Literature / Nobody Gets the Girl

2003 paperback cover

A superhero genre novel written by James Maxey.

Richard Rogers awakes one morning to find himself transformed into an invisible man. Suddenly thrust into a new life as a superhero called Nobody, he fights alongside two stunningly sexy superheroines — Rail Blade and the Thrill — in an effort to save the world. A one-hundred-foot baby doll with a gun for a head is just one if the obstacles in his path. The real drama lies in his quest to regain his identity. But the door to that plane of his existence may be closed forever...

Nobody Gets the Girl: A Superhero Novel is a part of the Whoosh! Bam! Pow! book series. Its sequel, titled Burn Baby Burn: A Supervillain Novel, focuses on two of the villains from the first book, Sundancer and Pit Geek. The action continues in Covenant: A Superteam Novel, as a team of superheroes struggling with dark pasts unite to face the mysterious terrorists known as the dervishes.

---

These books contain examples of:

• Ability Mixing: By combining Psychic Link and Compelling Voice into Mind Manipulation, Sister Amy was able to build Brain Trust into the world-shaking force it became.
• Accidental Murder: Rail Blade did this to her younger brother Alex when he grew jealous after she became Stronger with Age and started teasing her.
  • Sunday’s first murder involved her trying to burn a nun who was disciplining her for being caught smoking, only to end up accidentally disintegrating her hand and blackening her arm down to the bone.
• Action Girl: Rail Blade.
• A God Am I:
  • The more we find out about them, the more clear it becomes that both Dr. Know and Rex Monday have serious God complexes.
  • Rail Blade shows signs of this as well.
• Always Chaotic Evil: The Pangeans are a race of super-intelligent chimps created by Rex Monday using an evolution ray. In both the second and third novel of the series, they attempt an Apocalypse How. In Burn Baby Burn it was out of resentment at being the minority compared to humans, while in Covenant they were merely acting as mercenaries for the Big Bad. In both cases, the underlining cause of their actions is their belief in The Right of a Superior Species.
• Ambiguous Clone Ending: App has a clone app. Unfortunately, he ended up falling under Sister Amy’s control. While App manages to take him out, he couldn’t get rid of the clone with the servers down. When Sarah asked him how he knew whether he was the clone or the original, App didn’t answer. It turns out she was right and the two eventually gave up on trying to figure out which one of them was the original.
• An Arm and a Leg: Sundancer’s leg was blown off accidentally by Pit Geek when he threw a grenade at the Thrill.
  • Rebecca Henderson served in Syria repairing helicopters until an accident left her a double amputee.
• And I Must Scream: Part of Servant's backstory is that he was a drug kingpin that picked a fight with Rail Blade and got himself sealed in huge block of iron.
  • Before the big reveal, Richard thought the afterlife was going to mean spending the rest of eternity like a Saturday morning that would never end.
  • Rex Monday claims that he was the one who created the world and Dr. Know was created when he imagined himself in it only for someone very much like himself to fill it. while he was stayed trapped outside:
  Rex Monday: I watched, ghostlike, in horror as someone who looked, sounded, and seemingly thought just like me carried on with what should have been my life. And for years, that was all I could do. Watch, while he gathered up wealth and power, watch while he fucked my wife and fathered her children. I hated him. I despised him. And I swore that one day I would kill him.
  • Servant’s powers fall under Blessed with Suck, as while his force fields are incredibly powerful since he can never turn them off, he can’t actually touch or feel anything.
• Alliterative Name: Richard Rogers
• All Therapists Are Muggles: Sunday’s therapist believed that her Power Incontinence was her just acting out at the fact that her mom had remarried. She was burning the sheets with an iron, and then pretending she didn’t know how it happened.
• All Women Are Lustful: According to Richard.
