Twenty-one years later in the Bronze Age, a funeral happened.

Old Mr. Carmine had died. The news reports said that he died of Acute Kidney Betrayal, but his friends suspected the spleen was in on it too. Either way, he was dead now so everyone figured it was Funeral Time O’Clock.

Back when Old Mr. Carmine was just regular Mr. Carmine he had been one of the co-inventors of the Frisbee, as came up in Part One. The decades since then had been good ones for Old Mr. Carmine, which is nice because he’d had a rough life before that. By the last year of his life he was the seventh-richest person in his home village of Ploip and he wasn’t even much of a jerk about it. People would often say of him “Of all the seventh-richest people of any given a place that I’ve met, he’s the best!” That’s why his funeral had very little vandalism and a handful of actual mourners.

At the funeral, Old Mr. Carmine’s business partner Kredick put his hand on Old Mr. Carmine’s coffin and whispered some tearful goodbyes to his friend. He was gaunt figure with long white hair and sharp teeth. He had not visibly aged a day since he had first met Mr. Carmine, for he was a vampire! Lightning streaked across the sky and thunder made a big boom too. It was creepy, but kind of cool.

Then Kredick turned away from the coffin toward the pews, his billowing cape flowing as he moved. He looked at those who joined him in mourning. Clarice was there, of course. She was Old Mr. Carmine’s eldest daughter, and the only one of the three Carmine children who had not left town to join the illegal surf-fighting circuit.

The staff from the Frisbee factory were there as well. There were only ever a few workers at the Frisbee factory, since all they needed to do was buy a thing of butter and take the lid and sell it as a Frisbee then repeat the process. A few years back they’d nearly doubled the workforce when they hired someone to wipe off any butter that got stuck on the lid, but it was still not exactly creating a lot of jobs for the village. But the people who did work there liked it well enough and bothered to come and pay their respects.

Oh, and also Ken was there. Kredick forgot who Ken was, but was sure he’d seen him around before. Maybe at Sally’s thing at the aquarium that time? Whatever. He wasn’t important to the story, but it was nice of him to come out.

Kredick looked upon these mourners and their sadness. He wished he could say something that could make sense of the tragedy, but no words came to his mind except “arable” which was a word that came to his mind a lot, but which did not seem to pertain here. He took his seat.

Kredick hated death. As an immortal vampire he had witnessed the loss of many people over the centuries, while he himself remained in his state of perpetual undeath. So many dead. Eleanor Frisbee, his true love. Johnny Squeables, his bookie. Traffic Cone, his dog. And now Old Mr. Carmine, his friend and business partner. That’s like four. “Death is really starting to cheese me off,” he thought to himself as he brooded. Of all the vampires in the world in those days, Kredick was among the most talented brooders.

Later, at the reception after the funeral, Clarice, who had noticed the brooding, approached Kredick to ask how he was holding up.

“mphoudoink?” she asked. Her mouth was full of little sandwiches, but Kredick got the basic idea.

“I am as well as ever, my friend, for I am dead. Eternal. Unchanging like the dust of the moon.”

“butymphochompifsmm,” she said.

“That is true, but–”

Ker-smash! The window had shattered as a dark figure jumped through and landed crouched in the middle of the room! The small crowd gasped and shouted, even Ken.

This new figure stood up straight and looked directly at Albatross McGee from the factory and pointed a long, clawed finger at her. “Wait,” said the figure. “You’re not the one.” He crouched back down, shimmied a little, then popped up again facing Kredick this time and pointed a long, clawed figure at him. “You,” he said “prepare to die!”

“Mortez!” said Kredick, who immediately recognized his old enemy from the end of Part One. An enemy he killed two decades ago! How could he be here now?

“I’m a vampire too!” said Mortez. Lightning and thunder went again but it was more threatening than atmospheric this time.

“Oh!” said Kredick.

Mortez had prepared a speech that would have explained how he came back as a vampire, why he waited until Old Mr. Carmine had died to get his revenge, and how he preferred muffins to puffins, but he never got his chance to give it. He didn’t realize that in the years since the invention of the Frisbee, people had gotten really good at throwing things. All the mourners except Ken started throwing their shurikens at Mortez the moment they realized he was a vampire. Seconds later Mortez was dead again.

“chplshlunklebm,” said Clarice as she put some more little sandwiches in her mouth.

“You got that right,” said Kredick and gave a joyful thumbs up.

So that’s how Kredick decided that death wasn’t all bad, because it could happen to people who were trying to get revenge on him. That boosted his mood for a while.

Eventually Clarice retired from her job as an astronaut, which gave her time to pick up some butter for the Frisbee factory, so Kredick gave her full ownership of the operation. Her family would go on to run the factory until the end of the Bronze Age when it was bought by Waffletaster Incorporated and sold for parts. And that is why Frisbees are so expensive now.

And as for Kredick? There are those who say that even to this very day he resides in his creepy mansion and watching over the village. Among those who say that is Kredick himself.

Patrick D Ryall, the D is for Coriander

Okay, obviously this has been the Summer of Sleepwalker, but that doesn’t mean I’m not allowed to think about Marvel’s most important character.

