The Initial Adventures of Bucket-Man and His Ostensible Enemies Read online

with himself but with a generous proportion reserved for our hero, the one and only Bucket-Man).

  “Shut your face!” said Bucket-Man, pulling the blankets from inside his bucket to wrap about the mouth and face of Boring Man.

  Although tempted to fight back, such activity threatened to be all too interesting, and Boring Man would have no part in doing anything actively interesting.

  Soon enough, the police arrived, and arrested Boring Man for disrupting the peace. While talking with the police, Bucket-Man said that it had been his most boring episode ever.

  Boring Man, handcuffed and muzzled by Bucket-Man’s blankets, still managed a tiny, boring chuckle. Not all had been lost! It was a small and boring victory for boredom!

  Bucket-Man, Ninja Janitor and Boring Man

  After vowing revenge upon Bucket-Man, the disturbed Ninja Janitor returned to his very clean apartment in the middle of the trashiest neighborhood in town. (Ninja Janitor believed that by setting an example of cleanliness, it would have a positive effect on his neighborhood. Ninja Janitor was very civic-minded in that sense.)

  The costumed custodian, feeling low, decided to clean his toilet to an ever-brighter sheen, as bleach-based activities never failed to cheer him up.

  “The only thing I love in life is cleaning, and you made me lose my janitor job, Bucket-Man. I’ll get you, your bucket, and your plunger if it’s the last thing I do!” he muttered to himself.

  Suddenly a black-clad ninja appeared from behind him. Thinking quickly, Ninja Janitor threw his toilet cleanser backward in defense.

  Momentarily stunned, the invading ninja had given Ninja Janitor a chance to knock the intruder out of the bathroom. Ninja Janitor grabbed his trusty Broom of Doom to beat his assailant senseless, but yet another ninja ripped the sanitation instrument from the hands of the costumed custodian.

  “Well, well, perhaps you’re not as hopeless as you appeared.”

  Ninja Janitor was suddenly faced with a room full of ninjas. They introduced themselves as a recruitment squad from the Ninja Association of Labor. The bureaucrat ninjas then served Ninja Janitor with an official complaint for defaming ninjas everywhere, claiming to be a ninja when he had no legitimate ninjutsu training.

  Ninja Janitor was afraid, but the ninjas gave him the chance to correct the problem by undergoing real ninja training.

  And then Ninja Janitor was overjoyed. It was a win-win situation.

  “This is my chance to become even more powerful, and destroy Bucket-Man!”

  He gladly accepted their training, and began his real education with gusto.

  Six months after Ninja Janitor completed his ninja training, there was an attack on Dullsville’s fertilizer factory. The place had been cleaned out, literally. The factory, which was normally full of smelly substance used to help plants grow, was sparkling clean, and suspiciously empty.

  The factory owners reported theft, and the police said to themselves, “This looks like the work of that crazed janitor.” Unable to find any trace of Ninja Janitor himself, the police called in Bucket-Man… as bait.

  Bucket-Man arrived on the scene and was left alone to look around. The police were ostensibly called away to investigate a traffic violation. And that was when Ninja Janitor appeared out of the shadows. He kicked Bucket-Man to the floor almost effortlessly.

  “You’ve been a stain on my reputation for too long,” Ninja Janitor growled. “Wiping you out will be a pleasure.”

  Bucket-Man raised his sidekick Sally Plunger in defense.

  “Get him, Sally!” Bucket-Man called, striking a blow at his arch-nemesis with the pink-headed plunger, but the villain Ninja Janitor had become much stronger, and was soon poised to remove Bucket-Man’s bucket helmet.

  That was when the police showed themselves again. As the peace officers raised their firearms, Ninja Janitor faded into the shadows and disappeared.

  “Your bucket helm and plunger sidekick will be mine.” The costumed custodian let the threat hang.

  Bucket-Man told the police what happened and glumly returned home, shamed by his defeat. Anxiously checking around every corner, Bucket-Man was very much afraid that his ninja nemesis would jump from the shadows to take away his cleaning-product-related arsenal.

  Now, Bucket-Man is undoubtedly crazy, and more than a little unintelligent, so I don’t know the full truth of things, but, in the midst of all this stress, Bucket-Man thought that he heard his trusty plunger Sally speak to him.

  “Bucket-Man, I don’t want to be taken by Ninja Janitor. We have to do something.”

