Tag: Indie Publishing
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If this was an adventure you were watching on the television or reading in a comic book, you would be advised to tune in next time or wait until the next edition to find out what will happen. However, this is the book that the television programme and comic book series will be based on (Hint! Hint!), so you won’t have as long to wait. In fact, I will tell you now.With the smallest of run-ups and a minimum of back lift, Falcon Boy hurled himself feet-first at the Troublebot’s head. The Troublebot rolled across the corridor and managed to staple its finger to its own ear.
This was another situation that the Troublebot had not been programmed to react to and so it was forced to pause while its brain-computer furiously tried to figure out a solution.
‘Careful,’ shouted Ellis, ‘it’s thinking what to do next.’
The Troublebot got to its badly-designed feet. Bewilder Bird (just about) managed to foot-sweep the Troublebot and it crashed to the floor again. Falcon Boy grabbed a fire extinguisher.
‘Think about this,’ he shouted as he emptied its contents into the Troublebot’s chest. This time, the shower of sparks flew from the Troublebot’s chest like a shower of sparks and the robot died noisily on the floor.
‘That was close,’ said Falcon Boy as he and Bewilder Bird high-fived each other.
‘Here we go again,’ thought Ellis as she sat on the edge of the crate and waited for the two of them to get bored.
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Dancing like a boxer trying to find an opening, Bewilder Bird got a little too light on his feet and his boots got tangled. With a slip and a cry he fell forwards, knocking Ellis and the flight case out of his way. This was all the advantage that the Troublebot needed and with a blood-curdling groan from its straining motor-pistons, it launched itself at Bewilder Bird, pinning him to the ground.
With all of its weight placed firmly on Bewilder Bird’s chest, the Troublebot began to decide which one of its finger-tool attachments it would need to take out this meddling superhero. The tin opener, the serrated scissors, the compass and the toothpick were quickly rejected in favour of the hole punch and stapler attachment and so the struggle began.
Would the Troublebot manage to hole punch and then staple Bewilder Bird to within an inch of his life? Would the helpless superhero manage to break free from the deadly vice-like grip of his metallic foe? What about our hero’s friends? Will they react in time to save the day? Or is Bewilder Bird doomed?
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Bewilder Bird was the first to act. He pinned the Troublebot to the wall with his shoulder. Ellis was next. She pushed an abandoned flight case as hard as she could against the robot’s legs. Bewilder Bird jumped out of the way and the Troublebot was trapped. The Troublebot couldn’t reach far enough with its arms to grab Ellis.
We will never truly know if the Troublebot’s inability to grab Ellis was due to a flaw in the design and construction process. However, no one involved in the design process, it appears, visualised a situation when a Troublebot might need arms long enough to grab a small child in order to prevent itself from being pinned to a wall by a discarded flight case.
Whether or not the problem here was one of human error, flaws in the design process, or shoddy market research and product testing, the Troublebot now found itself in very real trouble.
With a shout and a swoop, Falcon Boy leapt onto the crate and started jabbing at the robot with a mop he had found. Ellis kept pushing and pretty soon the Troublebot’s logic circuits were close to collapse. It couldn’t work out what to do to escape.
Should it grab the small child pushing the crate? Or smash its fist into the face of the annoying man with the hairy top lip? The Troublebot couldn’t decide and ended up doing neither. It was Bewilder Bird who made the decision for it.
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The friends arrived at Doodah’s dressing room to find a security guard standing outside, holding a clipboard. The guard wore a baseball cap with the peak pulled down over its face. He was also wearing a fluorescent tabard with ‘SIKURETY’ stencilled on it.
‘That’s not how you spell ‘security’,’ said Ellis. She went to open the door to the dressing room.
‘No entry, Miss,’ said the guard menacingly. ‘Doodah cannot be disturbed.’ The guard put his gloved hand on Ellis’s head.‘That’s a heavy hand,’ thought Ellis.
‘Get out of my way,’ exclaimed Falcon Boy. ‘I am Falcon Boy and I am here on official world-saving business.’
