Welcome to Ghostliness & Nerfherders Presents: Paper Girls, Issue #4! In the previous installment, Erin got shot in the gut with a gun, and I definitely haven’t seen a young girl get shot in the gut with a gun since Kamala Khan got shot in the gut with a gun! A futuristic dude in futuristic armor patrols the neighborhood killing “stragglers”, and he gets shot in the head with a gun!

The weirdos who stole Tiff’s walkie-talkie seem to be friendly. They’re teenagers!

Who knows where this is headed? I’m excited! Are you excited? Well, keep it in your pants, homeboy.

Paper Girls, Issue #4 [January, 2016]
Written by: Brian K. Vaughan

An old man, wearing a Public Enemy t-shirt, wakes up to a phone call in a bedroom that better befits a child. The call comes from a woman dressed in futuristic armor, and she has her own Halo Energy Sword. “Aye up, Cardinal here. Maxima for callz, sir, but troubles. Alister’s ben unmoored.”

Cardinal is referring to Mr. Shot-in-the-Noggin’, who was hitherto unnamed. He lies dead in the street, in front of the now-abandoned car the girls were driving, with his faithful giant pterodactyl dragon buddy by his side.

“& de masters what did him hav ghosted. Badder, they maytooken stragglers,” continues Cardinal, peering into the empty car. This displeases Public Enemy Man greatly! Maytooken stragglers, you say? Unspeakable! “Best call down an Editrix,” he tells Cardinal, which she finds quite alarming. Apparently, an Editrix is a rather drastic measure indeed.

Public Enemy No. 1 is positive that the Editrix must be called down, as it were. So Cardinal radios the Editrix maybe? Hard to say, here are the dumb words she utters: “Tasking 1 to the rhymescene now. R killers canst run… but they willn’t get far.”

Ay, yo, Chuck, I don’t understand this, man. Yo, we gotta slow down man, you losin’ them.

Enough of this, what are the titular Paper Girls up to? Aha! They’re having fun traipsing through the sewers! A perfectly safe place for Erin to be, just inches away from a river of fecal matter while she has an extremely infectable open wound. One of the mutant teengers cradles Erin in his arms. The three not-shot-with-a-gun girls bring up the rear, looking rather uneasy and suspicious.

“What’s the holdup, ladies?” says Mutant #2 through his Rosetta Stone decoder coin, “Let’s keep moving. Unless you want to take your chances out there with the old-timers?”

No, that’s not how it’s going to go at all. KJ’s gonna hold up the gun again is how this is going to go. “We’re not wading through another inch of this diarrhea until you tell us who you are and, and…and where you’re taking Erin,” she demands. Well, look, girl with the gun, you can hold everyone up if you want to, but the longer they all dawdle, the less of a chance there will be to save the dying girl. Word on the street is that there’s a device that can save her! By the way, Mutant #1 is named Heck. Mutant #2 is named Naldo. These are terrible names.

“That’s what the last guy promised us…before you murdered him,” says KJ, who makes a fantastic point.
“I didn’t murder anyone. I executed an evil son of a bitch,” says a rather self-righteous Heck, “Murder is what he did to my boyfriend.”

These 1988 girls ain’t very woke about that.

Dudes kissin’ dudes? Not in Reagan’s America!

Heck brushes the reactions off. After all, 1988 was a fucked up time.

“Hold on,” begins Mac, “If this is all for real, why don’t you just turn back the clock to save your…whatever he was?”

Sorry, Mac, this is Lost time-traveling rules. Whatever happened happened!

Tiff asks where these dudes are even from. The answer is Thirteen. They’re from the year Thirteen. “We kinda rolled back the odometer after the Calamity ended all the–” says Heck, but he’s cut off by a mumbling, barely-conscious Erin: “…papers…please don’t forget…my papers…”

Mac is like, yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah, your newspapers. Who gives a shit? Newspapers don’t matter anymore. People are disappearing. Shit’s wack. Whatever.

A mysterious “AAAAOAAAAOAOAO…” echoes through the stinky sewers. Heck and Naldo are like awww hell no. Not the Editrix! Shit! “How could it even find us?”

It’s that translator decoder coin. Fuck, man, it’s been tracking them. How could they be so stupid?

And whatever an Editrix is, it looks like a large green orb with protruding robot eyeballs. It shows up. It starts attacking.

Don’t you hate it when you’re traipsing through the sewers, minding your own business, and you get hunted down by the Editrix??

Welp, Heck was taken out. Naldo runs ahead still cradling Erin. The other three girls start freaking out. KJ aims the gun at the Floating Eyeball Orb.

