Agency 13 # 9
Enter: the Holographic... Man?!
In the midst of a burning building, if you look hard enough, you can spy the unconscious form of one Chase Storey, laying face down in a pile of blood and other, unknown materials. Above his prone frame, you can also see the much more animate body of Sticks McLellan, who is grappling with an unknown assailant, one who seems to have a fashion sense devoid of reason, for he is wearing a gaudy red spandex suit, a large yellow cape, and an oversized red helmet.
(That should do for a 'cover', shouldn't it?)
Notice: for those of you that are faint of heart, the following tale isn't exactly what one would call G-rated in nature. It contains a plethora of bad language, excessive violence, sexual innuendo, and of course, things that would get this story burned, were it in a printed form, by the more fanatical elements of just about any religion on earth. In other words, if these things offend you - you've been warned.
(That should do for a 'disclaimer', shouldn't it?)
***
"I hate you!"
With that, Sticks McLellan grew silent, waiting for yet another annoying comeback from this despicable man, this so-called reporter that she'd been saddled with on her current investigation. When she first met the boob, she didn't think she liked him, and now, after riding cross-country with him over the last nine hours, she was sure of it. The man had too much smarmy confidence for his own good, and he kept staring at her.
Chase Storey, on the other hand, found Sticks amusing. Here she was, supposedly this nigh-perfect former priestess of some sort, and she was getting all flustered about his dirty joke. Well, all thirty-seven of them, at any rate, and he had a few more ready. He couldn't help but admire the raw crimson shade of her cheeks, though, all of a sudden - even if he couldn't tell if it was from embarrassment or from anger.
"All I said was -"
"Shut up."
"But -"
"Shut up!"
"But I -"
"Shut UP!"
"Fine, be that way. I'll just drive us all the way to Bear Butte, or Ass Hole, or whatever dinky town we're headed to, without anybody to speak to. I see how you are. Don't talk to me, then." And she didn't. For the next two hundred miles, Sticks spoke nary a word, not until the duo finally arrived at their destination, the quaint little town of Flat Head, Utah. When the car stopped outside the bank, she finally talked to this man that she despised.
"Are you sure this stupid plan's going to work?" He nodded, smiled, and flashed her the gun under his suit jacket.
"Of course it'll work. I've done this more times than you'd like to think. All we need are these real, fake badges, convincingly bland attire, and the guns. Just act natural and follow my lead. And if anybody questions you, put on the butch routine. I'm sure that should come easily enough to you..."
If looks could kill, Sticks' gaze would have blown Chase to bits.
Mustering her professionalism, Sticks nonetheless followed Chase into the bank despite the crime scene tape, the police, and even the two FBI agents checking out the scene of the crime. When one of the suited government agents tried to block their progress, the duo simultaneously whipped out their badges. "Name's Smith, US Marshall. This is my partner, Nyquilla Bland. Is there a problem, sir?"
The FBI operative looked stunned, as though he were still sorting out the name Chase provided for his erstwhile partner. "Nope, none at all. What brings you two into the mix? You got dibs on the perp?" Breathing in hard, Chase lied again.
"Yep, we've been following this clown since he knocked over a bank in Brush, Colorado. From what we saw, he used some goofy light show to confuse the guards, and then cut his way into the vault with a hard-core welder.
"You got that right. Come check out these burn marks!" Following the federal agent, Sticks and Chase made their way to the bank vault, and saw the burns on the metal. "This ain't like no torch I've seen before, though. Look at these cuts!" Eyeing the precise nature of the cuts in the vault steel, and the angle inherent to the burns, both investigators could see that they were made in the same way: an industrial laser mounted on a projector right where they stood.
"Did the surveillance tapes survive the initial flash this guy caused when he made his entrance?" The FBI man nodded, and led them to the bank security office, where he then played the tape.
"You ought to get a kick out of this... our perp's a total fruit loop!" Watching on, they saw several regular bank patrons get engulfed in an overwhelming flash of light, and when it faded, a man in a garish, red Spandex ™ costume stood in their place!
