Chapter 7
The Screen Teens
Inaction Man awoke with a start, his consciousness having just moved from one dimension to another. He worried that his host mind, the spectre slave he had just left, might tell its master, Lord Lagus, about his current location. In his haste to leave, he had torn away his grappling hooks and heard the creature he rode parasite on yelp in pain. Inaction Man caught the whiff of urine from his trousers but knew that it was stale and would offer scant protection. He shook Symbol awake, picked her up and ran frantically out of the bushes, hollering crazed warnings about the dark lords.
Many heeded his warning and withdrew to a safe distance and he was glad to see them move away from him. Not all had time to flee. Inaction Man inadvertently startled two star-crossed lovers, who had been sitting on a nearby bench contemplating the beauty of the Seine. Locked in a tight embrace in which they exchanged sweet nothings, neither one had noticed Inaction Man approach. Indeed, Inaction Man hadn’t noticed them either, as he was looking behind him and carried a bike in front of him.
They gasped when Inaction Man crashed into their bench and shouted his dire warnings.
“Run! Run for your lives, children of Eros. The dark lords are coming and my bladder is almost empty. I have not enough urine to cover both of you. Run, I say. Run!”
Run away they did, hand in hand. Inaction Man continued with his own escape. He panted into the setting sun with no idea where he was going but with the certain knowledge that he had to go somewhere. Not being caught, he knew, would require all his powers of indecision. The dark lords were sure to try to second guess him and predict where he would hide, so it was only by not thinking about his destination that he could be safe.
He found himself, about a half an hour later, sitting on a bench in a small square called Place Monge. Unable to recall how he had arrived there, he knew he could not have been followed.
“Ignorance is invisibility,” he told a confused Symbol.
The last shards of daylight were disappearing over the tops of the buildings when a sense of doom and foreboding stabbed Inaction Man. He wondered if this would be his last night. Even the full moon, which was rising above him, seemed to mock and curse him. He was not a man accustomed to fear, but on this night it surrounded and enveloped him.
He had to defeat it. The shadow creatures smell fear and seek it out. There was also the secondary risk that the threat might tempt our superhero into action. Inaction Man concentrated and lines creased his brow. He gritted his teeth, clenched and unclenched his powerful anal sphincter muscle and farted loudly. By employing his superpower of dementia buttocks thus, he overcame his fear. As the methane vapours wafted through his nostril cavities and passed through the blood brain barrier, Inaction Man began to forget about the threat from the dark lords. To help protect Symbol, he broke wind a second time in the bike’s general direction and wafted the holy air around her.
Freed from memory and the fear it engendered, Inaction Man surveyed the square before him, like a king surveying some new dominion. In the centre of the square, near a small fountain, there stood a small group of teenagers, who appeared to be communing through smart phones. All eyes pointed screenwards. Fingers typed truncated words while throats remained silent.
Inaction Man knew the dark truth behind portable screens. Mobile phones and tablet PCs were actually fog machines, but only he could see the dark grey mist spewing out of them. The fog was turning the teenagers to stone right in front of his eyes, but only he could see it.
“Screen children, LED addicts. Is it not a pitiful sight, my Symbol?”
“You mean the teenagers on their phones? They look harmless enough to me, Inaction Man.”
“Appearances deceive, like screens deceive. What they see on their screenface is not reality. Look instead at its mirror image, the faces of the teens themselves, if you wish to tell truth from fiction. Note their blank gaze, their vacant visage. These are stone children, poor blind Symbol.”
One of the teenagers looked up from his hand held device and noticed Inaction Man staring at him. He nudged his companions who all turned to face Inaction Man. The lazy circle became a semi-circle and all heads pointed towards Inaction Man.
Their faces grew monstrous and even Symbol noted the transmogrification and urged Inaction Man to execute an immediate retreat from the teenagers’ field of vision. Like a pack of gargoyles, their lips twisted into grotesque shapes and formed lewd aggressive words. They told Inaction Man, in some vexation and with a great deal of the vernacular, they he should not look in their direction any longer, on pain of physical retribution. Or words to that effect.
“Scruffy hoodlums,” Symbol whispered to Inaction Man. “But just to be on the safe side, shouldn’t we be moving on?”
“Forgive their harsh words, Symbol, for they know not what they do. It is the screen fog talking, not the teens themselves. I shall speak to them and try to raise the humanity within. If a heart beats inside their rocky exteriors, I shall warm it. And in so doing, I shall turn cold stone to warm flesh. Transubstantiation, you might call it.”
“Bloody lunacy is what I’d call it!” Symbol grumbled.
The bicycle tried to convince Inaction Man to leave the teenagers alone but his mind was set. He carried Symbol over his head, both as a message to the teens on the evils of action and as a way to battle harden Symbol, who needed lessons in soldiery. The bicycle had become far too cautious since the brawling vagabonds had dented his handlebars in their projectile assault on the previous evening. Armed with his unwilling Symbol, Inaction Man walked toward the teenagers.
“Look on my bike, ye mighty screen children and despair!” he bellowed.
“He’s a total looney. I told you we shouldn’t have started on him,” one of the younger teens said to the others.
“You’re afraid of a smelly bum, are you? What a freakin’ cry baby you are,” an older teen replied, in what was probably intended to be an aggressive tone but emerged as more of a whimper.
The semi-circle began to break up. Some teens edged backwards while others held their ground, but even they had jittering knees and checked the flight path behind them with rapid turns of the head. Inaction Man moved closer, jagged step by jagged step.
“Suffer children unto me. Let me release you from the fog that suffocates you. Deliver your screens unto my feet and I shall smash them for you.”
“He’s after our phones! Gonna sell them for booze, I bet,” said one of the teenagers, who now sounded more like a child.
“I say we should teach him a lesson,” one of the taller boys said, but even as he said so, he was moving towards the back of the group.
The group retreated across the square, in awkward hesitant steps, but Inaction Man was still getting closer and closer. He demanded once more that they render their phones to him, so that he might destroy them and save their skins from petrification.
Noting that the fog was dragging them away from him, Inaction Man started to trot, and would have broken into a run were it not for the difficulty of carrying Symbol’s heavy frame above his head – made none the lighter by the bike’s constant whining, which he was glad the teenagers couldn’t hear. Inaction Man’s sudden increase in speed completely routed the teenage gang and they turned and fled in many directions, scattering moments after the ravens at the fountain took to flight.
In their haste to flee, one of the teenager’s mobile phones fell out of his jacket pocket and crashed to the ground. Inaction Man saw his chance and used his old brown boot to stamp on it. He heard its crunch of pain and lifted his booth. He saw that the innards of the fog machine were already bleeding, but to be certain of victory, he stomped on the phone twelve more times and cursed the device in thirteen different ways.
He took some of the phone entrails and smeared them over Symbol as a first blood ritual. When the initiation ceremony was complete, he threw his head upwards and laughed wildly.
“Victory is mine. I am Inaction Man
, defender of the Earth and despoiler of phones.”