  Richard: And women, good God, women say the raunchiest things when men aren't around. I swear, you ever turn invisible, go hang out in a women's restroom for an hour. You'll hear shit that'll make your hair fall out. When men aren't around, women are just downright crude. I heard these two girls once, they were riding in a car, and this one was talking about her boyfriend's penis. I'm not kidding. A twenty-minute drive, and the whole way she keeps describing this penis, talking about what kind of veins it has, talking about, I swear, what kind of moods it has. I mean, come on! Men could never carry on a conversation for twenty minutes about the physical attributes of their girlfriends. They need, what, three words, tops, Hooters. Big ones.
• Amazon Chaser: This is why Richard ultimately ended up with Rail Blade over her sister.
  Rail Blade: Have you... ever thought about me? Sexually?
  Richard: Yeah, sure. I mean, I wouldn’t have betrayed your sister when she and I were together, but from the moment I first saw you outside the plane window I thought you were amazing. I mean, maybe it’s a guy thing, but you’re flying beside us at 700 miles an hour or something and the main thing my brain is screaming is, hey, she’s hot!
  Rail Blade: Interesting. Don't I scare you?
  Richard: Terrify is a better word.
  Rail Blade: Terrify is a much better word.
• Antagonistic Offspring: The Thrill
• Apocalypse How: The plan of the Big Bad of ‘’Covenant: A Superteam Novel’’ is to kick start Armageddon by transporting New Jerusalem back to where old Jerusalem was, escalating the current war into a full-on nuclear holocaust.
• Asshole Victim: The men at the dive bar who tried to rape Sundancer in Burn Baby Burn ended up being vaporized. She left the one who initiated it, Root alive with both his hands burnt off and his eyes melted out of their sockets.
• Arbitrary Skepticism:
  • Despite destroying and recreating the universe turning it into a Fantasy Kitchen Sink yet wasn’t willing to accept that he had an Evil Twin.
  • Mrs. Knowbokov doesn’t believe in magic. This is despite the fact that in the same conversation she denied its existence, she didn’t discount Rex Monday being Back from the Dead because she was married to a man who built a time machine.
    • Played with. Due to everything that has happened to her, Mrs. Knowbokov has come to believe that nothing is impossible. She also believes in Clarke's Third Law.
• Armor-Piercing Response: After Jerusalem was destroyed by Rail Blade, Clint’s church decided to build New Jerusalem. App felt this was a waste of time and asked Clint if he thought he might be wasting his talents as a carpenter. Clint’s response:
  Servant: Jesus was a carpenter.
• Artificial Limbs: Rebecca’s boyfriend Mark Porter was able to build her prosthetic legs using schematics he downloaded from the dark web and a bunch of 3-D printers.
• Badass Bookworm: Dr. Know is a black belt in seven styles of martial arts.
• Beware the Quiet Ones: After Dr. Know’s wife kills him, her daughter mentions how quiet and harmless she was, like a little statue in the library.
• Big, Screwed-Up Family: In spades. Dr. Know treats his daughters Rail Blade and the Thrill as soldiers in his war. His wife (the one nonpowered member of the family) can't deal with the weirdness and reaches the point of wanting to kill him. See also the Unperson entry.
• Big Sister Instinct: Rail Blade had Richard take Boxing Lessons for Superman as she didn’t want her sister put in danger protecting him
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Since Servant is immune to Sister Ami’s telepathy, she didn’t let him in on the fact that Brain Trust was an Apocalypse Cult until it was time to enact her plan.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: When they first met, Sundancer had trouble reconciling the Bomb-Throwing Anarchists who Would Hurt a Child with the guy who grabbed Rex Monday’s arm to stop him from beating her. When she finally asked him, he shrugged it off stating that he was a Punch-Clock Villain and Bully Hunter.
• Brainwashed and Crazy: The Dervishes were just ordinary people that Sister Ami brainwashed into being terrorists. In fact, the majority of Brain Trust is under her control.
• Brought Down to Badass: A lot of the hardware for the server that houses App’s data was Rex Monday’s own design, and it is doubtful that the Knowbokov Foundation could fix it. So by the end of "Covanant", the twin App’s have lost their immortality and the only power they have is the apps that were already programmed into their belt when the server was destroyed.
