Pouchtober!?!

 https://www.instagram.com/p/DAQ3inkREiP/

If you ask me, the whole month should be dedicated to THE Pouch, but I don't make the rules. Check out these otherwise very good drawings by the very talented peeps involved in this madcap draw-a-thon!

Pouch Spotting: Issue 6

Another masterpiece from the man himself. Here's another variant cover that's sure to go up in value. Get one, if you still can!

 

FanFiction of the Week: A Pouch Among Many by anonymous

 There had been no crime, none that he'd known of. There were no cries of anguish, no injured shrieks. He hadn't charged out into the street to do a heroism, he hadn't charged out at all, only walked a shuffling gate from his front stoop towards the city park, hoping the bagel guy with the good pumpernickel ones was still open and selling and not towing away his little cart all shut up like last time. Hoping, but not rushing. It was a good bagel, not the end of the world; the world couldn't end on a Wednesday. 

At the corner and then beyond a bit, maybe the bagel guy didn't show up today for some reason? His usual spot didn't show any spots from drippings, condensation or axel grease or anything else. Weird. The Pouch, frustrated but only mildly so, turned to walk back to his place and had gotten to the edge of the park when he heard a noise that sounded like his name and he turned and saw a brief flash and then nothing. 

He woke up, it seemed to be much later. He was low to the ground even though he thought he was sitting and he wasn't alone. There were other pouches, he was only one pouch, this was him?

"What happened to me?" he said, only to hear a number of responses all different but all similar, all questioning him, telling him that they were the real pouch and he was just one of the many pouches that had somehow all been blown apart, their living leather living on even as individual pouches. 

"Hey, everyone, follow me!" one of the pouches said, racing into the now dark park. 

"Why should we follow you?" one of the other pouches asked, "who made you boss?"

"Nobody made me anything. Anybody else have an idea?" said this pouch. No one had any other ideas so one by one they picked themselves up off the ground and began following him down the paved path that lead deeper into the park. 

There was small talk among the pouches, nothing all that interesting, mostly grumbles about what a hassle it was to be a single pouch, not only because of the severely limited carrying capacity, but also the loss of a feeling of individuality; all the pouches were pretty much the same and none of them had any special claim to status or uniqueness. 

"Anybody got anything interesting in them?" one of the pouches asked all the other surrounding pouches as they continued their slow slog deeper into the park. 

"I've got a pair of nail clippers," said one.

"I've got some nail clippings," said another. 

"Anybody got any money? We might want to split a beer or something later," one of the pouches said but nobody replied, either because none of them had any money or the ones who had the money weren't planning on sharing. There were some minor clanking sounds as the group of them walked, but maybe those were just the nail clippers or some other metal implements without any real value. 

The pouch who was in the lead, who was in some sense leading all of the other pouches, walked off the paved path over to the side of a statue and waited for all of the other pouches to catch up. Waiting for the last stragglers to catch up, the pouch who felt pretty certain that he was The Pouch, a feeling he assumed they all shared, looked up at the statue. He'd been in or near this park everyday for years, but for the life of him, he couldn't remember this particular statue. It wasn't clear what exactly the sculptor was going for with this form. Perhaps it wasn't human at all. There was a nonzero chance that some being from another planet was being commemorated here, or a being alien in form from this very planet. As was his usual, the Pouch suspended judgement until such time as he was able to gather more information and with that make a properly informed decision.

"I think we'll find some answers in here," the pouch who had been leading them all said, reaching out to the edge of the plague on the statue and pulling on it just a bit, at which point the plague swung open like a small door, revealing darkness inside. 

Just then, the pouch who considered himself the Pouch looked at the statue again. With the small door open, it sorta looked like it could maybe be a weird spaceship. That would explain some of the oddness of the design. Once you were in space, aerodynamics meant a lot less, there was a lot less air to cut through. Also, in some of the more recent hard sci-fi he'd read, and also in some of the half chubb sci-fi, there was the notion nowadays that something like gravit could be achieved by the space ship's thrust, pushing down on everyone inside. So instead of a ship being oriented like a boat or a plane, everyone's heads would be pointing at the front of the ship, up would be the direction of the ship's travel and down would be the thrusters providing the thrust. With that perspective, the statue very much could be a space ship. Also, this was a real shit spot to put a statue, but a real good place to land a spaceship. If that ship had smaller internal compartments, it would be hard to abduct a full sized human but you could probably get an assortment of pouches in there pretty easily. It was a lot harder to try to reassemble a normal person once you'd cut them apart, but a bunch of pouches could be stitched back together pretty easy. 

