Sequel: Earth to Me

Generation Why Bother

Explain Yourself!

Johnny Cool was technically given his powers via a cat. Granted, that cat was able to communicate with him because of its collar that translated messages from the Stars to give him valuable information regarding his future as a crime fighter, but when it came down to it, Hoshiko the fat cat had crash landed into Johnny’s apartment, his life, and the world.

He was backed into a corner, still, at the beginning of the second issue, and that cat was still staring at him with the screen scrolling in front of him.

“YOU HAVE HAD GRATUITOUS STAR POWERS BESTOWED UPON YOU, JOHNNY. WE EXPECT YOU TO DEFEND THE PLANET EARTH TO THE BEST OF YOUR ABILITIES, AND WE TRUST THAT THOSE ABILITIES ARE PLENTIFUL.”

Almost like he was praying for whatever was going on to stop, Johnny stared at the ceiling. “Wh…this can’t be real…what…”

Hoshiko cut off his fragment with a big meow. More words began to scroll across the screen.

“YOUR PLANET IS IN DANGER, AND YOU HAVE BEEN CHOSEN TO SAVE IT.”

Johnny wiped his eyes as if adjusting them would make the words disappear and turn everything back to normal, but it didn’t. The letters still glowed in the dim light of his apartment. He just mumbled to himself, “Why me…?”

But unlike the rest of the questions he hadn’t even asked, the Stars had not answered. Not even Hoshiko gave him a reassuring purr.

That wasn’t the entirety of the second issue of Johnny Cool and the Dudes, but the last panel before an advertisement for a local arcade showed the a wide shot of his apartment room and the clothes and crumpled paper scattered all over the floor, Hoshiko sitting there with an innocent cat-smile, and the back of Johnny’s head as he sat slumped in the corner. Coming out of his mouth was a speech bubble that read, “…What?”

It certainly wasn’t the happiest way to introduce his situation, and in hindsight it was a bit silly. But it hooked me even further along with the brilliant colors and fun attitude of the first issue. There was another side to his situation, and even if I was barely a decade old, it still hit me where it hurt.

And I still couldn’t help but think about it in times of peril like that. Now, when I say “peril,” I don’t mean the lightning strike that happened the night before at the show. I was pondering over that familiar plotline in the backseat of Andy’s tiny little punch buggy as he zipped it all around the city, weaving in and out of traffic without even a turn signal. The way he was driving made Tegan and I feel like we were seriously going to die – if not by unfortunate weather, then by a really crappy driver.

The hospital still held us up for a while even after Andy left and we checked out. They gave us a ton of painkillers and lotion to help the scars fade away, and at first they still objected to the idea of letting us out at the bare minimum time. Of course, that didn’t make Andy any happier, and we could tell that when we marched out of the front entrance in fresh clothes our parents brought for us – he was slumped against the back of his tiny car looking like he was smelling something foul.

When he saw us across the parking lot, he shouted, “Finally! God, what took you so long?!”

My dad grunted a foul word in Spanish and squeezed my shoulder. “Don’t let that guy do anything to you or Tegan. Do you hear me?”

“Yes, Papá,” I recited.

Our parents headed out in my dad’s car while Tegan and I took a stroll towards Andy, not even bothering to address his question. The haze in my brain was almost completely gone, but that didn’t make anything seem much more authentic than my paranoid head thought things were. I looked both ways before crossing over the one-way lane that snaked its way through the lot, and we power-walked over to him.

He motioned for us to walk faster, but he still had a smirk on his face like he was just joking around.

But when we took our seats behind him in his car, we instantly knew that his seemingly calmer demeanor was just a guise. He whipped out of his parking space and didn’t even care that he nearly scraped the car next to him, and he floored it while zooming just out of the lot. Now, granted, a Beetle isn’t a vehicle that commands attention and would shock people around the area. However, inside, even wearing our seatbelts, Tegan was slamming into me and I was knocking my head against her shoulder when he took the sharpest turns – maybe even on purpose.

And I swear, getting on the main street out of the hospital on the way to the flat, he punched the gas pedal so hard I think we got a good few inches off the ground. I figured that from the way we hit the ground, forcing our heads forwards. Andy even shouted, “Whoo!” like it was all just a big game.

Even from behind his seat, I could see his hands shaking as he held the steering wheel. He didn’t talk a lot except a few squeaks here and there and a few swears when people beeped at him for driving so terribly, but just from the sweat dripping down his neck and into the wheel, I could tell the dude was freaked out about something or other.

