#the militia

[scaryscarecrows]

One minute they’re moving, the next they’ve been set upon by ninjas.

That’s the only way Curt Evans can think of to describe the sudden assault; armed men, terrifyingly agile, falling on them before anybody had any idea they were even there.

It’s over embarrassingly quickly.

No one’s dead, though they’re all bruised. Jesus Christ. He’s on his knees, badly winded and yeah, that’s a cracked rib, and all he can think right now is, what just happened? A quick glance around at his squadmates says they’re thinking the same thing.

The ninjas are wearing black and red, with stark white full-face masks and blood-red goggles. Several of them have swords–swords, what the fuck?--but all of them have guns. One of them, smaller than the others, steps forward. They tilt their head, goggles boring into Evans’ eyes, before their hand snaps out and tears his dog tags from his neck.

“Hey-!”

“Shut up,” somebody else–a man’s voice–snaps. “We didn’t ask you to talk.” Then, “We takin’ ‘em back to base, sir?”

The man holding his dog tags doesn’t answer. He just looks at Evans (or, well, that’s what it looks like he’s doing) for a long moment before his arm flies out, swinging the dog tags like a flail. They hit him in teeth (that’s a chip, ow) before the man flips over him (what the fuck?) and–hurk!

Air-air-air-air–

His vision’s just starting to go when the chain loosens from around his neck. He’s still gasping when a boot between his shoulder blades puts him flat on his face and then he’s kicked over, onto his back. A boot’s planted on his chest and a massive sniper rifle that looks leagues beyond anything he’s ever worked with levels itself at his face.

The expected death doesn’t come. After two minutes of staring into those red goggles, his assailant scoffs and steps off him, snaps his fingers and jerks his head. The man from before nods.

“Yessir. Get up, assholes, we’re goin’ for a ride.”

* * *

The ride is twenty minutes. It’s a quiet twenty minutes, but it ends when they pull up to a massive military compound. High walls ringed with razor wire, security guards, and cameras. Big gates that look like something out of Jurassic Park. And an entire army’s worth of men inside, from the looks of it; trucks, tanks, the whole thing.

What the hell?

The little man from before hops out before the car comes to a stop. Striding across the compound is a giant that looks like he could snap Godzilla in half. He stops, though, when the littler guy whistles, puts his index fingers against the side of his head, and salutes*.

“Think he and Antoine had a TC,” the giant says. “They should be done soon. Why?”

A thumb jerks back towards the jeep.

“Shiiit,” the giant says appreciatively. “He’s not gonna like that.”

Who’s not gonna like that?

The small man laughs. Not totally mute, then, and clearly not deaf. Impediment? Just an asshole?

“I don’t think it was supposed to take–there he is.”

Oh.

Oh, good God.

Evans’ first, crazy thought, is that Gotham’s Bat has gone off the rails and set this up. Then the…thing…gets closer and he can see that it’s not quite the same. No cape, for one. And the full-faced helmet. It looks more like a cyborg than anything, but it’s coming this way.

“Riley brought ya a present,” the giant calls. The cyborg stops, looks at the blond man trotting behind it, and shrugs.

“Something tells me it’s not Reese’s.”

The voice is heavily filtered, sounding more demonic than human. The smaller man–Riley (huh, he knew a Riley once)--nods and erupts in a flurry of gesticulations. The cyborg tilts its head, sun reflecting off that blue visor, and remains quiet until Riley stops moving.

“Good call,” it says, and then it’s stalking towards them. Up close, it’s big. Well-armed. The insignia on the armor is unfamiliar and the armor itself is hard and sharp, almost medieval. “Well, gentlemen. What brings you out this far?”

Nobody answers. Then, quick as a snake, the cyborg lunges and pulls Evans away from the rest of his squadmates.

“Curt Evans,” the demonic voice growls. “You’re in charge of…well, that’s interesting. Operation Pleasure Time? Thought that was a soda.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says immediately. “Who the hell are you?”

