"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.
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