This guy then opened fire with, of all things, a flamethrower, while several accomplices entered the bank and ran back towards the vault. The would-be villain then gloated about his genius, taunted the bank's customers with his fiery weapon, and generally spouted off at the mouth until his goons came out of the back, each carrying large bags full of money. "Just look at this guy, he's fresh out of a Batman movie!"
Chase nodded, and asked if he could view the video frame by frame. The federal fellow nodded, and then left the office, knowing that they'd be studying the video for quite some time. "If you need anything, just come get me. I'll be downstairs talking to the press..." From the tone of his voice, you could tell that the FBI man was thoroughly unhappy about that prospect. His shoulders sagging, he made his way back to the lobby, looking a broken man.
As the two watched the minutes preceding the insane robbery, Chase tried to figure out just why somebody would go to these lengths to simply rob a bank, when the authorities would be sure to come crashing down on him... hard. Once his description was spread around for all the world to see, his life would soon become a very, very unpleasant place. Then he saw, exactly one minute before the big light flash, a man tripping on the threshold at the bank's entrance.
Rewinding the tape, he played it again, and again, and again, at normal speeds and much slower. "Sticks, take a look at this." Repeating the process, the two investigators watched the guy, a little old man, dropping what looked like ball bearings as he tripped, which rolled away from him towards the corners of the bank. Just a second before the big light flash, a sparkle was visible from the one that was in the camera's range.
"I'll go grab a smoke, Sticks, and see if those things are still down in the bank." As Chase did so, she watched the video of the old man again and again, as well as the two folks around him. There was something odd about their movements, but she couldn't put her finger on it until she ran their motions through her head. That was when she figured out that the two other customers' movements mirrored the old man's, if displaced a second or so in time.
They were fake people! Illusions or something, but definitely not real.
"Interesting..." She continued to mull this over, and then made her way back to the lobby herself. Playing a hunch, she started going over every piece of furniture in the bank, as well as the wall, counters, and assorted papers and other refuse that had been knocked over during the robbery. When Chase came back in, he wandered over into the corner, and indeed found one of the spheres that he old man had dropped, and quickly pocketed it.
He then found two more in the other corners, though he wasn't sure what happened to the fourth one that he assumed should be there; four corners, and all. Looking each other in the eye, the duo simultaneously decided that they'd learned enough, and went to leave. When that pesky federal agent asked where they were going, Chase simply said "Goin' to get lunch. We should be back in an hour or so. It's not as if the bank's going anywhere, now, is it?"
Before the man could respond, the two investigators left the bank, and Chase quickly drove them out of town. "Aren't they going to look for us once they figure out we weren't cops? I mean, I sure as heck would..." Smiling again, Chase answered her with glee.
"Well, they might think about it, but those feds would have to explain letting us into the crime scene without identifying us properly, and that'd make 'em look real, real bad. Don't worry about it."
After driving east for an hour or so, Chase pulled the car over at a handy hotel, and got a room for the night. Once this was settled, the two actually did get lunch, though it was really an early dinner, and then went over what they'd discovered. Chase pulled out the spheres and showed them to Sticks. She inspected them, and subjected them to her mystical senses. "Nothing magical here, buddy. What are they?"
"Don't know for sure, but I think that they're some sort of powerful light projectors. They may've caused the big flash that blinded people, causing them to be unable to get a proper view of that idiot that's robbing banks with them. What do you think?" She nodded in agreement.
"Makes sense, but I think they're more than that. I think they're some sort of image generators, or hologram emitters, or something like that.
"Think about it. This idiot cuts loose with a flamethrower, in a bank, and nothing gets burnt? I think it was all an optical illusion. I bet the whole thing was just a silly, advanced light show. Maybe augmented with some sort of sound system or something for the flames. You think?" Chase looked at her and grinned like an idiot. Heck, even he didn't think about why the place wasn't as scorched as you'd think it'd be, and he was the investigative reporter!
"That makes perfect sense! After all, the guy uses lasers, why not holograms? Maybe he's got a whole light 'motif' going on. So, we just need to find some weird optical scientist who's motivated enough to rob banks in the most conspicuous way possible, and we've got this goon!" She looked at Chase, almost not hating him for a second, and shrugged.
