Cop
A Legion of Lawndale Heroes 'Mini', by Brother Grimace
Legion of Lawndale Heroes created by James Bowman
Oh, no! Bob the Beastman has been hit with a teleportation spell, and now
he's in the middle of New York City at high noon! He's going to be spotted any
second now, and The Masquerade will be exposed! It's too late to hide, here
come the Muggles!
As Bob cringes, the pedestrians approach... and proceed to ignore him. A couple
of teens joke about his costume, a father tells his son not to make eye
contact, while a woman in passing mutters about how there are more weirdos in
the city every day. Most folks simply walk by without even a second (or first)
glance. After a few seconds, Bob shrugs and looks for a subway map.
City Of Weirdos is a Comedy Trope when people in a city idly dismiss
unusual happenings and odd-looking strangers as part of metropolitan life. This
joke is almost always invoked in large urban centers, where the everyday bustle
and diverse population justifies such reactions. Unlike a Weirdness Censor or a
Fisher Kingdom, the Invisible To Normals effect doesn't require any magic or
Applied Phlebotinum to work — the jaded residents have Seen It All before, and
they just don't care.
-'City of Weirdos' trope, from TV Tropes.org
The Chief of Detectives for the Lawndale, Maryland Police Department took his
cup of coffee from the guy in the panel truck, pocketed his change, and turned
away from the 'Mr. Munchie' truck.
I've been doing it for almost ten years, the officer thought, looking
around at the scattering of people sitting in the 'pocket park' - a small,
landscaped parcel of land that the Legion had bought and donated to the city as
a place that anyone could just sit and relax.
Nice benches - good, solid tables – and I heard that there's a free 'hot
spot' here, so anyone can use their laptops to go online here, the Chief
mused silently, looking about the pocket park. The Legion makes sure that it
stays cleaned up, and the Commissioner always has a car swing by, so nobody
gets the idea to start acting like a fool here.
God knows I'm glad that I haven't had to fire my gun at anything but a paper
target in three years – hmm?
Idly glancing past, he happened to look down and see the text on the laptop
screen of the person sitting at the table he was walking past – and the tent in
the blue bar at the top of the page caught his attention.
___________________________________________________________________
PPMB * Edit post – Mozilla Firefox
Great. Another sightseer from 'over there'.
The Chief let his curiosity get the better of him (it's still my worst
quality, he berated himself), even as he let his eyes travel down the
screen to the typist's text-
undefinedlust wrote:
Ranger Thorne wrote:
undefinedlust wrote:
The Sidhe wrote:
Ms. Kinnikufan wrote:
Daria was about to kiss Tom...but then he was shot from 29 different directions!
* Shouldn't this be in the "1001 Death of Tom Sloane" thread?
* Naahh, 28 of the directions are just different angles from the School Book
Depository and the Grassy Knoll
* Of course, the Lawndale PD didn't think it was strange that all the shots
from the grassy knoll had to travel three miles, take two left turns, a right
turn, then go over a hill and around Tom's car before hitting him.
* Given their recent run-ins with Ringbearers, Legionaires, reapers, zombies
and roving packs of teen lesbians, nothing surprised the Lawndale PD
anymore...
_____________________________________________________________________
"Why should it?"
Before he could stop himself, the words had come out; the typist looked up to
see the Chief looking down at the screen.
"I – excuse me – that's rude, and what are you talking about?" The
typist was slightly insulted at having been spied upon over their shoulder.
"Nothing surprises us in LPD anymore. With folks like you showing
up every now and them for 'Chinese food' - not to mention the interesting
things that happen over at Lawndale High around and in that classroom
where they used to teach the Self-Esteem class before O'Neill brain-locked and
got put into the rest home - why should it?" The Lawndale PD
Chief of Detectives scoffed at the typist. "For over twelve years of your
time and roughly two years of ours, we've all held onto the belief that a cute redhead
could keep damn near every red-blooded boy in this town at bay and totally
uninterested in her - simply because she has big glasses, a high I.Q. and an
attitude problem."
The typist closed his laptop as the detective laughed and continued on. "That's
as unbelievable as - as - some guy hiding a dual identity by putting on a
pair of glasses as he works daily among the highly-trained investigative
reporters at a great metropolitan newspaper, or a teen pop star hiding
in plain sight in this internet-savvy world where EVERYONE has a camera simply by
putting on a blonde wig and wearing bedazzled clothes when she's on
stage!"
The detective took a sip of his coffee, and then, smiled as reached out, lifted
the laptop screen back up, and pointed. "By the way - you misspelled 'Legionnaire'
and 'Reapers.'"
He finished his coffee. "Hell - with all the weird stuff that's happened
here BEFORE the Ringbearers and the Legion - why do you think we've got our own
section of Special Unit 2
here? Oh, and the reapers, zombies and lesbians were here first."
The Chief of Detectives looked at his watch, and then, back at the poster.
"Beats the hell out of all the teen pregnancies, rapes, drug problems and
other teen crimes we were flooded beforehand, eh?" he asked. "Personally - I
got tired of seeing teenage girls getting date-raped and beaten into a coma
because some guy thought that she deserved it. You know; for not treating him
the way he deserved, just because he bought her dinner and wouldn't drop her
pants afterward on his parents' boat. At least we can put a zombie where he
deserves to be – in a cell, or on his way to Hell. I'm also not fond of seeing
teenage girls killing themselves for stupid crap like some boy who didn't call
her after a date - and she's too young and dumb to know that she will get over
it."
Popping a piece of gum into his mouth as he walked off, the Chief of Detectives
looked about the Shopping District of Lawndale as he fingered the PFT-M1
attached to the car keys in his jacket. "Yeah," he thought aloud, the
typist in the pocket park already vanished from his thoughts.. "I'd rather
deal with the extraordinary crap that we can find an actual solution to."
As he passed in front of the 'Funky Doodle' clothing store, the Chief saw
several small, burnt wads of rolled-up paper in the small alley next to the
store. God knows I have to deal with the real-life stuff every day, up close
and as life-size as it can get, he thought, crushing the tiny remains of
someone's discarded joints into nothing beneath his heel. No matter what we
do, or how many of these bastards we take off the street... we'll never solve
all of the real problems here in Lawndale.
END