Tegan poked my forearm and gave me a look that said, “Um, what’s with this guy?”

I just shrugged. If I spoke up, I might have made him mad, and that was one of the last things I wanted to do at the moment.

So, Tegan did it for me without even knowing. “Uh…are you alright there?”

Andy glanced through the rearview mirror and put a slight smirk on his face, probably to make his anxiety seem less intense than it really was. “Me? Yeah, I’m fine. Just trying to be speedy. That’s all.”

“Well, why the hurry?” she prodded.

It was like she jinxed us. The light in front of us had turned red, and normally I’d have bet that Andy would run that light, but there were cars in front of us that weren’t taking that risk. He ended up slamming on the brakes with a nice elongated f-bomb, and when we stopped, he punched the steering wheel.

“There’s so much to do in so little time.” He sounded like he was speaking through a locked jaw, but I couldn’t completely tell. “I might as well start while we’re held up at a stoplight for no reason!”

I didn’t bother pointing out the fact that traffic on the other side was kind of heavy and needed to get through, so I kept it to myself.

He grunted, then gave in a little bit. “Okay. So it’s pretty obvious at that point that that little incident wasn’t normal. The lightning you two were struck by was elemental and was contained to only you two. To make a long story short, it was thrown down by the universe to bestow a different element upon each of you – well, that’s the first part, anyway.”

Tegan glanced at her lightning scar, and out of instinct, so did I.

“There’s…there’s even more to it? That’s already insane…” she said quietly.

Andy must not have seen her face and the gloom that hit us both, because he laughed, sounding a bit like a serial killer. “There’s so much more to it.”

The light turned green, and he laid on the horn for a good five seconds before traffic moved and we could successfully go back to breaking ten driving laws at once.

I scooted closer to Tegan, as much as my seatbelt would allow, and whispered, “You think we should’ve gone along with this…?”

For a brief moment, her face was wiped of the fear and sinking feelings, and her eyes even brightened a bit. “I could use some excitement, even if he’s just gonna murder us.”

“Oh, God. You actually think I’m kidding?” Andy said like it was the biggest shock of the century.

Tegan wasn’t gonna cover us this time, so I smoothed over the situation by letting out a nervous laugh that sounded like a dog getting run over. “Um, not completely, no sir,” I whimpered.

“Don’t call me ‘sir,’ dude. You’re making me feel old – Christ, I’m only 24.” As we whipped around a corner onto a little side street, he went on. “And if I was gonna murder you, I sure as hell wouldn’t pull so many traffic violations right before doing it.”

“Well, why not? If you’d get in trouble for murder, why not go big or go home?” Tegan reached. I elbowed her in the ribs but she didn’t budge. I literally could not tell if she was just doing that to play devil’s advocate, or if she was on some sort of adrenaline rush brought on by all of the chaos surrounding us at that point.

Andy had an answer, though. “I’m not doing anything wrong in addition to all that crap I pulled on the roads back there, so if anybody’s following me, they’re not gonna see a murder or whatever sick crap you think I’m gonna do to you. Plus, I did it for a reason – the more time we save, the better.”

Alleys and dark roads all around us, the car conversation went silent, and I had my hands folded in my lap. I could hear the little motor whirring inside the Beetle as he still slammed the petal to the floor, hardly even slowing down when we turned corners, but after about ten more sharp turns through back roads, he whipped the wheel and we were in a parking spot behind a huge building facing a main road.

“Okay, we’re here. Now we’re not taking the elevator up to our room,” he instructed, jumping out of the car (he wasn’t even wearing a seatbelt) and letting us get out as well. “That thing gets jammed every day and we’re not gonna risk it when we’re only on the seventh floor.”

I could almost feel the growl Tegan uttered when we squeezed out of his clown car, and I couldn’t resist a slight eye-roll at his roundabout ways.

The seventh floor of that building? When I looked up at it, it looked like a skyscraper with black and white stripes that billowed endlessly into space. Granted, we were going into it by the back, and in the darkness of the alley we were in, it almost looked sinister. But when the sunlight reflected off of it at its front, which I could see to an extent, the building looked unrealistically huge.

“Let’s go!” Andy ushered, jogging to a door at the side, holding it open for us. Tegan and I shared a sigh and decided to go along with it, and I made a mental note reminding myself of my dad’s advice – if he tried anything, just pee myself and scream…

And of course, there was a staircase facing us upon entering, and Andy took it upon himself to run in front of us while shouting, “Race ya!” He descended the flight with a little more energy than I expected, seeing as how he got so out of breath running through the hospital, and when he passed us going up the next flight, he laughed like a maniac and stuck his tongue out at us.

