Chapter 2
Have Jacket, Will Travel
Author's Notes
- The rogue’s gallery of the I, Crimsonstreak world is chock-full of some real winners. Dark Plague can make people sick, but he can’t cure them. O-Zone can punch holes in the ozone layer, but is incapable of doing anything else. Sylvester Striker is a reformed villain (his bio is actually kind of sad). Just an observation.
- Chapter 2 contains the first passage that really gives us a hint that Chris is a little too obsessed with popular culture. There are other references beforehand, of course, and tons of references afterward. But his comment mentioning Reading Rainbow, “Dementors,” and “Nazgul” indicates his broad scope of pop culture knowledge. At the same time, the character is fairly well read. He mentions Crime and Punishment and (a little later) makes a good Sherlock Holmes reference. Chris is definitely a little ADHD in his thought process, a conscious decision on my part. He may not have his father’s genius, but he does process things very quickly. So quickly, in fact, that he can afford to go off on “thought tangents” without losing focus on the task at hand.
- Crimsonstreak doesn’t know what to think about religion. After all, his mother and father are superpowered beings who routinely fight others with god-like powers. This doesn’t mean he doesn’t believe in a higher being or understand the importance of faith. It’s just something that’s hard for him to relate to. That’s where his comments about Sylvester Striker come in to play. He takes a bemused detachment toward Sylvester's faith and isn't mocking it.
- Crimsonstreak catches a break when the Crusading Comet and Infrared appear. This almost works like the beginning of Return of the Jedi, where Leia turns Chewie over to Jabba the Hutt to gain access to the bad guy’s inner circle. Of course, the two heroes didn't exactly want to get captured and sent to Clermont.
- A quick aside here – our hero is a major sports fan. His tastes, for better or worse, gave me a chance to get on my Midwest, Big Ten soapbox. Like me, he’s a Colts and Indiana University basketball fan. It seems like so many characters in fiction are Yankees or Cubs or Red Sox fans. I took the chance to give my teams a little love and (occasionally) take a shot at the New England Patriots. I know pure evil when I see it.
- The Purdue knock was completely unnecessary. I actually like the Boilermakers a lot (I blame my brother-in-law for graduating from Purdue), but made the comment because anyone who’s from Indiana knows that Purdue could win three straight national championships in basketball and everyone in the state would still be talking about how Indiana made the Sweet 16.
- A few more heroes trickle in, setting up a prison escape for Crimsonstreak and his allies. One of those heroes is a guy named Scarlet DashBoy. He was originally just a character mentioned in passing, but one of my beta readers thought DashBoy was hilarious. I expanded the character just a bit, giving him a couple of flashbacks and a cameo later in the book. For any of you in doubt, DashBoy is an idiot.
BACK TO CRIMSONSTREAK CENTRAL!