The cyborg chuckles.

“The Arkham Knight.” What the hell? Some freak escaped from Gotham? Evans has never set foot there, but one of his old squadmates had been a local. That guy was fucked up. “Don’t play coy with me–well, well, this is interesting.”

It plucks the small body camera from his vest and kicks Evans’ legs out from under him, lets him fall to the dirt in a heap.

“Drouot.”

“Yessir.”

“Tell Rogers to get into their camera frequency and run a cover-up.” It–he?--pauses. “Not that ridiculous jungle monster cryptid, something practical. Crocodiles.”

“Aw, you’re gonna break his heart, boss,” the blond says. The Arkham Knight scoffs.

“He’ll live.”

“Yeah, but he’ll be annoying about it.” 

The Knight tosses the camera over and the blond disappears. Evans swallows.

“That’s recording already,” he says, willing his voice to be steady. “It doesn’t matter what you do now, it’s been viewed.”

“Nah.” The Knight sounds incredibly entertained. “We have a scrambler. All that’s been viewed is static.”

“We’re not telling you shit.”

“I really don’t care what you’re doing out here. I just care that you keep your mouths shut, and you know what they say about dead men.”

“What the fuck–”

“Get rid of them.”

“What, you won’t even do the job yourself?” Rodreguez shouts. “Fuckin’--”

BLAM!

“There. I killed one of you.” The Knight reholsters his gun. “Happy? Now. Get rid of them. Unless…” He turns to look at Riley, who shakes his head. “Never mind. Just get rid of them. I want to see your squadron in two hours; see what you’ve learned, huh?”

*Riley actually has two ways to refer to Jason: one is the shorthand symbol for crazy (index finger spiraled near your head) followed by ASL for knight. Crazy Knight=Arkham Knight. The other is this one–Evans may not know the Family Politics here, but Riley respects, and thus salutes, very few people. So this is the more affectionate one he uses to Jason or with the Squad.

[traveling-spartan]

This is what I mean by "guy-time."

I had a good weekend.

[djevilninja]

As nights turn to days, days go back to nights, we be speaking it right, And keeping it tight up in the street life. I meet life, head on, no holds barred; Born with a heart of gold, now mostly cold and scarred. En guard, choose your weapon, or get to steppin'; Lyrical bullets make you dance from the trance you be kept in. Assessments are made before, and during combat, I master my hunger, blow the spot when I bomb cats.

Gang Starr feat Big Shugg & Freddie Foxxx - The Militia

[thedigitalcrates]

Cory Gunz Drops The Militia Mixtape

  Multi-platinum selling recording artist Cory Gunz releases The Militia mixtape featuring fellow Militia members Black Saun, Whispers, RMK, Mulaarie and more. The Militia tape contains nine new songs with production from Black Saun and Qui3t with a feature from Ms. Hustle. Cory and The Militia members come through with bars showcasing their lyrical wordplay over a combination of gritty sounds…

[sang-i-fetge]

Something that really amuses me is that who want GoodDad!Bruce reconciling with jason really just want arkham batman.

Who, upon discovering the identity of the guy that orchestrated a violent takeover of (a mostly empty) Gotham, goes "Jason...🥺 I thought u were dead...🥺 we can fix this...together...🥺"

[largemandrill]

Is this anything?

[elcuervoborracho]

A commission for the unwavering Panda, of Miss Militia! You know, she's probably one of the two or so BB Protectorate heroes I really like, I think it's because of the 90's antihero vibe. Gun is a great superpower too.

[lemedstudent2021]

as seen on reddit

3 years later and (un)surprisingly accurate.

[cpericardium]

Taylor lowkey had a parasocial relationship with Miss Militia in canon and all the fic writers fell for it. She was like ooh I'll write my vulnerable letter to Miss Militia and burn it 🥺 I'll let myself be taken in by the PRT if you make Miss Militia the leader of the protectorate 🥺 Miss Militia you're my favourite 🥺 Girl you don't even know her... you don't know the things she's done

And in fics she just lives up to all those standards and is basically the mommy of the team

[spacedace]

Continuation/blurb/snippet from this writing prompt.

