398 replies to this topic

[Galactus]

Greg is no match for Rex te Wonder DOg when it comes to commie-busting.

[Hereward]

Galactus, on 12 January 2012 - 06:02 AM, said:

Greg is no match for Rex te Wonder DOg when it comes to commie-busting.

Or Timmy. And Timmy was pretty handy in apprehending Gypsies, too.

[MinDonner]

Hereward, on 12 January 2012 - 06:57 AM, said:

Or Timmy. And Timmy was pretty handy in apprehending Gypsies, too.

That dog had a proper distrust of the lower orders. Apprehending dastardly foreign jewel thieves would have been right up his alley. Maybe a series of spin-off novels would be in order?

Quote

"Oh Timmy, you are a scamp," said George, eyeing the bloody corpses of Dimitriov and Igor.

"Woof," said Timmy, wagging his tail happily.

As they rowed away from Kirrin Island to be home in time for tea, orange mutant crabs emerged from the purple waves and crawled up the beach to feast on the sumptuous meal of disembowelled Russian intestines...

lordMountainGoat, on 12 January 2012 - 05:09 AM, said:

I just realised something horrifying - Min are you reading through these books twice? Once to get the gist of it and then the second time to post the comedy review here? I had assumed you were just doing the reviewing as you went along. How can your mind withstand reading this stuff a second time without losing your sanity completely???

Hah, no such thing. For the most part I am just reading this once through and reviewing as I go. But sometimes it's hard to resist skipping forward to see what horrors are lying ahead...

Speaking of which, here's Chapter Six, which is a mere two pages long and has no apparent reason for being a chapter at all, as it's basically just finishing off what went on on chapter 5.

As befits the military commander of a recently-nuked city at war with terrible occupying forces, Rock is busy in the Archiving Room, gluing together bits of an old book from the era of the Founding Fathers. Good god, priorities dude! This is possibly the reason that Security Chief Rath, who actually has a job, is a bit testy when he arrives with news that a small boy is claiming to have an important message. He suspects that Billy "The Kid" is just pretending to have a message in order to meet his hero Rockson. However, Rock, fresh from gluing detail, is happy to hear the kid out.

And just as well too!

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"Jesus Christ," Rockson said, raising his steel frame to its full six foot two inches, his face white with rage and fear. "We've got to get a fighting force together immediately and rescue them."

He looked Rath square in the eyes. "Look, man, you know there's no time to go through a lengthy debate in the City Council about whether or not to send out a rescue team. So as Commander of the City's military forces, I hereby declare this an Emergency Military Response, Priority One, and command ten men and supplies to leave within two hours."

Well, it's not like he had anything better to do right now. Rath, of course, raises some petty bureaucratic objections, as that appears to be his main role, but Rock will take full responsibility! Now he just has a couple of hours to find out whether anyone knows anything about Fort Svetlanya and figure out how he's going to rescue his girlfriend. Oh yeah, and the president, obviously.

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As he walked down the ramps into the sub-basement of the world that had been carved into the mountain, his eyes grew bright, sparkling with a violent energy - one blue, one violet star, threatening to nova on the Red Galaxies surrounding him.

Edited by MinDonner, 12 January 2012 - 01:05 PM.

[Sophelia]

Enjoyed your commentary on Rock doing his scrapbooking project in the library while the world is crumbling around him.

Quote

As he walked down the ramps into the sub-basement of the world that had been carved into the mountain, his eyes grew bright, sparkling with a violent energy - one blue, one violet star, threatening to nova on the Red Galaxies surrounding him.

Er what?

OK, according to the doppler effect this means one eye is going backwards and one is going forwards... or is one eye a white dawrf and the other a red giant?  In any case his eyes are about to explode... onto...um...what are the Red Galaxies surrounding him?  Acne?  Bureaucrats... or the commies somehow managing to surround the ...um...caves.

P.S. How do you disembowel an intestine?  That's kind of like deboning a bone or delapidating a hair.

Ooh I like being a pedant!

[Rakka]

The crabs then, of course, drag off the bodies' heads to make nurseries for their mutant babies as a part of the beautiful Circle of Life in Nature. And there are 1 329 of them.

