Battle the Universe: Send in the Clowns!
Aug. 15th, 2022 04:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lb_leeSend in the Clowns!
Series: Battle the Universe
Summary: A former two-bit supervillain finds new life and purpose in political protest… with clowns.
Word Count: 3500
Notes: Stand-alone. This was posted back in February for folks on my Patreon, but a recent conversation withminoanmiss made me decide to put it up for public reading. Also, content warnings for political protest, violence, and Nazis with superpowers.
“Okay, people,” Ringmaster bellowed to her troops, “we have a horde of Nazis coming through our town. Presume them angry, armed, and assisted by police, but no word of supers yet. Even so, it’s going to get ugly, folks, and we’re here to soak it up. Go time! Hands up; show me your numbers!”
Everyone rolled up their sleeves and raised their arms to display the phone numbers written on their skins in magic marker—except one turned up bare. Someone whipped out a marker to fix that.
“Good. Rules, sound off!”
“No talking!” Kitten shouted, adjusting the padding under her jumpsuit. “We’re not here to debate!”
“No hitting back!” Rip shouted, pulling on his padded gloves. “Don’t break kayfabe!”
“No dignity!” Gonzo shouted, honking their red nose. “Shame is the game!”
“Damn right!” Ringmaster shouted, adjusting her jingle bell collar. “This isn’t a revolution; this is a circus! I want all eyes, all voices, and all commentary on us and how laughable this shit is. Let’s make these fuckers look stupid.”
With that, the squad of clowns got ready to deploy, armed with unicycles, bike horns, and vuvuzelas.
They were a ragtag bunch. Ringmaster had learned the hard way that temperament (and ability to take a punch or ten without breaking character) mattered more than background or skill. Gonzo was a true clown, treated it like a deep life philosophy. Rip was an out-of-work amateur pro wrestler. Kitten had brought some of her friends from the guerrilla improv club (who’d needed some training to stop talking but were otherwise effective). There were a couple Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a gaggle of miscellaneous oddballs, and a few Black Bloc anarchists with strange senses of humor.
And then there was Ringmaster.
She’d been a tin-dime supervillain once. (Well, tin-dime superhero, depending who you asked and when, but if you asked her, the whole super-macy was horseshit, and so were its labels.) Rabblerouser, they’d called her, because of course they had. She’d protested and marched with the best of them, been pepper-sprayed and billy-clubbed and tank-rammed and all the rest of it. She’d done it a long time. She’d been pretty all right at it, maybe.
Until she got the feeling that she was doing it wrong.
Not the causes, of course (she was determined to recite Goldman, Feinberg, and the Combahee River Collective into her damn grave) but the methods. With the rise of the protester-troll, she began to feel… outdated, somehow. No matter how powerful she felt in a crowd of chanting people, she couldn’t help but feel like it was an illusion. Getting frog-marched off in zip-ties was fine, but after her bloody face became a hilarious meme, she started to wonder if she was achieving anything. It wasn’t like the old days anymore, where half the job was getting people to look at evil so they’d care. Nowadays, everyone looked at evil so they could laugh.
It boggled her mind. How could anyone look at this world and not care? How could you make someone care?
It took her a while to figure it out. But after the month where her dog died, her partner dumped her, and her mental breakdown became another Internet joke, she herself began to see the appeal of not caring. When yet another protest came up, sheer inertia and spite barely got her out of bed. When she did finally drag herself out, only to find protester-trolls armed with racist meme music and shit-eating grins, all she could think was that even though they were horrible authoritarian fuckwards, they were living up to Emma Goldman’s “dancing at the revolution” way better than she was.
The thought was so infuriating that it gave her some energy. She stormed up to a loudly laughing dipshit wearing a “U MAD BRO?” sign, intending to scream, “How do you people have so much energy? You don’t care!”
And just as she opened her mouth, she had her epiphany: they did care.
They had to, because why else would they come? People who didn’t care stayed in bed. Sure, one or two might roll out for the hell of it, but this many? With signs and music and everything? No, no, they not only cared, they cared a lot. They just pretended otherwise, because every middle-school poseur knew that was how to look cool.
It seemed so simple. So obvious. She almost refused to believe it on principle—there was no way it was that easy. Life was a never-ending fight for survival and better things, and here was half the opposing army, feigning indifference!
She’d come up to U MAD BRO with the intent of berating him, quoting Nietzsche, and maybe throwing her coffee in his face. Instead, she broke up laughing. (With a ragged edge of hysteria. It’d been that kind of month.)
U MAD BRO looked around, searching for the object of her hysterics. When he realized it was him (because she was clutching her sides and pointing at him), he turned bright red and turned on her.
“Stop it!” he shrieked. “Stop laughing at me!”