It took less than a week to get custody of the Fenton children.

Oswald expected that it wouldn’t take long with his connections, but even that turn around is faster than what he expected. He'd anticipated pulling strings, greasing palms, maybe making some threats, but before he can even think of getting things moving to do so the paperwork is signed and a social worker is calling him to sort out the travel arrangements for the kids.

It's all done local, the judge, CPS, the witnesses and lawyers, each and every one calling the town home. Each and every one pushing the case through at a speed that Oswald didn't think was possible even in the most crooked of situations. He smelled conspiracy, but not - surprisingly - a malicious one.

Amity wasn't the smallest place in the world, but it was small enough. And the Fentons were public figures, though not in the way that Jack and Maddie Fenton obviously thought they were. How long had the people of Amity been watching things go wrong for the kids? How long had they been trying - in their own, limited ability - to help? Long enough to get desperate, seemed to be the answer.

The only resistance Oswald can find as he reviewed all the information he could get ahold of, was from the Mayor - Jazz and Danny's godfather, somehow more crooked than even Gotham's elected officials as far as Oswald could tell - and the Dr's. Fenton themselves.

The Mayor was summarily denied any influence of the case by the judge on the grounds of the long standing and publicly recorded ugliness of Master's relationship with Danny - which was something else Oswald was going to have to figure out. Along with all the…ghost stuff.

Oswald wasn't sure what to make of the ghost stuff.

Honestly he was leaving it for his people to figure out and wrangle into a reasonable explanation to report to him later. It was…something, a big something, and not - as he'd originally suspected upon initial cursory research into the town - a tourist gimmick or an overly high meta population. A later problem, provided he had to co tend with it at all once the children were officially in his custody in Gotham.

The biggest issue had been the kid's parents. Or really, the biggest issue had been the shady government agency backing the kids' parents.

The Fentons were the Ghost Investigation Ward's pet mad scientists. Creating weapons and genocidal plans - against ghosts - and generally tormenting the towns' living inhabitants just as much as the undead ones. The GIW had been protecting Jack and Maddie from any repercussions of their recklessness, and were willing to butt in on an unexpected custody battle in order to keep their maniacal golden geese happily working away.

From what Oswald had heard, a representative of the GIW had shown up to convince the judge to dismiss the case, but the judge had been faster. By the time the men in all white appeared - garish and tacky in their ill fitted, bulky suits - it had been too late of course. The judge had apparently anticipated their impending appearance and had made their ruling and had everything filed tidily late the night before. Courts did not typically stay running til three in the morning, but apparently an exception had been made.

There were a great many things wrong with Amity Park - wrong in a lot of ways they were in Gotham, wrong in ways they weren't - but the people that called the place home seemed to have come to a decision on one thing: the Fenton children were not safe, and unknown or not they were trusting Oswald to get them out of there.

It was strange and a little overwhelming, for an entire population that did not know him to see him as some kind of hope. Some kind of hero.

There were many, many things wrong in Amity Park.

He tried to assure himself when everything was said and done and the kids were packed and on their way that it wasn't his problem. He was officially Jazz and Danny's guardian, in a city half a country away that even with his - nominally- cleaned up act he held a great deal of power over. He was nearly untouchable within Gotham's shadow, and no one from some half-mad town was going to be able to do anything to change that.

He made preparations though, just in case. He hadn’t gotten where he was by being stupid. The Bat could use something to chew on that wasn't one of Oswald's entirely legitimate business ventures anyway. An ethically suspect government agency that was likely to come sticking their noses in Gotham's business sooner than later would do just nicely for that, and might even earn him some kind of grace from Gotham's brooding knight without getting him in hot water with any of the city's criminal element.

