[3/31/2001 4:53:34 PM | steve higgins]
"Apparently this monster has been present in Cape for quite some time," Vacuumboy explained as he dimmed the lights. 
"progger?"

"thank you," Progger said as he stood up from the remnants of the deflated conference table and activated an inflatable video
 screen on the wall. "As you can see on this graph, there has been a growing trend of late within the residence halls of 
campus for roommates to really dislike each other." Progger pulled out a laser pointer and aimed it at the graph on the video
 screen. "As you can see here, typically the number of roommate confrontations were just on a level of animosity until two 
years ago." Progger activated the laser pointer to highlight the left portion of the graph, which showed a rough plateau 
leading up to late 1998. 

the laser lit up the room like the mid-day sun. "GAH! my eyes!" screamed stallio!, finally shaken free of his CYD by the 
blinding light. "turn it off!"

the room returned to darkness. "sorry. I guess when i tried to modify it to give it more power I went a little overboard."

"Moving on," Vacuumboy continued, "you can see that the first semester of '98 had more room changes than the previous 
three combined. Residence Life officials accredited this trend to the younger students simply having been spoiled with 
cable and privacy in their rooms as they grew up. But as you can see the trend has gotten worse."

"Last year the animosity elevated into actual incidents of violence," Progger explained, "with ten reported cases of 
roommates getting into fistfights over petty things. One guy beat up his roommate for having stacks of half-empty Coke 
cans all around the room and discarded papers carepting the floor." 

"By the junkyard of Sanford!" Hunter uttered. "Who could live in such slovenly conditions?"

"But that all seems pretty minor," Murray said. "I mean, what's a floor without a little battle royale every now and then
 to break the tension?"

"that's what we thought, until this year," Vacuumboy said. "In the first semester alone, eight people were killed by people 
they lived in close proximity to, all for little to no reason."

"Each of the people claimed to have not known what they were doing when they attacked people they normally considered 
friends; they were simply very angry," Progger explained. "So we investigated and found this." He pointed to a vial full of
blue goo that Quiet Girl held in front of her.

"Found what?" the white slut asked. Quiet Girl waved the vial in front of her until The White slut looked at her. "Oh, I 
didn't notice you there."

"This residue was found at each of the sites of the murders," Vacuumboy told his fellow heroes. "Progger worked with the 
local parapsychologist Snider to analyze it and found..."

"We found that the goo is ectoplasm of some sort, containing the psychic residue of a very angry individual who is projecting
 his feelings onto others," Progger said.

"Don't you interrupt me!" Vacuumboy shouted.

"See what I mean? Put that stuff away before something happens," Progger told quiet Girl. Once it was safely tucked away 
in a lead box, Progger continued...



[3/31/2001 5:14:59 PM | steve higgins]
"Further analysis of the data showed us that this individual had centered its aggression upon our old stomping grounds, the
 seventh floor of south. We tracked it there with Snider's help and discovered that it was accessing Towers via the sewer 
system, so we took Vacuumboy's group of students down into the sewer to investigate its whereabouts."

"It?" Tyke-bot asked. "I thought you said it was a href="an individual". Isn't it human?"

"Not quite," Vacuumboy said. "there is definitely human brainwave patterns present there, and there are traces of human DNA 
in the residue we discovered, but..."

Progger interrupted him again, but this time Vacuumboy did not over react. "But what we faced in the sewers was not human." 
Quiet Girl walked around the group and handed each person a picture. "These are stills from the video cameras Snider set us 
up with when we went down below. As you can see this monster is like nothing we've seen before."

"I've seen it before," Murray said. "This is the Blob."

"Pretty much yeah," Vacuumboy said. "But it seems to be growing, feeding on our hate. By snider's estimates it started out 
around ten gallons but it has been steadily growing and by the time we met it in the sewers it was the size of a VW bug."

"An old one or one of the hip new ones?" RecklessBoy asked.

"so why are we here?" the white slut asked, ignoring Chet's question. "Why couldn't you guys take this thing out on your 
own?"

"My students were too green to handle this monster," Vacuumboy explained. "they let their emotions cloud them and the monster
 took advantage of that. It slaughtered them. Hoepfully we, being a more experienced group, will be able to put emotions 
aside and fight this thing without as much of a problem."

"I don't know about that," Progger said doubtfully. "Before Snider died, he and I analyzed the data he uncovered during our 
battle and we discovered why this thing has human DNA. It used to be H2Whoa."



[4/1/2001 1:08:13 AM | steve higgins]
"But they're dead!" cried out the Hunter. "How...?"

"who the heck is H2Whoa?" Kid Wicker asked.

"Well this is all just supposition..." Progger began.

"yes but your supposition usually acts as exposition for our readers," stallio! said.

"huh?"

"it's called metafiction, man. get with the times."

Progger ignored the strange comments from stallio and continued. "As we all recall, H2Whoa played an important part of the 
demise of the Shupe vampire by turning into holy water. But when we spilled some of them, they couldn't reform without 
becoming mangled corpses."

"Oh yeah!" Murray cried out. "so we had Godboy turn 'em into wine and partied all night." 