And when that made her laugh even harder, he hauled off and slugged her, and the (counter-)protest devolved into a riot soon after. Ringmaster got pepper-sprayed and arrested, again, and she didn’t even care, because she’d figured it out. She knew how she was going to survive the miserable, interminable hell-future: she was going to make her enemies an even bigger subcultural joke than she was.
And so she became the Ringmaster. She built her clown squad. She used all her old connections, all her old skills, trying to make friendly and build coalitions with groups who thought that a pack of activist clowns was a stupid-as-shit idea and didn’t understand that yes, that was the point.
At first, no one would give her the time of day. But then there was the American Freedom protest.
The American Freedom Liberation Front were a horde of racist assholes who only forewent pillowcase headgear because that wasn’t mod anymore. They went marching through the middle of downtown, wielding flags and chanting “white men built America,” and it was all set to become terrifying.
And then the clowns descended.
There were only a dozen of them back then. They’d stationed at a crosswalk, and as the protest approached, Ringmaster marched out, dressed in an enormous, moth-eaten, hastily-purchased duck costume, honking her bike horn and leading her crew of fellow clowns, all similarly dressed. There were just enough of them to cover the crosswalk coming and going, and they looped back and forth, endlessly marching to nowhere.
At first, the American Freedom Liberation Front hadn’t known what to do about them. Shouting at people in duck costumes was… well. Undignified. At first, they tried to wait, but when it became clear that the duck march was eternal, they held a brief conversation, chose a spokesman, and sent him to politely request they depart.
The ducks responded with a chorus of bike horns and kept on crosswalking.
The spokesman got louder. They honked louder.
“Look, we’re expressing our American—”
HONK!
“First Amendment—”
HONK!
“Thomas Jefferson—”
HONK HONK HONK!
The spokesman went to go confer with the police. The ducks continued walking, honking, and doing the chicken dance.
The cop looked at the spokesman, neatly dressed, hair combed, with a sign quoting Strom Thurmond in elegant print. The cop looked at the ducks, merrily honking and waddling in an infinite loop of absurdity.
The spokesman, clearly trying to play the one sane man, politely, patiently explained his constitutional rights, how this… this performance was an unlawful barrier to a peaceful protest, and couldn’t the police kindly assist its lawful citizenry?
The Ringmaster undid the buttflap of her duck suit, squatted, and laid a water balloon egg. The other ducks clapped.
The cop started laughing.
The American Freedom Liberation Front went apeshit.
Ringmaster got her ass kicked again, but the media ate it up. MAKE WAY FOR DORKLINGS, read one headline. INSANE CLOWN POSSE read another. The laughing cop became a meme.
Ringmaster was hooked. Who knew the sight of a pig helpless with laughter at the sight of her would become a point of pride?
The duck parade had been a crude attempt, she knew that now. So many things could’ve gone wrong. Had the protesters kept their tempers and calmly forced their way forward, that would’ve been it. (Indeed, that had been her expectation—a brief absurdity, not total bedlam.) But then Gonzo called her up.
“Clowns do three things,” they told her. “They divert attention—of people or raging bulls. They use humor to transgress, to speak truth to power. And they make fools of themselves in public. I’m in, if you’ll have me, just so long as I’m not first in command.”
As a second-in-command, Gonzo made all the difference. They turned flailing nonsense into strategy. They also knew “Roaring” Rip Thompson.
Rip was insane. He’d kept kayfabe through a dislocated shoulder. He was fearless, heckler-proof, and he could rattle off total gibberish with deadpan conviction. Babbling wordless nonsense that nonetheless sounded like English was far harder than it looked, and it was astonishing how many people would smile and nod along, and for how long; presumably because they were used to dignifying white men spouting nonsense. Ringmaster immediately appointed Rip the clowns’ spokesman; it helped her resist her own urge to explain herself.
“This isn’t a debate club,” Gonzo kept telling her. “There’s a place for long, reasoned argument, and it’s not around a bunch of shouting people with nightsticks.”
With Gonzo’s planning and Rip’s social skills (he was a warm, approachable man, when he wasn’t spouting garble), the clown squad’s jobs multiplied, then clarified: taking hits and luring raging bulls away from endangered civilians, drowning out speeches and chants, and stealing attention. What made better tabloid fodder, the Meritocrats for America, or the clowns in mortarboards doing acrobatics?
Plenty of people secretly wanted to beat up clowns, but nothing would make it dignified, especially if said clowns had been drilled to make fights look as embarrassing as possible.
The clowns got punched and arrested. They got put on watchlists for “dangerous left-wing radicals.” They got rumors that their cream pies were full of bricks and chloroform. (That didn’t last long, in part because neither did the pies. Carrying cream pies around on a unicycle? Get out of town.) They got a bunch of think-pieces written about them, overwhelmingly negative.
Ringmaster was having a ball.
