Subtler Than Light #3
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Subtler Than Light #3: What Are You Doing Here?
Part 1: https://lists.eyrie.org/pipermail/superguy/2023-May/000302.html
Part 2: https://lists.eyrie.org/pipermail/superguy/2023-May/000303.html
The notes on this episode are beneath the cut! Join me in my dance of death!
Notes on 3:
We pick up in the aftermath of the fight that ended episode 2. Ki Kazza Malissk is in the wind, the Hawaiian-shirt-wearing demon monkeys blipped off somewhere, and everybody's picking up the pieces. It seemed like a good time to burrow into the skull of one Lemon Hardy Rydell, now-agent of the Mega-Intelligence Bureau, and take a look at how he sees the world.
Originally, though, the focus was going to be on Cendra Seconds in this episode. The second scene (the first after the title card) was hers, and then I embarked on a long scene after Lemon's second, and got up to 3k words with 2-3k more on the horizon before it would end, making the episode (already 8.6k just up through the end of Lemon's reunion with Esteban) far bigger than I wanted. And since Lemon's emotional comeuppance felt like a good beat to end an episode on, that's now where it ends. And, I've now got 3k already written for episode 4, and time to nail down some things that I've, until this point, let stay fuzzy in my head.
I've toyed around with ideas of how the Heart of Mu (or, more accurately, the aetheric-dimensional effects it generates) affect various characters. For some it's fairly innocuous, like Rad dropping the 'likes' and 'y'knows' from his speech, or Cendra being notably more impulsive. For some it's stronger, like China seeing embodiments of past selves... or its effect on Lemon.
Lemon's not a narcissist, despite what other characters sometimes imply, but he is an instigator. Back in Rad #96, when I first introduced him, I deliberately shaded him as a trickster in his introductory image, naked and covered in wort, influenced by Lewis Hyde's great book, "Trickster Makes This World." I had a nebulous idea of him getting trickster-type powers later on, and though he's going in a different direction now, that idea of him still fuels his character and his impulsive behavior. So I thought... what if the Heart's effect on him is to make him face the truth of the effect his tricks have had on others?
It's something that's happened before, particularly in the big blowup that ended his relationship with Esteban and sent him storming out into the world, where he evidently traveled much and experienced a lot before hooking up with the M.I.B. What consequences it has this time around will play out in upcoming episodes.
Outside of this drill-down on Lemon, the episode is largely about taking a breath from the action of the first two episodes, getting a broad view of the context of what happened, and shuffling some characters along to where they need to be in subsequent episodes. The path to the end of the 'Hidden Hearts' arc is starting to gel in my head, beyond the generalized endpoint I'd always had in mind, and this episode starts us down it.
Reinventing Dr. Gigawatt as being deeply invested--past the point of caring about things like sanity, hygiene, or fashion--in the conspiracies and mysteries behind the Hidden Empire was a lot of fun. It's something I imagine happened gradually, turning him from the more-or-less stable scientist we saw in Rad Returns (Rad #91-100) into the obsessed conspiracist (or, should we say, carefully enunciating each syllable like they would on the History Channel, "Ancient Subterranean Theorist") we now have. The yarn gag was something I've had floating in my head for ages, and now it's out. As for Gigawatt's summation of the multidimensional nature of the crisis (or crises)... we'll just have to see how things play out, won't we?
Shelby d'Rodang was fun to introduce. The whole 'Little Kaijuville' bit from episode 1 felt like it needed a character to tie into for further exploration, hence Shelby. The various once-giant monsters of Monsta Island (Godziller, Mothball, Gaudyra, etc), of course, were originally introduced way in the beginnings of the Superguy list (Rad 25-36, the "Monster Mash" storyline, written in spring 1990). I was chagrined to see I hadn't introduced a Rodan equivalent with a stupid parody name, and decided to rectify that here. I also nail down just when the never-written Monsta Island invasion storyline occurred — 2017, six years before when this episode occurs in 2023.
The Charnel House is something I briefly alluded to in Rad Returns. Back then, it was in Gothopolis, and it was where (in 1898) a character called Loose Lips took a kidnapped President Cleveland, who was subsequently rescued by Richard Cartier, the occult detective known as the Dweller in the Shades (and who would survive to become the M.I.B.'s Director in the present day). I can't imagine why I brought it up in this episode again, as surely it has no bearing on the storyline (he lied smoothly).
Also mentioned in passing in Rad Returns, only to be mysteriously (and pointlessly, since how could it have relevance?) brought up again in this episode, is the High Technocrus. It's one of the universe's accreditations, along with the Sorcerer Superlative, the Scaly Sorcerer Supreme, the Sorcerer Superfluous, and so on. Eric Burns-White named it in Scholarman #4, in 1993, describing it in passing as one that reflects "the ascendancy of science." Nothing else was said about it since then, until I picked it up in the Rad Returns storyline, establishing that it was the then-High Technocrus's experiments in the late 1800s that gave Capella Ookanaptra superpowers (at least, outside the influence of aether). The High Technocrus of modern days is, of course... someone else.
Bonnie Rydell is a technomage, one who (theoretically) looks up to the Technocrus, though in practice she clearly does not. She also reflects an idea of what technomagery looks like that isn't so cyberpunkish as you might expect. Rather, I see it as an inversion of Clarke's law: a sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology. And what better embodies that in modern times than the magic rectangles we carry around with us to summon people and carry on battles in hidden dimensions and so on and so on? Her path to this point will be illuminated later on, particularly in the side trip to Malaga.
I liked the idea of spurring Johnny Clark's healing through a lateral connection to a spam cookbook. His mother, Key Li Pan (aka MeltDown, from CalForce), got her powers from the an experimental spam-powered nuclear plant in Fresno way back in the day (after unwittingly eating the core because they were hungry, as established in CalForce #1, in late summer 1992). It gets around the difficulties in affecting his Heliumian inheritance from the side of his father, Mighty Guy. As for why there are specific Heliumian energies that can hurt Johnny, and which were also known in the late 1800s... well, I did imply that it wasn't only the Reptiloids mucking about in Earth history, no?
"She'd been through things in her youth--including but scarcely limited to being made the tool of a malevolent ex-empress in an attempt to devastate the galaxy...": this refers to what then 10-year-old Cendra goes through in the final CalForce arc, 'The Last Empress,' from 1996.
"James Churchward's most radical unpublished theories about the fate of Atlantis...": James Churchward was a real guy, who wrote a series of bonkers books about Mu in the late 1920s and most of the 1930s. I like the idea there's stuff he held back for being too bonkers even for those books.
"You don't say ham, you say Spam...": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLRPJEoQBQQ
"I tried singing the 'Ulysses 31' theme in the lift tube, and they didn't join in...": China knows her past versions well. As for the theme itself, here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNrppMMuQnU (What? How could you not sing along to that?)
Sy Sperling: the Hair Club for Men guy, mainly only remembered these days by old dudes like me. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeFoLdeqG1I (Cendra, born a few years after Sy's brief cultural moment, immediately associates from the 'Psy' of 'Psywave' to him because... I mean... I'll have to get back to you on that.)
Aaand, that's about what I've got for this round. I've got to get back to novel work, but episode 4 should be out sometime this summer.