Bewilder Bird stood next to him.
‘This is my disaster-averting colleague, Bewilder Bird, and we must both be afforded every co-operation by yourself and anyone else we meet in the execution of our duties.’
Falcon Boy stood as tall as he could in front of the guard.
‘I have also just come back from the dead, so kindly step aside and let us heroes take control of the situation.’
‘I don’t care,’ said the guard. ‘Even if your name is Ronny Rocket Chops and you are planning on painting the whole planet pink, you are definitely not down on my list and therefore you are not allowed in to see the band.’
‘But you haven’t even checked your guest list,’ countered Falcon Boy, still with the wind in his sails, ‘so how do you know I am not allowed in?’
‘I don’t need to know,’ said the guard, ‘because I do know and I know you’re not.’
Now, we all know that Falcon Boy is sometimes left to one side by public displays of logic and reason, but on this occasion, even he wasn’t entirely convinced by the guard’s argument.
‘Let me see,’ he said, attempting to snatch the clipboard from the guard’s hand.
‘Stop that!’ shouted the guard. A tussle ensued. As the guard and the superhero grabbed at each other and the clipboard, Ellis heard a tremendous RIIIIIIIIIIIP!!! One of the guard’s sleeves was ripped clean off to reveal a rusting metal arm.
‘Not another one!’ groaned Falcon Boy and Ellis together.
‘Crush you all!’ declared the now-revealed malevolent menacing metal maniacal monster.
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With Falcon Boy back from the dead, everything was now go-go-go again. The smirk on his face was a mile wide and he couldn’t stop jabbing his larger friend on the bicep.
‘Back from the dead, eh?’ he said. ‘Now that’s a story for heroes if I ever heard one.’
Obviously, Bewilder Bird didn’t reply. Ellis turned around.
‘Come on,’ she said to the friends, ‘we’ve got to find Doodah straight away.’ The trio set off.
‘If only we had our very own Windy,’ Ellis wished to herself. ‘I could send him running for the authorities while we wait here.’
Just before they reached the dressing room, the three friends bumped into the Rebel Robot MCs who had just finished their set.Sadly, however, due to the profoundly punitive reporting restrictions laid down by the Fuzzy Cola© Corporation, not only am I not allowed to tell you anything about what they did during their performance, I am also not allowed to tell you anything about what they did for ‘no less than one hour after any performance’.
I am allowed to tell you that Ellis was really pleased to see them. I can also tell you that she wanted to have her picture taken with DJ Slo-Mo, her favourite of the three rappers, but was not allowed to, due to the fact that ‘no unauthorised recording equipment or related technology, whether audio, visual, audio-visual or indeed any other technology or technique not yet invented but capable of analogue and/or digital capture were it to be conceived, considered and/or invented, is allowed within three metres of the Rebel Robot MCs, either singly, in a group, or in any other combination thereof.’
So that was that then.
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‘Of course,’ lisped Falcon Boy through his fat lip. He pointed at the pile of rubble, ‘but someone else doesn’t look so good right now.’
‘We thought that you were under there,’ said Ellis. ‘We thought that you were dead.’ She started sobbing again. ‘I’m pleased you’re not.’
‘So am I,’ smiled Falcon Boy sheepishly. ‘I don’t remember much, but I’m guessing that in one of those very lucky story-saving-type things that only happen in certain kinds of adventures, I was somehow thrown clear when the Troublebot exploded.’
Bewilder Bird stopped sobbing. He stood and stared at Falcon Boy. Falcon Boy stared back. Bewilder Bird smiled. Falcon Boy smiled. At this point, it felt as if the whole world had paused for a very brief second and then this feeling was over before it had even begun and our two superheroes high-fived each other and started their celebratory posing once again.
‘Stop!’ shouted Ellis. ‘We don’t have time for that now.’ The superheroes stopped celebrating. ‘Listen,’ continued Ellis, ‘that Troublebot thing was disguised as one of Doodah’s backing dancers.’