[MinDonner]

After a week-long field trip into the apocalyptic wastelands, investigating the wily and elusive species of Americans (Ultimate and otherwise), I am now back and all set to bring you Chapter Seven. First up, a confusing bit of amateur astronomy.

Quote

The moon swooped up into the dark violet sky like a thing alive - searching, hunting as it sent down its burning waves of white. Tonight it looked so pure, untouchable against the radioactively glowing upper atmosphere of the earth, streaked with endlessly orbiting webs of green and pink that had come from the isotopes released by the atomic war of the last century.

Ted Rockson, high atop his golden-maned hybrid, surveyed the heavens with a cynical eye. ... Beautiful, Rock thought to himself, staring up at the perfect harmony of the moon and the stars, the rose-tinged clouds that floated over it all. It created for a second a vision of ultimate beauty, a Japanese print spread out across the epic heavens, made for his eyes only.

So then. Is the moon a predatory burning hunter, or is it pure and white and serene? How on earth is this a cynical view of the sky? Why is the moon so clear and visible if the sky is full of glowing clouds? Well, at least Rock isn't looking at the scenery in a girly way like that Rona.

Rock's team is heading down the trail on their horses - usually Rock can do horse-telepathy, but not today, as he's too worried about Kim. What if the Mindbreakers are at work on her already? Luckily he knows that Commies are really slow and inefficient and probably need to go through some bureaucracy first. Even so, he stares beyond the stars and prays to a possibly-nonexistent God that Kim will be OK. Oh yeah, and the President, obviously.

Rock's sharp, trained fighting eyes keep a keen watch on the fields full of daisies, sunflowers and puffs (obviously a trained fighter can even identify flowers in the dark, a crucial skill in these dark times). As the moon drops "like a corpse wrapped in dirty linen into the grave of night's black soil", he turns to Detroit to discuss pitching stats, they they enjoy the cool dew-scented morning breezes and birdsong for a few minutes. Could it get any more bromance-tastic? Why yes, yes it could.

Detroit: "Do you ever wonder about the end of the war?"
Rock: "Nope."
Detroit: "Cos anyway while my arm was cut off, I started thinking that I might want to settle down with a family one day, have a wife, teach a kid to play ball..."
Rock: "Fraid not dude. You and me are NOT SUPPOSED TO EVER GET MARRIED cos we're FIGHTERS and that means we have to keep on doing this manly shit and fighting Russians together and you're not allowed a wife anyway so there."
Detroit: "You're right, sorry, yeah it sounds kind of shit anyway, lol"

At this point, they reach a handy grove of melons, and McCaughlin cooks up some rabbit and melon stew. Yum!

The Rock Squad this time consists of our usual guys (Rock, Detroit, Chen, McCaughlin, Archer) plus two young martial artists (Du Soo and Lenny Brown), a grizzled old scout Reston, and some techy nerds who are all nervous about being outside, but who are good at dealing with Mindbreakers.

Quote

The untested members of the force laughed and joked with one another as the rest watched, smiling, but with a secret knowledge that didn't allow them to laugh quite so freely. For they were already feeling what they did on every mission - the presence of death. Still dim, wavery around the edges - but there. Death had its dark eyes locked on the team.

Eventually the sun falls gracefully like a burning swan from the cloud-bouldered sky, and it's time to move again. And now we have confirmation - Rock has his old friend Snorter back! Yes, Snorter the magic pony, somehow managed to escape from the nuke at the Convention Centre and then find its way back past the megapedes to CC. Either that, or someone has pulled the Everlasting Hamster trick familiar to primary school teachers, who don't want to upset the kiddies when the class pet dies, so replace him overnight with an identical model. Stacy plays up the "unshakeable loyalty between man and animal" thing for half a page but I suspect this may actually be Snorter II.

Obviously the new team members are a shambles, hopping around with one boot on etc etc as the camp swiftly packs up - of course it would not do to train anyone properly for a suicidal assault on a heavily guarded Russian fortress, when instead you can use them as contrast to the awesomeness of the Rock Squad!