Even now, the shout of, “send in the clowns!” got her blood pumping. She blew her whistle, and the clowns rolled, tumbled, and leapfrogged out, accompanied by “Entry of the Gladiators” on Kitten’s boom box.
The Nazis had expected them—they had clowns of their own, mostly dressed as antisemitic memes. Clearly untrained, though; they kept talking.
Rip hurtled off to put himself in trouble. Gonzo led a unicycle line, dispensing water and snacks. Kitten and Kayla began pantomiming a dramatic love confession with silk flowers in front of the “heterosexual decency” float. Ringmaster busied herself with outclowning the Nazis. She challenged one to a duel with a rubber chicken. She cartwheeled circles around them. She honked her horn and danced and sweated in the eye of a growing hurricane of chaos.
Things started getting heated. The cops waded in. Rip got pepper-sprayed in the face twice and just kept going. Gonzo and Ringmaster did their best to put themselves between aggressors and attacked. Someone stomped Kitten’s boombox. Things were getting scary.
And then Ringmaster saw the street vig and knew they were fucked.
“Street vigilante” was the new PC term for anyone fool enough to mask up and play hero without a license. It said nothing about the person’s morality, only their stupidity. (Not that “real” superheroes were morally better, but at least they waited for health insurance before picking fights.) A street vig could be anything from an obsessive culvert-cleaner to a Klansman with a club.
On the surface, this one was just a clean-cut white guy in cargo pants and a fitted white T-shirt. But printed on that T-shirt was a bundle of bound rods, topped by an axe, and Ringmaster had heard of him. He had powers. Very bad powers.
“Mesmer!” she shouted, breaking character. “Drown him out! Drown him out!”
With the boombox, they could’ve, maybe. But all they had was their noisemakers, and someone tossed Fasces a microphone. Into it, he boomed two words:
“Power together!”
His voice ripped through the crowd like a physical force. Everyone reeled, even the cops. The Nazis stopped fighting. As one, they turned to Fasces.
“To me!” he boomed.
The mob swarmed. It began to organize.
“No, no, no! Shit!” An angry mob was bad enough, but the only edge the clown squad had was organization; if the mob outdid them…
Gonzo was at her shoulder. “Cream him?”
They both knew that wouldn’t be enough. What the clowns had achieved through years of drills and careful hand-picking, Fasces was beating through psychological brute force. Even a few people on the clowns’ side were heading towards him, rapturous looks on their faces. With charisma powers that strong, even a pie (or a fist) in the face would look good, and the mob would most assuredly prevent anyone from beating Fasces powerless. What could you do against that?
Ringmaster watched the mob form orderly ranks, pick up sticks and stones and bricks. She wondered how much control Fasces really had, over that many people. How many were being compelled, and how many were just taking advantage of the excuse?
One way to find out.
She patted Gonzo. “You and Rip are in charge.”
“Wait, no—”
“Break a leg.” She kissed their greasepainted cheek, and then she started walking up to Fasces and his mob. She couldn’t run; that’d give the game away. But walking, smiling, she looked like she was joining him.
Most people didn’t know Ringmaster (FKA Rabblerouser) had powers. Even she wasn’t sure; she’d never been formally tested, and they weren’t fully under her control. But like Fasces, she could inspire people to action. Unlike Fasces, she could unfortunately inspire only one action: beating the shit out of her. (Best not to ask how she found out.)
It only worked on a few people at a time… when it was just her. Add Fasces, though…
She felt adrenaline, but she wasn’t afraid. A clown had three duties: to divert attention, to speak truth to power, and to do stupid shit. This was her job.
She walked up to Fasces, who smiled at her. It was a beautiful smile. He looked so friendly, so clean-cut, so hopeful.
“Joining up?” he asked, and even with his normal voice, even though she knew better, she felt the pull to please him, obey him, become part of something bigger and more important than herself.
But she already was.
Pies were too big and awkward to carry around a protest. Instead, the clown squad carried pocket-size water balloons filled with whipped topping. Ringmaster splatted one into his face, and it burst with a ridiculous splort.
Everything went dead silent.
Fasces gasped.
Never break kayfabe. Ringmaster hung a goofy grin on her mug, crowed her most obnoxious, punch-my-face clown laugh, and turned her powers onto him full blast.
Fasces’s face contorted with rage. “Get her,” he snarled.
The mob came roaring for her. Ringmaster ran.
She was a good runner. She had to be, with her powers, her job, her lifestyle. But the mob was a tidal wave, a lava flow, a hurricane. It came pouring after her, trying to cut her off, outflank her. None had speed powers (small mercies), but they were being egged on by Fasces, pushed beyond what they could do individually. They seemed to move with one mind, one purpose.
They were going to get her. She knew that. But as long as they were after her, they weren’t after anyone else. They only had deniability for as long as they were obeying Fasces, and if she could just keep them busy, keep them enraged, keep them long enough…
She turned a corner, vaulted a fence, hurdled gravestones, pounded out an open gate. She heard the mob baying for her, but she didn’t look back.
