The Moderator Saga: Armed & Dangerous

“Oh, good,” CrazySugarFreakBoy! greeted Helen MacAllistair, Muffy B. Harplicker and Brap as they returned to the area of the underground storage facility where Flapjack and Functionary had been searching for supplies. “For a while, I was worried this was gonna be a total sausage festival,” Dreamcatcher Kokopelli Foxglove grinned at Helen and Muffy, before noticing Brap, “I mean … no offense, dude.”

“None taken,” the French-accented bipedal pig bowed.

“Don’t mind us,” Flapjack leered reassuringly at Helen, which failed to reassure her, “we’re just catching up on old times with Dream here.”

Helen regarded the wanted former member of the New Lair Legion, who had tied the left arm of his Silly Suit around his chest, to serve as a tourniquet for the wound where his left arm used to be, which was wet with neon green blood. “You two know each other?” Helen addressed Flapjack and Dream skeptically.

“Hell, I know both of ‘em,” Dream claimed between chugs of Rocket Fuel Soda Pop, using the bottle in his right hand to gesture toward Flapjack and Functionary, as Helen spotted that he’d already drained several dozen other bottles.

“He apparently remembers working with us,” Functionary explained, pausing pensively before he elaborated, “as supervillains.”

“Hey, all I’m saying is, I remember you hiring Flapjack,” Dream reasoned, as he tossed the now-empty Rocket Fuel Soda Pop bottle to join the pile of others on the floor, “I remember being a member of a team that you led, and I remember Flapjack working for a reality-rewriting archvillain … and besides, I already know I was a bad guy, so …” Dream shrugged, before he snapped his fingers. “Revisionary! That’s what you were called!”

Helen shut her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose. “I suppose we can scarcely afford to turn down any assistance at this point,” she finally shook her head. “Besides, your newfound old friend might be able to make use of something we’ve discovered.” At this prompt, Muffy and Brap set down the stack of crates they’d been carrying, and Brap grabbed Flapjack’s crowbar to pry open the wooden side of the heaviest one, on the bottom, revealing a collection of dull gray robotic technology.

“Are those … android parts?” Functionary squinted in recognition.

Helen blinked in surprise. “Yes,” she nodded, genuinely impressed, “good eye. Anyway, this was one of The Moderator’s many abandoned projects. Some time ago, the New Lair Legion captured a Transformer from the planet Cybertron – specifically, an Autobot who identified herself as ‘Glitch’ – who had been sent on a reconnaissance mission to Earth. Before she escaped, we determined that she was composed entirely of Imaginesium,” here, she turned to Dream, “an alloy whose properties were strikingly similar to those of your Impossibilitium Silly Suit.”

“My Impossibilitium everything,” Dream grimaced, as his right hand clutched the sore, bloody wound where his left arm had been. “I’m entirely composed of the stuff, too.”

“Yes,” Helen agreed, “The Moderator knew that. He also suspected that your Impossibilitium makeup would make you harder to control, and considered replacing you with a series of clones, but ruled that out as soon as he realized that any such cloned copies would be likely to be even more unstable than the original, if only because of the degradation and loss of resolution that tend to be inherent in most cloning processes.”

“So he opted to create a … synthezoid instead?” Functionary deduced.

“The Moderator declined to include me in that particular discussion,” Helen conceded, pursing her lips peevishly, “but from what I was able to gather, either Muffy, Al or both were tasked with synthesizing Imaginesium alloy, with which to produce CalmSereneFlunkyBoy… facsimiles … but in spite of their most brilliant work, the damned stuff remained stubbornly … inert.”

Dream burst into barking, braying laughter. “Of course it did!” he bellowed. “Nobody but an Agent of Chaos can create, discover or activate Impossibilitium or Imaginesium!”

Helen smirked as she knelt down, peered into the crate and pulled out an artificial left arm. “And you’re an Agent of Chaos.”

Dream’s face fell suddenly, but slowly gave way to a smile that spread from ear to ear, as he grasped the implications and reached out his right hand, gratefully accepting the substitute appendage that Helen held out to him. “Oh, yeah,” Dream called out, as it occurred to him that he needed an extra hand, literally, to untie the left arm of his Silly Suit, and unzip it low enough to slide it down off his left shoulder, “can I get a little help, here?”

Brap pushed another, smaller crate over for Dream to sit on, while Flapjack removed Dream’s makeshift tourniquet with a practiced skill.

“This might hurt a bit,” Helen warned Dream, wincing sympathetically as she supported his shaky right arm, to guide him in attaching the artificial arm properly to his left side.

“No, it’s gonna hurt a lot,” Dream chuckled, even as he sweated, trembled and breathed deeply to steel himself, before he jammed the plug of the artificial arm into the socket of his open wound.

The dull grays of the metallic left arm exploded into blindingly fluorescent oranges and neon greens, as its shiny, synthetic fibers leaped to life and expanded to envelop the day-glo yellow flesh around the area of the wound, spreading far enough to completely cover Dream’s left pectoralis major muscle in front, and his left shoulder blade in back.

As Dream screamed in pain, Helen returned the tight grip of his right hand on her own, while Flapjack gritted his teeth and continued to press the artificial arm firmly in place at the shoulder. Once the lightshow had finally subsided, Functionary rushed forward to catch Dream as he passed out.

When Dream’s eyes fluttered open again, he wearily rubbed his eyelids with the fingers of his left hand, then went wide-eyed with wakefulness at the fact that he had a left hand again, albeit one made up of fluorescent orange and neon green Imaginesium, rather than the day-glo yellow Impossibilitium flesh of the rest of his body.

“I’d say this science experiment is a success,” Helen beamed.