The hybrids get up to a good run as they head out of the woods, which allows us an interesting glimpse of how they work:

Quote

Their thick powerful legs churned away like locomotive wheels, as their mouths opened wide, sucking in oxygen to fuel their bodies.

Yes, THAT is the best that Stacy can do in describing a galloping horse. But then! Rock catches a terrible scent on the air! It is the smell of burning flesh!

...to be continued...

[Lummel]

MinDonner, on 23 January 2012 - 01:18 PM, said:

Yes, THAT is the best that Stacy can do in describing a galloping horse. But then! Rock catches a terrible scent on the air! It is the smell of burning flesh!

...to be continued...

yeah I think that can happen if your horse goes too fast, either that or the glue like smell of melted hooves, one or the other I can't remember which.

[Maithanet]

MinDonner, on 23 January 2012 - 01:18 PM, said:

Detroit: "Cos anyway while my arm was cut off, I started thinking that I might want to settle down with a family one day, have a wife, teach a kid to play ball..."
Rock: "Fraid not dude. You and me are NOT SUPPOSED TO EVER GET MARRIED cos we're FIGHTERS and that means we have to keep on doing this manly shit and fighting Russians together and you're not allowed a wife anyway so there."
Detroit: "You're right, sorry, yeah it sounds kind of shit anyway, lol"

Maaaake oooout!

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Yes, Snorter the magic pony, somehow managed to escape from the nuke at the Convention Centre and then find its way back past the megapedes to CC.

Snorter is the true hero of this story.

Quote

It is the smell of burning flesh!

I hope it's our Aussie friends!  Maybe they're roasting a kangaroo?

[MinDonner]

Sadly, more sinister things than a kangaroo roast are afoot, and Rock signals his team to dismount so they can be all sneaky and stuff. Archer grabs his crossbow, Chen grabs his starknives, you know the drill. What could this new threat be?

Quote

Just below they could see them - filthy, liquor-crazed men dancing in front of the fire. And around the putrid campsite were bones - human bones. Rockson quickly scanned the area: a large pile of bones to the right; five men strung up on poles - apparently dead. And two immense spits on which there were skewered two human bodies, speared from the mouth through the asshole, and cooked until the skin was an even crunchy brown.

I can't decide whether that paragraph owes more to text-based PC adventure games of the early 80s, or to some kind of lifestyle cookbook. Those are some keen warrior senses Rockson has, to recognise the culinary skill at fifty paces in the dark. An even crunchy brown! Then simmer on a medium heat, until juices run clear, basting occasionally with your rosemary-infused olive oil.

The cannibals, in typical form, are also dancing round the fire, brandishing arms (er, as in body parts, as opposed to weapons), bits of thigh, even raw internal organs which are still dripping with bloody juices. Tsk tsk, food safety!

Rock could easily pass this by, as he's on an IMPORTANT MISSION, but nothing disgusts him more than cannibals, it is the most revolting of all crimes! Americans, eating their own brothers and sisters?

Yes, you heard right. Rockson finally admits that some Americans might actually be bad guys. However, this is immediately backtracked by referring to the cannibals as "half-men" and their leader is an albino anyway, so they're not proper Americans. Phew.

Now follows the inevitable banter-and-battle, with much overuse of the word "slime" and some very convoluted sentences indeed. For example:

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The drooling, slime-coated faces in the center of the clearing froze, as if caught by a photograph, holding their bloody dinners in their hands.

"Howdy boys," Rockson said, unsmiling. "We heard you was having a little banquet, so we thought we'd join in. Looks like there's plenty here."

The leader of the cannibal slime, an immense, very light-skinned, almost Albino man, who stood directly in front of the bonfire in which the other human appendages were sizzling furiously, turned towards the stranger.

BLAM! He hurls the forearm he is munching on into Rock's face, then all the cannibals attack!

Rock shoots the nearest one in the chest, causing his lungs and heart to explode from his body in a hurricane of pink and red. Meanwhile, Stacy seems to have forgotten that Chen's star-knives can explode, but this does not stop him from ninjing out some inscrutable and generically Oriental death. Archer shoots some people, Rock shoots some more, someone's groin ends up spouting blood like a tributary of the Mississippi... then the albino smacks Rock in the face and knocks him into a pit full of bones! Luckily Rock manages to spring five feet into the air and go and chase after the guy again.