• Brought Down to Normal: Played with. While Servant ended up surviving his Heroic Sacrifice, the Space Machine ended up absorbing all of the vacuum energy that allowed him to create his force fields, essentially tearing his power from his body while he was no longer super powered. His true form is still the shape of the man who’d been known as Ogre.
• Calling the Old Man Out: Rail Blade did this after Dr. Know tried to kill her
• Child by Rape:
  • Sunday was conceived by Rex Monday raping her mother.
  • Servant’s father was a supervillain who raped his mother.
• Clone Degeneration: The clones of Servant are flawed. Their cells don’t process energy as efficiently as his. Stress them for more than a few minutes of sustained effort and they burn out, crumbling to dust. This is why the Brain Trust needed the original as a Living Battery.
• Compelling Voice: The Thrill's voice has an overtone that activates people's pleasure centers when they follow her instructions.
  • The Big Bad of the third novel was given this after reawakening the knowledge in the inmate that was used to study The Thrill’s power.
• Contrived Coincidence: While tailing a bomb-throwing anarchist, Thrill put him to sleep. Unfortunately the absence of any observers other than Sarah caused Richard to become solid again. Making things worse, he materialized in such a way that a wire from the bomb looped through the buttonhole on the sleeve of his shirt. Luckily the wire turned out to be the right one to disarm it.
• Crazy Enough to Work: Averted. When Sarah’s husband finally confronts her about her disappearances and bruises, he jokingly asks if she is a vampire when she wants to go to the backyard because it is dark there. She briefly contemplates trying to convince him, but ultimately decides that it was time to stop lying to him.
• Crazy-Prepared:
  • Rex Monday created technology that makes him Immune to Mind Control. Mrs. Knowbokov started using it after his death.
  • The White House wasn’t happy about dealing with Dr. Know when he used his telepathy to get his way, so they built a bunker beneath the White House with psionic baffles that are shielded from all telepathic access. There is even a security code that can be used to ward the President against possible psionic incursion.
  • The Russian military is so corrupt that Mrs Know was able to cripple their nuclear capabilities just by throwing money around. They have a lot of missiles sitting in silos that won’t go anywhere because the rocket fuel has been sold on the black market. Lots of other missiles are essentially empty shells because terrorists have paid top dollar for the fissionable material.
• Deadpan Snarker: Richard: it comes from being a stand-up comedian
• Death by Childbirth: Clint’s mother died in childbirth, and he believes it was the result of his energy fields.
• Deconstruction: The third novel has one for Augmented Reality. After surviving a cacophony of tiny explosions, her helmet warning her of the smoke, the flame, the dangerous proximity of trees overhead if she took flight and her opponent being not only far more distracting then helpful but something she could see with her own eyes, she was forced to cut its power.
• Defrosting Ice Queen: Rail Blade in the first book, Sundancer in the second.
• De-power: By the third novel, Sarah has had surgery to remove her Compelling Voice. She now goes by Skyrider! The champion of the skies.
• Diabolus ex Nihilo: Nobody knows what the deal with Pit Geek is, not even himself or Rex Monday.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: Nobody killed both Rex and Dr. Know.
• Didn't Think This Through: Chimpion decides to do a secret mission on her own to prove herself, only to realize after the fact that no one at the Knowbokov Foundation is standing by to retrieve her since she’d used the space machine without permission.
• Emotion Bomb: Panic has the power to induce raw terror over a wide area.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • Sunday could stand people thinking she was demon-possessed, and she was resigned to the fact that word would soon spread that she was a horrible nun-burning mutant, but getting branded a Nazi was too much.
  • She was also disgusted upon finding out that she was a Child by Rape and called Rex Monday a monster.
  • Pit Geek refused to eat Sunday and stopped Rex from beating her.
• Evil Genius: Despite a long history of behavioral problems, Sunday has scored as high as 156 on IQ tests.
• Evil Has a Bad Sense of Humor: Rex Monday told his daughter Sunday that seeing her face bleed reminded him of her mother.
• Evil Is Petty: Pit Geek and Panic killed Veronica as revenge for Richard attacking them for holding her hostage.