As of right now, the Rocket Racer and Sleepwalker have not met. What does PDR, a fan of both characters, think about that? PDR thinks that’s fine. Not all characters in a shared universe should meet one another. If every superhero goes to parties with every other superhero, it makes the universe feel small and I don’t like that. My opinion is that there is no great reason that the worlds of Sleepwalker and the Rocket Racer need to cross over.

Okay, but that’s not much of a post. What if PDR was REQUIRED to make a story where the two of them crossed over? The way I see it, we have two options: A retro-style story set in between the comics from the ’90s, or one in the Marvel Universe of today.

For the former, we’d want it to fit into the early days of Sleepwalkers comics, when things were episodic. In that era Sleepy was not well trusted at that point and Bob was taking jobs as a bounty hunter, so lets say someone puts a bounty on the strange green alien guy and Bob goes for it. There would have to be a flying chase scene. Maybe Sleepy could use his warpbeam on Bob’s skateboard, which brings Bob to despair. When he explains to the alien that he needs the board to make money and support his family, Sleepwalker can help Bob and then Bob lets him go. It’s an easy standalone story.

But what would I do in the present? Gotta go with a miniseries. I’d want it to be kind of cyberpunk, since that’s my take on Rocket Racer, but with the supernatural weirdness of a Sleepwalker story. With that in mind, let’s say that a massive tech company is using some kind of otherworldly power generate their “augmented reality” tech, and it acts the way so many comics from the ’90s thought virtual reality could, and alters the physical world. And let’s say they have some equivalent of a data center that is absolutely wrecking some town.

Rocket Racer wants the tech for himself, both for financial reasons and to stick it to the company in question, and so he is doing a heist that involves hacking into some kind of cyberspace scenario. Meanwhile, Rick Sheridan and Sleepwalker have come to town to investigate the weirdness. In the standard tradition, the heroes tangle at first, but then realize they need to come together against the baddies. Let’s reveal that the rich idiot running the company wants to rewrite reality in a manner more suitable to his preferences and now he has a reality distortion field that makes him the big villain of the story.

Throw in a supporting cast of townsfolk who oppose the data center and some weird cybernetic monsters for everybody to fight. I’m sure there’s a way to tie Rick’s love of movies into the cyberspace stuff. Finally, I may not love when this happens, but we could probably pull off a climax where the heroes are fighting the villain in a big special effects landscape, but it kinda makes sense given the cyberspace setting. In the end, probably Bob gets his hands on the tech and wants to use it to better the world, but someone else (maybe the villain’s downtrodden assistant?) snatches it and uses it to erase the otherworldly power-source itself. In the end, Bob isn’t any better off personally, but he and Rick and Sleepwalker get to enjoy the townspeople’s celebrations.

It could work. There are wrinkles to iron out, but it could be made into something. Maybe I don’t think these characters should cross over, but it wouldn’t be unworkable.

This one has a pretty great cold open. A guy is fleeing from the Invaders, winds up at the airport and tries to get the help of a guy who works there. The airport guy doesn’t know what to make of the guy raving about aliens, so he’s relieved when two official-looking types show up and tell him that guy was crazy. They calm him down (using the hypnotism crystals) and have him walk in front of a landing plane to his death.

Anyway, that poor man was a hotel owner and the whole thing was a plan the Invaders did so they could take over the hotel. Not just for the fun of owning a hotel! Oh my, no. They’re doing it as step one in another plan! A famous scientist named Paul Cook is coming to advise the government in matters of missile defence, and he’s staying at the hotel. The Invaders are gonna do a scheme about that!

I’ve mentioned before that these Invaders are NOT pod people. They can take human form, but they can’t just take over the form of an existing person and pretend to be them. I mean, sure, there was that time in Moonshot that they posed as that astronaut, but that was possible because the real version of that guy had been burned up and got plastic surgery, so the fact he looked different could be explained. That’s a coincidence that isn’t going to happen too often. Anyway, Paul Cook is a bit of a recluse who hasn’t been seen in public for years and was in an accident that scarred up his face and also left his niece Maggie, his only living relative, blind. See? It’s a slightly different scenario.

Anyway, the Invaders are spying on Paul (hence the title of the episode) and learning his voice and mannerisms so they can trick Maggie. Then they bump off Cook’s assistants, so that when Maggie assures the government that this imposter is their man, they’d believe her. Probably would have been a good plan for this very specific scenario if David Vincent hadn’t heard about a man who claimed aliens were after him and then got an airplane to the face. David Vincent notices things like that.

Our man Vincent has never been great at subterfuge. He takes a job as a bus driver, less to pose as a bus driver than just to drive it to the hotel. Once he’s there he absolutely introduces himself by name and explains his job as an anti-alien crusader. There is an admittedly hilarious bit where he sneaks in the hotel room door in the second that Maggie has it open, then just awkwardly tries to find evidence while she absolutely knows he’s there. A flaw in Vincent’s plan is that he assumes that Cook is going to be one of those people working with the Invaders, a traitor to humanity. He was not prepared for the impersonation aspect of their plan.

But, if David Vincent is bad at subtlety, he’s good at being an action hero. Once the imposter makes a slip-up that lets Maggie know he’s not really her uncle, Vincent makes short work of them and Maggie explains things to the government as best she can.