2182: NEVER MESS WITH A OUIJA BOARD – Oneshot

Title: NEVER MESS WITH A OUIJA BOARD
Author: River Styx1201
Media: Animation/Creepypasta
Topic: Young Justice/Ben Drowned
Genre: Humor
URL: Oneshot
Critiqued by BatJamags and Kane

Oh, for the love of fuck. “Hey, I’ll riff this stupid crossover,” I said. “It’ll be short and funny,” I said. “Oh, I’m sure it won’t trot out rape as a generic trajek backstory,” I said. Well, I didn’t actually say the last one, but I would’ve been wrong as fuck if I did, and now I have to put a warning up here. Thanks, fic.

Hello once again, patrons! I’m your host, BatJamags, and I’m going to have to be the bearer of bad news. You may have all thought you were safe, but you were wrong.

The spoopy has followed us into November.

 

Today we’ll be dipping into not one but two fandoms we haven’t seen before in the Library. First is Young Justice. As one of our resident DC nerds, I’ll have to give an unnecessarily complicated explanation that you really don’t need.

Back in the ’90s, the Teen Titans were getting older. As they were being written, most of the core members of the team were well out of their teens, and most attempted roster overhauls fared… poorly. Along comes what we can sort of consider the third-generation superteam: Young Justice. Young Justice had a core roster of the third Robin, the second Superboy (and the first not to be a dubiously-canon younger Clark Kent), Impulse (Barry Allen’s grandson from the future who would go on to become the second Kid Flash), and the third Wonder Girl (again, counting the original past-Diana one). They had a few original characters as well, but we won’t get into that. Young Justice is not exactly my strongsuit in terms of continuity, but I know they were popular because of their comedic slant, which was lost when they eventually got merged into the Titans.

Similarly, the animated show Young Justice also has kind of an odd relationship with the Teen Titans, both the comic and the show. First, it draws a lot of concepts from the comics’ Titans (including the core team’s founding roster being a retooled version of the Titans’ founders). Second, the animated Teen Titans and Young Justice have almost reversed tones and styles from the comics that share their name. Teen Titans delves into wacky comedy antics (in between some surprisingly dark storylines for what’s decidedly a kids’ show), while Young Justice focuses on more serious action and character drama.

Young Justice (from here on out, assume I mean the animated one when I say that, since aside from a few characters it’s fairly distinct from the comic) focuses on a team of sidekicks organized into a black ops team to deal with missions the Justice League is too publicly recognizable to handle. The founding roster includes Robin (Dick Grayson), Kid Flash (Wally West), team leader Aqualad (Kaldur’ahm), Superboy (Conner Kent), and Miss Martian (M’Gann M’Orzz or something like that). They’re later joined by Artemis (Artemis Crock – a sort-of-mostly-original* character to the show who is supposedly an ally of Green Arrow), Zatanna (who is reimagined as being younger than most appearances), and Rocket (who I know precisely jack shit about since I wasn’t familiar with the character previously and she does literally nothing of any importance whatsoever in the show).

*She technically exists in canon, but in the form of an obscure villain named Tigress or Huntress (no relation) who has the same real name as the animated character but that’s about it. She also uses Arrowette’s costume.

They battle the machinations of the Light, a secret society formed by a somewhat unlikely combination of supervillains (Vandal Savage, Ra’s Al Ghul, Lex Luthor, Queen Bee, Ocean Master, The Brain, and Klarion the Witch Boy of all people) to defeat the Justice League and – you guessed it – take over the world.

That would be funnier if Channel Awesome hadn’t turned out to be full of shit.

The first season builds up to a confrontation with the Light, who have mind-controlled the Justice League, forcing the team (who are never specifically called Young Justice in the show and in fact are not give any name, so I will henceforth refer to them as The Team™) to battle their mentors.

For Season 2, subtitled “Invasion,” we get a five-year time skip, which is a trope I hate. Time skips and full continuity reboots (two different flavors of the same general brand of stupidity) are almost universally never good ideas. In fact, screw the “almost.” They’re bad ideas and should be avoided at all costs.

Regardless, the second season has a bunch of offscreen character development because “Fuck showing and not telling, we can just use a timeskip,”™ (brought to you by the Plot Contrivance Corporation™) and adds like a ton of new members to the team. Particularly important ones include Robin III (Tim Drake – Dick became Nightwing in the interim and is now the team’s leader), Blue Beetle III (Jaime Reyes), Beast Boy (Garfield Logan, who had a pre-superpowers single-episode appearance in the first season), and Impulse (Bart Allen).

Season 2 continues the Light plot, but introduces the Reach, a seemingly-friendly species of aliens connected to Blue Beetle’s powers. The Reach are actually planning to launch an invasion…

… With the intent to – you guessed it – take over the world.

