#Captain Zap and her Hyperspace Rangers

[kbox-in-the-box]

Captain Zap and her Hyperspace Rangers

1988 was the year that the planet Aetheria was liberated at last from the mad Emperor Xerxes, but it was neither the great space hero, Samuel Gerald “Astro” Armstrong, nor his daughter, Samantha Gillespie “Astra” Armstrong, who struck the final, decisive blow.

From 1933 to 1938, Astro Armstrong, Hedy Fine and Dr. Leon Volkov fought for the freedom of the people of Aetheria against the tyranny of Xerxes and his daughter, the wicked Empress Eris.

But in 1959, Astro Armstrong went missing, and in 1966, Astra Armstrong and her mother, Prof. Hedy Feynman, returned to Aetheria after Dr. Leon Volkov’s son, Dr. Leonid Volkov, told them that Astro was still alive, on Aetheria, but captive in the clutches of Xerxes.

As Astro’s family and allies sought to find him again, all while resuming their war with the forces of Xerxes and Eris, they found themselves facing a new foe, the first human ever to join the dark side of the Aetherian Armada, a mysterious masked man known only as Kommissar Blitzkrieg, who somehow seemed capable of anticipating Astra and Hedy at every turn.

By the 1980s, Hedy had begun to suspect the terrible secret of Kommissar Blitzkrieg’s true identity, one that could never be revealed to Astra, which the ruthlessly clinical Prof. Feynman recognized would necessitate the enlistment (or more accurately, the compulsory impressment) of new allies into their struggle, young outsiders with new ways of thinking, whose strengths would draw from their lack of preexisting emotional connections to this star-spanning conflict.

In 1984, the “Hyperspace Pilot” video game had cabinets distributed to the Bits & Blasts Arcade near the edge of the Ned Pines Neighborhood, the Pink Flamingos Mobile Home & RV Park on the outskirts of Eliot’s Expanse, and the Cabaret Cinema in the core of Edwin A. Abbott Square.

Opening in 1922, the Cabaret Cinema remains the oldest continuously operating movie theater in the state of Calizona, its infrequent stints as a Union Gospel Mission location notwithstanding.

The Cabaret Cinema was where a young Valerie Gail Zappa watched nostalgic rescreenings of Saturday matinee serials such as “The Adventures of ‘Astro’ Armstrong," and by the summer of 1984, Val was not only 18 years old and freshly graduated from Stanford S. Strickland Junior High & High School (go Teen Wolves!), but she was also a veteran usher at the Cabaret, where she took in countless classic films for free, and racked up high scores on “Hyperspace Pilot.”

Val and her two-years-younger sister, Tara Moonchild Zappa, lived at their parents’ double-wide at the Pink Flamingos, but like their fellow Pink Flamingos resident Crystal Swan, who was still attending Strickland Junior High in 1984, all three girls were pretty much raising themselves.

Tara had aspirations of enrolling in Beauty’s Beholder Cosmetics & Cosmetology, so she could eventually work at Nagel’s Picture-Perfect Cuts & Colors in the Gold Key Commercial Core.

And while Val’s on-again, off-again boyfriend, Buckminster “Bucky” Martínez, was still sorting through prospective career paths, he’d already earned an athletic scholarship, as a soccer and volleyball player, through Coral Shores Community College (go Atoms!), part of the Calizona Community College Athletic Conference and the National Junior College Athletic Association.

Even Morten Emory Thistlethwaite, the spoiled antisocial prodigy whom Val grudgingly agreed to babysit when she was in junior high, because he was three years her junior, was already on track to attend the University of Calizona, Santa Teresa (go Manticores!), with the Quatermass University of Abstract and Applied Sciences (go Tachyons!) as his designated fallback school.

And yet, Val herself simply drifted, never pursuing a post-secondary education or a long-term occupation beyond what was required to pay for the rent and fun nights out on the town during her weekends off, much to the dismay of her peers and former teachers, all of whom sensed far more potential in her than punching ticket stubs at the Cabaret Cinema, subbing in to lead group workouts at Aphrodite & Adonis Aerobics, or feeding quarters into “Hyperspace Pilot” cabinets.

