OH EM GEE, you guys, OH EM GEE. Right now Oracle is so very! I can’t EVEN! Usually I wait for Karen to reach a sticking point in her lit review and resort to hard liquour, or run around her room and skid on a tossed pamphlet and fall down or, like, leave the house, because otherwise she’s all “Misfit, did you move my book piles/eat my last packet of chips/drink all my Diet Coke and leave the empty cans in the fridge with the tabs carefully popped back up so I’d think pixies came and drank it by magic?”. And then I feel bad.
But she was working and wouldn’t stop, and I totally needed a break, so in the end I just bounced in and knocked her out a little bit. She’ll be fine. It’s not like I BROKE HER ANKLE or anything.
So! Mailbag!
Dear GRC,
I have been deaf since childhood, a disability which is important when it comes to the ways I communicate, but central to my abilities as a crimefighter. I have absolute visual kinetic recall, which allows me to copy exactly any move an opponent makes, which, in addition to my own well-honed skills, is of some use in my sometimes bloody career. Of course, there are disadvantages, too – I’m unable to work as effectively in the dark, and I encounter all the ordinary difficulties of the deaf, like people assuming I’m stupid, or failing to face me directly when they speak so that I might read their lips.
However, recent events have been confusing. On an assignment for my new team, I managed to masquerade in Tokyo as a (hearing) airbrained heiress. Also, although my co-workers sometimes remind each other to look directly at me when they speak, they regularly hold conversations with me while half-turned, or with their backs to me entirely, or speaking through masks that cover their mouths. And yet, I seem able to understand! It’s almost as if, during these periods, both they and I forget that I am actually deaf.
Can you explain this?
Echo.
Dear Echo,
Oh, I’m totally sorry, but I have no idea! Oh wait! Maybe you’re totally a Skrull! I hear that, like, everyone over your way is a Skrull.
And if your teammates aren’t talking to you properly and haven’t even noticed that you understand, (and everyone knows that COMMUNICATION is probably the most important part of teamwork, and anyway it’s definitely not making people wash dishes or telling them they’re too young to be a Bird of Prey or hiring other girls who are ALSO teenagers if you haven’t NOTICED) then they are either 1) big old disrespectful jerks or 2) also Skrulls!
So that works out, because if they’re disrespectful jerks and you’re a Skrull then you’re not on the same side anyway!
Smack them good! Jerks.
Love from
Misfit!
Dear GRC,*
I’m a Japanese woman who has taken up the title Judomaster. During my first adventure with superhero team Birds of Prey, I managed to not only understand and take part in English conversations, but participated in a number of linguistically demanding jokes. I was proud of this facility with the language.
I have since joined the Justice Society of America and have mysteriously and tragically lost all competence in English. Now I am not only incapable of my previous humour, but understand only a few words of the conversations happening around me. I suspect some of this dialogue constitutes jokes about me that I cannot understand, which I find extremely discourteous.
Why have my English language skills deserted me? I feel as if I am being forced into the stereotype of the inscrutable and silent Japanese woman, and entirely resent this change.
Yours,
Judomaster.
Dear Judomaster
So THAT’S where you got to! Man, I was so worried. Because when teammates don’t turn up after their family business they were taking care of you’re supposed to worry about them and I am all about teamwork!
It really sucks that you’ve lost your ability with English, because I bet you worked really hard! I’m trying to learn Spanish, because have you seen Blue Beetle? Under the carapace he is totally cute in a scruffy way! Although his file says he has a girlfriend. But maybe not forever, who knows, right?
Anyways, my point is that learning other languages can be really hard and for someone to just steal all that effort from you and make you silent and unable to comprehend jokes about you is just gross. Also, what are your teammates doing, making jokes about you that you can’t understand?
My advice is that you come back and join the Birds of Prey and maybe that will fix your English problem! You can have Black Alice’s room.
Love from
Misfit!
Okay, this one is kind of not an actual letter, but like a conglomerate of letters:
Dear GRC:
I have big spherical breasts and they stick out instead of obeying the laws of biology and gravity even when I’m clearly not wearing a bra and sometimes when I’m upside down and they look inhuman and weird and I’ve never had plastic surgery, please help me, have I been experimented on by aliens?
I enclose two of about maybe ten thousand pictures demonstrating my totes icky situation.
Thanks bunches,
Everyheroine.
Dear Everyheroine,
These letters stuff the mailbag fuller than Black Alice’s bra. Oh yes, I DID say it! My socks with the purple kittens on the cuffs are missing and I don’t think that’s COINCIDENCE!
But that couldn’t be the reason for this many letters all about impossible stick-out boobs, because I don’t have that many socks. So I’m going to say, yeah, aliens? Invisible aliens with a gross-tesque interest in bizarrely altering women’s bodies?
The only thing I can say that might make you feel better is that I know sometimes it goes away. Cos I used to look like this (which isn’t totally awful or anything, but still, like, no wonder I managed to get into clubs six years underage):
And now I look like this:
See! There’s hope!
Love and totally boundless sympathy,
Misfit
PS) WASH THEM AND GIVE THEM BACK.
Uh-oh. Karen’s groaning. Guess I better bounce back to Mopesville and totally ignore Ms I Dress In Black And Am So Much Cooler Than You some more.
Catch you next time, guys! Don’t forget, I’m the one and only MISFIT!
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* Translated from the Japanese!