Keep smiling. Keep running. Keep going.
Oh god.
Her lungs were on fire. Her heart was a hammer.
She wasn’t even dressed for martyrdom. She was in her jingle-bell Harlequin suit, and she was going to die as she lived: as a fucking clown. A loltastic meme for edgelord dipshits.
In the end, none of them outran her. No, one of them threw a brick. It caught her in the shoulder, a glancing hit, but it knocked her off-balance, and she was moving too fast to compensate. With numb inevitability, she fell.
Oh well. She’d done her best. Shadows fell across her. She curled up to protect her guts and head, prepared for a bad end.
“Stop.”
The voice carried like Fasces’s but lacked the compelling quality. Nevertheless, the mob paused, looking confused.
The speaker was a Sikh man in a dapper blue suit and a power wheelchair. Next to him was a short white guy in cargo pants—another street vig.
Fasces took a while to catch up; he clearly hadn’t done much long-distance running, and he was clutching a stitch in his side, but he’d mostly wiped away the cream. He looked angry but also perplexed.
“Who are you?”
The man in the chair flicked his eyes to Ringmaster. “Turn it off,” he said. His tone was even; her powers weren’t affecting him.
She turned them off.
“Thank you.” To the mob, “Go home. This event is over. I am authorized by the police to disperse you peacefully—”
One of the mob charged him.
Ringmaster wasn’t sure exactly what she saw—the guy was dashing forward, and then he was hurtling backwards, hard enough that he fell over. He didn’t seem to hit a wall, or get hit in turn. His speed just seemed to… reverse.
“Thank you, Kara,” the man in the chair said.
The short guy grunted.
Fasces must’ve been new in town, here only for the protest; he was squinting like he was trying to place the man in the chair. Ringmaster decided to help.
“You’re All-Seeing Eye, aren’t you?” she said in her clown voice. “My ex is a big fan!”
This was a lie. Her ex hated Eye as a sell-out to the colonialist ableist super-macy of society, had a photo of his face pinned to the house dartboard. Judging by the look Eye gave her, he knew it too.
Fasces fell back a step. “From Law and Justice?”
Eye nodded. Fasces got his smile back on, but it took a moment, and Ringmaster didn’t need psychic powers to know he was conflicted. On the one hand, Law and Justice were as American as police brutality and apple pie. On the other, Eye was a brown beardo in a turban. For a moment, Fasces tried to stare Eye down. When Eye only looked back with disinterest, Fasces opened his mouth.
Eye said, “cuckaduck48.”
Fasces went pale and turned away. In his normal voice, he said, “Let’s go.”
Someone went, “But—”
A hint of compelling boom. “I said let’s go.”
The mob left—even the ones who weren’t compelled by Fasces knew better than to swing on a licensed Law and Justice superhero without a mind-controller to blame. Eye and the inexplicably-named Kara (who Ringmaster did not know) watched them go, then the latter gave her a hand up.
“You all right?” Chicago accent. Not from around here.
Dropping character, Ringmaster asked Eye, “What’s cuckaduck48?”
“Something he doesn’t want spread around,” Eye replied. “It was that or start a fight, which I’d rather avoid, and someone here informed me that sometimes humiliation works where force doesn’t.”
Ringmaster wasn’t sure how to respond. She’d dealt with superpigs before… but as a villain, not someone getting saved. It made her uncomfortable.
“You’re Rabblerouser, aren’t you?” Eye’s question was clearly rhetorical. “The one who shamed White Knight out of the business.”
“I haven’t been that in a long time.” Not since the recording of White Knight beating her half to death at a protest went viral. She still couldn’t escape the memes of her bloody face, both as oh-so-noble calls to action, and also as “prime lulz.” “What do you want, ‘hero’?”
“Myself? Nothing. A friend of mine in the street vig business wants to speak with you.” He handed her a card with Incognito on it in small caps. “Would you like to press charges?”
“More pigs? No.” Even if she agreed with the carceral injustice system, it was still working out how to deal with psyche-affecting powers. They were no more prepared for someone like Fasces than they were for someone like her.
“Then go home. Rest. Stay in trouble.”
“Always.”
She didn’t shake Eye’s hand, but he didn’t offer it, and she jingled off to find her people. And also to find out more about cuckaduck48. After all, she was sure someone with Eye’s power set wouldn’t have shared it with her if he hadn’t trusted her to use the information well.
Series: Battle the Universe
Summary: A former two-bit supervillain finds new life and purpose in political protest… with clowns.
