The Monster Maniacs

 

The Monster Maniacs are not the kind of killers that stealthily and cleanly make their victims disappear. They’re the kind of killers who make their victims die horribly in very public, very loud, very brutal ways that will be talked about for years to come–and then, with the crime scene soaked in gore, they  vanish as if they were never there.

 

Blood is the goal, insanity is the reason, and brutality the means. Two of the Monster Maniacs eat people, and one doesn’t wait for his victims to die before he starts chewing and swallowing. Their name is well deserved. They are monsters. They are maniacs.

 

Each member is an infamous serial killer empowered by a semi-intelligent thought-form of impulse and id known as the Atavist. Before they encountered the Atavist, each member served as a textbook example of lizard brain over cerebrum. But now, they embody primitive instincts. They are hungry. They are enraged. Great, yearning pits gape wide within their souls which can only be filled by bloodshed. And as they feed their appetites, the Atavist feeds as well, and grows stronger and stronger.

 

In the 1990’s, the Monster Maniacs met their end when they traveled to Mexico on a killing spree and crossed paths with the superhero luchadors Frankensteiner and Ultimo Guerro Lobo, but they have returned to life through the power of the Atavist. Good killers are, apparently, hard to find, and the Atavist is protective of its minions.

 

Chainsaw Tex

 

 

“Eat you raw? No! You think I’m some sort of animal? I’m going to cook you first.”

 

Before making contact with the Atavist, Chainsaw Tex was Teddy “Tex” Gates, a notorious serial killer obsessed with the color blue. “Blue Tex,” as the media called him, dyed his hair blue, targeted victims that wore blue, had blue eyes, wore blue clothes, or were in some way related to the color blue, and strangled his victims so that they left blue corpses. Serial killers are rare individuals, and rarer still are serial killers with psycho-sexual color fixations. Blue Tex was a unique freak, and his uniqueness attracted the attention of the Atavist, who turned Blue Tex on to a new kink–cannibalism.

 

The Atavist has enhanced Tex’s physical abilities to superhuman levels and has given him his “chainsaw” which replaced “Blue” as his descriptive moniker, though rarely does it look or function like a chainsaw. Tex’s chainsaw is a thought-form attracted to and nourished by violence. Chainsaw Tex dutifully feeds it like a mother to her children.

The chainsaw is a shapeshifting tangle of sharp metal parts and blazing flames. It cleaves meat from the bone and cooks it, preparing Tex’s meal as he salivates at the smell. Most often, the chainsaw is in the form of open flames and blades, both reaching for the target, but Tex has figured out how to turn it into a large metal rifle that shoots concentrated bursts of fire. This fire gun surprises opponents, as psychotic slasher villains aren’t typically envisioned as using guns.

 

Of all the Monster Maniacs, Chainsaw Tex is the most stable, but the fact that a cannibal wielding a nightmare of fire and metal is the most mentally sound of their number says a lot about Monster Maniacs. He is able to, for a time, satisfy his id cravings through imaginative meditation, and thus afford himself time to strategize. He likes to daydream about how someone’s flesh will smell once it’s cooking, and that leads to him thinking about how exactly he’s going to cook them. While certainly not a tactical genius, he understands the value of a good ambush–and the waiting makes the first bite of flesh all the more pleasurable. 

Though he is an unrepentant cannibal, Chainsaw Tex considers himself better than other superhuman cannibals like his teammate Backstabber Blade, because, you see, he cooks his food.

 

In the 1990’s, Chainsaw Tex apparently met his end against the superhero Frankensteiner, who attacked beyond the range of the chainsaw by throwing his lightning-flail and smashing Tex’s head to bits, but he has been brought back to life by the power of the Atavist and has worked up quite an appetite after missing so many meals.

 

Backstabber Blade

 

 

“Can you hear me? I want you to hear me, right now. I want these words to burn into your mind. You can hear me, but you can’t see me. I can hear you…and see you. And soon, you won’t even be able to hear me…hahahaha!”

 

Ben “Backstabber” Benjamin was an English serial killer known for leaving behind his murder instrument right between the shoulder blades of his victims. While not as flamboyant as Blue Tex, he was still a media sensation. When Earth State passed ordinance banning the possession of blades, partly due to his killing spree, he taunted the authorities by shoving spoons into his victims. When the Gaia Guardians finally apprehended him, he furthered his notoriety through courtroom antics, laughing and screaming until he was gagged. Given several life sentences, he rotted in jail until the Atavist released him, taking him into the Astral, into the being’s very core, and remade him with a strengthened hunger for violence and an all-new hunger for flesh.

 

Now superhuman, Backstabber Blade continues his grisly work with a new twist–he is armed with a thought-form of pain that takes material form as a strange kind of hand-held rifle. The component parts of the rifle appear perfunctory and nonfunctional, as if they exist to fit Backstabber Blade’s ideas of a gun and nothing more.

This thought-form absorbs pain, and to be more specific, sensitivity from whoever Backstabber Blade aims it at. The target’s senses are dulled. Their vision dims, their hearing fades, and their skin loses the ability to feel. While his targets are desensitized, Backstabber Blade rushes behind them and starts to feed. He has managed to strip entire arms of flesh with his teeth before his victims even realize he’s right beside them.

 

In the 1990’s, Backstabber Blade was apparently slain by the superhero shapeshifter known as the Ultimate Wolf Warrior. Though Backstabber Blade used his thought-form of pain on him, the Ultimate Wolf Warrior anticipated him doing so, and used a special shapeshifter technique to set a trap behind his back where he anticipated Backstabber Blade being. Though cut clean in half by the Ultimate Wolf Warrior’s attack, Backstabber Blade was revived through the power of the Atavist.

 

The Vessel

 

 

“…”

 

The immortal sapient thought-form of fear, Sharp Hand Joe, has worked with the Atavist in the past and considers it like his favorite stray cat. It wanders to his side, wanders off, and wanders back. It expects food, though Sharp Hand Joe doesn’t mind sharing his victims with the Atavist, because the Atavist brings victims of its own to share with Sharp Hand Joe like a cat brining home dead birds.

When Sharp Hand Joe learned that the Atavist had created the Monster Maniacs, he thought that they would be the perfect minions for his plots and led them on a “vacation” through Mexico to assist Sharp Hand Joe in his search for the lost calendar of the Yoalteuctin, the Lords of Night, which was constructed by the Mayan Hero twins to control their power just as the dual masks of Xibalba.

 

Only a large blood sacrifice committed with ritual obsidian knives within Chichen Itza would reveal the calendar, and the Monster Maniacs were posed to carry it out on victims kidnapped across the Yucatan peninsula, but the superhero tag team of Frankensteiner and the Ultimate Wolf Warrior defeated the Monster Maniacs.

 

Sharp Hand Joe, who has difficulty manifesting in physical reality, acted through a biological robot stolen from a research institute in Mexico City. This vessel was equipped with superhuman muscle, but far more dangerous was its weapon, which sprayed clouds of gaeite powder which allowed Sharp Hand Joe to attack the minds of those it touched.

 

Unable to damage Sharp Hand Joe’s vessel, Frankensteiner and the Ultimate Wolf Warrior defeated it by setting it on fire. With his body destroyed, Sharp Hand Joe could do nothing but watch from the Astral as his minions were defeated…and vow that somehow, he would take revenge on the duo…