Speaking of stitching, the pouch who considered himself the Pouch reached back to feel along his back to check out the seams that had been ripped to separate all these pouches from each other. There was no ragged cut, no evidence of cutting or chopping at all. Instead, along the place that he imagined he'd been attached to the other pouches there was a strange emptiness. Looking at the back of the pouch in front of him, he saw that the lines on his back had a weird misty sparkle to them. He stepped forward and tried to touch this seam, only to feel the edge of himself he was using as a hand pass into this odd region entirely, which caused another pouch somewhere to giggle and exclaim something about getting tickled. 

So, the pouches were not really separated, or rather were joined by some strange... portals for lack of a better term. It made sense to the pouch that thought of himself as the Pouch. Any normal person so divided would freak out and lose their minds entirely. The fully segmented nature of the Pouch meant that these subdivisions could be more easily understood and accepted. He'd not thought before how much each pouch must have been contributing to his mental processes. He'd read about how the human biome impacted their thinking process, so perhaps it was the same with the pouches? He must be the brain pouch, or at least the pouch that did the most specifically cognitive processing. All of these other pouches were more like team players. If he kept them happy, they would go along with whatever he planned. 

If he was the mind of the loose pouch federation commonly referred to as the Pouch, who was this pouch who had lead them this far, who had knowingly opened this secret door and beckoned them all to enter, without having, yet, entered himself? Now this was a question to be explored immediately. First, the pouch no longer thinking of himself as the Pouch, but only the executive function of the Pouch looked around to figure out which one of the pouches might be the gumption pouch, the pouch where stubbornness came from, the spine pouch, the balls pouch. That didn't take long, there was one pouch standing out on the edge of the group shaking itself slowly in a way that looked like a slow head shake. Luckily it looked as though the pouch that generated caution and reserve, though also irrational feat, was at the front of the group, essentially blocking the process of any other pouch into the open door. 

The executive function pouch waddled over to the resolve pouch and said, "You gonna let this pouch tell us what to do? Any pouch should be in charge, should be you. Settle this like real pouches, go fight one on one." The executive function pouch had some idea of how to motivate the resolve pouch after years of experience. The resolve pouch took the bait immediately.

"Hey, who do you think you are telling us to do anything? Anyone here should be deciding what we do, it's me!" said the resolve pouch, shoving other pouches out of its way while it strutted towards the front of the group. Once there, it slammed the door shut as a provocation. The way the flap of the other pouch shifted, it was clear that this act had angered it, but it didn't want to react too swiftly or too rashly. 

"I'm not telling anyone to do anything, I'm simply pointing out a fun mystery I thought we could explore now that we're small enough to fit through that door," said the pouch that had lead them all this far into the darkened park. "Again, I ask, who else among you has a better idea of something we should do? I'm all ears," said this pouch.

The executive function pouch hadn't stood idle while his pushy pouch brother pushed his way to the front. He'd managed to locate the vice inclination pouches that had found a joint on the ground while walking through the park and were passing it around in a small circle. 

"Hey you guys, this asshole up front is trying to get us all to go on some kind of adventure. Why don't we go to the bar? That would be an adventure. I bet if we spread out and search the ground we could find a coupla bucks. Definitely enough for a few cold cans at Corner Bar." Even mentioning Corner Bar, so named because of its peculiar floor plan, little more than a hallway around the corner of an old decaying mass of building, it was only possible to see half the bar at any time and so many a friend had failed to meet up with their friends there simply because they forgot to check both sides. This spot had been the location of many hazy memories that made the executive function pouch cringe with regret, regretting also the memories that were surely lost that began there and ended up far away and even more embarrassing. If the Pouch woke up somewhere with no idea how he got there, it was always a safe bet that he'd started out at Corner Bar. 

"Dude, you know what," one of the vice pouches said while exhaling an impossibly large cloud of pot smoke, "we should go to Corner Bar. The thought just came to me."

"Bruh, we could gather up money from the ground if we fan out," said the pouch next to him. 

"Man, we should like stick together, though," said a third pouch. It was just about now that the confrontation at the statue/rocketship's plaque/door was coming to a head and the stranger pouch had yelled asking if anyone else had any ideas. 

"Yeah, yeah man, I got an idea. Corner Bar, Corner Bar, Corner Bar." This chant was slowly taken up by more and more of the pouches standing around. It was clear that the pouch who had been leading the mass of other pouches had lost control of the situation. The pouches all began walking back the way they came, heading for Corner Bar. The executive function pouch kept watching the other pouch, waiting to see if he would fall in line, would join the march towards alcohol fueled oblivion, or if he would try another angle. 