Word Count: 3500
Notes: Stand-alone. This was posted back in February for folks on my Patreon, but a recent conversation with
minoanmiss made me decide to put it up for public reading. Also, content warnings for political protest, violence, and Nazis with superpowers.“Okay, people,” Ringmaster bellowed to her troops, “we have a horde of Nazis coming through our town. Presume them angry, armed, and assisted by police, but no word of supers yet. Even so, it’s going to get ugly, folks, and we’re here to soak it up. Go time! Hands up; show me your numbers!”
Everyone rolled up their sleeves and raised their arms to display the phone numbers written on their skins in magic marker—except one turned up bare. Someone whipped out a marker to fix that.
“Good. Rules, sound off!”
“No talking!” Kitten shouted, adjusting the padding under her jumpsuit. “We’re not here to debate!”
“No hitting back!” Rip shouted, pulling on his padded gloves. “Don’t break kayfabe!”
“No dignity!” Gonzo shouted, honking their red nose. “Shame is the game!”
“Damn right!” Ringmaster shouted, adjusting her jingle bell collar. “This isn’t a revolution; this is a circus! I want all eyes, all voices, and all commentary on us and how laughable this shit is. Let’s make these fuckers look stupid.”
With that, the squad of clowns got ready to deploy, armed with unicycles, bike horns, and vuvuzelas.
They were a ragtag bunch. Ringmaster had learned the hard way that temperament (and ability to take a punch or ten without breaking character) mattered more than background or skill. Gonzo was a true clown, treated it like a deep life philosophy. Rip was an out-of-work amateur pro wrestler. Kitten had brought some of her friends from the guerrilla improv club (who’d needed some training to stop talking but were otherwise effective). There were a couple Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a gaggle of miscellaneous oddballs, and a few Black Bloc anarchists with strange senses of humor.
And then there was Ringmaster.
She’d been a tin-dime supervillain once. (Well, tin-dime superhero, depending who you asked and when, but if you asked her, the whole super-macy was horseshit, and so were its labels.) Rabblerouser, they’d called her, because of course they had. She’d protested and marched with the best of them, been pepper-sprayed and billy-clubbed and tank-rammed and all the rest of it. She’d done it a long time. She’d been pretty all right at it, maybe.
Until she got the feeling that she was doing it wrong.
Not the causes, of course (she was determined to recite Goldman, Feinberg, and the Combahee River Collective into her damn grave) but the methods. With the rise of the protester-troll, she began to feel… outdated, somehow. No matter how powerful she felt in a crowd of chanting people, she couldn’t help but feel like it was an illusion. Getting frog-marched off in zip-ties was fine, but after her bloody face became a hilarious meme, she started to wonder if she was achieving anything. It wasn’t like the old days anymore, where half the job was getting people to look at evil so they’d care. Nowadays, everyone looked at evil so they could laugh.
It boggled her mind. How could anyone look at this world and not care? How could you make someone care?
It took her a while to figure it out. But after the month where her dog died, her partner dumped her, and her mental breakdown became another Internet joke, she herself began to see the appeal of not caring. When yet another protest came up, sheer inertia and spite barely got her out of bed. When she did finally drag herself out, only to find protester-trolls armed with racist meme music and shit-eating grins, all she could think was that even though they were horrible authoritarian fuckwards, they were living up to Emma Goldman’s “dancing at the revolution” way better than she was.
The thought was so infuriating that it gave her some energy. She stormed up to a loudly laughing dipshit wearing a “U MAD BRO?” sign, intending to scream, “How do you people have so much energy? You don’t care!”
And just as she opened her mouth, she had her epiphany: they did care.
They had to, because why else would they come? People who didn’t care stayed in bed. Sure, one or two might roll out for the hell of it, but this many? With signs and music and everything? No, no, they not only cared, they cared a lot. They just pretended otherwise, because every middle-school poseur knew that was how to look cool.
It seemed so simple. So obvious. She almost refused to believe it on principle—there was no way it was that easy. Life was a never-ending fight for survival and better things, and here was half the opposing army, feigning indifference!
She’d come up to U MAD BRO with the intent of berating him, quoting Nietzsche, and maybe throwing her coffee in his face. Instead, she broke up laughing. (With a ragged edge of hysteria. It’d been that kind of month.)
U MAD BRO looked around, searching for the object of her hysterics. When he realized it was him (because she was clutching her sides and pointing at him), he turned bright red and turned on her.
“Stop it!” he shrieked. “Stop laughing at me!”
And when that made her laugh even harder, he hauled off and slugged her, and the (counter-)protest devolved into a riot soon after. Ringmaster got pepper-sprayed and arrested, again, and she didn’t even care, because she’d figured it out. She knew how she was going to survive the miserable, interminable hell-future: she was going to make her enemies an even bigger subcultural joke than she was.
And so she became the Ringmaster. She built her clown squad. She used all her old connections, all her old skills, trying to make friendly and build coalitions with groups who thought that a pack of activist clowns was a stupid-as-shit idea and didn’t understand that yes, that was the point.