And now that inevitable passage once again....

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As Rock tore ass toward the flesh eaters' commander, Chen and Archer were living out their second-by-second drama of life and death - only the other guys were dying. Until now, the bestial tribe had had no problems taking what they wanted, eating whom they wanted. The cannibals had thought themselves fearsome, tough, ready for anything the world could send them. Ready to not only kill, but then eat their opponents, absorbing them into their very bloodstreams - the ultimate insult. But as they faced the spinning Chinese bolt of lightning and the club-wielding giant, their ferocious expressions were replaced by looks of the sheerest terror.

Now a page of kung-fu-fightin action (whoa-oh-oh-ohhhh!) as Chen kicks and karate chops his way through the cannibals, breaking necks like a hangman's noose, smashing skulls like coconuts, that sort of thing. Also a machete gets chopped out of a guy's hand at such a speed that it slices some other bloke's head into two halves. Archer, meanwhile, gets half a page of knife-fighting, as he rips open stomachs full of half-digested human flesh and tears out whole backbones and that sort of thing.

The Albino now has a pitchfork, and is trying to poke Rock with it. "I no think you taste good when I eat you," says the Albino, further proving his not-really-American credentials. "But someone eat you - so no matter!"

Rock detects that this witty banter was just intended to distract him, and so grabs the chance to bend the laws of physics and plausibilty to win the fight in a manner that would have even shamed Road Runner.

Quote

As the Albino lunged forward, Rockson grabbed hold of the fork itself, guiding the end straight down into the dirt, where it buried itself to the hilt. The Albino was unable to stop. His huge mass of flesh-filled fat was carried forward onto the handle of the fork, which buried itself deep in his stomach.  It catapulted him straight over the top like a pole vaulter, sending the screaming killer nearly five yards through the air, and then onto his head on the ground, just a few feet away from the blazing fire.

Rock stabs Albino with pitchfork, Albino falls into fire and instantly burns to death. Job done! A few of the remaining cannibals try to surrender but the Rock Squad is having none of it, and executes them "under Provision 13 of the Reunited States of America", which sounds remarkably like he just pulled an excuse out of his arse then and there.

Edited by MinDonner, 25 January 2012 - 04:55 PM.

[Antonius Pius]

Is it me, or is Stacy getting ever more crass? Death and mayhem aren't surprising, but... Tearing ass, spits through assholes... Stacy should pay more attention to his manners.

MinDonner, on 25 January 2012 - 04:53 PM, said:

Yes, you heard right. Rockson finally admits that some Americans might actually be bad guys. However, this is immediately backtracked by referring to the cannibals as "half-men" and their leader is an albino anyway, so they're not proper Americans. Phew.

Close call by Stacy!

MinDonner, on 25 January 2012 - 04:53 PM, said:

....and executes them "under Provision 13 of the Reunited States of America", which sounds remarkably like he just pulled an excuse out of his arse then and there.

Either that, or a copy of the New Constitution miraculously found it's way to Snorters saddlebags and made it back to CC with him, giving Rockson the chance to familiarize himself with it. Which is always handy in case you run into canibals that need killing.

[MinDonner]

It also belatedly occurs to me that "provision 13" is a surprisingly low number. Given the myriad problems of postapocalyptic governance of a blasted land under enemy rule, you'd think that there'd be more than 12 other issues of greater urgency than the need to execute all roving bands of cannibals on sight. Still, the Convention did get nuked after only about 10 minutes, maybe they just didn't have time to sort the order out properly.

[Antonius Pius]

I would have thought that in a commie-nazi occupied nuclear wasteland, the first thing to do is kill everything that's not we the people. So I would have thought that killing "others" was the first thing on Stacy's new constitution. Or does the provision only apply to cannibals? In that case I assume provision will be "and ye shall guide any glowers ye find to commie-nazi's".

