terrycloth: (Default)
terrycloth ([personal profile] terrycloth) wrote2008-07-07 12:28 pm

Late night reading...

I've been thinking about doing a text version of '11 will die', because of a regrettable tendency I've noticed in my writing to never kill off anyone ever. '11 will die' was a finitely-bounded comic strip by Kelvin the Lion where he had a secret cabal vote on which of the 12 characters would die in each chapter, as they all tried to race for a prize hidden in a dungeon. I don't think I'm going to use a dungeon... and so far, I've only come up with 10 characters that I think I could write well enough to use.

But that's not the point of this. While mining for extra characters, I read through the old archives I have up on the web (http://home.earthlink.net/~aaronm1/archive.htm) of (some of) the story posts I wrote to alt.devilbunnies way back when. So I started re-reading them. And coming to the conclusion that while I still found the jokes funny, the plot was... kind of scatterbrained.

So, let's see if I can summarize it:

Loren Greycoat, a silver-furred squirrel uplifted by devilbunnies, runs an underground city of squirrels located beneath Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. Known as 'UCirc warren'. Aaron Mandelbaum, a hapless college student, accidentally discovers the squirrels and is forced to join their cause or die because he knows too much. Since their cause is saving the world from evil devilbunnies, he agrees.

Only they seem to be killing off innocent devilbunnies who can't fight back, so he kills the squirrels he was sent with and saves the bunnies. Loren isn't amused, but Aaron convinces him to give him a trial instead of executing him out of hand. The jury is randomly selected, evidence is presented, and despite Aaron's clear guilt he's found innocent, because squirrel friends of his rigged the random selection process to select his friends. Loren tries to kill him anyway, but he escapes with some of the squirrels.

On the run, he meets up with an insane psychopath who saves him from a human (but allegedly bunny-sympathizing) cop by shooting the cop, and they form WOMBAT, an organization dedicated to killing only innocent rabbits and ignoring the armed devilbunny armies -- by this point, Aaron's realized that the 'innocent' bunnies are the real threat since they're using the power of cuteness to take over the world.

Meanwhile, Loren arms a bunch of squirrels with lasers and antigravity backpacks and tries to take out a bunch of bunny supply bases in Ohio -- Ohio being the stronghold of General Longears, another PC on the newsgroup, and basically the heart of all midwest bunny operations. He fails and is presumed dead. Teral Acorn, his nth in command (but the highest ranking squirrel left behind), takes over.

Teral is a very bad leader, but somehow inspires loyalty in his troops. So when Loren returns alive, there's some fighting to put him back in power. Teral stays on as the head of the maintainance division for a while, somehow, despite having a large following, but instead of trying to retake 'Ucirc' (Loren's warren) he decides to capture Toledowarren, a devilbunny base that's mostly a transshipment point, held by a small garrison. Using thousands of troops converted from previously nonsentient squirrels in cities all over ohio and indiana, he succeeds, although with horrific casualties.

By this point, Aaron has been captured by bunnies (EDIT: No, wait, he was captured by SQUIRRELS!) and infected with the bunnyvirus. His squirrel friends infect him with the squirrel uplift virus, turning him into a squirrel instead. Since human-to-squirrel transformations are previously unknown, and they don't want Loren or Teral getting any ideas, they rename him 'Chit', after one of the team that was killed in action.

After conversion, 'Chit' went back to Ucirc and worked under Teral for a while, until Teral went off to capture Toledowarren, then transferred to a remote base in Missouri with his squirrelfriend Kara, where he worked on uplifting the local squirrels (in preparation for Teral's assault on Toledowarren, or for Loren's plan to uplift every squirrel in the world with an airborne squirrelvirus -- which never actually gets put into play because he can't figure out how to keep it from mutating and killing everyone -- depending on who you ask), training them to be soldiers by having them play lots of X-Com, UFO Assault.

Loren eventually figures out he's one of Teral's agents and sends ninja assassins after him. Chit defeats the ninjas and decides to infiltrate UCirc under a false identity, 'Chit'. (Chit being the short form of 'Chitter', one of the most common squirrel names) (it's pronounced as an abbreviated chitter, and Chit sometimes transliterates it into english as 'meep') This doesn't fool the ninjas, and they capture him and tie him to a wheel of death, a lie detector hooked up to an electric chair. He truthfully says that he didn't kill the agents (one of his soldiers did, with a grenade), so they untie him, then Kara assassinates all the ninjas and they escape.

Meanwhile, Teral is fucking up Toledowarren even worse than he fucked up UCirc when he was in charge, and eventually the devilbunnies (chiefly Wynn, a PC) recapture it, keeping most of the squirrels there alive as slaves.

Chit and Zander (one of his squirrels from Missouri) sneak into the warren to try to get in touch with Teral, secretly, only to find out that hey, bunnies. They're forced to flee for their lives. Teral (who sent the message asking them to report in from elsewhere) sends another message making Chit the hub of his spy network, since he's Teral's oldest and most competent agent -- despite the fact that Chit hates Teral and has never, in all this, ever agreed to do anything for Teral. Ever.

So Chit buggers off to Colorado, where he formally joins the Fudds -- the official, human-dominated faction opposing the Devilbunnies (with several other newsgroup members running it). Teral eventually ends up with the Maine squirrels (run by Aldin Bushytail, another PC). Aaron, the actual person in real life, gets bored with the newsgroup and stops posting. }:)