The other pouch quickly shuffled to the front of the procession, but was promptly trampled and walked over. Getting up, unable to control his rage, this pouch that was not like the rest of the, the executive function pouch had some suspicions and these were immedately proven true as that pouch morphed into a small alien creature, shaking with absolute anger. It reached into its waistband and pulled out some type of device. It began fiddling with the controls, giving the executive function pouch time to run over and jump through the air. Opening his flap while in flight, the executive function pouch engulfed the little alien and then constricted, crushing the little device. It then exploded, but it was a small explosion.

In the morning, or sometime after, the Pouch woke up in a shopping cart two neighborhoods over. Every movment hurt his head and he couldn't tell if he was tired or sick or had too much stuff in his pouches to move easily. Finally escaping the shopping cart by tipping it over to the side, an approach which included a painful impact onto the sidewalk and a loud horrible clangor of shopping cart on the same sidewalk, but at last free, he was able to drag himself up and then towards home. Looking through himself as he walked, there were tons of napkins full of scribbled nonsense, all of them from Corner Bar. Not sure why he kept all the empty cans, likely some recycle plot was hatched. He stopped to unload all of these into the nearest recycle bin. One pocket didn't have an empty smashed can, but a small angry alien who also appeared a bit hungover and also a bit scorched as if by a small explosion. The alien seemed to wake up, shielding its eyes from the morning sun, it raised its other hand in a fist and yelled something in some alien tongue. The Pouch laid the little alien down under neath a park bench where he was unlikely to be stepped on and walked away hearing the shouts. 

Man, who knows what happened yesterday. Hopefully that alien didn't represent some sort of interplanetary incident that would lead to some type of war of the worlds. There was something, too, a little extra blurring around the corners of his mind, something more than the hangover which was very much in effect. It was almost like his brain was a little scorched. Maybe the alien guy was involved. Who knows. Who could know. The best thing to do was to get home and lay down and probably put on some very quiet music to ride this out. Maybe grab a bagel on the way home. There was that one guy by the park most days. He had some really good pumpernickel bagels. Yeah, that was a good idea. What's the worst that ever happened to a guy running out for a bagel.

FanFiction of the Week: The Return of the Cult by Ima Individual

"Hey, you the Pouch?"

The Pouch opened his eyes, not deep sleeping enough for dreaming, not enough to remember any, just a light doze on a grassy spot in the sun. There were worse things in life, and in this town. 

"Yeah. What's up?" Part of being a superhero was being super polite when randos disturbed you. There was no "me time" in a superhero's life. 

"Man, I dunno how to describe it... there's a whole buncha people, looks like they glued themselves together. I think technically they're all naked but it's hard to see much the way they got themselves... it has to be glue, right? People don't just stick together like that. I don't think it's sexual, it didn't give me any sexual vibes. Anyway that whole thing is happening two blocks that way and they're all screaming in unison that the Pouch has to come out and fight." The bike messenger had sort of a Mad Max style going on, no shoulder pads, though, but the clear and shining skin of someone who lives in a functioning society, the kind of place you can get skin care products and have a skin care routine. 

"I'm going to take a wild guess and assume that's The Unified Union of Unisus Fellowship, taking their union-ation thing to the next logical conclusion," the Pouch said. 

"You know them?" asked the bike messenger. His name was Brique but that doesn't come up in this story, but I thought you might be wondering, or not, either way. 

"We had one other encounter. They lured me to their place of worship with promises of free food and booze, but all I got was their attempt to destroy me," said the Pouch.

"Hate it when that happens. Hey, I gott get this parcel across town, good luck," Brique said, just before speeding away on his fixie. 

The Pouch got up, groaning as he did so. Must have slept funny, he thought, plenty of his pouches were stiff. The again, it was probably the hangover. That was, after all, approximately 57% of the reason he ended up napping on the grass in the park. His other reasons involved what a nice day it was, the fact that his air conditioner was on the fritz, and, lastly, the eerily uncomfortable benches that resulted from the city's decision to employ top ergonomicists in an attempt to discourage anyone from sleeping on them at any time. As he walked out of the park, the Pouch fished out a little spare change from random pockets to gently place near each of the individuals he passed who had proven his betters, full on snoring on the benches. Life finds a way. 

