Home Sweet Home Invasion

Available on the Author's Super-Awesome Site

This stupendous, amazing, spectacular, not-at-all-overhyped comedy/science-fiction series can be found in the following parts:

Book 1: Serial Fiction Sideshow

Book 2: Home Sweet Home Invasion

Book 3: Technophobia

Book 4: Armageddon Trigger Finger

Book 5: The Genetic Equation

Book 6: Power Tool

Book 7: The Lesser of Two Egos

Book 8: Untitled of Attitude Adjustments

Book 9: Those We Left Behind

Book 10: Metaphor for Life

Book 11: Oh, Crock, Here Comes a Meteor!

Book 12: His Kingdom Come

Book 13: A Wolf in Sheep's Armor

Book 14: Man Versus Machine Part 1 of 1

Book 15: Our New Hiring Policy

Book 16: Life like Broken Glass

Book 17: The Church of Steeple

Book 18: Blood Bunny

Book 19: Disease of Behavior

Book 20: The Paper Tiger's Yardstick

Book 21: This One Has a Dancing Gibbon

Book 22: My Brother's Captor

Book 23: Marching Orders

Book 24: To Wake the Deactivated

The Story So Far Vol. 1

Please visit the In a Galaxy Far, Far AwRy site for all these free e-books and more information.

Other Dissertations by the Author concerning the Socioeconomic Condition of Society

Maybe check out these other things 'cause they're superfine too!

Not So Superpowered, available at tiny.cc/nssuperpowered

Three Flash Fictions, available upon request from the author

Revenge skywriting, available among the clouds

Dedicated to...

...all y'all. But especially my wife, LeAnh, cuz she lets me get away with writing while she keeps salesmen at bay with a broom she lights on fire. This is also how she feeds the kids.

And to indoor plumbing. Love that stuff.

Acknowledgements

As with every author, I have a few shout-outs I need to make to people who helped bring my second baby to you guys. It was a colicky baby. Remember to feed it plenty of breast milk.

Some jobs are solo jobs, one-man armies doing what they do. That's never the case with a book. At least a good one. And I'd like to think this is a good one. So, in no specific order, I give a firm and awkwardly drawn-out handshake to...

...Matt Levesque. This is the guy at whom I can throw any written piece of junk and he'll help it look like classic literature. Hey, Matt, any time you want to hash out a few details over a game of Fluxx or Bang!, I'm game.

...Steve Baptista. Here's the man (more likely a robot) who helped me keep track of every detail of what happened previously. If a character suddenly drew a gun he shouldn't have or said something that contradicted previous material, Steve computed the error in his mainframe brain and spat out a solution. I swear I hear gears grind when he does that. Steve, I don't know how you do it, and sometimes how you do it scares me, but I'm glad you're on my side. Please don't exterminate the human race.

...Mark Nadon. Say hi to the person who pored over my jumbled mess of military knowledge and made it not only plausible but good storytelling. Mark, if not for you, my characters would probably still be shooting off in directions that don't make sense like a driving student who just confused the gas pedal for the brake. Ahhh, memories of my first cop chase.

...LeAnh Gibbs. Here's the woman who gave me the time to get this finished and polished in the first place. LeAnh, you held down the home front long enough for me to put this idea on computer paper and sweat over it for another dozen drafts.

...Andrew MacLellan. Thanks for being the—excuse the cliché—brother from another mother. Andrew, there's nothing else I can say about you that wouldn't further dilute that sentence. But it rhymes, so we'll always have that.

...Mo Gibbs. Hats off to you for helping to assemble the cover. Now readers can check the art out in awe without the bleed severing characters' body parts.

...Bernie Pallek. This is the dude who helped assemble the web site, make it more modern. Without you, Bernz, the site would still look like art someone's kid stuck to the fridge.

...my grandfather, William Gibbs. He's the one you get to thank/blame for this series. Without him, my hobby might have been hang gliding. That wouldn't have ended well but a stone cliff somewhere would have resembled a Rorschach blot.

...birds. You've never once splooged on my car, and I salute you for that. Wait, you did that one time. I'll look the other way.

Prologue

The previous book, Serial Fiction Sideshow, was something I wrote because I needed a break from writing mammoth, seven-hundred-page stories. That book was meant to be an introduction to the aforementioned mammoth stories. And that introduction was meant to end there. But it took a life of its own and became a reboot, replacing the original canon. We've covered this already.

And so here we are at book two. The previous book dealt with the characters more as regular civilians, not as hyperpeople. In this book, they come together as comic book caricatures, complete with media names (dual identities) and media outfits (costumes). This book really sets the character identities as hyperpeople (superheroes and supervillains).

As I said in the first book's prologue, I had written a smattering of short stories to go with my novels. Serial Fiction Sideshow was originally one of those shorter stories, but it was almost three times as long as the next longest, which maxed out at forty pages. No big deal. Every anthology of short stories has one fat brother.

But I had so much fun writing that one—and it had such a different voice—that I wrote book two. And book two was longer than the first. And also better than that old canon.

So it was this book that finally drove the nail into the coffin of the old canon. This was the book that firmed in my head that this new canon was here to stay, that I had formally said goodbye to my two-and-a-half-books-with-a-smattering-of-short-stories series.

I hope you enjoy this one as much as the first. This was a real kicker to write.

Three bits of trivia. First: I don't remember why or when I decided Power Plant and Franchise should be friends. In the original canon, they barely interacted with each other. They might not have even met. I like the characters better this new way.

