire, aren’t causing any trouble, and have the money to pay their tab, then they can imitate anybody they want to!”
“The trouble is, I have this sinking feeling they are going to cause trouble,” the waiter said quietly.
“Just get back to work, Eeyore,” said the manager, “and stop all this complaining, or you’re fired!”
“Yes, sir, Mr. Toadswell,” replied Eeyore Asston.
The Porker, bored out of his skull, finally yelled out, “P-One to P.M., code words: gentle-animals, start your engines!”
With that, the Porkermobile activated, seemingly on its own, and — quickly shedding the tarp atop it — started driving from the parking lot outside toward the nightclub’s outer wall to reach the heinous harlequin hog and the mad scientist lemur. As it crashed through the wall, the Porker then said, “P-One to P.M., code words: treasure chest!”
This caused the trunk of the Porkermobile to open and reveal an acid-squirting flower, a bag of exploding marbles, a poison gas-dispensing scepter, a deck of razor-edged playing cards, a lethally gimmicked hand-buzzer, a spritzer bottle that squirted out a super-adhesive, a five-in-one blaster pistol that could be switched between a heat-ray, a freeze-ray, a shrink-ray, an anti-gravity ray, and a hyper-gravity ray, and a suit of high-powered exo-armor. The Porker grabbed the specialty weapons, while Lemur put on his power gloves and grabbed his blaster pistol.
Since that lunatic had to go ahead and do this, I might as well join in on the fun, the mad scientist lemur thought silently to himself.
***
Firefox was cruising above Zooville, looking for any signs of trouble that would indicate the location of Lex Lemur and the Porker, since she, Ducktor Quackum, and Commander Fowl had already searched the abandoned super-top-secret underground military base and had realized that, from all indications, the Porker and Lex Lemur had not been using it as a hideout.
Commander Fowl was now back at Quackum Labs, awaiting word from the Outhyders on their investigation of the mastermind behind the giantism epidemic, as well as the newly discovered outbreak of spontaneous monster-animals. As for Ducktor Quackum, after giving Fowl a ride back to the lab in the Atomic Rocket, the eccentric scientist had rocketed back to Zooville to pick up his monthly order of Tweeties, the breakfast of champions, from McSnurtle’s general store. Then, if he still had any time left over after shopping, he promised to check on the progress of Comic-coo-coo and the Plaid Porcupine in their own investigation. That left Firefox to continue the search from the air.
Firefox’s fiery hair and tail left a brilliant fire-trail through the late-evening sky as she cruised, not really sure of what she was looking for. Then she heard the sounds of trouble. Speeding up instantly, she headed down toward the street, where patrons of a nightclub were racing out of a hole in the wall.
Scanning the club’s interior, she saw two figures matching the descriptions of Lex Lemur and the Porker who were loaded down with items that definitely looked dangerous, including what appeared to be dangerous-looking power-gloves. Frowning, she landed, then extended her hands, grabbing the Porkermobile in a gravitonic beam and yanking it out of the club, sitting it on its roof on the opposite sidewalk. Then she was inside, the room lighting up brilliantly as she deployed several light-spheres, and she faced the villains. “I’d suggest you stop this and surrender,” she said in a commanding voice, “or I might be forced to hurt you.”
Lemur proved to be unfazed by Firefox’s entrance. After all, he had tangled with Super-Squirrel himself many times and had very nearly defeated the Rodent of Steel on more than one of those occasions. His porcine prankster partner was simply too crazy to allow himself to be scared. The mad scientist Lemur laughed and said, “I must warn you, foolish vulpine, that it takes more than an impressive light-show and an antigravity trick to intimidate one who could quite honestly be considered the arch-enemy of Super-Squirrel himself. As such, I am quite accustomed to dealing with super-powered opponents!” At that, he activated his armor’s hypersonic pitch device.
Firefox was clutching her ears, the hypersonic vibrations making it impossible for her to concentrate enough to use her powers. While the vulpine heroine was thus momentarily disabled, Lemur switched a quintuple-purpose gun on freeze-ray to immobilize the heroine.