Finally with foot on city sidewalk, the Pouch could already hear the disturbance. The sonic field of the city shifted rapidly for any disturbance. You didn't need superpowers to notice its subtle fluctuations, but spending a lot of time outdoors helped, as did living in a tiny, shit apartment. The nature of the disturbance was a off the direction Brique had pointed. It was unlikely that he'd gotten such a key detail wrong, this thing must have been on the move. This also matched up with the sounds echoing through the tree and townhouse lined streets and also through his inner ear pouches. A stationary event sounded different. Fewer people would encounter it as a general perimeter would quickly form. This thing sounded like it was on the move, no doubt about that. A moving phenomenon only created a perimeter behind it, and even that was a moving perimeter, more of an invisible wall of people pseudo-following the event, rubber necking mostly. This would be smaller than the surrounding group of a stationary event. Anything on the move was inherently more threatening. It could turn and walk in any direction, so there wasn't as much clustering and a lot more fleeing. Also, the moving situation put itself into more and more people's paths, increasing exposure and disruption. The perimeter that formed around a stationary happening was a site of information sharing. 

This was a lot of clear thinking, the Pouch thought, clearly. Maybe that it wasn't that bad of a hangover. Or maybe, it wouldn't be the first time that some youths, passing his sleeping form, caught sight of the cops and, in a panic, stuffed a bunch of contraband into one of his pouches, ditching it. That's how he found out, the hard way, that angel dust wasn't for him. Luckily, for the residents of his neighborhood, his hallucinations mainly took the form of super villains who where outside of his weight class, metaphorically speaking, and so he mainly tried to keep people safe from them while he waited for better super heroes to show up. Now that they were legalizing weed, it was fairly unlikely that anybody would be stuffing that into him, though the one time they did, he ended up spending way too much money filling his pouches up with chocolate chip cookies before watching a marathon of the Twilight Zone. By the fifth episode, he develoved an uncanny knack for calling out the twist within minutes of each episode starting. 

No, a quick inventory of his pouches while still walking towards the shocked screams, cars breaking, and car horns honking cleared up this suspicion. Perhaps it was the leather protector he'd sprayed on this morning, mainly in an attempt to cover up the booze smell oozing out of all his pouches. He'd bought a new brand some weeks ago and forgot to try it out. Maybe it was performance enhancing when applied to sentient leather? In the unlikely event that he survived the upcoming encounter, he'd have to test it out again, maybe even try to get sponsored by the company. His potential as a spokesperson was criminally underused, he thought, turning the corner and quickly hoping that this was, in fact, a PCP flashback of some sort. The stumbling composite kaiju that the The Unified Union of Unisus Fellowship had formed was something awful to behold. 

The Pouch had read Clive Barker's short story "In the Hills, The Cities" and strongly felt that so too must have at least one member of The Unified Union of Unisus Fellowship. Looking directly at the horrific agglomeration of people who clearly hadn't been hitting the gym to work on their glamour muscles, which wasn't easy to do, the Pouch noticed a series of ropes and some light padding that was holding the whole affair together. He could see how, at merely a quick glance, one could think that glue was involved. Also, the sweat covering the mostly white and untanned individuals lent a hint of Elmer's glue to the proceedings. The Pouch chuckled, recalling the famous line from Airplane, "I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue." The Pouch felt that he picked the wrong week to skip pouring bourbon into his morning coffee, but that was only because he didn't have any left over from last night's "session" and so none was at hand this morning. Any kind of buzz would have helped dealing with this herky-jerky mass of religious nuts that was currently terrorizing his neighborhood. I mean, the kids were going to have nightmares, you couldn't see shit like this at a young age and still be okay later in life. 

Uncertain how to even mount a frontal attack, the Pouch ducked behind a trashcan to survey the situation for a moment. His first thought, cut a few ropes and see what happens, was quickly rejected. The last thing he wanted to create was a sort of crushing crowd event. The cultists, sorry, new-faith-ists were clearly deranged, more clearly after this stunt than before, but that wasn't a death sentence. Some of them would probably respond very well to therapy and/or deprogramming. Ideally, he'd want to get them some place that would facilitate a soft landing. Water was out, though, as drowning was too likely an outcome for at least some of the individuals. A bounce house would be good, but surely the weight of the assembled cultists was beyond the maximum of even the largest bounce house and the ensuing explosion would have unknown consequences. Well, maybe you couldn't make an omelet without breaking some eggs. The Pouched reached into the pouch very near his heart where he kept what was for now his most prized procession. Mary Sew had let him borrow one of her seam rippers and forgotten to ask for it back. Nothing about Mary Sew was common, and her seam rippers could cut through anything. 

