The Spectacular Spinnerette (Frost and Z.G.)

[☢☢Zombies Galore☢☢]

ISSUE #1 (APR 2016): SPINNERETTE TEACHES TAX ETIQUETTE

Do not desire to seek who once we were,
Or where we did, or what, or in whose name.
Those buildings have been torn down.

- For City Lovers
by Stephen Vincent Benet​

From one perspective there was a government building held hostage by someone the papers had referred to as an “otherworldly nutbar,” and from another it was being annexed from the invaders for the greater glory of Autochthonia. Few people were able to truly penetrate the rambling treatises Alienist regularly sent to media outlets, and those organizations had long ago lost interest in the contradictory and bizarre statements issued within. This attitude ultimately lead to the events of April 14th, the day that Alienist decided to take the IRS building.

He had flown in at 10 AM on the back of a pterodactyl like creature, albeit a wet skinned, pulsing mockery possessing three wings and a mass of tentacles where its beak would have been. It skidded to a halt on the roof, a cluster of vestigial promethean limbs breaking to absorb the landing impact.

The villain, clad in a green body sleeve with an obsidian disc mask hopped from its back after cooing nonsense syllables to sooth the weeping creature. He snapped a verdant green gloved hand, forcing the creature to twist in on itself with a grateful squawk before disappearing. Alienist walked over the black roof tiles and stepped up onto the ledge, looking down five stories to the milling mess below him.

“This is my right,” he said to himself, arms akimbo. He turned that round plate mask up to the sun feeling the light warm the glassy, matte black circle. Both of his arms shot up, fingers wide open. As he pulled them down to balled fists at his sides fat wounds tore open in reality unleashing a putrid stench.

And a rain of giant, starfish limbed creatures falling out like plastic monkeys being shaken from a child’s toy container. The spun and flopped in mid air, their fat pseudopods bouncing when the hit the roof. Approximately half missed, silently falling to their doom on the asphalt.

A select handful of pedestrians soon found themselves covered in the already putrid entrails of mottled brown-gray monsters, strange muscles twitching in thick ropy masses.

“Children! For Autochthonia!” Alienist cried in a reedy tenor, pointing down the sides of the IRS building. They lurched to the sides, pseudopods contracting and relaxing as they whumped their way across the roof and then down the sides. More portals opened, raining yet more oversized leech skinned starfish down around the villain.

The monsters punched their way through windows, throwing themselves at auditors and administrators alike without any other concern than subduing the hostages. On two legs they towered over all but the tallest office workers, revealing a puckered sphincter ringed with rows of concentric fangs steadily oozing thick yellow slime.

As the invasion went on more and more starfish monsters fell through his portals until they convered the outside of the building, the only spaces uncovered by their forms the holes they had bashed into the windows. Lines of them formed around the building in waves while Alienist directed them, looked through the optical spots that covered their bodies and listened in through microscopic resonant array dimples.

He dug a phablet out of his pocket, an off brand thing with a Linux based OS that, in conjunction with some common underground services, allowed for practical anonymity. The irony of that had never struck him.

First he dialed 911, “This is the Alienist. These are my demands:

“First, repatriation of all Autochthonic artifacts to Autochthonia.

“Second, in the Pledge of Allegiance, in place of ‘One Nation under God, etcetera, etcetera’ shall be ‘a group of feeble, oppressed shitheads bent under the yoke of Autochtonia, readily subjugated, with liberty and justice for only those who know their place.’

“Finally, I will have a statue erected in my honor. Next to a horse,” he paused speculatively, then clarified, “with five legs.

“If these are not fulfilled within the next three hours I will begin to eviscerate every IRS auditor in this misbegotten city.” Demands safely left with a speechless emergency services operator Alienist closed the call and next made short calls to each of the major media organizations with stringers in the city, as he had a handful of times already, to repeat his demands and trailing threat.

Once the communications were taken care of he slotted the phablet back into one of the secret pockets littering his body sleeve and closed his eyes. Someone would show in almost no time--it wasn’t some vigilante it would be the military. He felt deeply ambivalent about either as potential foes: some alleged heroes were pushovers and some operated with the safety off by default, much like the military. However the military was significantly less prepared to deal with the kind of danger he and his ilk brought to the fore.

With that in mind he staged the starfish, creating baffles and traps throughout the building in preparation for the upcoming battle. He directed one to break through the utility door on the roof, “Thank you,” he muttered to the slobbering nightmare.

