Tag: Superhero
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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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Ellis had started to cry. How could she not? Everything was ruined now, and all of the braveness she had been feeling now left her all at once. Her tears were large and heavy and salty. They fell from her face like the sprinklings for the saddest cake ever baked.
I think I’m going to start crying as well in a minute.
Ellis wanted her Mum. She wanted her Dad. Ellis wanted everything to be exactly how it had been before she set off to rescue Falcon Boy and Bewilder Bird. She didn’t want to be standing backstage at a Doodah concert, staring at a large pile of rubble with a dead superhero beneath it.
There were many things that Ellis didn’t know, but the one thing I think she was pretty sure about right now, is that she really didn’t want to know anything about people she knows dying.
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Okay, so I’m losing the run of myself here, but Falcon Boy’s demise really is a huge loss to the world. Or at least the world I’ve created. If not the world, then at least the story because, if you think about it, what am I going to do now?With Falcon Boy now dead, then so dies the story as well. How can I possibly be writing a book called Falcon Boy and Bewilder Bird versus Dr Don’t Know in a Battle for All the Life of all the Planets when we no longer have a Falcon Boy?
I’m sorry if this is disappointing. You have read the story this far with what, I can only imagine, must have been a great deal of patience, persistence and perseverance.
I’m also guessing the journey has not been an easy one, what with the more than occasional lapses in sentence construction, not to mention some of the far greater crimes committed with narrative construction and the over-liberal use of coincidence for the sake of convenience.
How do you think I feel? Perhaps we would have been better off with Bewilder Bird as the lead character. He’s bigger and stronger than Falcon Boy and as we have just seen, hasn’t died in the battle with the Troublebot. To think that I have wasted two years of my life putting this story together, only to find that the central character isn’t strong enough to survive.
What am I going to do about the other two books I am planning? I already have the first drafts of those complete. I really don’t have the heart to begin all over again with another superhero and another friend and another villain with another evil plan and another resourceful child saving another foolish world from more total and utter destruction.
You were probably even beginning to think that Falcon Boy and his friends were going to successfully thwart the evil plans of Dr Don’t Know. It doesn’t matter now, as Falcon Boy’s careless use of a drum stool as a weapon had caused an enormous explosion, which buried him and the Troublebot he was fighting beneath a huge pile of broken masonry, flight cases, ceiling and other general bits of broken backstage stuff.
One of the Troublebot’s badly-designed legs was sticking out of the rubble and, were you able to focus on anything other than the complete and utter tragedy of the situation, you would probably remark upon the fact that, from a design perspective, the explosion had somewhat improved the ergonomic line of the robot’s leg.
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It’s over. End. Of. The. Road. The Line. The Story. The Trilogy. The Film. Action Figure. Lunch Box. Duvet Cover. Video Game. Fast Food Endorsements. Chat Shows. Award Ceremonies. The. End. Of. All. Things. Ever. Falcon Boy is no more.
He is gone. Missing in action. Vanished in a puff of grimy, oily smoke. Consumed by a conflagration. Farewell Clayton Candlegrease. Au revoir to the small man with the big dreams. Adios to the hairy top lip. We will never now see that moustache in full bloom. Goodbye. Thanks for everything. And nothing (really). It truly has been emotional.O, most-lamented hero of the super kind. Your type will never be known again. You, who were the rarest and most noblest of breeds. Gone before your time. Because the soles of your boots were not rubber.
His family will be getting a telegram. A phone call. An email. A headline in the local newspaper. A mention on the news. I can picture Juniper Jarvis now.
‘Hi everyone, my name is Juniper Jarvis and I’m reporting live for 123 Celebrity News.’
She turns so that the stadium is behind her.
‘The big news today is the death of that much-loved superhero Falcon Boy, who sacrificed himself to save the lives of his friends, Ellis and Bewilder Bird, and by doing so also saved the whole planet as well.’ Juniper turns to Bewilder Bird who is standing next to her.
‘I am joined by Bewilder Bird, who was there when his friend and co-hero passed away.’
Juniper has to hold the microphone higher than usual because Bewilder Bird is so tall. She smiles.
‘So, Bewilder Bird. Perhaps you could tell us what happened?’
Bewilder Bird doesn’t answer.
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The Troublebot stopped struggling and started short-circuiting instead. Bewilder Bird leapt up as the mortally wounded man-like machine twitched and smoked and arced on the floor. Luckily for him, the one good thing about his useless boots was the fact that they were rubber-soled. Otherwise things might have gone far worse than anyone would have liked.Falcon Boy, on the other hand, was not so lucky. His boots had some kind of artificial soles and Falcon Boy now found himself fused to the dying Troublebot.
‘Falcon Boy!’ screamed Ellis. ‘You’ve got to let go! It’s going to explode!’ And she was right. The Troublebot was about to explode.
‘I can’t,’ squealed the superhero. ‘I can’t let go.’ The electrical charge that powered the Troublebot had shorted up through the metal leg of the drum stool and Falcon Boy’s hands were now stuck fast. Oblivious to all this panic and consternation, the Troublebot went about dying in a noisy and sparky way.
‘Jumping Jupiter!’ screamed Falcon Boy as the Troublebot exploded in a horrendous flash of thick, oily, sparky smoke.
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Ellis opened her eyes to see Falcon Boy crown the Troublebot with a drum stool he had conveniently found. With a glorious THWAAKKKK! the stool connected with the Troublebot’s forehead and down went the poorly-made metal imitation of a man. Bewilder Bird was right behind his feathered friend holding a cymbal stand.‘Take that, you badly-soldered brute!’ shouted Falcon Boy as he went at the Troublebot with the drum stool. ‘No one threatens anyone around here unless it is us doing the threatening!’ Bewilder Bird nodded his head in total agreement and joined in with the cymbal stand.
CLANG! CRASH! KAPOW!!!!!!!!!
‘The grille!’ shouted Falcon Boy. ‘You’ve got to open their grille. You can only stop a Troublebot by opening the grille on its chest and jamming their workings.’
How on earth does Falcon Boy know this? With everything happening right now, I haven’t got time to tell you but if I get a chance, I will tell you later. If I don’t get a chance, then maybe you can decide for yourselves how Falcon Boy came by this information.
Bewilder Bird dropped the cymbal stand, threw himself on top of the Troublebot and started wrestling with it. Troublebots are pretty strong, but are not at their best when laying flat on their back. Battling with one arm to stop the flailing Troublebot from dislodging him, Bewilder Bird eventually managed to pry open the grille.
Falcon Boy approached the Troublebot with his drum stool. With a shrug and a shove, and also a very real disregard for his own personal safety, Falcon Boy rammed the metal leg of the stool into the Troublebot’s inner workings. A shower of sparks erupted from the Troublebot’s chest and soared into the air like a fancy firework.
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Just before they reached the dressing room, the three friends bumped into the Rebel Robot MCs who had just finished their set.
BARNABY TAYLOR 