He could tell himself it was the hangover, but really it was a lack of a regular exercise routine that caused the Pouch to stop several times to catch his breath while walking up the stairs of the little apartment building a block away from the lashed together cultists and in its path. For the first time ever, someone actually listened when he said "superhero business, I gotta get on your roof" and let him in the side door of the apartment building where the stairwell was. Once got to the top of the three story structure, and had caught his breath once again, he looked over the side of the building to see the ambling cultist Voltron just about to pass. He was a higher than the uppermost layer of cultists and so would have to jump down on to the head or shoulders of the abomination. 

The Pouch watched the progress of the cultists towards him and noticed that they obviously hadn't had time to practice this whole thing. For every step forward, they nearly took a step back. Coordination wasn't working out very well in the legs. Still he thought he'd timed in just right when he finally jumped, only to be thwarted by an unexpected half turn, causing him to miss entirely and smash own on the ground. He'd managed to open most of his pouches and they, like mini-parachutes, caught enough wind to slow him down enough so that when he hit the sidewalk, it wasn't hard enough to knock him out. Sprawled out on the ground within feet of the monstrosity, some of the cultist in the legs saw him but nobody above the waist did. The resulting confusion lead to an even hurkyier, even jerkier confusion where the cult seeming to be pulling in all ways at once. 

Ditching his top down idea, instead the Pouch ran up the front of a parked car, a Toyota Camry with a dented bumper, and launched himself towards the midsection of the humanish form. His presence drove the cultists absolutely wild, and those in the general proximity of where he landed completely forgot about their greater obligations and instead began punching towards him and yelling all manner of nasty things. A wave of general confusion swept over the cultists as many couldn't see the Pouch and so had no idea what was happening. They tried frantically to shift the overall body around to get a better look. This, combined with the immediate cultists not pulling their weight, caused the overall structure to start to buckle. The Pouch, seam ripper in hand, started cutting the harnesses and joining ropes while doing his best to ignore the vitriol and physical assaults. Luckily the cultists were not particularly creative people and so their insults were childish and basic and drew no emotional blood. Likewise their flabby arms and poor striking technique meant that what blows they did land hardly hurt at all. 

All at once, the agglomeration of cultists bent at the waist, so that the top portion and the bottom portion were both on the ground. This was a soft landing and the best the Pouch could have hoped for. Now the gestalt being had been rendered entirely dysfunctional and unable to move forward. The Pouch jumped off of the heap and stepped back to watch. No one was being crushed to death. He had succeeded. A group of police officers finally came around the corner in riot gear. 

"You guys think you can take over now? Looks like they can't move anymore," the Pouch said to the boys in blue.

"Oh yeah, we got this. Thanks! We didn't know where to even start with this thing. Good thing we got supes like you," the commanding officer said. The Pouch waved to the small crowd that had assembled and shuffled off, back the park and the nap on the grass he had been deprived of. 

FanFiction of the Week: The Steamed Dumpling Gang by Patty Shure

Damn, it was hot. The Pouch couldn't sweat, one of his many similarities to dogs, maybe that's why he always got along with dogs so good and leaned on them for support in social situations, but it was probably for the best. He didn't want to even imagine what it would smell like if all of his pouches started pooling sweat on a hot day. That would be rank. It wouldn't be practical to apply some type of deodorant to the interior of ever pouch, even that full body stuff the close talking lady had been shilling on the TV. Of course, this wasn't a hot day, this was the criminal hideout of SoyBoi and all that heat was coming from the giant steam pot he was firing up so he could kill the Pouch in it once and for all. First, his minions had finish stuffing the pouch with a variety of fillings. 

"Why don't you just kill me, SoyBoi, why the elaborate process?" the Pouch had asked.

"Thematic consistency," SoyBoi had answered. "I'm going to leave you out on the streets of your beloved neighborhood, reduced to a lifeless mass of dumpling, stuffed with pork, because I know you don't care for it. That ought to show all the haters how evil I am!" 

"SoyBoi," the Pouch had answered then, "that's just some dumb rightwing meme, it's not about you, nobody has been talking about you all this time."

"Well, they'll sure be talking about me after this heinous crime!" SoyBoi shouted. He'd clearly been practicing his evil inflections, probably a voice coach. The Pouch tried to make a mental note to investigate if any members of the local theater community was helping out his improbable and often ridiculous collection of enemies. He wasn't looking to punish anyone he found, contemporary culture's treatment of the theater had done enough of that, he just wanted to understand their motivations and maybe flip them as an informant. If he could find out who was practicing their evil talk, maybe he could intervene before they did any crimes. Being honest with himself in these, that might be his last moments, he realized that his only interest in this plan was to bring it up to Mary Sew in yet another attempt to impress her with his crimefighting skills. Mainly he'd established himself as the type of hero who could take a helluva beating, but he also wanted her to think of him as a thinker, as someone doing the work to address the greater issues of crime and not just absorbing the damage once it was too late. 

