| "City of Trash" | |
| Season 1, Episode 5 | |
| Episode Guide | |
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"City of Trash" is the 5th episode of "The Hero Generation."
Synopsis[]
Joe discovers an underground city composed of trash and garbage.
Plot[]
When you hear strange noises coming from underneath of a dumpster, you probably shouldn't investigate. I had to learn that the hard way.
Of course, being me, I did. I heard what sounded like a crowd of people talking underneath of a dumpster. And, as you could imagine, I couldn't simply push the dumpster out of the way.
"Looks like a job for Rocky Toad!" I exclaimed, his hologram showing up before me as I activated the KeyTrix. I pressed down the hourglass symbol. Immediately, I knew something was wrong. I was shrinking. Rocky Toad was 10 feet tall- I shouldn't be shrinking. My skull felt like a box, and my eye sockets felt like rectangles. When the green light faded, I really did shrink.
"Oh, well this is just perfect," I complained. "How is HayWire going to push a dumpster out of the way?" I sat and thought. I knew that transforming into HayWire wasn't a good thing, because my personality changed into an annoying, peppy idiot. Of course, it got the better of me.
"Excuse me!" I yelled, flying out into the street. "Excuse me, you, you with the pick up truck. Can you, like, ram this dumpster over here for me?" The man in the truck frowned, then veered around me.
"Can't get good help these days, can you?" I said to myself. I floated over to a parked car with a new idea. I'd just possess this parked car with my powers, then drive it into the dumpster! I'm such a genius. I touched the hood of the car with my finger tips, my body automatically turning into a bolt of electricity, taking over the car's engine. Blue and black striped designs now decorated the car. My face showed up on the built-in GPS.
"At the next noisy dumpster, TURN LEFT!" I exclaimed, summoning the gas pedal to go down. As the car sped forward, I motioned the steering wheel left, and I steered into the alley. Then I rammed the car right into the dumpster, immediately shifting the car into reverse so I wouldn't hit whatever was beneath it. I unpossessed the car, taking back to my humanoid form, realizing that underneath the dumpster was a huge hole. I hoverd down it, floating where the tunnel led me. Of course, the KeyTrix timed out, leaving me to fall down the rocky tunnel.
When I got up, my first thought was, did I really just ram someone's car into a dumpster? But then my thoughts changed as I gazed at the sight in front of me- a city, made completely of trash. The street was made of potato chip bags. The buildings were made of cardboard boxes. Windows were made of plastic wrap. The electricity poles were made of soup cans, each individual can stacked on top of each other. The wires were made of string. The only odd part, aside from the entire place being composed of garbage, was that there were no living things in sight.
"I don't feel... welcome here, exactly," I said to myself as I stepped out of a hole in the side of a rock wall. Maybe some kids found a hollow opening where a building used to be and made it into their own hide out. Got to admit, they did a pretty good job. The place was huge, and everything seemed so well-built.
"Just to be safe," I started, activating the KeyTrix's holographic playlist. I selected Makeshift and pressed the hourglass down.
"Being invisible ought to give me some stealth, in case anyone IS down here." I turned myself intangible and phased through walls of cardboard and plastic. As I passed through the silent trash town, I noticed something straange- a circle inside of another circle was engraved on some of the buildings. Like I saw when I was fighting those snow men monsters a while back. That's kind of strange. In some buildings and streets, 2-D cutouts of people stood, frozen in strange positions. They were completely white except for black lines that drew their hair, eyes, and mouth. Nothing else.
"Kind of eerie," I couldn't help saying to myself. All of the sudden, my single sentence echoed through the entire place. Cardboard buildings rumbled, and the streets shook with a strange vibration. The cardboard people- they were moving. They tore as they did so, but from the rips in their beings grew black, puffy tentacles. Some of their cardboard heads ripped completely in half, revealing a puffy black face with a red jaw and two, beady black eyes. Some had the limbs of crickets. Others had wings like hornets. They all shrieked, charging at me. Which was strange; I was still invisible. They shouldn't be able to see me...
"Whoa!" I yelped, floating above them. Some stacked on top of each other to try and grab me, others used their tentacles. Some of them jumped up at me with inhuman neatness and some flew up to me with their insect wings. Of course, they all phased through me, as long as I was intangible.
Suddenly, something grabbed my exposed spine and pulled me down.
"Okay," I said, "maybe I spoke too soon." How were these things able to touch me in my intangible form? Unless... they were intangible, too. Intangible cancels out intangible, as far as I know.
"Alright, you can hold your own against Makeshift," I told them as I twisted the dial on my chest, "but..." I pressed in the hourglass symbol.
"...can you handle... Rocky Toad? Wait, no, I'm Saguara." I stretched my plant arm at the creatures, rouding them up. Then, they all started biting my arm.
"Ow! Lay off, guys. You tried to kill me first." They pushed me back into a cardboard building. Immediately, the boxes started wobbling, resulting in the entire structure falling apart. The creatures shrieked madly like it was my fault.
"What? I didn't do it!" I yelled. "Look, I'll fix it..." I stretched my arm so far, that it unintentionally divided into two seperate arms.
"Whoa," I whispered to myslef. "That'll help." I split my arms into eights so I had 16 arms each. I stretched them all, using each like a finger to crasp all of the grouped cardboard boxes, and put them back in order. I withdrew my arms, all 16 of them merging back into two arms only as they shortened.
"Satisfied now?" I asked. They were at ease. Until they started attacking again. I spun the dial again, and pressed down the hourglass. I transformed into BioHazard. I shot a couple of explosive green discs at the monsters, blowing them apart.
"I'm guessing you regenerate yourselves?" I asked them. "All the bad guys I've fought so far have been able to regenerate." Of course, they started regenerating. Well, the black parts of them, at least. Their cardboard exoskeletons were left behind; now they were black, puffy liquid-like monsters with red jaws and beady black eyes that came in odd-numbered sets. One opened its jaws, its tounge shooting out and grappling around my waist. I shot a green disc at its tounge, and it let me go. Suddenly, the KeyTrix started giving me its time-out beeping noise.
"I'll save this case for another day," I said to myself as I flew back to the opening. "A little bit creepy if you ask me."