By 1987, the band of Valerie and Tara Zappa, Bucky Martínez and Morten Thistlethwaite knew they had little enough left in common to wonder aloud why they were still hanging out, but they knew the answer to that as well, since not only had they all remained avid players of “Hyperspace Pilot,” but they’d taken up the next iteration in the franchise, i.e. the “Hyperspace Pistoleer” light-tagging toy guns released in 1986, for which Bits & Blasts had economized its existing space, and even leased adjacent property, to set up a hide-and-seek arena for — among other players — Captain Zap, Brigadier Buckyball, Lieutenant Luna and Master Sergeant Mars, as they preferred to be called on the game clock.

And by the summer of 1987, the band had reasons to celebrate, with Morten’s acceptance for UC Santa Teresa’s fall semester confirmed, Tara feeling confident she would finally be promoted from apprentice to junior stylist at Nagel’s Picture-Perfect Cuts & Colors, and even Bucky finally having settled on a major, after three years, at Coral Shores Community College.

Everyone was heading places, except for Val, who’d always dreamed of travel, but never had the free time or finances to spare, just as her ongoing consumption of classic cinema ensured her lock on the pink-for-entertainment slice of the pie any time she played Trivial Pursuit, and yet, for all her fascination with the film industry, she still couldn’t summon the patience to audition, or even sit still for test shots, for more than sporadic roles as an extra.

“Why does this feel like the end of that made-for-TV movie where roleplaying games drove Tom Hanks crazy?” Tara asked despondently, as the band sat at their regular table in Bits & Blasts, nursing their slices of Pizzazz Pizza.

“You know why,” Val smirked ruefully. “Everyone else is about to embark on grand adventures in bold new campaign settings, while some of us are just destined to ... hang back from the action, and become non-player characters.”

“It doesn’t have to be like this,” Bucky clasped Val’s hand in his own to console her.

“I heard Lis Berger is shutting down the Hyperspace Pistoleer arena after this summer,” Morten blurted out, acutely uncomfortable with the unpleasant emotions his peers were displaying so openly. “Even though it’s still popular, she’s losing a ton of money on it. I say we play one last round now, before it gets torn down.”

Val stood up and laid down a few dollars for the tip. “Might as well go out shooting,” she grinned.

The entry of every officially licensed “Hyperspace Pistoleer” arena was equipped with speakers to play the same opening narration before the players went inside, complete with a flash of light to simulate an interplanetary tesseract:

“As the people of the planet Aetheria cry out for aid, in their fight for freedom against the evil forces of the mad Emperor Xerxes and his Aetherian Armada, a highly trained special mission force has been recruited from the ranks of ordinary humans, right here on Earth, to respond to this call. They are the Hyperspace Rangers, and their brave battles began when they stepped into the Star Point Portal ... and vanished.”

After the obligatory flash of light, Lis Berger’s assistant games supervisor, Rachelle “Ratchet” Chennault, checked the activated “Hyperspace Pistoleer” arena, only to find it empty.

The “Strickland Slackers,” as they came to be branded in subsequent press reports, were gone.

Hedy Feynman knew she had a limited window of time within which to work, because time itself passes on Aetheria at roughly one-seventh the rate that it does on Earth, and because she knew the start of the Harmonic Convergence would commence on Aug. 16, 1987, but even she had failed to grasp how quickly most toy and video game franchises fall out of fashion.

Hedy had commissioned the younger Dr. Leonid Volkov to produce the “Hyperspace Pilot” and “Hyperspace Pistoleer” game lines, as covert training and recruitment tools for what she had envisioned as crack commando units to be branded the “Hyperspace Rangers,” since they would be able to operate not only behind enemy lines, but also between the boundaries that defined both the war and space travel itself.

Because Hedy wished to avoid drawing too much notice, and because she’d retained enough of her conscience not to want to press-gang too many child soldiers into risking life and limb for a cause for which none of them had knowingly consented to sacrifice themselves, the Star Point Portals affixed to the “Hyperspace Pistoleer” arenas absconded with only scattered handfuls of players from her former home planet.

The sustained toll of their secret missions was brutal, culling all but a few of the promising crop Hedy had authorized to transport from Earth during the summer of 1987, but one unlikely band of Hyperspace Rangers somehow not only kept on surviving, but also succeeding in completing their missions, thanks in no small part to the guidance and motivation they drew from the canny strategies and inspiring speeches of their Valkyrie-like leader.