  • While Rex Monday sees himself as a Well-Intentioned Extremist given the number of innocent people he’s killed and the fact that he’s main motivation is revenge for what he feels is Dr Know stealing his life he is more this
• Evil Plan: Amy McPherson’s plan is to have her Dervishes perform terrorist acts on American soil, increasing political pressure to send more troops to fight overseas, then use her Mind Manipulation to get the President to reinstate the draft and send the youth of America off to put an end to this terrible, terrible threat. Then, once she’s started World War III, she plans on transporting New Jerusalem to Old Jerusalem, exacerbating things until the Nuclear Option is the only choice the leaders of the world have.
• Extreme Omnivore/Stomach of Holding: Pit Geek.
• Facial Scruff: One of the Johnnys grew this as a way to distinguish himself from the other; the fact that App is normally better groomed makes it even more noticeable. It could also double as a Beard of Sorrow.
• Failed a Spot Check: Sister Amy may have Telepathy, but she’s not omniscient. She tried to kill Skyrider by teleporting her into outer space because she wasn’t aware that her suit was pressurized and didn’t know that App is Immune to Mind Control while in ghost mode.
• Failure Is the Only Option: It was simply impossible for Sarah to rescue her mother after Sister Ami shot her. Either the pullet reached her first or the shockwave created from Sarah’s attempt at reaching her in time would.
• Forgot About His Powers: While tailing Sundancer Richard forgot that he was intangible and carefully avoided the thousands of people in the mall.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: Delilah McPherson went from a deranged if standard Church Militant to someone with enough knowledge and power to cause The End of the World as We Know It.
• Full-Frontal Assault: Servant can’t wear clothing because, due to his force fields, they just fall off of him. Luckily, he can make his force fields opaque and change their colors. Ap finds it hilarious upon finding out that Mr. Holier Than Thou prances around in public completely naked. Sarah, meanwhile, is reluctant to let him lead a press conference because if something breaks his concentration, his fields go transparent.
• The Fundamentalist: Servant became this after his Heel–Faith Turn, which can make him come across as a Knight Templar Politically Incorrect Hero. He even recommended conversion therapy to Ap when he found out he was gay.
• Gadgeteer Genius: Rebecca Henderson and her boyfriend Mark Porter created a robotic dragon suit and prosthetic limbs. They modified an off-the-shelf model drone to run on a hydrogen fuel cell. According to Rebecca building, things together is what made them such a great couple.
• Gag Penis: Servant is apparently very well endowed. According to Sarah the porn industry suffered a tragic loss the day he picked up a Bible.
• A God Am I: Since Rex Monday believes he created life, he feels no remorse about ending it. What he wants, he takes, since, really, everything is his.
• God Is Evil: Rex Monday is not a kind and loving god.
• Grey-and-Gray Morality: Dr. Know wants to cure all the ills of the world and is willing to kill people and take control of their lives to do it; Rex Monday wants to stop him and is willing to kill people and terrorize populations to do it. Their willingness to toss ethical constraints out the window arguably reaches the level of Evil Versus Evil.
• Hates Small Talk: Averting being a Pop-Cultured Badass is a part of Servant's nature as The Fundamentalist. Cling disdains small talk. The world has too many serious problems. Why anyone would waste God-given moments of life with a comic book, a movie, or even a novel eludes him. He considers fiction like a sort of stealth drug, as effective at distracting its users from life’s real problems as any of the junk he trafficked as Ogre. The Bible is the only book he owns, and the only book he ever reads… assuming that, one day, he got around to actually reading it.
• Heel–Faith Turn: In Burn Baby Burn, Servant claims to have been a former drug lord who turned good after being released from the And I Must Scream mentioned above and accepting Jesus.
• Heroic Build: Discussed a combination of Sarah’s energy and the fact that comic book heroes always seemed to be packed with muscles no matter what their profession before they gained their powers, caused Richard to decide to start doing a little weight lifting.
• Heroic Sacrifice: After Sister Ami was defeated, Servant refused to be set free of the Space Machine despite the fact that it was killing him, because they still needed to transport New Jerusalem back to Texas and he’s the only power source that can move the city back into place.