Second: this was Ace Spandex's debut, but I liked the character so much, I wanted him in the series from the start, so I added him into scenes from the first book. If his role in this book feels like an introduction, that's why.

Third: this book had several previous titles: Interplanetary Fender Bender, Like Hugging a Porcupine, and An Accident Waiting to Happen. I think Home Sweet Home Invasion sounds more exciting and would draw more readers in.

Enjoy, and I hope you join me again when the third book makes its appearance, hopefully in January 2016. You can preview it at the end of this book. Or wait it out. I'm not your boss.

Talk to you soon.

In a Galaxy Far, Far AwRy book 2

Home Sweet Home Invasion

Chapter One: Appropriation through Supercoolocity

October 29, 9109. 10:13 p.m. (Galactic Standard Time).

The space station was big. But was it big enough? Ah, that wouldn't matter once Master Asinine installed the radioactive thundermammal moat. Heh. A moat surrounding a space station. He'd have to give himself November's Employee of the Month award for concocting that idea. Funny how that would make him employee of the month sixteen times in a row.

Master Asinine had found this moon-sized space station abandoned, and he had decided he had to have it. From here, the Bad Guys would launch their assault on the Good Guys, crush them, and wrest control of this galaxy. How unstoppable this station would become, how destructive its flatulence. Was flatulence the right word? Didn't matter. Asinine found this station more than flatulent for his purposes.

The station had been vacated by Virillian scientists who had used it to study cancerous growths on asparagus or some such scientific money pit. The Bad Guys' head scientist, Brick, claimed it was the last of seventeen space stations used to terraform the planet Vesta into a habitable planet—a venture later deserted—but Brick was always long winded, so Asinine usually ignored him.

The station now sat lifelessly in space. It could escape Vesta's orbit and become a free-floating ball of Bad Guy destruction. But repositioning this monster was complicated: deorbiting was impossible without initiating separation procedures with Vesta so that Vesta's planetary mainframe could compensate for the lack of counterbalanced gravity. That would alert authorities of the station's unauthorized use before Asinine unveiled his Rampage-o-Tron. But Brick would handle that mundane detail. Brick specialized in mundanity. He also specialized in freaking Master Asinine out with seventeen-syllable words.

Master Asinine shuffled away from a few generics, the anonymous Bad Guy underlines all dressed in red, and made a panoramic scan and nodded approvingly at the bare room illuminated in sunlight that dazzled through the grime-smeared windows. Some of the Bad Guys stood around him in a semicircle, watching. Smelling faintly of the unwashed metal of the walls, the room had potential if not more layers of dust than a copy of Groovemaster's Master of Grooves album. This room could be so much: a briefing room, a sparring room, a monster truck arena.

Ooh. Trucks crossed with monsters. Duly noted.

The irresistible coolness of the space station caused Asinine's crooked smile to grow so wide it would leave stretch marks. He sensed promise here, which supercharged his blood with sweet adrenaline. Or that might have been his fifth coffee. I like this place. I like it a lot. Let's take it. Lieutenant, this calls for a celebration. Pizza lunch for everybody.

The crowd of thirty murmured a hubbub of approval, and Lieutenant IQ 23 perked with life. Good idea, sir. I'll see what toppings the generics want. Beside him, Braindead shuffled his weight.

Brick cleared his throat, which sounded like the rumbling of a thousand supercomputers determining what million-letter words to use for an otherwise simple statement. His every movement, his every sound in this room echoed hollowly.

Master Asinine rolled his eyes. Brick, if you hadn't single-handedly installed solar panels on my even bigger solar panels, I would have fired you eons ago. What blither do you want to blather on about this time?

He turned to the long-winded know-it-all and was presented with the scientist's seven-foot brownstone frame. Brick was a body of boxy bricks. A boxy upper torso connected boxy shoulders. Boxy arms had boxy hands that extended from boxy wrists and ended in boxy fingers. Boxy legs met boxy knees supported on boxy feet. A boxy head with a boxy face controlled the boxy bulk that moved like a boxy box.

Mr. Asinine, Brick said. He was as annoying as a jackhammer thundering between Asinine's ears. May I aspire to verbalize a contention with the assertion on your conjecture concerning this orbital dwelling? We cannot merely appropriate this edifice for our assemblage in such a technique and comportment.

Master Asinine gagged with the urge to puke his cookie cake and vanilla custard all over Brick's feet. His stomach muscles churned bile, his brain shifting from neutral to impossible gears to vainly discern words from the turkey gobble Brick tried passing off as English. Asinine wished Brick would use vocabulary that had actually been invented.

Whatever Brick had ninnered, Asinine was going to assume it had something to do with snuffing out his fun. Let me counter your conjecture of the appropriate assemblortment technique...contertion—a deep breath—"whatever else you said. We found this space station. We're here. No one else is. Listen, I was talking with this old buddy of mine who says this guy he plays pinochle with has a sister who lives across from that guy who was in the Tremors remake with Kevin Bacon's clone, who used to work at a surveying station. Anyway, this surveying clone says nobody's used this place in years. So I call squatter's rights."

You're calling squatter's rights on a crocking space station? Schizophrenic's left head spat a single chuckle that echoed against the naked walls. A toothpick shifted around Lefty's lips. He snorted. That's freaking rich.

Shouldn't we be sitting to call squatter's rights? Righty asked. This can be my room. That wall is where I'll hang my poster of a wall. Schizophrenic's right hand pointed at a support beam. Where's your room going to be? he asked Lefty.

Mr. Asinine, Brick said, squatter's rights is what the common populace brands an urban myth. Naysaying. Always naysaying everything. Brick had become Asinine's most