All that was left at that point was actually meeting the kids in person.

His kids.

He ignored the strange, bittersweet ache that touched his heart at that. It was, after all, entirely a means of improving his reputation in the city. The kids mean an end. He'd take care of him the same he did all his people, but not any more than that.

It was just business.

If he reminded himself enough, it might even be true one day.

He suspected though, as he laid eyes on them for the first time - shadow eyed and leery, haunted in a way that ghosts couldn't manage and looking not much at all like Oswald outside the fear and the pain he did his best to forget from his own upbringing - that the point of not caring had been passed the minute he'd gotten that first call.

*

Apologies if Penguin is out of character, all I know about him is what I vaguely remember from TAS, what I’ve absorbed from fandom and what I tried to put together from a wiki lol.

I did this instead of sleeping last night because I couldn’t get the initial idea out of my head (which slightly defeats the purpose of making it a writing prompt so that I could just read everyone else’s wonderful thoughts and writings on the idea instead of getting side tracked from my other writing projects - again lol - but oh well).

I don’t know if I’ll write anymore, and as with everything else I post this is open for anyone who is interested to run with.

Tag time!

@phoenixdemonqueen @justgray15777 @gin2212 @blankliferain @meira-3919 @lexdamo @hallowsden @derpygirl64 @thewondersoflebanon @amercurio @vythika96 @my-perfect-storybook-love @apointlessbox

[all-lee24]

Twin curse-swap

[trump666traitor]

[hashtagnevermore]

THE MISFITS AND THEIR SILLY LITTLE BLOOD OATH I WANT WHAT THEY HAVE SO BAD

[artbyblastweave]

I've never made any connections between Worm and the Captain America mythos before. Spill some ink?

Okay, so from a purely aesthetic perspective, the gimme is Miss Militia. She's the most obvious "Captain Patriotic" in the roster, she has the power of GUN, she's the only one who actively buys into the mythology of America specifically. She's a Kurdish woman occupying an aesthetic niche generally held by a rugged squinty white guy. She's an output of the melting pot narrative. She's sort of a rendering of what a grounded superhero who somehow became very aesthetically into America might look like. Not in the craven marketing-driven way of Homelander or Comedian, not in the jingoistic maniac way of USAgent or Peacemaker. She buys it in the broadly left-liberal (USamerican connotation of that term) safe, friendly, reclamative way. Why, what a great rehabilitation of the archetype!

She's also deeply, deeply afraid of rocking the boat. She's got a deepseated childhood trauma related to the bad things that happen when she puts herself in a leadership role. She goes along to get along. When she's proactive, it's usually to point a gun at Tattletale to stop her from upsetting the status quo. She sits through a lot of situations where Steve Rogers, as commonly modeled, would probably plant himself like a tree by the river of truth and go, "Hey, this is fucked up." She more or less capitulates to Undersider domination of the city, in a way that predisposes us to think of her as a voice of reason after all these total nuts that Skitter's been up against- but would Taylor "to relinquish control is a form of ego death" Hebert really be willing to leave someone in charge of the local Protectorate branch who she thought couldn't be corralled? She looks like a beacon, but doesn't- indeed, probably can't- ever truly behave like one. I mean, you can debate the on-the-spot morality of any given one of her judgement calls, that's actually one of the less exhausting Worm Morality Debates to have- but in aggregate, a person in American flag garb who actually meaningfully criticizes the paramilitary organization they're part of is not gonna survive long in that role!

So again, she's the gimme from an aesthetic standpoint. But what I don't really see a lot of discussion of is how Cauldron plays into the riff.