She looked down at the Troublebot to see that it had now finished convulsing. ‘This must be part of Dr Don’t Know’s terrible plan.’ She shivered slightly and as she paused, Falcon Boy couldn’t resist flexing his biceps in his friend’s direction. Bewilder Bird found it impossible not to giggle.
‘We haven’t got time for tomfoolery,’ said Ellis. Both superheroes were giggling now. ‘I think we had better get back to Doodah’s dressing room before something else happens.’
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Ellis carried on crying. Her crying bubbled upwards in great gushing jags that showed no sign of stopping. If I don’t do something very soon, she is likely to faint from her grief and that is not going to make anyone feel any better. Here goes nothing.
Someone placed a hand on Ellis’s shoulder. She was too upset to turn around.
‘What’s the matter?’ asked the someone behind Ellis. ‘Why are you crying?’
Ellis was so upset, she couldn’t reply. She just carried on crying. Were you standing behind Ellis at this point, you would see Bewilder Bird’s shoulders shaking as he was consumed by his silent grief. Touched by the sadness of the scene, the someone standing behind Ellis started to cry as well.
‘Looks like something terrible has happened here,’ sobbed the someone. ‘Something really bad.’ The same someone sobbed some more. ‘Whatever are we going to do now?’
The someone behind her sounded familiar. A thought stirred deep within Ellis, an idea beyond her grief. She turned around.
Falcon Boy’s shirt was singed, and ripped beneath the left armpit. His left trouser leg was scorched at the cuff, and Ellis could see a hairy leg through the hole in the knee. The visible parts of his face were blackened from the blast, and his tears had streaked watery little lines through the dirt. A fat lip made his moustache look wider.
‘You’re okay,’ sobbed Ellis. ‘You’re okay.’
She was stunned. Bewilder Bird turned as well. He would have been lost for words if only words were his thing.
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Bewilder Bird sobbed silently but violently. His large shoulders heaved up and down as the tide of his grief washed over him like a stormy sea. To begin with, he picked and pawed at the pile of rubble, dislodging a brick here and bit of plaster there, but clearly nothing was going to move and so he gave up and was now just standing and sobbing and staring.
When this book is made into a film, this will be the moment when the camera pulls back to show us Ellis and Bewilder Bird standing on either side of the same frame with the pile of rubble in the middle of them. And when we see this set-up we, like the critics who will review this film once it is released, and review it favourably, will understand that we are watching the two friends united in their loss of Falcon Boy but separated by their grief.
At this moment, we also have to understand that without Falcon Boy, there was no longer any reason for Ellis to be here alone with a grown man wearing a badly-fitting superhero outfit with a foolish pair of bird-claw-boots that always trip him up.
By the same token, of course, without his foolish friend with the hairy top lip and the crazy dreams, there was no reason for Bewilder Bird to be standing in front of a pile of rubble with a young child who had somehow been allowed to escape the attentions of her parents.
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Normally, we would look for parallels of Ellis’s experiences with those of Pearly Stockwell, but on this occasion, the child detective’s adventures haven’t yet caused her to stare Death directly in the face.
Pearly is an orphan, as the captions say at the start of every adventure, but her parents died when she was three weeks old and so she never knew them. Surprisingly, or unsurprisingly, depending on how much regard you hold the various writers of the Pearly Stockwell series in, nothing else is ever said about her parents and aside from the fact of her inheritance, this aspect of Pearly is never ever explored. (This may well change, of course, as the editorial team responsible for the Pearly Stockwell series tend to have a very high turnover and the franchise is in continual need of reinvention).
Those of you who have read the series for yourselves will know that the writers tend to prefer to keep people alive for what often seem like solely spiteful reasons, and many is the time that you find yourself thinking that perhaps the death of a particular character would prevent them from having to face the kind of humiliation that a gifted but fictional child detective is always capable of dishing out.
Anyway, on with the sadness.
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While Falcon Boy, Ellis and Bewilder Bird were busy battling the Troublebot, Doodah were having troubles of their own. It was now only minutes before show time and Donny had disappeared.
BARNABY TAYLOR 