"Boss, we've got all the chive in there, is the pork ready yet?" one of SoyBoi's underlings asked. 

"Not yet, it must simmer for another ten minutes," SoyBoi said. 

"Does it matter? I mean, nobody's gonna eat this guy, it's just for the bit, right?"

"How you do anything is how you do everything!" SoyBoi shouted, striking his minion so hard that several small crumbs of bean curd broke off of SoyBoi's hand. This did not go unnoticed by the Pouch. Apparently the steam was softening his tofu form, definitely moving him from extra-firm to a softer state. If he could stall, the Pouch thought, he might have a chance of getting out of this. The Pouch focused all his energy on digestion. 

"There's practically no chive in any of these pouches!" SoyBoi screamed, now striking the other minion who happened to be nearby, again losing a number of crumbs from his hand while doing so, but seeming to not notice. 

"We stuffed it in, like you said," the minion said, cowering a bit, but not too much. It didn't look like that blow was particularly painful. 

"Luckily I have extra chive for just such incompetence. Go fetch it from the store room. I will oversee this batch of stuffing." 

The Pouch knew that he couldn't digest while they were stuffing or they would notice and maybe knock him unconscious. Also, he didn't want anymore chive, he was all chived out and doubted in a very serious way whether or not he would ever be able to enjoy a chive again. The serious steam also seemed to be softening the noodles that they'd used to bind the Pouch to the legs of the stand that the enormous steamer sat upon. A few more minutes and it was very, very likely that he could break free. 

"So, I know the pork is because you've found out my distate for it, but doesn't it upset you to work with meat? I mean, aren't you a vegetarian or something?" the Pouch asked, knowing the answer in advance and only stalling. 

"No, you moron, I eat meat! Tofu isn't just for vegetarians, that's a hurtful myth, but not one that hurts more than this!" SoyBoi said, striking the Pouch and in the process now losing the whole hand to a pile of crumbles that fell on the floor. "Oh no, the steam seems to be impacting my firmness, hurry up you morons, we have to wrap this up quickly," SoyBoi yelled to his minions. Then, turning to the Pouch he said, "Seriously, you never heard of Ma Po Tofu? It's served with pork. You know, it wouldn't have hurt you to have educated yourself when you were still alive. Then again, I guess there wouldn't have been much point as this was going to be your final outcome either way," said SoyBoi. 

SoyBoi then leaned over, gathering up the largish crumbs that had, until very recently, been his right hand. While thusly leaned over, he noticed the other bits of himself that had fallen off while previously. Once he'd gathered up pretty much all of his crumbles which he awkwardly held in the crook of his left elbow, he pulled out a large wooden contraption that rolled on squeaky wheels and just managed to get the lid up before tossing the bits in. The Pouch figured out pretty quick that this was SoyBoi's press, the place where he'd mush himself back together after a period of activity. This would explain why he wasn't overly concerned about losing a hand. 

The Pouch tested the now remarkably overcooked noodles that held him fast and found them so soft that they fell apart with even the slightest effort. Still, he remained as he was, waiting for a better opening, the minions had returned, dragging large burlap sacks full of chives. Setting a sack on either side of him, the minions each took a handful of chive and reached in to separate pouches. The Pouch flexed these pouches, trapping the hands of the minions, and then, arms free in an epic flex that sent noodle bits flying, the Pouch knocked the minions' heads into one another, knocking them out cold. He stood up, releasing his hold on the minion hands so that their unconscious forms slid to the floor.

"Okay, SoyBoi, that has gone as far as its going to go. We can do this the easy way, you give up now, or we can do this the way I'd much prefer where I smash the shit out of your soft body and then load up you press with a generous helping of my shit and reform you into an entirely new villain called ShitBoi. Your call buddy," said the Pouch, pissed off enough to sound like he really meant it and not entirely sure that he didn't mean it, the abundance of chives he'd digested were making their way towards the exit in what was primarily an orderly manner, but there was some urgency there. 

"You're all talk, Pouch, and even in my soft state I'm more than man enough to kick your ass proper. Let's dance!" SoyBoi yelled. Unfortunately for SoyBoi, it was he that was all talk. Even the process of stepping forward caused his leg to break off below the knee, sending him face down onto the floor, causing him to break up into several pieces, not a dramatic shatter, just a sort of meh crumble. 