I felt my footing slip on the last stair of the first flight and almost fell to my death, but Tegan grabbed my arm, preventing me from falling. “Don’t do that again,” she snickered, patting my shoulder.

It took a while to get up seven flights of stairs to reach Andy’s floor. Apparently, for Andy, it must’ve felt like an eternity, because when we got to the very top of the last flight struggling to keep our knees from crashing into one another, he let out the most dramatic groan I’d ever heard from anybody, making yet another exaggerated expression of exasperation.

“You guys are slow as hell! We’re gonna have to work on that,” he added, scrunching his eyebrows together like two big fuzzy worms. “Now c’mon, we’re almost at our flat.”

He insisted on jogging the rest of the way down that hallway and past the beautiful elevator that could’ve made this ordeal a million times easier and probably multiple times faster. When he got to a door at the very end of the hallway on the left, he yanked the keys out of his pocket and jammed them into the doorknob, practically tackling the door to open it.

Tegan and I followed him inside, but before we could get a good look, he cupped his hands around his mouth and screamed, “CODE BANANA! I repeat, CODE BANANA!”

He went further in, allowing for us to enter, and the door slammed behind us on its own. With a couch circle in the center of this apartment, roomy living room space, a kitchen to the left and a hallway to the right leading to what I assumed were personal bedrooms, the few things that gave it away as a band’s home were the random dirty clothes lying on the floor and crumpled papers peppering the carpet.

The only other person standing in the main room at the moment of our arrival was the drummer for Put’emup, Put’emup, Mick. He had a burger halfway up to his mouth when Andy shouted what I guessed was the signal phrase, and all he wore were a faded tie-dye t-shirt and boxers.

However, he dropped the burger and dropped his jaw at the same time upon hearing those words.

“Code…Banana? Already? For real?” he gasped, looking Andy dead in the eye with panic.

“Yes, Mick, Code Banana,” Andy replied with a nod.

Mick backed up slowly towards the wall near the kitchen. Keeping his eyes on the three of us, he felt along the wall until coming across a large button right underneath an electrical outlet. Still with a distinct look in his eye, he pressed it with a shaking hand.

Suddenly, the couch nearest to the window that took up a good chunk of the wall facing downtown folded into the floor. It was like we were in some cartoon where the evil genius has a secret laboratory hidden in plain sight and it all came loose with the touch of a button – as quickly as the couch flew into the floor, a gigantic computer monitor sprouted from the hardwood and took its place facing us standing in the doorway.

In front of that five-foot tall and six-foot wide monitor sat a huge circuit board that made no sense to the untrained eye, but I had to take a wild guess and say that it was all linked to the buzzing and beeping noises coming from the monitor, the map of the earth, and the radars scattered in random places along that computerized map.

I’m pretty sure I looked like a fish. I know Tegan did, and though we had a tendency to synchronize our facial expressions, I probably looked a thousand times more dumbstruck.

What snapped us out of that trance, though, was the pitter patter of socks on hardwood floors and the big THUNK that echoed through the flat when someone’s head hit the floor. We all snapped our heads to the right, and standing in the hallway was a deathly serious-looking Anthony, their long-haired bassist, and writhing around on the floor next to his feet was their apparently clumsy guitarist, Chance, who was the one wearing socks.

“What’s going on, Andy?” Anthony demanded.

Andy threw his thumb back at me and Tegan and smiled as he replied, “We’ve got numbers 5 and 6, dude.”

Completely ignoring Chance stumbling to get up, Anthony’s mouth slightly parted and I even saw him grin a little bit for a second. “No way. You got ‘em here already?”

Andy folded his arms in confidence and nodded. “I used my charm to win them and their parents over.”

Tegan snorted, but only I heard it.

“God, you’re an idiot, but somehow you managed to pull it off,” Anthony grumbled, moving further into the living room. “Didn’t see that coming.”

Chance, holding himself up by the wall, rubbed the back of his head and added, “Two more folks to add to the mix?”

All the while, Mick was having himself a laugh and rubbing his face, moving the shaggy hair out of his eyes. When Andy quelled the band’s initial surprise with a nod in response to Chance’s question, Mick pointed at me and Tegan.

After his giggle session, he spoke up, and he spoke the truth. “You guys are in for a hell of a ride.”
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thank you guys all for commenting and subscribing! I'm still chuggin' along writing this - like, good lord, I think this is the most I've ever written for a story right off the bat. Anyways, I hope you all have awesome days!