Lemur and Porker were both wearing special earplugs that allowed them to hear just fine, but also shielded them from any frequencies above normal conversation, such as the frequency of the hypersonic pitch device. They grinned at Firefox’s frozen form. “So, Lexie, can we keep her?” the Porker laughed. “Huh? Huh?”
However, the balding scientist saw another flash, this one from Ducktor Quackum’s Atomic Rocket, and as the rocket landed, he spotted three figures he didn’t recognize: Quackum himself, Comic-coo-coo, and the Plaid Porcupine.
“Good thing Firefox left an easy trail for us to follow,” Comic-coo-coo said as he morphed into his anthro-bat form.
“Yes, the booby-traps we narrowly avoided setting off in that abandoned novelty store told us that the place was the villains’ hideout,” the Plaid Porcupine agreed, “but the lack of response from the villains told us they weren’t at home.”
“Well, the hole in the wall at this club, combined with the fiery trail leading here, mixed with the Porkermobile being ‘parked’ on its roof on the opposite sidewalk, made it pretty easy to deduce… uh…” Ducktor Quackum began. Then the absent-minded duck genius stopped for a moment and asked, “What did all that make it easy to deduce, again?”
“That the Porker and Lex Lemur were at this club, and Firefox confronted them,” Plaid Porcupine said with a sigh.
“Oh, right. Silly me. Thanks, Plaid,” the elderly avian scientist said with a sheepish grin. “I’ll handle Lemur,” he said. “I always wondered how I’d stack up against the most brilliant evil scientist on Earth-C-Minus. You two take the Porker.”
With that, Firefox melted her way through the ice generated by the freeze-ray-mode of Lemur’s five-in-one blaster. “Allow me to assist you with Lemur, Duck,” the atomic-powered vulpine heroine said. Just then, the air grew very hot around Firefox as she literally vaporized to steam the condensed water vapor that had turned to ice around her, then stood up. “Oh, come on! Using a freeze-ray against me?” she said to the Porker. “They don’t call me the nuclear vixen for nothing!”
She gestured, and the air around Lex Lemur turned into strong metal foil wrapped tightly around him. “I can also do some interesting tricks with matter and energy,” she said, grinning. “Now, I’d like to introduce a few friends of mine! Say hello to Ducktor Quackum and Comic Coo-coo!” She grinned as she advanced toward the pair, moving aside to allow the others in on the fun.
Firefox, Ducktor Quackum, and Comic Coo-coo listened as Plaid Porcupine said, “Excuse me, madame Firefox, aren’t you forgetting somebody?”
The heroine grinned sheepishly and said, “Right. Sorry, Plaid. You were directly behind Comic-coo-coo in his anthro-bat form, so I didn’t see you there.” As a force-field appeared around Lemur, cracking open the metal foil, Firefox made introductions. “Porker and Lex Lemur, this is Plaid Porcupine. Plaid Porcupine, this is the Porker and Lex Lemur.”
“I’m used to fighting super-powered opponents, so I programmed my power-gloves to erect a force-field,” said Lemur. “Oh, and incidentally, Miss Nuclear Vixen, trying to transform these power-gloves…”
The criminal scientist’s speech was interrupted as Firefox tried to use her power to transform his gloves, only for the energy from the blast to be harmlessly absorbed and added to the glove’s battery.
“As I was saying, trying to transform these power-gloves won’t do any good,” continued Lemur, “because the advanced computers at my lair already programmed them with an energy adaptor that allows the force-field to absorb your blasts harmlessly.”
At that, Lemur moved in on Firefox and Ducktor Quackum, while Comic-coo-coo and the Plaid Porcupine squared off with the Porker.
“Aren’t you going to write up something to stop the Porker?” the Plaid Porcupine asked.
“No. I try to exercise some measure of fair play as to how I use my special pen,” Comic-coo-coo said honestly. “I figure the power of my anthro-bat form, combined with your fighting skills, should be enough for us to handle the Porker on full alert. He’s very clever and dangerous, but his hand-to-hand skills are only average, and he has no super-powers.”
“So, as long as we don’t give him a chance to use any of his weapons, we should be all right?” the Plaid Porcupine concluded, to which Comic-coo-coo nodded.