"But, we don't know what this guy even looks like, unless the 'old man' routine wasn't a disguise itself."
Chase just frowned. "Wow. Paranoid much?"
***
The next morning, Sticks woke up feeling like she didn't really get much sleep. When she pulled herself together, she realized that she wasn't alone in her hotel bed, and it didn't take too long for the night's varied events to creep back into her conscious mind.* She didn't get it; there she was, hating the guy with every fiber of her being, and she wound up getting involved with him. At least he wasn't really as repulsive as she'd initially thought. But still.
Gathering herself, she went and gave Mike 013 a call, telling him what they'd found, and gave him their theory about what had really happened. Mike seemed to concur with her hypothesis, and said he'd look into things to see if there were any parallels to this particular modus operandi in the Jensen Congress' data, as well as any pertinent data right here in this timeline. This would take an hour or so, so Sticks decided to go for a nice, long jog before she took a shower.
Chase, on the other hand, wasn't feeling so frisky. He heard Sticks leave, and grudgingly pulled himself out of bed, thinking he'd get some breakfast. Or a nice, big bottle of Mountain Dew ™, or at least something to make the pounding in his head go away somewhat. If even a little bit. Of course, when he'd gotten dressed and opened the door, the sunlight made him flinch mightily, like a decrepit vampire woken early by a door-to-door salesman.
Donning his sunglasses after the shock went away, Chase went to the convenience store across the street, and did indeed find himself a tasty, carbonated citrus drink. Walking out after paying for the delicious treat, he stopped and took a nice, long drink out of the bottle, when he was abruptly knocked over by four big goons on their way in. "Watch where yer goin', pip squeak!" Chase thought that odd, considering that he wasn't moving before they hit him.
Frustrated, Chase sat down away from the door, wishing to simply wake up in peace. A few minutes later, those burly fellows then left the convenience store, loaded up on junk food, cartons of cigarettes, and a whole lot of beer. However, Chase noticed that one of them was wearing an eye patch; not a totally bizarre thing, of course, except that... that he remembered one of those goons that helped rob the bank in Flat Head also wore one!!
Memorizing the make, model, and license plate number on the van, Chase watched them leave, noted their direction, and then ran back towards the hotel. Grabbing all his stuff - and Sticks' - he raced to the car and started to look around the tiny town they spent the night in for his current partner. Finding her after about five minutes, he pulled up next to her, shoved her into the driver's seat, and (crawling into the back) had her drive.
"What the heck are you doing, Chase? I haven't even had a shower yet, and I've been jogging in this blasted heat for ten minutes!!" When he told her, Sticks calmed down immediately, and then set out in a south-easterly direction. "So, you have to snooze there in the back seat so they don't see you again, huh?" When he nodded in the affirmative, she simply sighed and continued driving, hoping to see the van that Chase spoke of.
Sure enough, she spotted it after about an hour of excessively fast driving, and managed to avoid their suspicions by keeping very, very far behind. This wasn't too hard, though, as the mountains the investigators were driving through were steep here, and their paltry rental car didn't like them very much. However, after what seemed like an eternity, the Agency operatives finally arrived in Pueblo, Colorado, and drove on after the van stopped at a warehouse.
Slapping Chase awake, she told him that she knew where the robbers had stopped, and that she was getting a hotel room nearby. "I need a shower!" Sniffing the air around her, Chase easily agreed to that, though this got him another slap upside the head. They got a room in the hotel closest to that warehouse, even if it was something of a dive, and began their surveillance of the place. They saw no motion, but there were several lights on inside.
Waiting until nightfall to make their move, the duo kept themselves busy, though they maintained a watchful eye on that warehouse all the same. At around midnight, they crept around to the rear of that villainous hideout, and looked for an out of the way way in. This, of course, involved Chase jimmying the lock, and he actually managed it without breaking anything. Creeping into the warehouse, the investigative duo found all kinds of weird, high tech machinery.