Then someone came--a blur at first, mercilessly ending starfish after starfish. He felt faint echoes of that life ending pain ripple out along their crude psychic network, the one he facilitated serving to make them freeze and stutter and fall like so many drunken ballerinas.

Alienist stopped in the stairwell. “Ah, fuck me running. That was fast.” He ran a hand over his blank mask, bloodshot brown eyes fluttering as a starfish he had linked his perceptions to exploded in a burst of otherworldly gore.

 

[Frost]

"H'okay. Alright. I got this. Just adjust a little bit here, aim a little higher and--"

It was impossible to describe the sound that 140 pounds of muscle, silk, and flowy red hair made when it was slingshotted by superpowered webs somewhere in excess of a hundred miles an hour toward the top of the local taxman's building. Many had indeed tried, and the closest they could come up with was: "VWIIIIP--- EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!"

A figure went rocketing past the lip of the building... and kept right on going, spiraling like a football until it was about a hundred and fifty feet above the roof top, the ascent slowing until she was outlined in perfect relief against the clouds above. She was beautiful, red-haired, pale-skinned, and wrapped in her own webbing, forming a haphazard uniform that marked her as the unmistakable, uncanny, and spectacular Spinnerette.

Below, the predictable clichés were disseminated amongst the populace.

"It's a bird!" said a man.

"It's a plane!" said a woman.

A weary SWAT sergeant buried his face into his hands. "... no, it's en enormous goddamn pile of paperwork and tax dollars down the drain," he muttered.

Webs shot down toward the building, connecting to the weather-worn roof surface where one of those starfish aliens slithered along, basking blithely in the sun's rays. Spinnerette stalled there momentarily before she jerked on her own webbing, aiding gravity's inexorable pull and launching herself into terminal velocity. Only, it never was for her. It was usually just for whatever she happened to hit.

Her fist broke through it, exploding it like a balloon... and the ceiling went with it. She tore down through that building and straight into the next floor. Reflexes were all too fast, grabbing onto one, two, then three starfish on the way down through the floors, dragging them with her into a blender of fists and rebar. Eventually, her fall was slowed on that fourth floor, right onto the top of a steel stairway meant for an emergency escape during fires.

And in the midst of the dust, Spinnerette called out in a pleasantly feminine voice:

"There are only two things certain in this world! Death, and taxes!"

She grinned through her webbing mask.

"Looks like you picked the right place for both."

 

[☢☢Zombies Galore☢☢]

Luckily for Alienist and his charges, the heroine's rousingly idiomatic introductory monologue gave them the time they needed to get over the pain feedback that had unexpectedly blanketed the psychic network. The villain leaned back against the wall, beads of sweat soaking into his neon green elastine skullcap.

There was no way the starfish would be able to handle her effectively or en masse--he would need something beefier, and for that he needed more intense focus. With a sigh the villain began twitching his hands in shooing motions. With each rotation a starfish creature gratefully twisted in on itself in a tight wad of green cracks, thankful to escape what it primitively understood to be its death.

The evacuation took place from the farthest edges of his network, starting at the ground floor and slowing working their way up.

~

Meanwhile, when Spinnerette made her plucky entrance she was greeted with a chorus of screams. The mostly middle aged hostages were sat down in a line by a cadre of unfeeling Autochthonian monsters, their sabretooth fanged maws quivering. Each razor sharp tooth glistened with saliva, thick ropes of it obscenely slicking down each monster's backside.

They had been trading theories, having been entirely cut off from the rest of the world by way of angry, giant starfish.

“Sea Man!” One fifty-five year old associate auditor cried out through the ringing in his ears and burning eyes.

“What? No!” The intern yelled, frantically crawling to her desk in a pencil skirt. She managed to find her bottle of water and upended it over her eyes, audibly sighing in relief. “It's the plaster dust from the ceiling, just what is wrong with you, James?”

The editor snorted and shook his head as the ringing subsided. It was hard to tell if it he was flushed from the kind of cardio only pants pissing terror provides or embarrassment. Both had a similar radish coloring in the man. “Not that! Christ, Kelly, get your head out of the gutter. I meant it must be Sea,,” he paused, “Man. From the Liberty Association.”

Kelly stood up and then immediately flopped down on an office chair while glancing at the poor state of her coworkers. All of them were wholly limbed and, more to the point, none of them looked (or smelled, mostly smelled) like they had voided their bowls.