• Humans Are the Real Monsters: According to Rex, there are two types of monsters. There are things that are less than human, and there are things that are more than human.
• I'm a Humanitarian: When Rex Monday first materialized in the real world the first thing he did was kill and eat a man who mistook told him to get off his property.
  Richard: You ate his flesh...?
  Rex Monday: Don't judge me. You can't imagine the state of mind I was in, after being trapped so long outside of reality
• Immortals Fear Death: Averted. After Chimpion destroyed his servers, App felt as if an invisible weight had been removed from his shoulders. His mind had squirmed away from any attempt to grapple with the ramifications of his potential immortality. Knowing that his current life might be his last made him feel as if it had some value.
• Impersonating the Evil Twin: Inverted. Delilah McPherson was one of the death-row inmates who were a part of Dr. Know’s Wetware CPU. After his death, Mrs Know wanted to give them a second chance and set them free, unaware that since he had used portions of her mind as a telepathic amplifier, Delilah was immune to the attempts at turning her into a Blank Slate. When she was released, she kidnapped her sister Amy, drugged her, and turned her loose on a highway in a car with a stuck accelerator and the brake lines slowly bleeding out. And since she had already stolen all of Amy’s memories, it was easy for Delilah to step into her life.
• Insane Troll Logic: According to Judgment it is blasphemous to have superpowers, as only God has the power to create something from nothing.
• Instant Armor: Rail Blade is able to do this
• Invisibility/Intangible Man: Richard, after he's been not-quite removed from reality. He can only be seen and touched by Dr. Know, Rail Blade, and the Thrill and Rex Monday.
• It's All My Fault: Richard blames himself for Veronica’s death as she never would have been killed if he didn’t go to see her.
  • This is Rail Blade’s personal mantra as she feels that there is always something that she could do differently to get a better outcome.
  • Cliff blamed himself for falling for Sister Ami’s manipulation, but Sarah assured him that it wasn’t his fault.
• Kick the Dog: After explaining the The Time Traveller's Dilemma Dr. Knowbokov beat the crap out of Richard.
• Kirk Summation: How Richard calmed Rail Blade down during her Roaring Rampage of Revenge.
• Living Battery: Sister Amy Rex Monday, the inventor, cut a deal with the Russians to draw power from one of their aging nuclear reactors. The Knowbokov Foundation has a fusion generator in their basement. In the third novel, Big Bad’s plan of moving New Jerusalem would take even more power than their reactor can produce, so she used Servant as a power supply when his clones proved ineffective.
• Luckily, My Shield Will Protect Me: Rail Blade’s ability allows her to protect herself and her allies.
• The Masquerade Will Kill Your Dating Life: Sarah Buchanan’s husband isn’t aware about her dual life as Skyrider, leader of the government-sanctioned superteam the Covenant causing her to be Mistaken for Cheating.
• Meta Origin: Dr. Nicolas Knowbokov's "vacuum bomb" caused the universe to transition to a new quantum state. Knowbokov's consciousness survived as an "observer" and provided the template around which the universe reassembled. Because he was a longtime fan of superhero comic books, the new reality included super powers.
• More than Mind Control: This is the crux of Sister Amy’s Evil Plan to send New Jerusalem to old Jerusalem.
  Sarah: We can’t leave the city here. Sister Amy didn’t need to control any nuclear weapons to trigger a global firestorm. You think the players over here are going to stand by passively and let a city built by Americans sit on sacred ground? We know there are nations in the mix that have nukes. We also know they have a history of spreading the pain around.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Rail Blade for Jerusalem after calming down.
• I Never Said It Was Poison: Though he didn’t confront her about it, Servant wondered how his pastor knew that the rest of his team was on Mars.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: In the sequel Burn Baby, Burn, Dr. Trog was able to build his own space machine thanks to Johnny posting the original source code and schematics on the Internet.