At first, no one would give her the time of day. But then there was the American Freedom protest.
The American Freedom Liberation Front were a horde of racist assholes who only forewent pillowcase headgear because that wasn’t mod anymore. They went marching through the middle of downtown, wielding flags and chanting “white men built America,” and it was all set to become terrifying.
And then the clowns descended.
There were only a dozen of them back then. They’d stationed at a crosswalk, and as the protest approached, Ringmaster marched out, dressed in an enormous, moth-eaten, hastily-purchased duck costume, honking her bike horn and leading her crew of fellow clowns, all similarly dressed. There were just enough of them to cover the crosswalk coming and going, and they looped back and forth, endlessly marching to nowhere.
At first, the American Freedom Liberation Front hadn’t known what to do about them. Shouting at people in duck costumes was… well. Undignified. At first, they tried to wait, but when it became clear that the duck march was eternal, they held a brief conversation, chose a spokesman, and sent him to politely request they depart.
The ducks responded with a chorus of bike horns and kept on crosswalking.
The spokesman got louder. They honked louder.
“Look, we’re expressing our American—”
HONK!
“First Amendment—”
HONK!
“Thomas Jefferson—”
HONK HONK HONK!
The spokesman went to go confer with the police. The ducks continued walking, honking, and doing the chicken dance.
The cop looked at the spokesman, neatly dressed, hair combed, with a sign quoting Strom Thurmond in elegant print. The cop looked at the ducks, merrily honking and waddling in an infinite loop of absurdity.
The spokesman, clearly trying to play the one sane man, politely, patiently explained his constitutional rights, how this… this performance was an unlawful barrier to a peaceful protest, and couldn’t the police kindly assist its lawful citizenry?
The Ringmaster undid the buttflap of her duck suit, squatted, and laid a water balloon egg. The other ducks clapped.
The cop started laughing.
The American Freedom Liberation Front went apeshit.
Ringmaster got her ass kicked again, but the media ate it up. MAKE WAY FOR DORKLINGS, read one headline. INSANE CLOWN POSSE read another. The laughing cop became a meme.
Ringmaster was hooked. Who knew the sight of a pig helpless with laughter at the sight of her would become a point of pride?
The duck parade had been a crude attempt, she knew that now. So many things could’ve gone wrong. Had the protesters kept their tempers and calmly forced their way forward, that would’ve been it. (Indeed, that had been her expectation—a brief absurdity, not total bedlam.) But then Gonzo called her up.
“Clowns do three things,” they told her. “They divert attention—of people or raging bulls. They use humor to transgress, to speak truth to power. And they make fools of themselves in public. I’m in, if you’ll have me, just so long as I’m not first in command.”
As a second-in-command, Gonzo made all the difference. They turned flailing nonsense into strategy. They also knew “Roaring” Rip Thompson.
Rip was insane. He’d kept kayfabe through a dislocated shoulder. He was fearless, heckler-proof, and he could rattle off total gibberish with deadpan conviction. Babbling wordless nonsense that nonetheless sounded like English was far harder than it looked, and it was astonishing how many people would smile and nod along, and for how long; presumably because they were used to dignifying white men spouting nonsense. Ringmaster immediately appointed Rip the clowns’ spokesman; it helped her resist her own urge to explain herself.
“This isn’t a debate club,” Gonzo kept telling her. “There’s a place for long, reasoned argument, and it’s not around a bunch of shouting people with nightsticks.”
With Gonzo’s planning and Rip’s social skills (he was a warm, approachable man, when he wasn’t spouting garble), the clown squad’s jobs multiplied, then clarified: taking hits and luring raging bulls away from endangered civilians, drowning out speeches and chants, and stealing attention. What made better tabloid fodder, the Meritocrats for America, or the clowns in mortarboards doing acrobatics?
Plenty of people secretly wanted to beat up clowns, but nothing would make it dignified, especially if said clowns had been drilled to make fights look as embarrassing as possible.
The clowns got punched and arrested. They got put on watchlists for “dangerous left-wing radicals.” They got rumors that their cream pies were full of bricks and chloroform. (That didn’t last long, in part because neither did the pies. Carrying cream pies around on a unicycle? Get out of town.) They got a bunch of think-pieces written about them, overwhelmingly negative.
Ringmaster was having a ball.
Even now, the shout of, “send in the clowns!” got her blood pumping. She blew her whistle, and the clowns rolled, tumbled, and leapfrogged out, accompanied by “Entry of the Gladiators” on Kitten’s boom box.
The Nazis had expected them—they had clowns of their own, mostly dressed as antisemitic memes. Clearly untrained, though; they kept talking.