  “What should we do, Sally?” Bucket-Man asked. “I’m so scared.”

  “You know,” Sally said, “This is the most exciting thing to happen in this town for a long time. Ninja Janitor is all over the news. And you know who hates excitement more than anything?”

  It took Bucket-Man a long moment to come up with the answer. “Boring Man?”

  “Boring Man,” Sally repeated the name. “He nearly bored the entire town into submission. Surely he can bore one man…”

  “You’re a genius, Sally Plunger,” Bucket-Man said, dashing off toward the boring office where Boring Man worked.

  Prompted by Sally, Bucket-Man knew just what to say to his old foe: “Hello, Boring Man. What’s new?”

  Everyone in the Boring Building stopped what they were doing to stare at the man with the bucket upturned over his head. The attention and excitement made Boring Man seethe with frustration.

  “This has been an altogether exciting day. Earlier Ninja Janitor grabbed everyone’s attention, and now you’re here, disrupting my precious, precious routine,” Boring Man complained, the pencil in his hand shaking with repressed rage.

  “You’d like to make all that excitement go away, wouldn’t you?” Bucket-Man said. “I can give you the opportunity. Together, we can find Ninja Janitor, and stop his exciting reign of terror.”

  Boring Man tapped his chin.

  “If you don’t agree,” Bucket-Man said, “I might just come here tomorrow and make that day interesting for you.”

  Boring Man grimaced. “How predictable of you. For that, at least, I’m grateful. Let’s go… as soon as the work day is over. I don’t want to use any vacation time.”

  Bucket-Man sighed and went to wait in the office lobby. As he was reading a magazine—Highlights for Children—a flying fist surprised him out of nowhere. Bucket-Man’s head rang against the inside of his bucket like the ringer of a bell.

  The secretary ran off screaming as Bucket-Man collapsed to the floor.

  “Don’t clutter up my floor, lying there in a heap,” Ninja Janitor taunted. “Get up and fight like a Bucket-Man.”

  It had been a particularly powerful hit. Bucket-Man struggled to raise his bucketed noggin.

  Suddenly Boring Man appeared, walking slowly through the lobby.

  “First the coffee didn’t boil on time, then there was a defective staple I had to re-staple… then I had to hear about your exciting crimes from my co-workers, then Bucket-Man came to weird up my day… and now a fight breaks out in the lobby. This has got to stop. Ninja Janitor, you are in advance advised to prepare for a boring onslaught from Boring Man.”

  Ninja Janitor raised his Broom of Doom and Dustpan of Despair, ready for just about anything.

  “Did you know,” Boring Man said, “That the use of dustpans dates back to ancient times?”

  Bucket-Man heard the boring fact coming, and stuffed his fingers under the upturned lip of the bucket helmet. He navigated his digits toward his vulnerable ear holes inside, just in time to avoid hearing the entire boring fact.

  The confused Ninja Janitor looked at Boring Man. “Yes, I knew that. But what does that have to do with…”

  Suddenly, Boring Man was right beside Ninja Janitor. The Boring Wonder whispered the most boring fact ever into Ninja Janitor’s ear. I won’t reprint it here. It is just so boring.

  Ninja Janitor dropped his ninja janitorial equipment and clutched his head, screaming,
“Why did you tell me that? I don’t care! And yet now I know it! Get it out of my head!”

  He collapsed on the floor in the fetal position, and remained there until the police arrived. Someone in the office had responsibly called them. Thanks to a timely phone call from neither Bucket-Man nor Boring Man, Ninja Janitor was placed in handcuffs.

  Bucket-Man turned to Boring Man. “Thank you. You really saved the—”

  “Shut your interesting mouth-hole and leave me alone, before I decide to make you as bored as Ninja Janitor has become,” Boring Man threatened.

  Bucket-Man retreated, somewhat victorious, into the late afternoon streets, beating rush hour traffic to make it home at a decent hour. A boring end to an uncomfortably exciting day!

  Don’t stop there!

  You’ve just read the initial adventures, but the antics continue in the full 19-story compilation:

  The Adventures of Bucket-Man and His Ostensible Enemies

  Need help? Call a professional!

  In other cases, you can e-mail Bucket-Man!

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  To contact the author directly, use the address below:

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  If you’d like to sample this author’s more serious take on superheroes (in a fantasy world) then please consider the first novel in the Legend of the Elementals series.

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