• No Conservation of Energy: Servant’s cells tap into the same energy as Dr. Know's vacuum bomb. This not only fuels his force fields, but can keep him alive without food, water, or rest.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Katrina Knowbokov took it upon herself to take responsibility for the actions of Rex Monday and her late husband. Sadly, she was unaware that the inmates’ time in the Wetware CPU had transformed them into Power Parasites when she freed them. This made her endeavor of giving them a chance at a new life doomed to fail, and is ultimately what led to her death. The Irony is that Sister Ami killed her in revenge for what happened at Jerusalem, something she had absolutely nothing to do with.
• No-Nonsense Nemesis: After realizing that she was The Mole, App came a across a feverish, mutilated, and half immobilized Chimpion. Instead of using his apps, he just took a rifle from one of the guards she killed and shot her.
  Chimpion: What? No acid mode? No eel mode? You’re just going to shoot me?
  App: Yeah, I’m going to fucking shoot you.
• The Omnipotent: Played with on the subtlest level of consciousness, Dr. Know's mind touches the thoughts of nearly every other person in the world. He cannot focus on the direct thoughts of everyone at once, however. So the privacy of the vast majority of the world's citizens is in no danger.
• One Dialogue, Two Conversations: Chimpion failed in her attempt to kill App due to not knowing that he could reboot even if the belt was destroyed. This caused her to express her frustration at typical human verbal looseness, as he’d said several times the belt was the source of his powers, barely ever mentioning the servers that truly housed him.
• Opposites Attract: Rail Blade and Richard
  Richard: Really. You're the most serious person I've ever met. I'm someone who's always treated life as a joke. It must be true that opposites attract, because I recognize in you something that I'm missing. You have a certain magnetism, pardon the pun. It pulled me across umpteen million miles to find you.
• Orgasmic Combat: Sunday associates her powers with sex due to the fact that they first manifested during masturbation.
• Our Worm Holes Are Different: It's revealed in Burn Baby Burn that Sundancer's actual power is to open wormholes. Since the sun happens to be the largest source of gravity in the area, the other end of the wormholes open up there, allowing her to vent fire from them.
• Parental Favoritism: Dr. Know based this on which child had the strongest ability while raising them, leading to a lot of Sibling Rivalry.
• Playing with Fire: Sundancer, one of Rex Monday's henchmen.
• Politically Incorrect Hero: Clint instantly believed that the terrorist activities happening in ‘’Covenant’’ were the result of Islamic jihadists.
• Power Degeneration/Your Days Are Numbered: Sundancer is immune to the heat she channels from the sun, but the hard radiation that comes with it eventually gives her cancer.
• Power Incontinence: This happened to Rail Blade when she overtaxed herself trying to stop the war at Jerusalem only for a suicide bomber to cause her to tap into the earth’s core to stop him.
• Power Perversion Potential:
  • After stealing a cab ride with a pair of flight attendants and accompanying them to their hotel room, Richard engages in a bit of voyeurism as he shares a shower with one of them.
  • Averted with Dr. Knowbokov when Richard mentioned he could use his Time Machine to win the lottery. The thought had never even entered Dr. Know’s mind.
• Powered Armor: Judgement, one of the inmates freed by Mrs. Know and later brainwashed by Amy McPherson, wears one based off Steam-Dragon’s armor, designed to look like an angle.
• Powers as Programs: Ap is the world’s first open source superhero. He was rescued by the Katrina Knowbokov Foundation after Rex Monday left him in a dematerialized state. However his years in a diffuse quantum state left his atomic structure highly unstable. As a side effect, this allows him to make minor programming alterations to his body.
  • The Dervishes are the result of the death-row inmates using the knowledge they gained from Dr. Know’s Wetware CPU to create Super Soldiers. Specifically, Uninhibited Muscle Power, Rail Blades’ Extra-ore-dinary, and Temporal Duplication.
• Psychic Link: This was Delilah McPherson’s job in the Wetware CPU. While the other inmates were tasked with solving exotic scientific challenges like cloning, time travel, energy harvesting, and unraveling the secrets of his daughters’ powers, her mind was used as a sort of telepathic bridge, a hub through which the thoughts in all the various minds might meet and cooperate with one another. When they were set free of the People Jars she still possessed this telepathic connection, not only with her fellow prisoners, but with anyone she focused on.
