The History of a Runner/3

Chapter 3: What What?
Matt Chapman burst through the doors of his apartment. "HALFWAY THERE!" he yelled. He had just finished his sophomore year in college.

His older brother Mike, who had graduated the year before, paused his game of Tag Team Wrestling and stood up. "Nice, bro!" he said, giving his brother a high five. "Looking good now."

"Yep. Nothin' getting in the way." Matt dropped his backpack onto the floor, causing school supplies to scatter everywhere. "So, any plans for the summer?"

"Eh, not much. Craig's coming over here from New York for the Games and, I dunno, I might join him.  Not sure yet."

"Yeah, I might just end up going to a Braves game with a guy I met. Nothing big.  Huh, what've we got here...?" Matt trailed off as he went to raid the kitchen. Mike just rolled his eyes and went back to his game.

****

"Agent H?" Agent K called from her office as H passed by.

"What is it?" H asked, stopping for a moment.

"The results came back from our lab in Bismarck." H nodded as K pulled up the research on her laptop. "It shows the results for the tests they did on Egon Sciuntid. I think you should hear about this one.  The study shows that if an electromagnetic current runs through ES &mdash; say, in a bolt of lightning &mdash; it becomes radioactive, and potentially harmful to anyone &mdash; anything that it is exposed to in any way."

"How so?" H asked, the previous night's thunderstorm immediately coming to mind.

K continued looking through the report. "All they mentioned is that it was unlike anything they had ever seen."

Hearing this, H rushed out of the room, heading to the Testing Room as quickly as he could. He said through his walkie-talkie, "G, this is H. I need you to come to the Testing room for ES as quickly as possible." The two reached the room around the same time. "What is it?" G asked.

H explained what K had told him as he mashed the code into the keyboard. When the doors opened, they almost pinched themselves. They couldn't believe what they saw.

They saw a bunch of weird creatures that didn't seem like any species of animal. A big square guy cuddling what appeared to be a cross between a cheese and an anvil. A short man with a husky Lucha Libre mask jumping on a giant gray body repeatedly saying "I hate you." And so much more chaos than the two agents could comprehend.

But what was most surprising was, through all the craziness, they could see three bodies, lying on the floor. Dead.

"What is this?" G finally asked. Suddenly, all the creatures looked at them.

"Ah, CRAP!" Lucha Libre cried, jumping off the body. "Homestar!"

"It wasn't me!" a tall, white figure with a star shirt quipped. "I think it was...uh...Biscuitdoughhandsman."

"See, I told you crime was on the rise," a bell-shaped body told the star shirt.

"I know. You still want me to put that dash between 'Homestaw' and 'Wunnew'?"

H was the first to make sense of what was happening. "That's what they meant..."

Somehow, the radioactivity must've been so severe the participants mutated extremely. Three couldn't take it and died immediately.

So now the question was: what were they going to do?

Fun Facts

 * The title of this chapter is a quote from Sir Strong Bad in "That a Ghost."
 * The two parts here were originally going to be two separate chapters, but I decided to combine them when I had trouble writing Mike and Matt's scene.
 * The first few lines of dialog spoken by Mike and Matt are references to the first three lines in the chorus of "Halfway There" by Big Time Rush: "We're halfway there / Looking good now / Nothing's gonna get in the way..."
 * In the beginning, Mike is playing Tag Team Wrestling. As some of you probably know, this is where the name inspiration for Strong Bad came.
 * For some reason I can't explain, I imagine a lot of government work happening in the North Dakota area. Since Bismarck is the capital of North Dakota, I chose that to be the place where they tested Egon Sciuntid.
 * Agent K's name is NOT a reference to Men in Black 3. (She's not even a guy!)  K was actually supposed to be H's name, until I changed for reasoned stated in the first chapter.
 * Originally, H was going to contact G via an earphone or wristphone or something, but the time this took place in stopped me. "I mean, seriously people.  It's the nineties!"
 * If you saw this coming right from the start...well, it's not that big of a deal, since it was kinda obvious.
 * The way I described the HR characters in the paragraph H and G discover what's happened are ways they've been described on the website. In fact, what Strong Bad is doing to Strong Sad is something he did in the Easter egg in "no loafing."
 * The conversation Strong Bad, Homestar, and Marzipan have is a reference to "Strong Bad is in Jail Cartoon."