Crisis averted, the Pouch turned off the big steamer. The whole notion of SoyBoi reforged with the addition of his own feces idea was tugging at the edge of the Pouch's mind, and while that would be satisfying on some level, it weren't particularly heroic on any level. Also, who knows what the result would be. Perhaps his pouch-poo would somehow strengthen SoyBoi, making him an even greater challenge in the future. Also, fighting with him would be pretty gross. No, it was better to do the right thing and collect up as much of him as he could and turn him over to the authorities. The minions looked familiar, they were probably free lance. A little time in prison would help them make connections so that maybe they could minion for a better criminal. The Pouch sighed and called the police. 

FanFiction of the Week: Poison Pouch Pill by Warwick Slawsgarde

"Do we need to go over the plan again?" Special Agent Jeanie Jeans of the Strange Creatures Affairs Team at the FBI asked, her right hand on her hip, her left pointing directly at the Pouch. "There's a lot riding on this," she said. 

"Um, yeah, why don't you..." the Pouch said, struggling to pay attention. It wasn't easy concentrating at this moment, while he sat in an uncomfortable chair one of the FBI's state of the art crime labs. The chair wasn't the distraction, he'd sat in worse, it was the small team of lab techs methodically filling up each of his pouches with very specific amounts of a white powder that caught the light oddly, sparkling like nothing else he'd seen as it disappeared into each pouch. As part of this process, they'd done a full survey of the exact capacity of every part of him, data they'd already emailed to an account he hoped he had the password written down for back at his apartment. They'd found pouches he didn't even know he had. The process was a little invasive, but, by pretending that his discomfort was physical rather than emotional, he managed to get himself of an injection of something that they wouldn't name that really, really relaxed him. They let him queue up a playlist and zone out, so as far as he was concerned, he was floating in outer space the whole time. They'd given him a much smaller dose this time. Instead of dissociating entirely, however, he was mainly distracted by the lovely lab techs and their very dedicated, very matter of fact filling up of himself. They had done a number of tests to confirm that the strange, slightly glittery powder wasn't reactive with the sentient leather that he was hewn from, which was another reason he was on a light dose of the mystery injection, so that he could react quickly in the case of an unexpected reaction. 

"Okay, we're going to drop you a few blocks ahead of the thing once we've calculated it's exact path. All you have to do is engage. We're 98% sure the creature will do its part," said Jeannie Jeans. 

"Oh yeah, one question, how do you all plan to get me out of this thing? I get the whole one gulp ingestion of myself and then the pouch opening part..."

"Don't worry about that part, actually. We'll be administering a time release agent that will cause an involuntary pouch opening event," said Jeannie. "In some of our simulations, you lost consciousness and so were unable to release your payload until much farther into the digestion process."

"Digestion, I thought you said I'd be fine in there!?!" the Pouch said.

"You will be fine, it's a very, very slow process. Our simulations indicate that it might take as long as a month for you to be fully consumed. With the current plan in place, the approximately thirty minutes you'll be spending in the belly of the beast should do little more than soften your living leather to an amount that may not be noticeable to you at all, but may well be apparently to others."

This comment of others and touching made the Pouch think of Mary Sew and an imagined scenario, she stroking gently his face pouch, saying, are you using some sort of new moisturizer to which he would say __

"Go time!" Jeannie Jeans yelled, shattering the Pouch's hazy imaginings. The mysterious powder that now filled all of his pouches, except his head pouch which was stuffed with a small oxygen tank in case the unnamed powder was not quite as fast acting as anticipated, must not have been very dense, or he could have been under the influence still of the equally mysterious injection because he didn't have any trouble getting up out of the uncomfortable chair. Once more they put the hood on him while leading him out, the rest of the labs and the very location of the facility were, if not top secret, much higher up the secret hierarchy than a point where anyone at the FBI felt comfortable sharing with a low-level "street" supe like the Pouch. 

A short... van? It felt like a van but a van with really good shocks, or maybe it was hovering? After a little ride in an official vehicle, they pulled the hood and the sunlight pounded down on the Pouch with the vengeance of a jilted lover. He'd been staying out late and sleeping in, well most of the day. Spending the last few days possibly underground in the secret lab complex that he only saw 1.5 rooms of didn't help. It's also possible that all the stuff they'd been giving him, while dulling practically all of his senses, had somehow amplified his light sensitivity. It did look like his neighborhood, maybe out on the edge, near the old canal. Did they say something about the canal? Oh yeah, this thing was going to crawl out of the canal. Why didn't they do something about it while it was still in the damn canal? The Pouch was finding that maybe his memory was impacted by the vast variety of chemicals he'd been in contact recently. Oh well, oh shit, here it comes! A gaping maw rose up just in site at the end of the block, dripping with the fetid skunky waters of the canal. The Pouch remembered the one time, still new to the neighborhood, when he'd tossed in a coin, as though it was a wishing well, only to see the coin sit atop the strange water source and slowly dissolve instead of sinking. 

