Just stay calm and remember that the heat death of the universe is more scared of you than you are of it.

Super Sunday: The Lightspeed Kid and Otto

The Lightspeed Kid

There is a group called the Weird Assassins. One of them likes to dress up like a cowboy. He always like cowboys as a kid, so when he developed a super power and became an assassin, he figured he might as well be cowboy-themed. It was that easy.

As his name might suggest, the Lightspeed Kid can move pretty fast, though only in short bursts. But he has learned to use these bursts for tricks like drawing his weapons at super speed or even dodging bullets. While that is enough for fighting regular people, and is generally good enough for the cowboy-themed assassin’s business, he has also worked up some tricks for fighting super-powered opponents, like using the momentum from a speed burst to make him jump long distances. All in all, he’s pretty badass and he’s for hire! Do you have more money than you need and someone you want dead? Drop him a line.

Anyway, the way I see it, moving momentarily at super speed would basically be like bullet time, so once I thought it would be a good power for a gun guy.

Otto

Otto is a vampire hunter. He does hunt vampires when necessary, but he is really hunting a vampire. In the singular. He is hunting Killshadow.

He also works for a vampire. His employer is the leader of the criminal cartel who Killshadow is working to destroy. He fitted Otto with enchanted metal limbs, made from holy irons that can not only cause harm to a vampire, but can also smash through a brick wall. But Otto is more than random hired muscle. His revenge is driven by the fact that Killshadow killed his brother. This time, it’s personal!

I had a sketch of this guy and didn’t know what he was. For some reason I thought of vampires, because he’d be posted near October (the Halloweeniest month), and I got it into my head that he’d be wearing those things to fight vampires. I decided to let it roll, so there he is.

Anyway, that’s the end of Supervillain Sunday year. I started at the end of November last year, but I think that was still longer than the Superhero Sunday “Year” was. Which, I think is appropriate. For superhero stories to work, the heroes should probably be outnumbered. That way it feels like they’re the underdogs. Even when they’re not.

What’s next for Super Sundays? I ain’t saying yet, but it won’t start for a few weeks anyway. We’ve got other things to deal with first…

The Story of the Class I Didn’t Drop

I mentioned the class I dropped during the first week of this year’s schoolin’s, but I haven’t said anything about my other classes. Let’s do something about that. I’m taking a class that is about the history of Vampires.

I wouldn’t say I’m a big reader of vampire fiction. I’ve read Dracula, and I’ve read Salem’s Lot, and I’ve read the Tomb of Dracula comics, but that is probably about it. Still, it seems like an interesting enough topic. So here I am.

So far, I very much enjoy the class. The professor actually lectures! That may not seem like an exceptional thing, but far too many professors I have encountered try to have a dialogue with the class. They stop every five minutes to ask a question, or even just get them to finish a sentence. I get that they’re trying to draw things out of the students so that they have to actually think or whatever, but it always slows everything down. We get significantly more class when they don’t stop class every five minutes. I pay attention to the lectures, so the interminable nuisance. It’s nice to have something better for a change.

Still, though. There’s a lot of reading in this, and all of my classes. I made a real effort to keep up with all the readings this year, and with only three classes I thought I could do it, but I failed. I am already behind. To be truthful, it’s kinda disheartening. There’s plenty of ways, good and bad, that school makes me feel stupid, but none gets to me more than the repeated insistence that the more I read the quicker I should be able to read. I read a lot, but I am and always have been very slow at it. I shouldn’t take it so hard, after all, I skipped whole books I was supposed to read last year without hurting my grades, but it’s sad to me because I really did try and I really did fail.

Anyway, in the meantime, I’ve been failing to keep on top of Secret Government Robots again. This time, it is for a better reason: Kip and I are working on a pretty neat project (details will come in the future). I’m pretty excited about that, so pretty much any time I’ve had that was not already claimed by school, or work, or sleep, I’ve been spending on that. If I’ve now given up on trying to keep up on school readings, maybe I’ll have time to do that instead.

If you don’t already have a “proof of identity” code that only you know, in case you meet yourself from the future, I can’t relate to you.