Love & Plunder – 3

I would have liked to team up with Taskmaster, er, I mean Tasklord, for a bit.  I liked working with him and it would have been nice to have someone to show me the supervillain ropes a little.  But he was hellbent on breaking Shadowlord out of prison and continuing the vendetta again the Protectors.  I think that’s what brings these guys down, they can’t let anything go.  I guess they don’t agree that living well is the best revenge. 

There’s this guy called Bullseye.  He’s very good at throwing things.  There’s this other guy called Boomerang.   He’s also very good at throwing things, mostly boomerangs.  Then there’s a man called Crossfire and he’s, wait for it, also very good at throwing things.   

I worked with Crossfire because he has a group called the Death Throws who are not as good at throwing things as those guys but are still pretty good at throwing things.  I was a pinch-Death Throw for a job.  I can throw a throwing knife okay which was the only requirement for being hired.  There was another Death Throw called Bombshell and she wasn’t happy about me being there because she liked being the only woman in the group. 

Crossfire called me up for a new  job because he and Bullseye and Boomerang were putting a crew together because they were mad at this new group of “good at throwing stuff guys” for being good at throwing stuff, which is gimmick infringement.  Deadeye, not to be confused with Bullseye or Deadshot, and Throwdini and a bunch of other idiots had formed a group to throw stuff and the OG throwing guys weren’t having it.  The Death-Throws were down a person because Bombshell had fallen into a vat of acid (surprisingly common workplace hazard for supervillainy) and they wanted a girl for their counter-group.  They even asked me if I would dye my hair blonde.   

I can understand Bullseye wanting to do this, he’s insane, and Boomerang is a moron so that makes sense that he’d be involved, but Crossfire was in the CIA before he started trying to kill Hawkeye.  He was a CIA field operative.  And now he does things like this.  I tell you, from what I’ve seen there’s something about putting on a spangly costume and rocket boots that rots men’s brains.   

I think the literature on the subject would have you believe that you have to be crazy before you become a supervillain.  That’s certainly the case for the big time villains, but I think there’s a lot of mid-level guys that start out rational, just in in for some money criminals with the intent to get out after a couple jobs.  But then some dude in a cape with a magic ring from outer space bests them and they can’t handle it.  They get obsessed with beating Captain Space Ring and forget all about why they started doing it in the first place.  It’s fascinating.   

The other group of throwing people stuff was called the Rabbit Tribe, I didn’t bother to find out why, and they agreed to meet the newly formed Bulleyes (guess who the leader was) in a spirited bout of throwing stuff at each other until everyone on one side is dead at high noon.   

You can’t make this stuff up.  A bunch of adults agreed to put on costumes and meet at the town square and throw deadly objects at each other, basically for no reason other than to do it.  This is what’s going on in the world.   

Sounds like a gas so I suit up and go out with the Bullseyes and right off the bat before anyone can make any speeches about who’s the best at throwing shit Bullseye knife-throws a throwing knife into Rabbit’s chest.  And let me tell you, it was quite a chest.  There was a problem though because Rabbit is a regenerator.  I think she might be one of twenty to fifty women out there with Wolverine’s DNA.  For a hairy five foot tall fugo that guy gets around.

As more stuff was thrown it became apparent that the Rabbit Tribe were all superpowered in addition to being good throwers, whereas our side were just good throwers.  That’s what analysts call a mismatch.   

Actually I’m not sure about Bullseye.  Is he a guy with super-throwing powers or just a guy who’s really good at throwing stuff in a non-super way?  Several people have told me that they’ve seen him kill people with a thrown toothpick, which sounds like superpowers to me, but I’ve never heard anything about him being a mutant or getting bitten by a radioactive toothpick.

Some of these throwing people use “sensible” gimmicks, like Boomerang and his boomerangs, but some of them go a step farther and throw playing cards or ball bearings because their gimmick is that anything they throw at you is a deadly weapon.  It’s dumb but it saved my life. 

One guy threw dirt at me, which then exploded due to his throwing power.  Another guy threw a poker chip at me so hard it knocked the wind out of me.  But if those had been, you know knives, I would have been dead.  That’s when I triggered the bombs I had rigged up on all the cars along the street at the showdown site and got the hell out of there. 

That job, if you can even call it that, had crossed the line from stupid fun to suicidal lunacy.