The Reach are secretly allied with the Light, but they’re both trying to backstab each other. In the end, the Reach are repelled and the Light are revealed to be secretly working with Darkseid, but then the season ends and the show got canceled. It’s been revived for a third season (now exclusive to DC’s kinda sketchy streaming platform that I’m only bothering with because I’m a shameless fanboy), but obviously I can’t comment on that yet because it’s not out.

Now, for our other fandom. I promise this won’t take as long. Mostly because I don’t know or care much about it. Ben Drowned is a fairly bog-standard haunted game creepypasta in the vein of sonic.exe, but with faked videos and websites and shit. It all sounds very gimmicky. Basically, it’s The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask with a ghost haunting it. And that’s pretty much all the info I have to dump.

So, let’s take a look at the summary, eh?

Wally brings a Ouija board to Mount Justice and Ben and Sally have some fun.

I don’t think it’s called Mount Justice, but the author is referring to the original headquarters of the Justice League (both in the comics and in the show, which loves dredging up obscure bits of comic continuity that only nerds like me would appreciate) that was repurposed as a base for The Team™.

Kane: I fail to see how anyone would be intimidated by a spirit that not only must perform childish parlor tricks with a board to communicate, but must share the board with another spirit.

Hi Kane.

Kane: I’ll confess to being somewhat disappointed you weren’t startled.

I’m only surprised you haven’t been floating around since the start of the Badfic Zone.

Kane: And what, pray tell, do you think I would want to do with werewolves and zombies?

Turn them into your mindless undead slaves?

Kane: …

Kane: I meant other than the obvious.

I don’t own any of the characters they belong to respective creators.

Author: But Tarzan grammar belong to me!

Wally came speeding into the base with his newest toy under his arm which he thought would debunk the existence of supernatural entities and everything paranormal. “Hey guys, guess what I got,” he said as he stopped in the training area.

Whoa! Hold up there, gymshoe! Did someone put this on fast-forward? Is this the author’s way of representing Wally’s speed?

Kane: And how does he expect a board to debunk the existence of all supernatural forces, everywhere?

By the way, early in the series, Wally gets kind of stubborn about the fact that magic doesn’t exist, but he gets over it well before the end of the first season.

“Not right now Wally,” Robin said as he trained with Conner. “Kind of busy.”

Generic Training™, brought to you by the Plot Contrivance Corporation™! Are you sick of-

*ZAP!*

Kane: You? Quite.

After some coercing Wally convinced the team to take part in his plan.

Seriously, this is going by crazy-fast.

“It’s not gonna work,” Artemis said as she placed her hand on the Ouija Board planchette.

Kane: See? This one understands.

Unknown to the team, two intruders had made their way into Mount Justice in their non-corporeal form. “Ben, I’m bored. Let’s play a game,” Sally said as she roamed around the training room.

And… why are these two here?

Ben’s gaze wandered over to the team and, once he saw what they were messing with, got an idea. “I have an awesome idea and I honestly cannot believe that these people are dumb enough to mess with a Ouija board.” With that him and Sally floated over to the team and sat in the circle with them. Ben motioned for Sally to stay quiet and waited for them to ask the first question.

The Team™: What is your name? What is your quest? What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?

“Okay,” Wally said as he looked at his phone. “It says in order for this to work we need to keep our hands on the pointer thing and ask whatever questions come to mind. It also says it works best in a dark room lit only by candles.” Megan sighed and used her powers to do as the webpage said and soon it was time for Ben and Sally to have their fun. “Okay, first question. Is anybody there?” Wally asked as he stared intently at the board.

Ben chuckled as he placed his hand on the planchette and moved it to the word yes and then the number two.

If I were a ghost and somebody asked me if I was there with a Ouija board, I would say “no” just to fuck with them.

“Does that mean that there are two people here?” Robin asked as he shifted his position. Again Ben moved it to yes and used his powers to mess with the electronics.

Megan was next to speak up. “What’s your name?” The planchette then moved.

“B-E-N,” Robin said as the planchette moved. “One of your names is Ben?” It moved to yes then started spelling out another name. “S-A-L-L-Y. Sally,”Robin stated. Again the planchette moved to yes.

Thrilling.

Kane: They’re oddly helpful, aren’t they?

“How did you die?” Megan asked. “B-e-n, Ben. D-R-O-W-N-E-D, drowned. You drowned?” It moved to yes. “What about Sally?”

Ben bit his lip before moving the planchette to no. He didn’t want to remind Sally of the tortures that her sick uncle had put her through. “No, you won’t tell us,” Wally asked as he ran a hand through his red hair. He moved the planchette to yes.

