Spanner Chapter 14: When the Cat's Away (Revised)

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Chaos Angel Spanner — Book 1: Rock City Blues
Chapter 14: When the Cat’s Away (Revised)

During last chapter’s titular “Battle of Evergreen Park,” people start learning about the surprise visit by some of the most feared leaders of the American Empire, led by King Patriot I of Texas, who is really Roger Steele Becket: founder of Dictel Corporation, father of the Becket brothers and their sister Drusilla — and the most dangerous man on earth. Fearing another Spanner Incident, or worse, the people who can afford it do the prudent thing and get the hell out of Metropolitan Seattle as soon as possible, leaving the poor and homeless majority to face the Empire’s wrath.

That means Team Bremelo have the run of Bremerton High. They can do what they want without the danger of spies like Kelly alerting their enemies. So what do they do? Go skinny dipping in the new swimming pool, then shower together coed in the pool building’s boys’ locker room. Jennifer and Leila realize their brothers look beautiful enough together that they immediately start to ’ship them...

But the fun and games can’t last. Preparation for the invasion must begin. The Bremeloes join forces with the Slasher Hunters and the hacker group known as the Wrecking Krewe. They work out their countermeasures. And then they must make an invasion of their own: a meeting of the Klown gangs, who are planning a terror attack of their own on the Conservative Revolutionary leaders, involving a blood sacrifice of pit bulls — and virgins...

Table of Contents:

1. City in Flight (August 24, 2011)
2. Fujoshi Paradise (August 25, 2011)
3. Optional School Day (August 26, 2011)
4. I Choose Free Will (August 27, 2011)
5. For His Satanic Majesty (August 28, 2011)
6. Last Chance for Free Play (August 29, 2011)

The original introduction refers to certain problems with the first draft, and to the still unfinished prequel/trial run Bad Company: A Corporate Terror Story. Other than that, the major changes fit this chapter into the stronger second-edition continuity.

So far, most of the action following Chapter 1 has been a series of fight scenes that I've had a hard time translating from comics script fragments into unvisual prose. From now on, it's no longer going to be just a series of Challenges in the never-ending "Tournament" that invaded the schools from the streets. Now we leave the high school corridors and go back to the mean streets where the gangsters, terrorists, and cops rule. And the cops have just gotten their bloody hands on the very latest in bleeding-edge law enforcement technology. Expect the crooks to steal it from the cops soon, just like they always do.

So far, the yuri fans have gotten all the fun. Now at last it’s time for them to take a back seat for once and make way for the yaoi fangirls. The girls have gotten to throw themselves at each other since Chapter 3; now the boys get to go at it. Face it: the boys want beautiful Robert Shelley just as badly as the girls do. But to balance this out, I’m going to introduce another of the great clichés of manga and anime, the Evil Bishounen. Arvid Shield is starting to get too ambiguous, so I need a beautiful boy who can incarnate pure hideous evil. So, from the pages of my unfinished prequel Bad Company: A Corporate Terror Story, I bring you one of its major villains.

Scenarios taken from my Project Notebooks of the early ’00s: the Law of Plausible Deniability, the coed shower scene, the band called Gang and their frontman Eddie Evil, the interrupted sacrifice, and the police [correction] Slasher Hunters’ raid on the pit bull fights.

Fasten your seatbelts, faithful readers! The pirate ship Spanner is about to shift into warp drive, and the real chaos is about to begin...

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Copyright © 2011 Dennis Jernberg. Some rights reserved.