[MinDonner]

Apparently just cannibals. After killing most of them for the basic reason that they pissed him off, Rock only pulls out this bit of legislation when it's time to kill the ones who surrendered. It would almost have made sense if he'd done this earlier, "oh fuck we're off to rescue Kim but the law says we must execute all cannibals, let's go boys", but nah.

[Antonius Pius]

MinDonner, on 26 January 2012 - 05:12 AM, said:

It would almost have made sense if he'd done this earlier, "oh fuck we're off to rescue Kim but the law says we must execute all cannibals, let's go boys", but nah.

Oh, I see. I guess making sense is still a bridge too far for Stacy.

At least those cannibals and their albino leader won't interfere with Rock's manly love for Kim anymore.

[Maithanet]

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As Rock tore ass toward the flesh eaters' commander

This quote...I do not think it means what you think it means.

I have never heard the phrase "tore ass" to mean "run".  The only time that my friends and I used this term was back in middle school to be another phrase for fart (we needed many such phrases at that time in our life).  It's possible Rock is using some sort of gas propulsion to give him an extra boost, but in my experience as a sprinter that does not help.  Perhaps Rock's mutant farts are more powerful than mine and this is just another evolution to help him survive.  But somehow I doubt it, as I think that Stacey would describe it in much more AWESOME detail.

[jagilki]

Nah, I've heard it to mean "run at a high rate of spead".

Although, thinking about it, I've heard it more dealing with driving.  As in somebody "tore ass" out of the parking lot.

[MinDonner]

Chapter Eight, and now we are in Wyoming. Wyoming, Stacy tells us, looks much as it might have a thousand years ago, as only two nukes went off over the state, both at 5000 ft "for maximum civilian casualties". Given that much of the state is actually at a rather higher altitude than that, I'm guessing the commies must have buried those nukes several metres underground. The landscape's resemblance to Days of Yore is apparently characterised by a thousand different species of cactus, up to ten feet across with yard-long spikes - the pilgrims must have chopped them down or something. That or Stacy has a) never been to Wyoming and b ) forgot what he was talking about before even reaching the end of the paragraph. Also, lizards and wild dogs roam around eating each other.

Rock can't see any danger through his electronic binoculars, but more importantly, he can't feel any either. The only thing that concerns him is that they might get a bit scratched from the cacti, and even then they all have metal blankets for protection, which also work against deadly acid rain. Foreshadowing?

McCaughlin spots something! Parachutes, dozens of them! But they don't look like commies. And there's something else, too...

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...a second wave of jumpers had followed the first. Only these weren't men - they were camels.

...

They watched the descending wall of humans, clad in khaki and wide-brimmed hats, and hundreds of yards above them, braying and kicking as if their lives depended on it, thirty camels, their long strong necks bobbing up and down, twisting from side to side as they kept wishing they weren't seeing what they were seeing - the ground coming up at them with an alarming speed.

The first of the humans to land stood up, undid his chute harness, and then took off his wide-brimmed Ranger's hat and waved it to Rockson and his men.

...

"G'day, matey!" the red-cheeked hale and hearty looking fellow yelled up to Rock with a wide smile. "This be America hey? Or 'ave we landed somewhere out in the bloody bush?"

Yes. The Aussies are finally here.

[Jon AS]

Quote

"G'day, matey!" the red-cheeked hale and hearty looking fellow yelled up to Rock with a wide smile. "This be America hey? Or 'ave we landed somewhere out in the bloody bush?"

Oh good lord, you couldn't make this shit up.

Or could you? I mean, somebody obviously did...

[lacuna]

"Matey"? Are these pirate Aussies?

"Yaaarrrr! A kraken ate my baby!"

Edited by lacuna, 28 January 2012 - 10:42 AM.

[princeMountainGoat]

How exactly do the camels land safely without breaking all their legs?

Why am I even asking such a stupid question? Gah!

Also why are the Aussies landing on US soil for the first time in Wyoming? Did they miss California, Nevada and Utah somehow? Or did they need a thousand miles underneath them before they were confident of landing on it with their camels? Camels?? Seriously, camels??? :head-explodes:

Edited by lordMountainGoat, 29 January 2012 - 07:02 AM.