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I had another iMinion job get cancelled where I was supposed to work with a guy called Cobra.  We were already waiting when the job was scrubbed so went out for a beer to complain about super-bosses and their silly ways.  I can’t say that having a medical condition like I did is the same as being raised in a lab by asshole scientists like he was, but we had enough in our childhoods to bond over.  We both know what it’s like feel trapped. 

Cobra likes gives me crap about not having a villain name or an outfit.  He usually backs off when I point out to him that there’s like 15 other dudes called Cobra, as well as an entire terrorist organization and that his “costume” is just a cloth mask like Zorro.  We got to be pals and after we had been hanging out for a while he introduced me to his group. 

I’m not a racist.  I know only racists say that but I’m really not.  But after meeting Cobr’as crew I understand better why some people would be afraid of mutants.  All you ever see on the news is the X-Men and whoever they’re fighting.  With a few exceptions those groups are a good looking bunch.  You see that tall redhead in a skin-tight X-suit on the TV whose superpower seems to be double Ds that ignore gravity and you think “why is everyone so mad about these people?” 

Cobra kind of looks like a snake, he has scales anyway, but he’s not so bad to look at.  His friends are a different story.  They’re good guys once you get to know them, but when you first meet a dude who looks like he’s half possum and half sewer sludge you understand where the mutant hysteria comes from. 

They called themselves the Lizard Tribe.  Only one other guy had scales but the name was something from a book or a movie where a lizard guy lived underground and led a rebellion.  They’re not criminals, well, they are because they commit crimes, but it’s a political thing so I think that’s different.  They smash up mutant registration centers and they terrorize people that support anti-mutant legislation.  One time they tried to attack a facility that makes that “cure” for mutants but they got their asses handed to them by those mutant hunting giant robots and had to run away. 

Once when they (we I guess since I helped) kidnapped the daughter of a senator running on an anti-mutant platform I asked Cobra “If these people are afraid of mutants is scaring them more really a good idea?  Won’t that just make them do more bad stuff to mutants?”  He told me that I couldn’t understand what it’s like to be a mutant.  I didn’t say anything more because he’s right, but I still think I have a good point. 

After a while Cobra got involved with a mutant called Rabbit.  The rumor was that she was a clone of X-23, who is herself a clone of Wolverine.  Which doesn’t make sense to me because if they’re clones shouldn’t they be short ugly dudes instead of hot babes?  That goes double for Rabbit because she is a real knockout, some of the lads called her XXX-69 behind her back. 

I don’t know why it happened, but Rabbit got Cobra to double-cross the rest of the Lizard Tribe and set them up for an ambush.  A couple of the Lizard guys got killed and I don’t even know what it was all about.  After that Cobra and one other guy joined up with Rabbit and she started calling them the Rabbit Tribe.  I could tell that Cobra was broken up about what had happened to his crew.  Maybe someday I’ll ask him what happened there.

Rabbit and Cobra cooled off which makes me wonder if getting him to turn on the Lizard Tribe was her plan all along.  Cobra and I drifted apart too.  He was just unhappy most of the time it seemed so it was hard to keep things going friendshipwise.  One day kind of out of the blue Rabbit called him up and said that Bullseye was going to kill her and he called me to come with him and help her.  He was still in her pocket as far as that goes. 

I know that Bullseye is kind of a joke out in the rest of the world because he gets beat up by Daredevil every other week, but in the villain community he’s a name you run away from.  He’s like a made guy.  He’s a named villain.  He’s no match for Daredevil, as has been proven a bunch of times, but he can kill all those people out there who laugh at him easy.  He’s a big deal to people like Rabbit and Cobra and me.

Cobra and I get there just as Bullseye sinks a shiv into Rabbit’s neck at fifty paces.  She can heal, but I don’t know if she can heal that good.  She’s like a copy of a copy of a copy, I don’t think she’s no Wolverine.  If that stuff is even true about her being a clone. 

Bullseye had some other guys with him, Captain Boomerang and some others and a superfight breaks out with the Rabbit Tribe.  That’s when I saw Helen.  She was on the Bullseye side but she was over the whole thing.  She set off some bombs and sprinted away like a deer during the confusion.

She had one of those rubber suits that the lady villains like and she was wearing a mask, but I could see the look in her eyes.  She wasn’t running scared, the look in her eyes was “fuck this bullshit!”  Right then I knew that I had to meet her.