This internship was just not cushy enough for that.

“Sorry,” she managed to get out. “But, I mean, why would a hero go rogue?”

“No, I mean, the ruckus. The building ruining affair going on above us.”

~

With the diminishing starfish lessening the load, Alienist knew just what was next. He snapped upwards and aimed his blank, reflective mask at Spinnerette.

“You’ll never understood honor, Spinnerette! Today I stand for the greatest liberty, the recognition of Autochthonians in their rightful land! There shall be no more taxation without representation, and soon we shall see Autochthonian as the national language. Too long have the invaders, you and your ilk,” he spat, fists blazing verdant green, “walked this pure land and corrupted it.

“More than that,” he brought his fists down, unleashing the Autochthonian he would use to distract her in a pile down the hall from Spinnerette. “As a patriot it is my duty… To stop you!”

Wet popping noises gave the game away behind Spinnerette, revealing the wet, fleshly version of something that resembled a stripped tree. There was a nearly pyramidal trunk with the same brown-green mottling as the starfish, and at its base a mass that closely resembled a tree’s root ball. Except root balls certainly did not have a disheartening propensity to churn like that, and the trunks never deflated as each of those tendrils shot out.

The creature snagged the heroine and slammed her bodily through the wall, while several other tentacles spiked into the concrete, anchoring it into the ground for the full body through. Unlike the starfish that had earlier stood sentry this creature was clearly warm bloodied, at least insofar as the heroine would be able to tell it was a lot warmer than the cold, slimy monsters she had single handedly beaten to explosion.

The trunk was low, canted on the far side from Spinnerette. The creature leaped forward and pressed the attack while Alienist took the stairs two at a time, all but flying back upwards away from his foe. The villain fed every bit of aggression and fear into the summoned monster, internally screaming at it to end Spinnerette.

Unwilling to disappoint Alienist, Autochthonia’s greatest revolutionary, the creature unmoored itself from the walls and jumped through the hole it had freshly created with Spinnerette’s body. Myriad legs pushed against the ground in a strange gate, tens of the things working in harmony to propel its great mass forward. The floor hardly creaked when it made for another pounce, sending a fistful of tendrils flying to slap her to the side, then going in for a toss through a cubicle.

 

[Frost]

Spinnerette had a bevy of powers at her fingertips. She had never quite understood where those powers had come from, only that they had something to do with some manner of spider totem she had once found out on a college hike somewhere in the depths of southeast Asia. Among those powers came a sort of sense, a feeling for the world around her. The way air brushed against her told her so much about the world around her, and distantly she was aware of the hostages she had yet to save.

Which was fine. In her experience, saving the hostages first usually took time and opened them all up to be vulnerable. Violently beating the bad guy to a pulp first usually worked out better. Mooks had such a tendency to give up when someone planted a fist somewhere between the lungs and colon of whomsoever happened to actually be signing their checks.

... did starfish even get paychecks from this douche?

Questions for later.

"Hey, hey. I already went through this once with Crazy Bull up on the rez. Just because things aren't going so well for your people doesn't mean that killing people is the answer. I mean, look at you! You could have run for public office! Be like, 'hey, at least I'm up front about being a giant slimeball'. They'd appreciate your honesty," Spinnerette said.

As he slammed his fists down, Spinnerette launched herself at him, her face a mask of grim determination. Behind her actual mask of webbing. She raised her hands, calling her webs to shoot from her wrists. The webs were bare inches from gracing the Aliensit before the monster basically came out of nowhere and made her eat complete shit. The tendrils wrapped tight around her body, and she gasped as she went through a wall, covering her in plaster and ripping her silken costume across the back. She was in an office now, and had even gone through a cubicle on the other side.

"... fucking... illegal... aliens," Spinnerette muttered under her breath. She saw the monster coming through the hole after her, and she rolled backwards onto her hands and thence into a flip. In the air, she locked blue eyes on its warm-blooded form (it was definitely a different breed of whatever than the other starfish had been) and her webs lashed out. Her body stalled in the air as her webs latched onto the wall on either side of the alien, the webs going taut with tension--

The webs snapped back, driving her body right back into the alien feet first just as it was leaping at her in turn. "Come get some!" she yelled at it. It was her usual go-to move, a slingshot kick into whatever enemy was after her. Usually it was enough, a hundred and thirty pounds of superpowered muscle going at terminal speeds.

But her usual opponents were not so tricky, squishy, and presumably shock-absorbent.