Nuklear Age by Brian Clevinger

stated it so quietly it seemed that he merely mouthed the word.
    Seamus whispered to Angus, “He be movin’ on to single syllable sentences. Tisn’t a good sign, boy-o.”
    “Aye,” the Surly Scot whispered back.Atomik Lad grabbed Nuklear Man by the arm and pulled him down the street as Seamus and Angus tagged along behind them.
    “Man, what was his problem?” Nuklear Man asked no one in particular. “Oh well.” He tossed a look behind him at his diminutive partners. “Angus, who’s your,” he nearly said “little” but remembered the beating from a few minutes ago and simply ended with, “friend?”
    The Iron Scotsman huffed loudly, “This fortune stealin’ son o’ a French whore ain’t no friend o’ mine!”
    “Where you be getting these crazy ideas, boy-o? Ain’t no one who’d buy ye Scootish Squishies breakfast cereal so I don’t see why you be thinking I stole the formula from ye.”
    “I dunno, sounds kinda yummy to me,” Nuklear Man said.
    “It be made o’ haggis,” Seamus added.
    “Ghak. Never mind.”
    “So’s Kismet Green!” Angus insisted as he hopped madly.
    “Kismet Green?” the Hero’s interests were clearly piqued again. “The secret ingredient in Kismet Krunchies?”
    “The same,” Seamus said with a mark of pride.
    “That's my favorite cereal!” the Hero squealed.
    Seamus immediately began to think of a campaign of commercials starring Nuklear Man himself. He could assault the televisions and young minds of the world with an invincible sales icon!
    Angus shook with rage, “It was my idea, ye fink-laddie!”
    “Whoa, hold it,” Atomik Lad halted their procession and quieted, at least temporarily, the bickering. “We've got some Kismet Krunchies back at the Silo. We can just run a sample of it through the molecular analyzer in our supercomputer and settle this once and for all.”
    The others were silent for almost a full minute as they mulled, compiled, considered, and generally pondered the suggestion.
    “But,” Seamus said. “Then it won't be a secret.”
    “Ah- ha! Why don’t ye want to do it? Because ye know ye ripped me off!”
    “All right! Let’s get goin’, if it’ll be shuttin’ ye up after all these years!”
    Atomik Lad sighed a sigh of relief, “Finally.”
    “It's decided then,” Nuklear Man said to once again assert himself as the alpha of this particular pack. It didn’t matter if he was the only person who believed it. It was only important that someone did. “To the Silo!” He posed purposefully, his cape billowed itself up a notch. “Ha-ho!”
    “DWARF-A-PULT!”
    “LEPRE-CANNON!”
    “...Sheez.”
    __________
     
    The quartet soared through the sky, though some did so more elegantly than others. Bumblebees shouldn’t be able to fly according to the laws of Physics, yet they do. Angus only reinforced this sort of paradox. Apparently if you put enough thrust behind something, then it can sustain flight no matter how embarrassing it is. This was the case of Angus. That and more sound pollution than every one-hit wonder band simultaneously playing every non-hit they produced on every radio frequency at once.
    They’re Iron: Bagpipe Thrusters, people. They’re that bad.
    Seamus stayed aloft by aiming his Four Barreled Clover Cannon (everything Seamus had was Four Leafed or Clovered and green) backwards and firing it whenever the momentum from the backlash began to drop causing him to do the same. This led to a very loud and clumsy flight.
    Nuklear Man and Atomik Lad just flew. That's it.
    The gleaming towers of steel and glass that made up the aesthetically pleasing Metroville cityscape fell behind them. The barren expanses of dirt that were the defining characteristics of Irradiated Flats, a great expanse of what used to be farmlands situated between Metroville and its Nuclear Power Plant, stretched out before them.
    “Almost there,” chimed Nuklear Man. He motioned to the brown and fetid fields below with a smile, “No yard