Rip hurtled off to put himself in trouble. Gonzo led a unicycle line, dispensing water and snacks. Kitten and Kayla began pantomiming a dramatic love confession with silk flowers in front of the “heterosexual decency” float. Ringmaster busied herself with outclowning the Nazis. She challenged one to a duel with a rubber chicken. She cartwheeled circles around them. She honked her horn and danced and sweated in the eye of a growing hurricane of chaos.
Things started getting heated. The cops waded in. Rip got pepper-sprayed in the face twice and just kept going. Gonzo and Ringmaster did their best to put themselves between aggressors and attacked. Someone stomped Kitten’s boombox. Things were getting scary.
And then Ringmaster saw the street vig and knew they were fucked.
“Street vigilante” was the new PC term for anyone fool enough to mask up and play hero without a license. It said nothing about the person’s morality, only their stupidity. (Not that “real” superheroes were morally better, but at least they waited for health insurance before picking fights.) A street vig could be anything from an obsessive culvert-cleaner to a Klansman with a club.
On the surface, this one was just a clean-cut white guy in cargo pants and a fitted white T-shirt. But printed on that T-shirt was a bundle of bound rods, topped by an axe, and Ringmaster had heard of him. He had powers. Very bad powers.
“Mesmer!” she shouted, breaking character. “Drown him out! Drown him out!”
With the boombox, they could’ve, maybe. But all they had was their noisemakers, and someone tossed Fasces a microphone. Into it, he boomed two words:
“Power together!”
His voice ripped through the crowd like a physical force. Everyone reeled, even the cops. The Nazis stopped fighting. As one, they turned to Fasces.
“To me!” he boomed.
The mob swarmed. It began to organize.
“No, no, no! Shit!” An angry mob was bad enough, but the only edge the clown squad had was organization; if the mob outdid them…
Gonzo was at her shoulder. “Cream him?”
They both knew that wouldn’t be enough. What the clowns had achieved through years of drills and careful hand-picking, Fasces was beating through psychological brute force. Even a few people on the clowns’ side were heading towards him, rapturous looks on their faces. With charisma powers that strong, even a pie (or a fist) in the face would look good, and the mob would most assuredly prevent anyone from beating Fasces powerless. What could you do against that?
Ringmaster watched the mob form orderly ranks, pick up sticks and stones and bricks. She wondered how much control Fasces really had, over that many people. How many were being compelled, and how many were just taking advantage of the excuse?
One way to find out.
She patted Gonzo. “You and Rip are in charge.”
“Wait, no—”
“Break a leg.” She kissed their greasepainted cheek, and then she started walking up to Fasces and his mob. She couldn’t run; that’d give the game away. But walking, smiling, she looked like she was joining him.
Most people didn’t know Ringmaster (FKA Rabblerouser) had powers. Even she wasn’t sure; she’d never been formally tested, and they weren’t fully under her control. But like Fasces, she could inspire people to action. Unlike Fasces, she could unfortunately inspire only one action: beating the shit out of her. (Best not to ask how she found out.)
It only worked on a few people at a time… when it was just her. Add Fasces, though…
She felt adrenaline, but she wasn’t afraid. A clown had three duties: to divert attention, to speak truth to power, and to do stupid shit. This was her job.
She walked up to Fasces, who smiled at her. It was a beautiful smile. He looked so friendly, so clean-cut, so hopeful.
“Joining up?” he asked, and even with his normal voice, even though she knew better, she felt the pull to please him, obey him, become part of something bigger and more important than herself.
But she already was.
Pies were too big and awkward to carry around a protest. Instead, the clown squad carried pocket-size water balloons filled with whipped topping. Ringmaster splatted one into his face, and it burst with a ridiculous splort.
Everything went dead silent.
Fasces gasped.
Never break kayfabe. Ringmaster hung a goofy grin on her mug, crowed her most obnoxious, punch-my-face clown laugh, and turned her powers onto him full blast.
Fasces’s face contorted with rage. “Get her,” he snarled.
The mob came roaring for her. Ringmaster ran.
She was a good runner. She had to be, with her powers, her job, her lifestyle. But the mob was a tidal wave, a lava flow, a hurricane. It came pouring after her, trying to cut her off, outflank her. None had speed powers (small mercies), but they were being egged on by Fasces, pushed beyond what they could do individually. They seemed to move with one mind, one purpose.
They were going to get her. She knew that. But as long as they were after her, they weren’t after anyone else. They only had deniability for as long as they were obeying Fasces, and if she could just keep them busy, keep them enraged, keep them long enough…
She turned a corner, vaulted a fence, hurdled gravestones, pounded out an open gate. She heard the mob baying for her, but she didn’t look back.
Keep smiling. Keep running. Keep going.
Oh god.
Her lungs were on fire. Her heart was a hammer.
She wasn’t even dressed for martyrdom. She was in her jingle-bell Harlequin suit, and she was going to die as she lived: as a fucking clown. A loltastic meme for edgelord dipshits.
