Tag Archives: Dr. Nightwing^*++$

February 19, 2024 · 7:38 am

frog passes frog along historic Route 66 in MO

“Interesting tattoo you have on your back there, Ms….”

“Krakow,” she finished for the doctor. “Marsha ‘Pink’ Krakow.”

“Yes, so I’ve heard. Very colorful.” The records said Shelley. Shelley Johnston Struthers. This was the correct body.

—–

“*There* it is. Up on the hill. At least we know we’re in the right Wayensville this time. Um, Waynesville I meant there.”

“Of course,” said the driver to the passenger who was also his lover. Bullfrog and Aqua Dude, on their way to a meeting with The Mann about the future of superheroes in general. And their whole DC University along with them.

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December 4, 2023 · 6:20 pm

00410211

She learned the truth about the chest that day. Octavia’s.

Borneo chest. Square. Iowa. Flying — planes (and lines (and points)).

He was… fascinated with that chest! she realized. What’s inside? Pictures of Octavia. Letters of love. Notes: “don’t forget to pick up milk at Speedy Mart before our rendezvous tonight” (etc.).

—–

She went back to her old home in (Paper-)Soap to check Mouse’s new info against her mother’s.

“Greene’s Motel,” she started. “That’s where the doctor — my father — said I was conceived.”

“Well there’s a green *door* inside. Along with a green phone. Maybe that’s what he was referring to.” Her Maw, Octavia Tart III, wondered if the old man perhaps was getting senile and confusing names with each other, overlapping colors where they shouldn’t be. Always fascinated with hues the good doctor was. Maw Tart wasn’t surprised that her old lover was involved with fellow doctors named Gray(son) and Brown, for example — fits the pattern. “Blue?!” he said one time to her, rubbing off the rouge she just put on that morning thinking it would please him. “I said red!” he said. Purple at the least, he thought to himself. She believed that was the day Alice came along. The door to her standard 104 room was locked for some reason — had to do it out back. Perhaps it was occupied, she realized now. Yes, Daisy was working that day as well. Made sense suddenly. Alice was conceived in the alley because of Daisy (she imagined). She’d have to mark it in her “Little Book of Vengeance” against the fellow hooker, now going on 12 (or 32) years at the Lucky Motel. 12 (or 32) years is too long — can’t call her Lucky now. Her: 6 (or 26). She still has some luck left but it’s running out quick. Mouse was a way out but wasted. No luck with Robert either, the owner of the swamp. Or so she thought.

“What about Claude? The golden robot?”

“What *about* Claude?” Maw Tart got tense all of a sudden, felt a surge of the unknown and probably unknowable coming, like in the Dark Days. Before the Coming of Jesus into her heart.

“Well… I mean, he — I mean, *she’s* in Cass City now. And he’s fiddling with her.”

“I bet he is,” spouts Maw Tart through the fear. Pleasure robots, *pheh*.

“No. I mean, he’s tinkering with her. Like in her parts.”

“My statement still stands.”

“*No*. Like… *reprogramming*. What do you know about the numbers 1886 and 1936?”

“I know they’re *years*.”

“50 years. Between them, I mean.”

“I’m counting, let’s see, 3822,” Maw said, showing off her math skills and being difficult at the same time. The fear was standing just behind her now, threatening to reach into her chest with its shadowy paw and pull out her savior.

“He’s interested in hues. Red to yellow to green to blue. Or something.”

“Hues, *huh*.”

“He’s doing *something* to that robot. He’s spying on his prospective replacements, Maw.”

“HUH — wish *I* had a replacement. Then I could go work at the beer factory they opened up in Barrow County; become like Laverne and Shirley like I always wanted to.”

Alice didn’t have the heart to tell her mother. Barrow County was no more. She’d been sending her postcards from the Void.

(to be continued)

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December 4, 2023 · 5:02 pm

00410210

“She’s gone now.”

“She certainly had important information to relay to us.” And lo and behold his 50 year old cold was gone (!).

Time to move back to the present as inevitably as red turns yellow turns green turns blue. 1936. Or thereabouts.

—–

Dr. Mouse confessed to his daughter Alice about what happened. “Why didn’t you just pay for an abortion?” she queried in the diner the next day. Mouse had to run off to an appointment the day before or certainly they would have caught up then. Interview with another doctor, a more promising one than Grayson and especially Brown so he couldn’t miss it. Apologized and was on his way, leaving Alice to the pinball machine herself; left alone in the city once more. She peered up at the last score before inserting a quarter: 28064212. Lunar month. Deception. The Sun nowhere to be found. Gloomy day.

The huge Arabic number disappeared as her own scoring began.

Sunnier now. A boy in the far distance stops revolving around 10 to 13 to 10 etc. etc. and becomes 18 for a spell. He asks out the girl down the street he’s had a crush on forever. Now that he can speak to her eye to eye he figures: why not. Forecast doesn’t call for rain until Thursday. And today was Munday; time for maybe even several dates with tall, blonde Sarah. Or was it Nikki?

Back to Mouse and daughter Alice in the diner booth. “Octavia,” he hesitated, “… we had a different relationship than…” Did he want to say “clientele”? He just decided on the “others.” Her other men, her other clients, Alice understood. “She knew the man who owned the swamp, the one the psychic children in town were always altering and changing. This made her special in my eyes. The man’s name was…” He suddenly couldn’t remember, although he’d thought of him a thousand times since Alice’s conception on an old mattress in an alley back of Greene’s Motel (he assumed). “Robert,” he then recollected. He tried the name out on Alice.

“I don’t know that name,” she returned. “Do you mean Bob Levarbe? Leverber?” she tried again herself. “Levargee.”

“Bill,” he suddenly recalled. And a last name. Lavosier! He felt the air around him become heavier and more combustible. BOOMB! he recalled. He got too close.

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December 1, 2023 · 2:49 am

00410208

Berta was conveniently on her lunch break but Keith B. timed it that way. Drugs in Biff Carter’s last coffee and also last donut just to make sure — he’ll be snoozing for a while. Time to take a gander at that 3n1 file he knew Dr. Mouse dropped off just day before yesterday on a visit to his old detective pal. Said to him: find this girl, before she separates out again and all is lost.

Entering the downtown building, he couldn’t see the evidence right in front of his face. A spacer this one is, always thinking about the next operation in a broader sense of the word. He’d just met with Dr. Grayson uptown at his Serapis Club, a potential replacement. Dr. Brown is no longer an option, since he perished in that Millbank haunted house explosion back in the last photo-novel. By Dr. Mouse’s hands no less. Brown maybe knew too much about the 3n1 since he had the same last name as one of the 3 components (Frankie “Beige” Brown) — he couldn’t take a chance. And all that talk about preservation and Halloween being a perpetual holiday from him. Nonsense! That would cut out his favorite one of all which was of course Christmas, Xmas as he liked to call it, not being a practicing religionist. Science is instead his thing of worship. If there is a God, he’s determined, he’ll have on a lab coat when he meets him at the Pearly Gates, with a beaker in one hand and a test tube in the other. Maybe some kind of Adam-Frankenstein laying on a nearby gurney. And of course an Xmas tree in back adorned with more beakers and test tubes. He’s pictured the scene quite a few times now. Makes him merry.

He feels like he has control of the city but it’s just an illusion caused by a game. An in-disguise Marsha “Pink” Krakow enthusiastically claps from across the midtown diner after he breaks the jackpot once again. He turns.

In fact, I don’t think there’s any way he could have missed that Pink Pawn sign and made the connection. Marsha did that as well. She’s covering her tracks. In fact, this is what she looked like to Dr. Mouse when he turned from his still dinging and clanging and whooping machine.

“Alice??” he exclaimed. His daughter.

(to be continued)

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November 23, 2023 · 7:55 pm

00410201

The day after Thanksgiving. Normalcy returns to the small virtual village of Amiable with plenty of leftover goodies from the festival, a huge success. Corn shucked, weighed and balanced, and then baked into bread and other products; sweet roots based music produced aplenty; sweets and refreshments served all around.

—–

“Offer you a drink, Doctor?”

“Not now Victoria.” He wanted to keep his eyes glued to the front of the club, for Dr. Grayson was waiting on someone, another doctor he assumed. The place: Cass City, queen burg of Satori’s Deep South. The time: 1939 apparently. Just before the great war that never was. Thanks to the book.

Dr. Mouse walks into the Serapis Club. “Check your coat, Doctor?”

“Not now, Victor.” He had a mission to fulfill. Bring what he assumed was another doctor up to speed. And then have him take his place. Hopefully.

(to be continued)

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March 14, 2021 · 10:16 am

Dinksyland

I hadn’t heard Dinksy Dix and his Wee Wonders Jazz Band in a while, so I fired them up when I had finished with Charlene. I thought about our conversation which took a strange twist and turn at the end while listening to what I believe was a Scott Joplin rag — unsure, though — must study up more on jazz soon. Anyway, the tune ended right as I came to the conclusion that she was just leading me on… perhaps she was even channeling that witch Fern in the moment — yes, I thought, that must be it. Just to throw me off. Makes sense: Fern could always do that with her surprise spells and notwhat. I decided I better move forward and tip the wee, dinky ones. Dinksy would never speak to me again in that squeaky, cartoon voice if I didn’t. I figured a ten-er would be enough. Not too much. Don’t want them going on the road again to Mississippi and Alabama and who knows where else. Teepot needs music and laughter too much in these days of dark times. Keep their income steady but low and they can’t fuel up that gigantic magic bus of theirs and fly off to… God it could be Mexico if we weren’t careful and they’d never make it back over the border, what with their size. They’d be branded foreign contraband for sure. But… enough. “Thanks Dinksy,” I offered to the drummer who was also the leader of the small band, and personally handed him the bill, knowing the others might just drink it away. I winked at Dinksy and he stared back, obviously expecting more for such fine playing. They’d been rehearsing for weeks, eager for Master Phillips’ return, as they called me, cute as a pie. I’m no more Master than the Doctor formerly serving drinks up at the Castle and now probably vacationing in the Alps or Cambodia or some other God forsaken place in the world at large. Somewhere either extremely cold or warm for certain, alchemy dictating the contrast.

(to be continued)

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August 18, 2020 · 6:54 am

castling

“You are a doctor. Aren’t you?”

The doctor puts his arms over his head in a stretch. “I am so, my dear lady. And *you*… are a nun. We are both servants of the community at large. This, erm, *Teepot*. Is that what we lot decided to call it, hmm?”

“I’m afraid you aren’t a part of our lot, doctor,” spoke New Nun honestly. “You are not an inhabited soul. You are merely a prop. I merely ask if you are the doctor to see if *you* realize this.” She was truthful but not harsh. No need to get testy with this fellow servant, as he called himself. Good. He may be worth saving in the long haul.

“I *see*.” But did he really see? He made the queer observation again in his pleasant, proper British accent, as if he were repeating himself at a set interval. “You know, when I started this bartending gig here those statues over there were nude. I just came to work one day and they were suddenly clothed, out of the blue. I remember it being a clear, crisp morning. I had the same tweed jacket I have on today. In fact…”

“You never remove it from your body,” New Nun guessed about what he was going to say.

The doctor eyed her keenly. “Yeeeess. Me thinks you know more than you let on, madam.” He thought back to her earlier statement, absurd in the moment but becoming a growing, flickering possibility in his diamond-like mind. Although a prop true, he was such an extraordinary learned and storied one that he truly may be becoming alive in the moment. New Nun could be right about him being worth saving. Why would I doubt her? It’s in her business after all.

She looked at him squarely. “But you are not the doctor I seek.”

“Oh?”

“No.” She took a final sip of her whiskey drink and was gone. The doctor vaguely waved goodbye before forgetting who she was.

New customer, one blacked out but with dangerous curves. She felt the cross and crucifix disappear from her hand beneath the counter. She remembers Rhode… second life. His head pivots toward her as the sequence begins again.

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August 26, 2019 · 4:58 am

teeth

Preston Weston heard his own voice on the tape his father was viewing. “Hey Dad?”

“Yes Son,” slouching Craighead Phillips Option 01 said from the couch.

“Whatcha watching, heh?”

“Oh, just your school play you put on last year. Can’t get enough of it.” He chuckles at something his son said on the videotape, currently playing the role of Hamlet.

“Cool, cool, heh.”

There was silence between the two as Dad watched act 01 scene 03 unfold.

“Hey Son. There’s Felicia Mae Appletree. Didn’t you have a thing for her (mother) last year?”

“Yeah, heh, a thing,” returns Preston Weston, thinking: duh, still a thing, Dad.

“What did you use to say about her? — so cute.”

“Geez, I don’t know, Dad.” Pacman level 3 had just been reached by eating the last red ghost.

“Yeah, he he, I remember. You said, that apple tree needs shaking, Dad.”

“Right. I remember.” A new ghost appears, new apple color. Green this time.

More silence as each are engrossed in their respective activities. Then Craighead Phillips abruptly switches off the new colored TV his wife bought just this afternoon. “Well, I’m satisfied with the product, Preston. How do you like the new colored monitor we bought in tandem, eh? 1/2 price on each. What a deal.”

“It’s, er, *great* Dad. Never knew there were more than two shades of ghosts. All these colors, heh!”

“Okay, we’re both satisfied. Let’s go tell your mother.”

“Oh, heh. Mom always goes out at about this time to the bridge club.”

“Oh… well, um, let’s get something to eat, eh? Little snack before supper?”