Eventually, the rest of the units were reduced in number enough that their remainders were seconded to Captain Zap and her Hyperspace Rangers.

During the final push to overthrow the misrule of Xerxes, when Astra Armstrong was devastated by the discovery that the merciless Kommissar Blitzkrieg was actually her long-lost father, Astro Armstrong — whose innate heroism had been artificially suppressed by technology the elder Dr. Leon Volkov had been conscripted to create for Xerxes — it was Captain Zap’s Hyperspace Rangers who kept up the pressure on the Aetherian Armada, giving Astra the chance to break through those psychic barriers to reach her real father’s heart, and ultimately redeem his soul.

... And so it was that 1988 was the year that the planet Aetheria was liberated at last from the mad Emperor Xerxes, not by two generations of the same heroic family, but by a third generation of complete strangers to their cause, and yet, even as the rest of the surviving Hyperspace Rangers were returned to Earth per their request, one band asked to stay behind.

Captain Zap, Brigadier Buckyball, Lieutenant Luna and Master Sergeant Mars each had their own reasons for wanting to venture further into the largely uncharted frontier within which they’d found themselves, but Hedy Feynman, as newly elected head of the likewise recently installed government of Aetheria, harbored equally ulterior motives for agreeing to retain their services.

Hedy knew that a tentatively democratic Aetheria, one which was now seeking to atone for the misdeeds of its empire by forging alliances among adversaries, needed free agents to act on its behalf, to make contact with the broader cosmos that Xerxes’ simultaneously expansive and provincial priorities had impacted, and yet also ignored.

Hedy also knew that Astra’s appetite for such crusades had been ground down hard over the course of the war, even before she’d inadvertently unmasked one of her fiercest foes as the vanished father whose legacy she’d sought to live up to her entire life, and for the first time since 1966, Astra found herself missing the old home planet she’d abandoned so casually.

Which was how Astra Armstrong woke up late one morning to the fanfare surrounding the hastily rescheduled launch of the Moebius Loop-powered Cavalry Cruiser-class Unification Searcher Spacecraft (USS) Starlin, the ship she’d simply assumed she would be tasked with commanding, because it had already taken off with its new crew, Captain Zap and her Hyperspace Rangers, without Hedy telling her.

Astra had resigned herself to the likelihood that she would be assigned to provide Captain Zap’s Hyperspace Rangers with essential insights on the various alien species, civilizations and cultures they might encounter, but Hedy had instead sentenced the former Empress Eris to serve as a Hyperspace Ranger, under the command of Captain Zap, as Ensign Eleutherios (”Eleutherios” being the birth name that Eris had always hated), as repayment for her sins.

And with a capable crew protecting the peace in her stead, Astra couldn’t help but smile when Hedy presented her with the Reckless Endeavor, the spaceship with which Astra’s parents and the elder Dr. Volkov had originally traveled to Aetheria, now freshly restored and ready to fly wherever Astra wished.

“First, I’m gonna take a long nap, and then, I’m gonna spend some time doing nothing at all, because I’ve been meaning to do both of those for years,” Astra laughed, even as tears spilled down her cheeks. “After that ... when we left Earth, I was so ready for something so much bigger. The only other gals I knew who wore pants were you, Katherine Hepburn and Laura Petrie on Dick Van Dyke. So much happened, just right after I left.” She chuckled. “It’s like Earth waited until I was gone to get cool.”

“And now?” Hedy brushed the blonde spit-curl from her daughter’s face. “You want to catch up?”

“I want ...” Astra paused, then unclipped the Walkman from her belt loop, that she’d carried to honor all the fallen Hyperspace Rangers, more than one of whom had worn such portable music players into the fray of combat.

Astra cranked the volume on the headphones up to the max, then pressed play, and the voice of Stevie Nicks began to croon:

♫ No one knows how I feel ♪ ♪ What I say, unless you read between my lines ♫ ♫ One man walked away from me ♪ ♪ First he took my hand ♫ ♫ Take me home ... ♪

��I want to go where the music sounds like THAT,” Astra’s voice choked up, as her eyes welled up with fresh unshed tears.

Hedy struggled to keep the quaver out of her own voice, as she squeezed her daughter tight to wish her safe travels. “Then you go there, baby. You go follow the music that’s in your heart.”