In the end, none of them outran her. No, one of them threw a brick. It caught her in the shoulder, a glancing hit, but it knocked her off-balance, and she was moving too fast to compensate. With numb inevitability, she fell.
Oh well. She’d done her best. Shadows fell across her. She curled up to protect her guts and head, prepared for a bad end.
“Stop.”
The voice carried like Fasces’s but lacked the compelling quality. Nevertheless, the mob paused, looking confused.
The speaker was a Sikh man in a dapper blue suit and a power wheelchair. Next to him was a short white guy in cargo pants—another street vig.
Fasces took a while to catch up; he clearly hadn’t done much long-distance running, and he was clutching a stitch in his side, but he’d mostly wiped away the cream. He looked angry but also perplexed.
“Who are you?”
The man in the chair flicked his eyes to Ringmaster. “Turn it off,” he said. His tone was even; her powers weren’t affecting him.
She turned them off.
“Thank you.” To the mob, “Go home. This event is over. I am authorized by the police to disperse you peacefully—”
One of the mob charged him.
Ringmaster wasn’t sure exactly what she saw—the guy was dashing forward, and then he was hurtling backwards, hard enough that he fell over. He didn’t seem to hit a wall, or get hit in turn. His speed just seemed to… reverse.
“Thank you, Kara,” the man in the chair said.
The short guy grunted.
Fasces must’ve been new in town, here only for the protest; he was squinting like he was trying to place the man in the chair. Ringmaster decided to help.
“You’re All-Seeing Eye, aren’t you?” she said in her clown voice. “My ex is a big fan!”
This was a lie. Her ex hated Eye as a sell-out to the colonialist ableist super-macy of society, had a photo of his face pinned to the house dartboard. Judging by the look Eye gave her, he knew it too.
Fasces fell back a step. “From Law and Justice?”
Eye nodded. Fasces got his smile back on, but it took a moment, and Ringmaster didn’t need psychic powers to know he was conflicted. On the one hand, Law and Justice were as American as police brutality and apple pie. On the other, Eye was a brown beardo in a turban. For a moment, Fasces tried to stare Eye down. When Eye only looked back with disinterest, Fasces opened his mouth.
Eye said, “cuckaduck48.”
Fasces went pale and turned away. In his normal voice, he said, “Let’s go.”
Someone went, “But—”
A hint of compelling boom. “I said let’s go.”
The mob left—even the ones who weren’t compelled by Fasces knew better than to swing on a licensed Law and Justice superhero without a mind-controller to blame. Eye and the inexplicably-named Kara (who Ringmaster did not know) watched them go, then the latter gave her a hand up.
“You all right?” Chicago accent. Not from around here.
Dropping character, Ringmaster asked Eye, “What’s cuckaduck48?”
“Something he doesn’t want spread around,” Eye replied. “It was that or start a fight, which I’d rather avoid, and someone here informed me that sometimes humiliation works where force doesn’t.”
Ringmaster wasn’t sure how to respond. She’d dealt with superpigs before… but as a villain, not someone getting saved. It made her uncomfortable.
“You’re Rabblerouser, aren’t you?” Eye’s question was clearly rhetorical. “The one who shamed White Knight out of the business.”
“I haven’t been that in a long time.” Not since the recording of White Knight beating her half to death at a protest went viral. She still couldn’t escape the memes of her bloody face, both as oh-so-noble calls to action, and also as “prime lulz.” “What do you want, ‘hero’?”
“Myself? Nothing. A friend of mine in the street vig business wants to speak with you.” He handed her a card with Incognito on it in small caps. “Would you like to press charges?”
“More pigs? No.” Even if she agreed with the carceral injustice system, it was still working out how to deal with psyche-affecting powers. They were no more prepared for someone like Fasces than they were for someone like her.
“Then go home. Rest. Stay in trouble.”
“Always.”
She didn’t shake Eye’s hand, but he didn’t offer it, and she jingled off to find her people. And also to find out more about cuckaduck48. After all, she was sure someone with Eye’s power set wouldn’t have shared it with her if he hadn’t trusted her to use the information well.
no subject
Date: 2022-08-15 09:32 pm (UTC)Good work! Thank you for posting it :D
- Q. (she/her)
no subject
Date: 2022-08-15 09:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-08-15 11:12 pm (UTC)Egos are to fraaaagile. Good thing clowns are great at juggling.
- Kado (he/him)
no subject
Date: 2022-08-15 11:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-08-16 01:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-08-16 01:59 am (UTC)I have a lot of similar feelings around protests because, while I can respect the power, I'm often conflicted about how I feel about their impact. I still don't have an answer for what I think is a better alternative, but I liked Ringmaster's solution.
no subject
Date: 2022-08-18 02:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-08-16 02:31 am (UTC)