“Shoot it!” yells Mac.
“I can’t!” yells KJ.
“You definitely can!” yells Tiff.

KJ admits, with wide regretful eyes, that she didn’t bring any bullets. So she can’t. It doesn’t look like a bullet would hurt this thing anyway. Might as well just throw the gun at it, maybe she can knock a robot eyeball unconscious.

Ooooh, quite seductive. This floating eyeball orb’s got some moves.

The Editrix starts eyeballin’, as it were, Tiff. As you can see, it wraps a tendril around her neck and stares her down a bit. This cause’s Tiff’s pupils to become square, It looks like she starts flashbackin’.

A long montage is shown of Tiff in her living room playing Arkanoid on her NES. Summertime, after school, late nights, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years, snowy days, springtime, rainy days, summertime again. Level 18, Level 21, Level 29, Level 35, getting better and better, obsessively breaking her own high score records…

I’m sure this will mean something later on, right? Hello? Anyone?

“LET GO!” KJ screams at the Editrix of Nostalgic Reminiscence. Mac tries to stop her, but KJ barrels forward anyway. She shoves Tiff down, which rips the cord right out of the orb. It starts emitting that AAAAAAOAAAAOAOAOAO sound again as it sprays red blood out of the new hole the girls just tore into the thing. Tiff snaps out of it. The Editrix seems to be temporarily incapacitated; long enough for Naldo to start spraying the fucker with laser gun lasers!

Now the Editrix is dead, if it ever was alive in the first place. Now it’s just a bloody lump on the sewer floor, looking like a Cacodemon carcass from the Ultimate Doom. Heck sits up and says something in his gibberish language. Mac is completely astonished that no one died.

“My…my life just flashed before my eyes,” says Tiff in a daze. “Most of it was just me playing the same dumb game. I didn’t even think I liked it that much, but now I realize I…I basically wasted my entire existence.”

Well, I’m glad we all came out of this experience a little bit wiser!

With everyone accounted for and definitely not dead, not even the girl who was shot in the stomach with a gun about two hours ago, the crew finally makes their way out of the sewer through a storm drain outlet in the woods near a small creek.

Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em, ladies.

Mac lights a cigarette. War is Hell, man. “So are we really following two perverts into the woods at night? You know how this joke ends, right?” Mac nudges KJ, but KJ is starting to get sick of Mac’s negativity. These perverts just saved their lives, all right? Mac’s not quick to trust these guys. Whoever they are, they’re still teenagers. Teenagers can’t be trusted. “Even my brother says they can’t be trusted, and he is one.”

So should you trust your untrustworthy brother about trusting teenagers? We’ve wrapped ourselves into quite a riddle here, haven’t we?

“So go back to the nightmare tunnels if you want, but I do trust these guys,” KJ stands her ground. We’ll see how that works out for her here in the Pervert Woods. Maybe they’re going to show the girls the box of porn they found.

Nope! Not a box of porn! The group comes across a very large object that looks like a front compartment of a space shuttle, just like one they found in a basement back in Issue #1. This is supposedly the device that will fix Erin; some type of healing chamber. Heck sticks his arm in a sphincter-like hole on the side of the machine, and a door opens with a vacuum-sealed hiss. The interior looks like Jabu Jabu’s Belly from Zelda: Ocarina of Time.

“This is mentally deranged,” observes Mac, cigarette now barely hanging onto the edge of her lip. Naldo carries Erin into the chamber. Heck follows. They say a few alien words to the girls and close the door.

That doesn’t seem foreboding at all!

“Now what? We’re just supposed to wait out here while they play Seven Minutes of Heaven in there?” yells an indignant Mac, but KJ still trusts the plan. Perhaps the three of them can keep lookout while the healing process takes its time.

Suddenly, the machine emits a burst of pale, pink light. It spins and contorts itself into a tornado of dimension-shifting fluid before disappearing completely in a wisp of pink smoke right before their eyes.

Healing’s finished!

Oops!

“Did. Did they…?”
“Those lying assholes bailed on us! They kidnapped Erin!”
“Oh, fuck.”

“I fucked up,” KJ laments pitifully.

The three of them are alone in the middle of the woods. High above the trees, looking down on the three girls in the center of the clearing, are three manned pterodactyl creatures. One of them is Cardinal, readying her giant Halo Energy Sword.

Final Thoughts

Everything keeps breaking bad for the Paper Girls! Perhaps they should have all just slept in late that morning. Nothing good can come from trying to solve a mystery, I always say.