Captain America is institutional, but in a comically morally uncomplicated way. The serum was originally mana from heaven, granted to a living saint, conveniently divorced from any nitty-gritty sausage-making process and even-more conveniently divorced from the horrible consequences of giving the, uh, the U.S government a replicable super soldier process. And in fairness to Captain America, this is 100 percent something the overall mythos eventually patched to my satisfaction; the sausage-making process eventually revealed as prototypical government fuckery driven by human experimentation on black servicemen, the overall Marvel Setting littered with failed attempts by the U.S. Government to recreate that golden goose so they can have their fun new jackboots. (In Ultimate Marvel, this is how almost all contemporary superhumans were created, and this is a state of affairs with a body count in the millions or billions.)

Cauldron draws you in with the same noble rhetoric about greater goods, the same one-off proprietary irreplicable formula- but you don't get the luxury afterwards of representing nothing but the dream. You aren't partnering up with a plucky crank scientist with a heart of gold. You're selling your soul to an organization with an agenda. The narrative makes no bones about the fact that everything you do is fundamentally tainted by the fact you opted into an end product created through torture, kidnapping and human experimentation. You don't get to pull a Kamen Rider by going rogue or opting out or making good use of the fruit of the poisoned tree; you are owned, and everything you do has this Damocles sword hanging over your head- when are the people who bankrolled this going to come to collect?

So that's the question of "who would willingly dress like that" covered, and the question of who creates a serum like that. What about the question of who takes a serum like that? I'd argue that Eidolon is the examination of that. Pre-Cauldron David reads to me like pre-serum Steve Rogers viewed through a significantly bleaker lens. They're both sickly kids desperate to serve, rocketed to the pinnacle of human capability by an experimental procedure. But for Steve Rogers, the crisis was that he had a specific vision of the world and was frustrated by his inability to carry it out. Before the serum he picked fights over what was right and wrong and got his ass handed to him; afterwards he picked those same fights and just started winning instead. The serum neatly solved a problem he had, and to the extent that his mindset is influenced by his pre-serum experiences, it's generally constructive; a desire to protect the weak, help the helpless, an appreciation for people who stand up for what's right even when they're clearly gonna get pancaked for their trouble. So ultimately there's no dark side, downside, or underlying neurosis ascribed to his initial impulse to take that serum.

But with David, it's not a tragic case of the spirit being willing but the flesh being weak. He isn't a preternaturally-noble soul, out to represent the best elements of the American ideal- he kind of represents the inverse, a guy who's been failed at every level while utterly convinced that he's the problem. He's actively suicidal because he's a wheelchair-bound epileptic in an economically-depressed socially-backwards rural town in the 1980s, and he's spent his 18 years of life internalizing the idea that he's worse than useless unless he can somehow find a way provide value to something larger than himself. Doctor Mother finds him in the aftermath of a suicide attempt spurred by his rejection from the army- and he didn't even want to join the army specifically, necessarily, he just needed his situation to be literally anything else, and he took what he thought he could get. And then he finds himself in a position to become a superhero, so he does that, molds himself into that, subordinates himself to that, builds his entire sense of self and values around the value he can provide in that role. No grand design or sacred principles carried over through the metamorphosis. Just relief at finally, finally having something that looks like an answer to the question of what he's supposed to do.

And you know, you know that if Steve Rogers was facing down the barrel of being depowered, he'd smile and nod, he'd Cincinnatus that shit. It's happened before. But for David, the emotional trauma and self-worth issues that caused him to roll the dice on a Steve-Rogers treatment never really went away. When would it? He's been Providing Value as a ten-ton Hammer Against Evil for thirty years. No family, no social life. Certainly, no incentive on his handler's part to lance his Atlas complex. So he barrels towards atrocity in the name of remaining useful. Admittedly, this is where the comparison breaks down in a significant way; Captain America is much more of a symbol than he is an irreplicable powerhouse, so it's not catastrophic if he's taken off the board. Eidolon is so unbelievably powerful that his myopia and self-centeredness actually do align with a real problem everyone else is gonna have if he loses his powers. But in terms of the starting points- I think that Steve Rogers embodies the myth about why you'd want to join the army that badly. Eidolon is, I think, much more closely modelling why you'd actually want to join the army that badly.