At least it looked like it. It was all chromed and shiny. Being careful not to touch anything, Sticks and Chase stalked along the hallways, looking for a sign of life, and found it soon enough. When the thugs suddenly came out of nowhere, both Agency operatives realized that the high tech accoutrements they were seeing were, in fact, nothing but optical delusions, for those bank robbing scum stepped right through them.
The four goons surrounded Sticks and Chase in a rough semi-circle from behind, and their boss, the madman in red Spandex ™, stood before them. "Who the heck are you idiots, and why did you break into my villainous headquarters!?" The duo looked each other in the eye, shrugged, and produced their weaponry in the blink of an eye. Sticks drew her, well, twin fighting sticks from the folds of her costume, and Chase drew his ubiquitous base ball bat out of his trench coat.
The goons rushed our heroes, leading to one heck of a scrap. Though tougher than dried snot, the minions of this Spandex ™ wonder simply couldn't match the fighting prowess of Sticks McLellan, and being unarmed, they couldn't really counter Chase's desperately violent swings with his bat. Within about twenty seconds, all four of them had been rendered unconscious and/or broken by the two stalwart investigators from Agency 13.
"Nicely done, nicely done! I was hoping I'd eventually draw super heroes into my net, so I could test out the full potential of my holographic technology! Behold!" The insane goon began to turn a dial on his belt, to which Chase stammered "Super heroes? We aren't comic book characters, you goon! And hey, what'd you mean by attract -" Chase never got to finish his sentence, of course, because the world turned inside out.
You see, the room around our heroes began to spin, pulsate, and undulate, and this caused Chase to totally lose his sense of balance. Reeling from the strange occurrence, he fell to the floor, immediately losing the contents of his lunch. Sticks, however, merely closed her eyes, and forced herself to ignore the reality gone wild around her. You see, she was sure this was just another visual display put on by this pathetic criminal.
Remembering where the man was last standing, Sticks threw one of her trademark weapons, striking him right on the bridge of his nose. This caused him to let out a decidedly unmanly shriek, at which point the room burst into flames. However, feeling no heat, Sticks decided to take her opponent down hard. She barreled right into the man, and upon striking him, found out that he was, in fact, a she!!
"Get off me, you creep!" Yep, that was definitely the voice of a female, Sticks thought. She then pummeled the apparent girl into unconsciousness, and removed her belt, since it apparently controlled the imagery run rampant in the warehouse. Turning the dial several times, she eventually got the place back to 'normal', which was essentially an empty place, though it was equipped with a few apparent holographic projectors in the corners.
Heading over to them, Sticks smashed each up in turn, and then kicked the door open, to attract wandering policemen. Helping a recovering Chase to his feet, Sticks dragged him out of the warehouse, and with a little fresh air, he recovered from his vertigo enough to walk by himself. The two investigators then ran to a nearby pay phone and, resisting the mighty urge to laugh, called the police to report a break-in at a nearby building.
Watching from the vantage point of their hotel room, Sticks and Chase saw the police pull up to the bank robbers' hideout and, after about five minutes, dragging them out in handcuffs. The ring leader of this little enterprise, still in that garish costume (apparently wearing it under her holographic disguise), was screaming the whole way out. "You can't do this to me! I'll get you! All of you! Arrgh! No one does this to the Holographic Man!"
The police just looked at each other in confusion at that, trying to figure out why this obvious woman was calling herself the 'Holographic Man'. They then chalked it up to raving insanity, and escorted her and her goons into a handy paddy wagon. As they drove away, the two Agency investigators simply laughed, and hoping to get back to Rock early tomorrow, went to bed. Even if they didn't get to sleep right away.
* See Agency 13 # 7 and 8 for the flash-back riddled skinny!
***
Come back next month to read the first part of an action-packed tale starring the entire cast of Agency 13! When several cyborg monsters wipe out an entire gang of the Warriors of Thor, the Agency has to figure out just who made these bio-mechanical monstrosities - and just what their plans are for these new weapons. Of course, once they get the answers they seek, they may find out that they've bitten off more than they can chew!
***
Agency 13 # 9 - Enter: the Holographic... Man?
Copyright 1999, 2004, 2012, 2023 Denny Hill 2
All rights reserved and so forth.
Extra Goodies: