The Story

Introduction

They met on a hot day in the middle of August. Charles was the first to reach the state fair, and he shifted back and forth on his feet as he waited for his two friends to show up. As per the unspoken agreement between the three of them, Charles wore blue jeans and tennis shoes, and the lightning bolt-emblazoned red T-shirt that proclaimed him "Fastest Man Alive." There wasn't any real truth to that boast, of course, but still, he was the first of them to arrive.
Kyle showed up next. He, too, was wearing blue jeans. His corresponding shirt was the familiar s-shield on blue that would seem to suggest that he was the mightiest of the three young men. Had he been bold enough to suggest that aloud, his friends would undoubtedly have nodded in agreement, saving their snickers for the first time his back was turned.
Joe, the third side of this not-terribly-superheroic-but-at-least-they'd-give-it-their-best-shot triangle, pulled up five minutes later. He, in a slightly different twist, was wearing baggy black pants instead of blue jeans. His bright green shirt (on loan from Kyle) was probably the least recognizable of the three, as the hero it implied had never had his own syndicated television show. To the untrained eye, in fact, it looked like nothing more than a green circle with two parallel lines running tangent to it. Joe liked it, though. His character was the only one with any imagination. And, though he would never mention it to Chuck or Kyle, Joe liked being thought of as the creative member of their group.
Charles and Kyle, now anxious to begin their excursion into the fair, both sighed inwardly as Joe lit up a cigarette. As he puffed on his cigarette, Joe entertained himself by noting the similarities between Chuck, Kyle, and himself. All three young men were relatively tall, none were particularly "built," and all three wore glasses. The only particularly striking difference between the three was their hair- Charles' dark hair was worn short, Kyle's bright red hair long, and Joe's blond hair shaved nearly off. Not for the first time, Joe thought of "The Witches of Eastwick." In the movie (the book sucked), Cher, Susan Sarandon, and Michelle Pfeiffer (with respective matching hair colors and, to a lesser degree, styles) played three friends around whom reality shifted whenever all three had the same thought or desire.
Joe finished his cigarette, and flicked the butt into the parking lot. By the time it landed, the cigarette butt was still firmly planted in reality. The three young men were not.

Chapter 1

"All's Fair..."

Kyle looked around. "What happened?" was the only question to which he could put a voice. Charles, ever the reasonable one, took note of a few facts. 1) He was no longer where he had formerly thought he was. 2) He had felt a momentary tingle through his whole body a few seconds earlier. 3) His friends seemed just as confused as he was. These three facts, plus a long history of reading comic books (one of the few passions all three friends shared), led him to the only logical conclusion. "We've been transported to an alternate dimension."
Kyle shrugged, having himself deduced the same thing a few seconds slower. A new question came into his head. "What do we do now?"
Joe interjected. "I," he said, "am going to smoke a cigarette."
Frustrated as much by his friend's failure to grasp the complexity of their situation as his blatant disregard for his health, Charles pointed out, "You just had a cigarette."
With a look of total seriousness, as if to suggest that he shouldn't even have to point out something so obvious, Joe shrugged and said, "Yes, but that was a whole dimension ago."
Neither Charles nor Kyle saw fit to argue the point. Joe lit his cigarette.

* * *

Three minutes later, the three young men examined their surroundings. As best as any of them could tell, they hadn't traveled too terribly far, geographically speaking. It seemed that they were still in Indianapolis, Indiana. It even seemed that they were still at the Marion County Fairgrounds. The only thing that really seemed different was the fair itself. The tents in this world seemed... gaudier? Brighter, flashier, different. None of the three could exactly say how, but even they, themselves, seemed a little bit different. A little bit more interesting, just by virtue of standing there.
"Well," said Joe after a long pause, "I guess we might as well do the fair thing."
Charles and Kyle nodded. None of them were precisely sure just what was going on, but they all seemed to agree that there was nothing to be done about it now. The guys each paid their entrance to the fair, and began to make their way through the line of tents and booths.
Kyle was the first to notice the poster advertising "Superhuman feats of strength and skill not seen this side of the X-Men!" All three guys got a kick out of this particularly ingenious bit of advertising, and decided that this was undoubtedly a show worth watching.
The three dimensionally-displaced friends let themselves into the large orange tent and found three seats toward the top of the bleachers. The show started about five minutes later.
The first act was decidedly unimpressive. A single clown, dressed in vivid oranges and purples, pedaled his way around the arena on a unicycle, juggling four balls and three pins. Charles looked at his friends and said, "I could do that."
Soon, the clown was joined by two men (twins?) wearing skin-tight, purple-and-black costumes. The two acrobats began their act by back-flipping into the center of the tent, then proceeded to sort of vaguely impress the crowd with a complicated series of flips and jumps from trapezes suspended forty feet in the air. Charles looked at his friends and said, "I could do that."
The third (and most impressive act) was a stunning woman with long brown hair dressed in a form-fitting green bodysuit. And, as if that wasn't impressive enough, she carried with her a forty-foot long python, which slithered back and forth through her arms and over her shoulders. Beating Charles to the punch, Kyle turned to his friends and said, "I could do that."
As the act progressed, the three friends chatted quietly from their seats in the rear of the tent. All agreed that the performers were pretty talented, but none of them were on par with the X-Men. Still, it was a fun show, and the guys managed to momentarily forget that they actually had no idea where they were. Joe started to figure it out when the ringmaster stepped into the middle of the tent.
He was a short man, dressed in hot pink pants and a sparkling green evening jacket (with tails!) covered in black stars. His face seemed long and pinched, and the curved, thin, black moustache he wore cried out for a cheesy french accent. What caught Joe's attention, though, was the bright pink top hat which the man wore half-cocked on top of his head. Only one man wears a hat like that, thought Joe. The Ringmaster of Crime. We're in the Marvel Universe.
Joe turned quickly to his friends and quietly ordered them both to put their fingers in their ears, close their eyes, and softly hum whatever song first popped into their heads. The suggestion was ludicrous enough to ordinarily require a smart-ass refusal, but the urgency in Joe's eyes left Charles and Kyle unwilling to argue. All three friends proceeded to do just as Joe suggested.

* * *

After a few minutes of "Shave and a Haircut" hummed over and over again with his fingers in his ears and his eyes jammed shut, Charles began to get bored. And curious. He opened his eyes. The four human members of the circus (minus, of course, the ringmaster) were making their way through the stands, collecting wallets, jewelry, and valuable trinkets from every member of the audience. At first, Charles assumed he'd just missed the set-up for what was going to be a very elaborate magic trick (thanks a lot, Joe!). But, as he looked on, he realized that everyone around him seemed to be staring blankly into space. No one was fidgeting, or watching the performers, or even, it seemed, blinking. Something was not right. Charles nudged Kyle, interrupting another out-of-synch rendition of "Shave and a Haircut." Kyle pulled his fingers from his ears and took in the surrounding scene. The two turned to see Joe staring blankly ahead, his hands resting on his lap. He looked just like every one of the other, mesmerized, fair-goers. Before they had time to panic, however, they both turned to see Ernesto, one of the Italian acrobats, holding a bag full of stolen goods, staring down at both of them.

Shock registered on the faces of all three men simultaneously. Charles, however, was the first to put everything together. He quickly jumped to his feet, pushing out against the felon in front of him. Ernesto, with the grace and poise that comes only from years of practice, fell backwards over the heavyset lady who had been sitting in front of Charles, struck his head on the bleachers, and passed out. Charles grabbed Kyle by the arm, and they ran.
The two first ran to the end of their row, where a series of unused seats made a set of stairs. Pausing to think for just a moment, Charles looked first up, then down the stairs. Realizing neither lead to anything any sane man might consider safe, Charles closed his eyes and jumped off the bleachers altogether, landing in a somewhat graceful heap at the bottom.

Kyle was a pretty sharp guy. Granted, the situation in which he now found himself was not one in which he'd ever counted on being. So his instinctive reaction to the question, "What do you do when you're surrounded by terrorists dressed like circus people?" was "I really have no freakin' clue." On the other hand, his body knew damn well what to say when confronted with a twelve-foot drop from circus bleachers- "What are you crazy!??!" Kyle watched Charles drop off the end of the bleachers, then took a step backwards as he pondered what to do next. In the second while he waited, Kyle found himself being slowly surrounded by the thick, muscular body of a forty-foot long python. Suddenly, the python's face was right in his own, mouth open wide! Its fangs gleamed in the dim circus lighting, and a sinister hiss escaped from the monstrous animal's throat. "Oh damn," said Kyle.

From the corner of his eye, Charles could see the second acrobatic twin making his way up the bleachers, all the while crying out, "Ernesto! Ernesto! What have they done to you?!?" He wasn't completely sure where Kyle was, but was relatively certain that he would be okay. What most concerned Charles at this moment was the now sinister-looking clown bearing down on him on a unicycle, throwing batons and knives in his direction. Charles picked himself off the ground, and ran under the bleachers, desperate for some sort of cover.

As soon as he watched his friends leave, Joe blinked a few times, and carefully crept down a few rows, where he sat down and once more adopted the blank stare he saw on the faces of those around him. He hadn't really intended to use his friends as cannon fodder, but if he knew his comic books (and he did), the only way to save everyone was to make it to the front row undetected. He was so focused on this task, he didn't even see Kyle ten feet away, about to be crushed by a giant python.

At the python's sudden startling appearance, Kyle fell backwards. His fall was cushioned by the body of aforementioned overweight woman. Kyle didn't care. He was relatively certain that he would need to change his pants soon, but he also didn't care about that. Folks, we're talking about a forty foot-long python, here. That's freakin' scary! Kyle acted out of the most primal, the most natural of all human emotions: blind, unreasoning terror. Adrenaline surged, and Kyle's fight-or-flight mechanism kicked in. With the python's body surrounding him, there was no where to run to, so Kyle (subconsciously, of course- bear in mind that Kyle hasn't had a rational thought since seven or eight paragraphs ago) resigned himself to battle. Picking up the nearest weapon at hand (aforementioned fat lady's purse), Kyle swung with all his might at the python, smacking it right in the side of the head.
This was one surprised python.

Confident that the clown (or, to address him by his super-villain code name, the Clown) would be unable to pelt him with all manner of unpleasantries, Charles wormed his way through the series of metal beams that made up the underbelly of the bleachers. After a few moments of twisting and turning, Charles also realized that his relative lack of movement also made him terribly vulnerable. Charles pulled himself up and between the slats between two seats. That is, he started to. A loose nail or somesuch had taken this precise moment to catch on Charles' jeans. And, after hearing a remarkably long ing sound and feeling a sudden burst of cold air on the back of his leg, Charles realized that his pants were stuck, and he was stuck with them. The Clown, now tired of throwing things around, advanced on Charles. The Clown raised one of his knives....

The Ringmaster's circus (the Circus of Crime, obviously) was not just composed of people who on occasion do bad things. Rather, it was a whole circus populated with people of generally rude natures. The midway games, for example, promised "useful, ingenious" prizes to the winners of their games of skill. Few people ever did win the rigged games, and those who did were unimpressed with their "useful, ingenious" prize.
Talula Baird had been a softball pitcher for most of her life. Sports were her way of compensating for a metabolism that, despite her active lifestyle, made her look like the Hindenberg's mean older sister. Talula realized earlier today that the Pitch-a-Ball game was rigged, but with a little determination, she'd won. Her "useful, ingenious" prize, the barker explained, could function as a doorstop, paperweight, or stepladder. He called it a "Fair Piece." It looked like a brick. Still, Talula had been pleased to overcome the challenge presented by the Pitch-a-Ball game, and so she had slid the brick into her purse before moving on to see what sort of show they put on under the big top.
The Ringmaster's clever way of cutting corners came back to haunt him as Kyle brought a brick-filled purse to bear against the face of a forty-foot python. Several of the snake's teeth shattered at the first blow, and several more went with each of the four follow-up hits. Finally, the snake lost consciousness, drooping lifelessly half-on and half-off the bleachers. Kyle dropped Talula Baird's purse, the adrenaline-fed energy draining from his body. Before he had time to faint, however, Kyle was knocked down once more by a very angry-looking Italian acrobatic twin named Luigi.

Joe was not the superheroic sort. In fact, Joe was not even the heroic sort. Come to think of it, Joe was kind of a pushover and not too nice all the time. All things considered, Joe was by far the least likely of his three friends to do anything that one might ever even remotely consider "heroic." Still, Joe found himself sitting in the front row of the bleachers, realizing that he had to act now, and he had to get this part right, or he and his friends would be in an awful lot of trouble. And, once Joe convinced himself that he had to get this thing right, he did.
Joe pushed off the dirt floor with both feet, launching himself in a flying tackle at the nearby Ringmaster. The Ringmaster had just enough time to cry out, "Stop!" before realizing what a bad idea that was. Up in the bleachers, Princess Python stopped weeping over the high cost of animal dentistry. Luigi stopped reaching down to pummel Kyle. Kyle stopped scrambling to his feet. The Clown stopped getting ready to stab Charles. Charles stopped panicking. In fact, everyone in the whole tent stopped. Except Joe. Bound as he was by the laws of physics, Joe kept right on careening into the Ringmaster. Joe and the Ringmaster fell into a heap in the center of the big top. Joe was on the top of this heap. The Ringmaster was in the middle. At the very bottom of the heap was the Ringmaster's bright pink hat. The last sound the Ringmaster heard before falling unconscious was the sound of thousands of delicate circuits, like thousands of delicate dreams, being shattered into little pieces.

* * *

The crunching of the Ringmaster's hat was basically the end of the battle, but not quite the end of the story. See, destroying the source of hypnotic suggestions doesn't immediately wake the victim. Like destroying a hypnotist's gold watch, all it really does is keep anything further from happening. Luckily, Joe was the first (and in fact, only) person to rise. While the command "Stop!" was vague enough to freeze everyone in his or her tracks, Joe recognized it as an abbreviated form of "Stop jumping at me, you dick!" And, as such, was never really held by the command at all.
So, a few seconds after colliding with the Ringmaster, Joe was back on his feet. First, he bound the members of the Circus of Crime, taking special care to place their ill-gotten gains at their feet. Then, he remembered his Handbook of the Marvel Universe, and took the Ringmaster's green-with-black-stars jacket away from him. Joe's third action was to telepathically activate the swirling patterns of said jacket to unhypnotize first Kyle then Charles. The audience, they agreed, would be unfrozen just as the three friends left, rather than face the police without any "real" identity in this dimension. This left everything neatly resolved except Charles' rather embarrassing lack of pants (extricating him from beneath the bleachers had involved extending the tears to rather inappropriate levels). In fact, Joe at this point also speculated that perhaps wearing T-shirts from the *ahem* Distinguished Competition's universe was probably not such a hot idea, either. So, before taking their leave of the Circus of Crime, our three heroes raided the villains' dressing rooms.

Joe, perfectly happy with his black pants, simply traded in his green shirt for one of the Ringmaster's black turtleneck sweaters. And, since Joe's penchant for horribly tacky clothing was matched if not exceeded by his love for jackets with hypnotic powers, Joe also opted to continue wearing the Ringmaster's green jacket with black stars. Being just a bit taller than the Ringmaster, if no broader in the shoulders, he found that the jacket stretched comfortably down to his waist, the tails just a little bit further.
Charles, now in need of both a shirt and pants, chose the brothers' spare costume. Both men were somewhat larger than Charles, but that, as they say, is the Miracle of Spandex. Clad now in a skin-tight purple suit and pants, with matching black gloves, trunks, and boots, Charles certainly looked every bit the superhero. With the also-matching lavender hood, Charles looked every bit the weenie, so he decided to leave that behind.
Alas, poor Kyle. He had neither first dibs on the cool jacket (not that anyone but Joe could ever think that lime green and stars was cool) nor first dibs on the outfit which featured pants. So, he got the leftover spare costume. Unfortunately, after trying it on, Kyle was forced to admit that he didn't have the figure to pull off Princess Python's slinky green number. So, Kyle got the leftover leftover spare costume. The clown suit. First, he tried separating the top from the bottoms. That made him look a little less cartoony. Then, he tried tucking the clownshirt into his blue jeans. That, also, made him look a little less cartoony. Finally, he tried tearing off the banana yellow, ruffled collar. That went a long way towards making him look less cartoony. Unfortunately, in a Fred Flinstonesque orange-with-black-spots, baggy shirt, Kyle still looked awfully cartoony. But, it was the best any of them could do. Now suitably attired, the three friends set off to explore the Marvel Universe.


Chapter 2
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