Kane: And these fools are oddly nonchalant about the presence of two malignant spirits in their place of dwelling.

They should be chalant. Way chalant.

*Kane glares at Bats*

*Bats shrugs*

Artemis then got curious. “How did you drown Ben?” He moved to spell out the one word that summed it up. “M-U-R-D-E-R-E-D. You were murdered.” Ben moved the planchette to yes. He then chose to freak them out. “N-O-W, now. I. M-U-R-D-E-R, murder. Now you murder people.” He moved the planchette to yes and started messing with the electronics like crazy.

For a humor-horror story, this is oddly tedious.

He then nodded toward Sally and she let out a sweet yet spin chilling giggle as she allowed her hand to graze over the back of Robin’s neck. “Who was that?” Ben chuckled as he once again spelt Sally’s name. “What’s her last name?” Robin asked in a calm voice as he got on his wrist computer. “W-I-L-L-I-A-M-S,” he said as he typed in her name and a holographic projection of all the information on her appeared. As he read through them his jaw dropped as he held back the tears of pity that threatened to fall. “She was raped and murdered by her uncle,” he said in a low voice, but the others heard.

*Nods up to warning at top*

Neither “Sally” nor “Williams” is an especially uncommon name, nor is the combination of them at all remarkable. If whatever database Robin is using is able to bring up information about dead Sally Williamses, he’ll need a lot more than her last name to determine a specific cause of death.

Ben looked over to Sally and noticed the terror and sadness that filled her eyes at the reminder of what had happened to her. Rage filled him as all the electronics in the room started to go crazy and blow out as Ben stood up. He made himself corporeal and floated right above the teams head as he glared at Robin. “You really shouldn’t have done that,”

he said in an ominous voice

as blood red “tears” streamed down his cheek.

…

Anyway, I started crying tears of blood and then I slit both of my wrists. They got all over my clothes so I took them off and jumped into the bath angrily while I put on a Linkin Park song at full volume. I grabbed a steak and almost stuck it into my heart

Really? You made me deploy three memes in a row?

“I told you that her past was to stay in the past, but you had to search her up. Well now you’ve met with a terrible fate.”

… BEING IN A BAD FANFIC!

At that they did the only thing they could think of…

Kane: Bind the ghosts’ souls to an ever-burning tome of horrors screaming endlessly through the twisted depths of the lower planes?

… Why would that be the only thing they could think of?

Kane: My options were extremely limited at the time.

*MEANWHILE IN THE WATCHTOWER*

Batman was at the computer reviewing some of the information they had gathered during their last mission when the Zeta Tube turned on.

Hey, I was right! I have psychic powers!

Kane: Doubtful.

“Recognized Robin, Aqualad, Miss Martian, Superboy, Kid Flash, Artemis.”

Each member of the Justice League has an alphanumerical designation that the teleporter computer voice thingy (that’s a technical term) mentions before their name. Also, attribute your dialogue.

They came running in with a freaked out look on their face right as Superman and Wonder Woman walked in. “What happened?”the three Justice League members asked simultaneously, preparing to fight.

Robin: It was horrible! Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman spontaneously merged into a character blob!

“GHOST!” everyone but Robin yelled.

Robin: And then so did The Team™!

Robin simply stated with a freaked out look on his face, “Ouija board that Wally brought.”

Batman took a deep breath while Wonder Woman face palmed and Superman just looked confused.

Kane: I think I speak for both of us when I say we sympathize.

“Didn’t you read the rules. Rule nineteen is, in capital letters, NO OUIJI BOARDS,” Batman said while glaring over at Green Arrow and Flash, who where blushing with a freaked out look on their face.

*Glares at fic*

You shouldn’t have done that.

*Green Arrow and Flash suffer a terrible fate*

… SO FUCK YOU, YOUR BLUSHING, AND YOUR STUPID TV SHOWS THAT CONSTANTLY KILL OFF AND/OR TURN EVIL ALL MY FAVORITE CHARACTERS!

*Sleep’d*

Kane: Enough.

They then returned to Mount Justice to find the Ouija board sitting in the middle of the floor and the room a mess. Right when Batman went to pick it up Ben appeared right in front of him. Reacting on instinct, Batman punched him in the face.

Ben turned non-corporeal and Batman turned to face the team. “And that’s why Ouija boards are not allowed.”

And that’s the end, folks. It just kind of… stops. So… yeah. See you next week for something significantly more infuriating.

*SLAM!*

And now, your out-of-context quote from the next riff:

Mandalorian 1: What’s a bird, anyway?

Mandalorian 2: You know, like a falcon.

Mandalorian 1: Yeah, I mean I’ve heard of the Millenium Falcon (It’s the ship that did the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs, for crying out loud!), but what actually is a bird? Or a falcon?

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