—–

“I’m on my dessert already and you haven’t even hardly touched your sandwich yet. What gives?”

“Oh, a little belly ache I suppose, heh.” Preston Weston forces himself to take another bite of the BLT before him, knowing that his mama would fix a full meal only about an hour later that he would be *required* to finish.

“How was school today? I forgot to ask earlier.”

“Fine, Dad. Thanks for picking me up,” he said with a mouthful.

“You’re welcome.” *slurp*

“How’s, er, mom’s mouse?”

“That’s mousse, Son. And it’s fine.” *slurp*. “Almost perfect, actually.”

“Oh right. Mousse, like the animal moose. Not a mouse, hehe, heh.”

“Right Son.” *double slurp* “Well, I’m done. Guess it’s time to go.”

“You heading back to — where, heh, did you say you came from today?”

“Athlone Village. In the middle of it all, which is — go ahead and say it with me, Son.”

“Which is unfortunately in the way,” they utter in tandem, Preston Weston rather reluctantly, tired of the old saying.

—–

“What time did your father leave today, Preston Weston?” Her voice suddenly had that edge to it. Father talk edge.

“Oh, heh. Um, about 4 I guess. Maybe, heh, closer to 5?”

“Bridge time, then, hmm,” Your Mama dismissed.

Preston Weston wanted to ask his mother if that bridge would ever get built but resisted the urge.

She turned to her other son, in the chair. “How about you Robin? When did *you* get home from the wilds? Did you also see your father?”

I’m not his son, he thought. “Oh, about 5 as well. Must have just missed him, sorry.” He wasn’t sorry.

They all kept watching “Leave it to Beav” in living color after this. Starring: the Beav.

“Look Ma,” Preston Weston indicated. “Like *me*!”

He was suddenly inside the TV set again, 3 hours lost.

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December 19, 2018 · 7:03 am

pause 04

Duncan spoke to the just arrived Dr. Nightwing. “The train derezzed before I could teleport you over. Sorry about that. But never mind. We’re here.”

“The beginning of the end,” the Dr. offered. “The trail to the treasure.”

“Well… *they* might think so.”

“Who’s ‘they’?”

“You’ll see.”

—–

The two began hiking through one of the most desolate, wastelandy places left in Our Second Lyfe. But the dotting system trees still comforted Duncan. He was Lindener above all now, since they saved him. *He* saved him. And this was about as Linden as you can get. Until you reach the end.

—–

“They’re heading toward the Moon of the Moon,” Ragdoll squealed in excitement. “The big loop! Beginning meets end.”

“Well, not quite,” said Ruby, pencil still twirling away beneath her hand.

“Let’s pause here,” Indigo declared, stretching her arms and yawning. “Getting late.”

“No,” countered her ragdoll sister across the table. “We’re almost there! Let’s press on. Get these two to the — what do you call it? Infohub?”

Ruby stopped the writing. “We better fire up the interwebs and check. Check out the whole Confederation of Democratic Simulators site before proceeding forward.”

“Second Lyfe Moon,” cooed Ragdoll. “And its own Moon not far behind. Equilateral gravity on all 6 sides. Just like Phillip prophesized about.”

—–

“The trees change here at this sim crossing, Dr. Nightwing. Snowier and shorter.”

“I still don’t see it.” He was a little out of breath by now. Duncan surged ahead, seeming to draw energy from the landscape.

“Not long now.”

—–

“*There* it finally is. Beginning to worry the thing we saw back there near the road was a mirage. Dr.?” He turned. “Dr.??”

The alien man had collapsed in the snow, as if the very landscape around them *drained* him. Duncan walked back to the Dr. “I still can’t see it, Duncan. I’m not sure I ever will. I’m changing over here. It’s a weak point. I saw the end but couldn’t change it. Fixed point in time. Legend will say (he caught his breath)… will say you killed me here. But we’ll know the truth. (deep breath) That’s the important thing.”

The transition began.

—–

He had no choice, if what the Dr. said was true. Head to the Second Lyle Moon — *potential* Moon — or else be imprisoned for life or worse. He turned back to the green pine forest now almost out of sight before ascending the final bit of slope. “Vanished, man,” he said, shaking his head in disbelief. “Just vanished.”

He had always heard it was otherwise.

—–

He was here.

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December 18, 2018 · 9:53 am

pause 03

As Dr. Nightwing continued to stare out the window at the southern Okemo Canyon view and contemplate possibilities, the 13th miraculously fell out of the sky right in front of him. Duncan Avocado. Landing without even a scratch upon his body.

—–

“Let’s talk about this,” suggested Indigo to her side.

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