"Do your thing!" someone shouted really close to him, patting his shoulder, and then shoving him pretty hard in the direction of the canal and its emerging monstrosity. The Pouch stumbled a few steps, maybe something was wearing off, he started to feel heavy, like really heavy, like heavy enough to maybe crack the crust of the Earth and fall into the mantle, or even lower. "Hurry up!" the same voice in his ear pouch again, this time with a harder shove. The Pouch took a deep breath and tried to focus his mind. The world was wanting to start spinning but he was wanting it to not do that, and was winning at the moment, for the most part, everything had settled at a forty-five degree angle but he was leaning into it and compensating and making steady progress. The horrible monster thing was still pulling itself up and out of the canal. The Pouch couldn't tell why it was taking so long, why time wasn't moving like it used to do, but he hunkered down and pushed himself, not quite running, but doing a bit more than walking. 

Once he got close to the shifting abomination, he understood what was taking it so long to emerge from the canal. It wasn't emerging from the canal at all, it was forming from the very canal itself, the fetid waters slowly congealing into a solid form. Not bound by the usual laws of creature body composition, the result was even more horrible, flabby and oily, speckled with incongruous bits of what jetsam cast into the canal over its long existence. On top of all the physical malformation, the thing looked pissed and ready to take it out on the surrounding city that had fed into its sorry state. Clearly this was some sort of environmental cautionary tale playing out before him, but the state of his mind was struggling to keep anything straight, though it did realize the presence of the road beneath his head pouches after a large and milky pseudopod of gelatinous material rose out of the canal and smashed him flat. 

It was hard to get a good read on how conscious the Pouch was just then as the pseudopod drew back, the Pouch more or less encased in its disgusting mass. It then drew him up high, over the thing's mouth, which looked a lot like when you gently blow a hole in the head on a beer, more of a gap than a fully formed mouth, though there were what looked to be something like eyes forming on the thing's "face", and those eye-like masses glistened with a sick sort of glee while dangling the Pouch above its shifting maw for a moment, seeming to relish the imminent ingestion of the neighborhood's sad sack defender. 

The Pouch woke up in this state, dangling above a really far drop. He couldn't be sure then if the timed release drug they'd given him kicked in right at that moment or if it was the sheer terror that ripped through his partially addled mind that sprung all of his pouches open at once, pouring the odd powder down in a stream, all of it going right down that twisting pathway of a seeming digestive tract. Then it wasn't clear if the thing dropped him on purpose or lost the coherence necessary to maintain the extension of its form, but the Pouch found himself falling and blacked out before hitting the mass beneath him, the mass that had quickly changed into a massive bubbling churn, the escaping gas making what some might have interpreted as a death wail, though others might have defined it as simply the sound of gas escaping a rapid chemical process. 

The Pouch woke up again, feeling a bit groggy, and not aware for maybe a whole minute that he was floating on his back, all of his pouches closed and holding in air to keep him buoyant. The sky above was a lovely blue with only a few clouds spread about, as if they were put there to complete the composition. Just then, some kid did a cannonball way to close to him and the splash broke his revery and he paddled out to the side and crawled out. The Pouch could hardly believe what he was seeing. The canal shimmered in the sunlight, clear down to the bottom. The neighborhood kids were wasting no time enjoying their new swimming spot. The Pouch looked around and caught sight of a massive glob of something sitting on the back of one ton truck, workers spreading a tarp over its mass while he watched. 

Special Agent Jeannie Jeans walked up and patted him on the shoulder and said, "Good work, Mr. Pouch. I never doubted you."

"So, what was all that powder?" the Pouch asked.

"That's top secret," Jeannie Jeans said. 

"What about all those drugs you gave me?" he asked.

"Also, top secret, but I managed to swipe you some," she said, slyly stuffing a small brown paper sack into one of his thigh patches. 

"Isn't that against the rules?" the Pouch asked.

"I don't care, I'm retiring. Well, I'm retiring once I sell all the property around the canal that I picked up on the cheap last year." With that the Special Agent walked away, half dancing, singing a Jimmy Buffet song to herself. 

Pouch Spotting!: Issue 5

 I missed this variant cover when it came out. This is one issue that's definitely going to go up in value!

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