• Punny Name: The villain in the first book calls himself Rex Monday, which is a pun on Rex Mundi, which is Latin for king of the world. Also the first book's name.
• Required Secondary Powers: As a Barrier Warrior, Servant can’t wear any clothing or carry any gadgets. This is because his Nigh-Invulnerability is only skin deep so they slide off of him, and when he utilizes his Time Master abilities, anything within the field but him ages as well.
• Resurrective Immortality: App can either Reset, which is a command used to return to normal after using a power, or Reboot, which is triggered remotely when the server realizes he’s been mortally injured
• Ret-Gone: Richard wakes up one morning to find that nobody can see or hear him, and that he can only interact with physical objects when nobody is looking. This is a side effect of Dr. Know's time travel — he inadvertently distracted Richard's father, causing him to buy a non-defective pack of condoms.
• The Reveal: Servant’s father is Rex Monday.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: Rail Blade after being attacked by a suicide bomber in Jerusalem.
  • And later when her father tried to kill her.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: The Thrill, Rail Blade, and Richard all leave after the Jerusalem fiasco.
• Serial Rapist: As of the third novel, Rex Monday has two children, each of which is a Child by Rape.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: Katrina Knowbokov freed the inmates from her husband’s Wetware CPU. The experience left each a Blank Slate, allowing her to give them all a fresh start by imprinting new identities over their existing memories, only for them to be brainwashed by Delilah McPherson into joining her Apocalypse Cult.
• Sibling Rivalry: Played with: since Rex Monday and Dr. Know are technically the same person, the battles between Thrill, Rail Blade, Panic and Sundancer are this.
• The Sociopath: Sunday’s reaction to Accidental Murder was that the nun deserved it for trying to punish her for smoking. She also felt thrilled upon seeing the fear in the eyes of the two girls who had witnessed it.
• Springtime for Hitler: Richard's initial reason for not wanting to use the time machine also counts as a Shout-Out Star Trek
• Staying Alive: Dr. Know poisons Rail Blade after she destroys Jerusalem. The poison stops her heart, but her powers enable her to keep her blood circulating without it.
• Steampunk: Rebecca is a huge fan of this genre and went to a half dozen conventions a year with her boyfriend.
• Superpowerful Genetics: Sunday is Rex Monday’s daughter and her powers are the result of inheriting his warped physics.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome:
  • Dr. Know can enter a person's mind so thoroughly, their entire personality is subverted, allowing him to control their thoughts. Not only does this take time, often up to several weeks, but once it’s done he can’t control their bodies, as muscular movement and balance require more than the conscious mind.
  • When Sunday first showed her powers to people using a Finger-Snap Lighter. She thought they would laugh at the fact she used a little more power than intended, instead she was met with Stunned Silence.
  • Sunday threatened to kill the girls who had witnessed her Accidental Murder if they told anyone, but inside of fifteen minutes, both girls had talked and Sunday was on her way to jail.
  • Rex Monday’s space machine is illegal in the U.S, so the Katrina Knowbokov Foundation doesn’t keep it there.
  • The Space Machine isn’t magic. It takes energy to operate. Moving a single human around the globe is a costly process. Also, unless it’s been laced with tracer nanites snatching a remote target is next to impossible.
  • Ap allows the public to provide new Powers as Programs. This means that by Catfishing him, villains are able to as well. By utilizing G.I.R.L., Trog not only wrote his preferred Restore Mode code, but created a Power Nullifier.
  • Even though Servant doesn’t need to eat food, he still enjoys meals. This was how his DNA was extracted, since what goes in must come out.
  • It is not App’s belt that keeps him alive, but the computers that house the code for the belt. His line of work is extremely dangerous, and as he himself stated, the belt gets destroyed all the time.
  • This is why Dr Know was amused by the President’s attempts at blocking his telepathy. Though it worked the second the president and his team left the bunker they would meet in to figure out how to deal with Dr Know, he’d know what they’d discussed. He said the only way for it would have really worked would be if they never left the room.
