Bugbug must have taken Hatacular’s advice seriously because it was forming words with with its wings. Thinks like ‘hello’ and ‘Fire’ and ‘hungry’.  It tripped on vowels, especially P’s and B’s.  It couldn’t manage S’s at all. Well, lots of people has lisps.

His wings. Bugbug identified as male, but not, to Hatacular’s surprise, as an alien.

“Then how did you get up here?  Or you like a mole person?”

“Really, Fury?” Hatacular asked, “Does he look like a mole to you?”

“No, but he could be from underground, or even Atlantis.”

“No,” Bugbug said, “I’m not,” but wouldn’t explain further.

“Well, did you eat Mr. Eastcott?” Fire Fury asked.

“No.”

“Then what happened to him?”

Bugbug twiddled his mitts and clicked his mandibles, uncomfortable.  

“Bugbug,” Fire Fury said in a warning tone.

“You really are a numbskull, aren’t you? Joan of Arc doesn’t have a gang. She’s a one-woman show,” she sounded a little bitter, “I’d make a great deputy, though.”

“So, in other words, you want to get in her metal pants.”

Fire Fury went red, and spurted flames from her nose, then said, “Watch it. I could barbecue you.”

“Vegetarians are better cooked sauteed, actually.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

I binge watched The Tick recently, and it spurred me to write Bugbug and friends in that universe.  But before I got to Winnie, I wrote Phillip.

If Phillip Harmonica was a super hero, here is his origin story.

Hatacular was a category zero last time he’d been tested. The whole orphanage had gone to AEGIS as a group when the obvious powers of Kenny Beck had emerged. The boy who would become Hatacular had hated his results at the time, especially when Kenny was adopted by AEGIS operatives.  Now Hatacular was glad that it wasn’t him who got adopted into the AEGIS lifestyle.

The boy- let’s just call him Phillip- Phillip’s family was the nuns and the boys who never seemed to manage to permanently leave the home. Phillip grew up into a hospice nurse- work that he completed with the utmost care and delicacy. His life changed when Mr. Milliner died. Phillip felt bad for the old man. No family members to visit him, but wealthy enough to will himself to Harmony Grove before dementia clouded his every decision.

As Phillip was confirming the lack of pulse, his fingernail caught on the old man’s green leather gloves. The old guy had worn them everyday was here and couldn’t be convinced to remove them. Fine by Phillip- these folks were dying so he might as well let them pass in whatever state of dress or undress they wanted to.

Phillip didn’t think much of it until he clocked out for his break and he saw the gloves again- on his own hands. They were quite irremovable- despite Phillip’s best efforts.

He lost his job, of course. It wasn’t just that he stole the gloves- he couldn’t feel pulses with hands permanently encased in leather. He was done being a nurse. The gloves, however, got him started on his new path as a superhero. They summoned Mr. Milliner’s hat when he snapped his fingers- what appeared to be just an old beat up panama but could fly, follow commands, and cut through metal beams. It could also nest on his head and show him recorded video- including a film made by Mr. Milliner himself.

Whelp I know I said I was gonna post on Monday, but I ended up just hanging out in fandom town. Then for the last two days, I’ve been in book5 territory.  Yanno, way too spoilery.  So I hit the archives.

Waaaay before the Island of Misfit Dorks was a thing, I had a story about Phillip and Winnie where...they were switched?  Like Winnie was a human being with anxiety and Phillip was under an object shapeshifting curse.  I like Winnie better as a bug and Phillip better as the one uncursed guy trying to hold things together- but I had fun finding this!

Anyway, here’s Phillip as a bike meeting a toddler who thinks he’s a unicorn.

Oh right.  There's a kid here.  And she- she kind of can tell I'm not just an ordinary bike, can't she?  She teeters over to me.  She's too old to be a toddler but the way she moves is not like an adult.   I turn to her.  In this form, my 'eyes' are fixed, sort of to a place between my handlebars.  She looks scared, but only a little. So much for not getting noticed.  I seize up and let myself fall into the wood grass.  It doesn't hurt.  Probably because I'm a well made bike. "Are you tired?"  She asks. I say nothing. "It's okay, Unicorn.  You can sleep," she kneels and stretches out a hand out awkwardly and starts...stroking my frame??  She hums to herself for seconds, but then starts sticking words in "Unicorns, I love them.  Unicorns, I love them.  Uni, uni, unicorns..."

i still can’t can’t quite stop obsessing over the bugbug au

i realized that i really like the idea of Winnie shifting in shape back and forth all the time when work called for it.  maybe the process for doing so requires a lot of dangerous type energy or something- in any case, he finds it much easier to make a copy of his human self to stand in his place

the first image is already uncannon as Winnie is a reasonably smart guy, but he’s no genius.  He can build robots.  probs has someone working for him- perhaps Dudley?  

my first idea was a robot but the human!winnie in the rest of these images are necessarily robots.  maybe they’re clones?  i also considered sort of an avatar situation where Winnie controls the body remotely like some kind of Henson animatronic.  

and then my mind dipped into a weird trying to get Phillip involved.  See, there’s two Phillips in this world- one Winnie’s living, breathing, 30-something ex, and Phillip5′s a digital snapshot of Phillip’s feelings and memories from when he was seventeen.  This AI has been uploaded onto a pair of glasses that can hijack bodies at rest.  Phillip is...kind of weirded out by this.

I think eventually Winnie will decide(with much prodding from Phillip) that using the memories of a kid to pilot his unwanted human body is kind of a shitty thing to do, but he feels too bad to shut down the AI by then, so they make Phillip5 a new robot body.