"Yes," Progger continued. "But my guess is they were still conscious. so when they went through our bodies, were distilled 
as urine, and were then expelled, they traveled into the sewer. There they slowly reformed, hell-bent on getting revenge on 
us."

"On us? why?" the Hunter said.

"imaGine you were tuRned intO piSS. how wOuld yoU feel abouT it?" stallio! sarcastically replied.

"So how'd they get this psychic projection power then?" kid Wicker asked.

"Yeah," Quiet Girl scribbled on her pad, finally joining the conversation. "And who's kaufman?"

"Who cares about that?" Reckless Boy shouted. "How can we fight this thing?"

"Well thanks to the Vestige's final act, we can track it through the sewers," Vacuumboy said. "But the key is going to be to 
try to NOT get angry. It feeds on that, making it stronger and turning us against ourselves.So no berserking, Hunter!"

"No berserking?" the Hunter said sadly, eyeing the 400 pound stilt he held in his hands.

"Yeah, now we better get a move on," Progger said. "The wicker barriers the Kid put in place might not hold much longer, so 
we gotta track it into the sewers now."

"Now?" the Hunter said even more sadly. "But you said you'd soup up the humvee..."

"We don't have time for that, ya big baby!" The White Slut screamed. "Now come on."

Everybody started to file out of the room to head for one of the many manholes in Broadway. As he left the room, the Hunter 
set the stilt down. "If I can't go crazy berserker-style, I might as well leave this here." and with that he slunked out of 
the room with sadness filling his bosom.



[4/1/2001 1:12:02 AM | Mike Rengel]
And he wept & he wept, until he had stained himself.


[4/1/2001 1:27:57 AM | Jared Edwards]
Then, remembering what happened last time he left his stilt unguarded, the Hunter dried his eyes and quickly retrieved the 
stilt. He placed into a special, hidden compartment on the Predator. 

"Thank goodness for the 'The Fall Guy'," thought the Hunter as he rejoined the others.


[4/1/2001 11:43:54 PM | Jared Edwards]
Moments later, aboard the full sized Love Chicken (easily accessed through a tunnel from Marvels & Legends, the Progger came 
to a startling realization. The group was in route to a deserted area of town, where the battle wouldn't cause too much 
distruction (hopefully).

"Everyone..." started a very disturbed Progger, "correct me if I'm wrong on any of this..."

"OK," agreed everyone is unison, knowing he rarely was.

"The members of the original team drank H2Whoa. Godboy had turned them into wine. Wine contains organic components. Those 
would have been absorbed by the bodies of those who drank the wine. That would leave the H2Whoa creature incomplete. H2Whoa 
told us that they could only serperate back into human form when they were whole. Apparently this creature has lost its 
sanity. It attacked in a way almost guaranteed to bring the old team back together. It had no way of knowing that some of 
us wouldn't return. Other than me, from my deaths, any of that organic matter which hasn't been sent down the sewers, where 
they could reclaim it, should still be in the bodies of the original team members. If H2Whoa wanted to return to human form, 
it would need to reclaim that organic matter, and the only way to do that, is to ingest us. Am I wrong?"

The entire group sat in awestruck, silent agreement.



[4/2/2001 12:46:56 AM | Jared Edwards]
"Ok, exactly as I thought," continued Progger after a moment of contemplation (and one author correcting another) , "in 
reality, it is unlikely that any of us still contain any part of H2Whoa in our systems two years after the party. However,
most of you were willling to believe me. This means that H2Whoa, which, as I pointed out, is clearly not sane, may very well
believe the same thing. Therefore, those of us who were at that celebration of Shupe's defeat must be extremely cautious. 
If everything up to this point was planned to draw us back for revenge, ingestion, or both, then this fight may be even 
more difficult than we were expecting..."



[4/4/2001 12:20:19 AM | Jared Edwards]
The heroes soon passed Wal-Mart, topped a hill, took a right, and pulled into a small parking lot designated for "commuters".
 
"Odd place for a lot," commented the Hunter.

"it's the community equivalent of pig lot (the sucky freshman lot on campus)," said Stallio.

"Why are we here?" asked the White Slut?

"Hunter, get that manhole cover," said Vacuumboy, pointing at a manhole cover in the middle of the lot.

The Hunter easily lifted the cover, and the heroes all dropped into the sewer system of Cape Girardeau. When Chet produced 
an industrial strength flashlight from his uniform the heroes found themselves in a cavernous room with six tunnels flowing 
in and only one tunnel flowing out. The Progger had soon set up both portable lights and a tracking device monitor in the 
room.

"Wow, I thought places like this only existed in action, sci-fi, and horror stories, not in real sewers," said the Hunter.

"Probably so," said Vacuumboy.

"WHAT?" asked the Hunter.

"metafiction," repeated Stallio.

"Kid, seal up all of the tunnels except that one," said Vacuumboy.

"OK," said Kid Wicker as he did it.

"Progger, is it on its way?" asked Vacuumboy.

"Fast enough to make you wet your pants," replied the Progger.

"When it enters the room, seal up that tunnel, too," said Vacuumboy to the kid.

"this plan besT be near perRfect lest we All end uP deceased because your Proposal failed to Ensure fast escape in case of 
Defeat," said Stallio.

"Yeah," agreed several of the heroes as the sewers began to rumble...