• There Are No Coincidences: Pastor Amy believes that it is God’s will for her to bring forth the apocalypse.
  Pastor Ami: I have the ultimate marching orders. I’m tasked by the Lord to bring about the end of days. I have been given my gifts to see His prophecy fulfilled. Why else would a sham death sentence have given me telepathy? Why else would the Lord have given me a volunteer army of thirteen genius scientists, their talents hidden beneath the false programming of the mind butchers of the Knowbokov Foundation? These geniuses awaited the touch of my mind to waken and nurture them. These things cannot have happened by chance.
• Time Master: Servant can alter time inside his field, allowing him to mimic the effects of Super-Speed. However, he can’t project it onto other people.
• The Time Traveler's Dilemma: When Dr. Know explains why Richard is out of phase with reality, Richard asks him if he can fix it with another time travel expedition. Dr. Know refuses to attempt it, because it would erase four other people (in Richard's absence, his parents later had two other children and his wife married someone else and had two children) from the timeline.
• Unperson: Dr. Know had a son who was accidentally killed by Rail Blade. He buried him in an unmarked grave, destroyed all his pictures, and tried to make the family forget that he'd ever existed because the memory made Rail Blade afraid to use her powers.
• Tricked Out Time: Richard used this to kill both Dr. Know and Rex Monday
• Underestimating Badassery: Servant, Ap, and Skyrider’s first fight with Sundancer and Pit Geek was pretty much a Curb-Stomp Battle. However, they lost because they stopped to have some post victory Casual Danger Dialogue, allowing Pit Geek to get the drop on them.
• Understatement: Dr. Know treats his wife trying to kill him as a downward spiral in their marriage.
• Unfortunate Names: The amnesiac Pit Geek was thrilled when he learned that Sundancer’s real name was Sunday Monday.
• Ungrateful Bastard: The man who shot Thrill immediately after she saved his life
• Unstoppable Rage: After a plan to bring peace to the Middle East fails disastrously, Rail Blade totally loses it and levels Jerusalem (though she does remove the people first), leaving a message threatening more of the same unless the world makes peace within a year.
• Utopia Justifies the Means: Doctor Know's got a plan to save the world and he doesn't mind letting innocent civilians die or killing a few reporters who stumble across his secrets. See also the Wetware CPU entry.
• Victory by Endurance: Most of the inmates that Dr Know had kidnapped had gone into death row in their twenties, but due to appeals, had faced execution in their thirties. Then, some had spent over a decade in a goo tube, and another six years had passed since they’d been freed. Judgement had to be at least 50 and maybe close to sixty. So even with his armor supplying all the real muscle, Sarah had far more stamina and endurance than him. She was even worried that he might keel over from a heart attack while chasing her.
• Villain Protagonist: Sundancer and Pit Geek in Burn Baby Burn.
• "Well Done, Son" Guy Rail Blade making the fact that he tried to kill her all the more devastating.
• Wetware CPU: Dr. Know has arranged to have death-row inmates delivered to him after faked executions; he keeps them in life support canisters and uses them as living computers.
  • Baby Gun is an atrophied body permanently installed in the giant Baby Gun doll.
• Your Mind Makes It Real: This is how Richards powers work his willpower is so great that after he was Ret-Gone he became a figment of his own imagination.
• Your Terrorists Are Our Freedom Fighters:
  • Rex Monday to Dr. Know
  Richard: Even if I believed, it doesn't matter. I mean, when it comes right down to it, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. Maybe Dr. Know is up to his eyeballs in this conspiracy junk. Maybe you see yourself as some kind of noble freedom fighter in opposing him. But you said it yourself—people with noble intentions do the worst things. And you've done some fairly vile things, placing children in danger.
  Rex Monday: I won't stand by idly while Dr. Know twists the world to conform to his warped vision.
  • Sundancer sees herself as a revolutionary fighting for a cause to the point where she got offended when an amnesiac Pit Geek said they should just robbed banks.