The Disguise Duo
From Unofficial Handbook of the Virtue Universe
"Things are not always what they seem; the first appearance deceives many; the intelligence of a few perceives what has been carefully hidden...” -Phaedrus, A Roman Poet
Super Reflexes
Interpol, Arachnos, Longbow, Vanguard, Paragon Police Department,
Etc.The *Redacted* Behind the Mask (WIP)
"Amanda Vines here sitting in with what most would call a villain. As He... Or She... or Whatever you are, calls yourself, Agent Double-Take, Tell the audience about your beginnings."
"Why, Howdy World! DT Here! I'm Sure You're all just itching for the REAL story! Who is this mysterious guy running around and being all amazing?! WELL. Let me start from the very beginning..."
The Very Beginning
"It was a cold evening on October the 10th in 1963... I was born along with my twin brother in a small rural community 17.47 miles from the capital of my home country of Iceland, Reykjavic. My Mother named me Dewey and my identical twin brother, Howe.
The Cheatem family seemed stable and secure. My Father was a local business man who made a decent living and supported his loving family. I remember fondly of the days our family would play poker every thursday night. My brother and I would always crush our weak parents and split our earnings equally.... Well now that I think of it we never really did split our earnings we were just so good at our Poker Faces that we evened out and got tired of the game. HA! We were the Original Poker Face! Take That Lady GaGa!... Amanda, Dear, you need to get that one on the front page. ANYWAY...
One day... I can't remember the second but I do remember that it was April 29th, 1971, at 9:03PM GMT (Greenwich Mean Time), that our mother, Cassandra Cheatem, sneezed that fateful harbinger sneeze that will define our lives from that minute in time to now. Our lives spiraled into a dark depressing depression. Our mother had been diagnosed in St. Elmo's Hospital by our family physician with what the doctors could only describe as "A Permenant Cold." Our father had to hold two jobs to pay for all of the cold medicine, cough drops and tissues. In the summer of 1982, my mother was sent to the ICU after sneezing for 98 times in a row. Doctors were worried that she would eventually explode once she hit 100 sneezes. That night she died in a tragic fire that consumed the entire Hospital. I was never able to watch the show or listen to the song "St. Elmo's Fire" without bursting into tears.
After our mother's tragic end our father was committed to the nearest mental Institution and my brother and I were orphaned and left to fend for ourselves. Using old kung fu movies and the occational scuffle with hobos trying to steal our earnings at the local casino we trained ourselves to fight most proficiently. In our teenage years we had made quite the name for ourselves as shakespearean Actors. You wouldn't BELIEVE all of th--"
"Wait, Mr. Double-Take, How did you begin your life of crime?"
"Well that's a whole different story altogether..."
A Whole Different Story Altogether
"Well it all started when Howe and I were at the height of our Acting Career. We had really begun to hit the Shakespearean Acting scene of Reykjavic when we hit our Big Break. We had been cast for leading Roles in the play A Midsummer Night's Dream! It was very Exciting! The spotlights. The Fame! But then We looked at teh Script and realized that no one really died in this play... We decided Ole Billy Shakespeare must've made a HUGE faux pas! So in light of the lack of bloodshed we decided to add our own twist to the story of A Midsummer Night's Dream.
In the play, For those of you at home not in tune with the fine art of Theatre, my brother and I were playing the parts of Peter Quince and Nick Bottom, who are putting on a play for the Dutch and Dutchess. The play is called "Pyramus and Thisby" and the two starstruck lovers had this sort of Romeo and Juliet thing goin' on... But then in the play... within the play... They are attacked by Lions! But they made extras wear lion costumes... We told the extras to take a hike and brought in some REAL lions to add into the fun! We want our audience to have authenticity, dang it! The look in someone's eyes as they are fighting for their very life from very hungry Lions is not easily forged by years of acting experience!"
"You actually got real lions?... Did they survive?"
"Well.. No... But it made for a great show! They were supposed to die anyway! It just happened in a more dramatic way! It's what Billy-boy would've wanted! And the crowd just ate it up! Well... Until the lions began to eat THEM up... Yeah... Evidently the theatre really doesn't like people getting up without an intermission. Very Strict Icelandic Theatre, let me tell yah."
"...You murdered an entire of theater of innocent Icelanders? How'd you get out of that?"
"Well This is where our made Acting and disguise skillz came in handy! We planted alot of evidence framing the manager of the theater for our crimes! Those silly coppers bought it! That dude's still in jail somewhere! Sorry Joseph M. Lewis!
But Yeah... That's how we started our life of Crime... It was glorious... Ahhh... Just like yesterday..."
"But Agent Double-Take, When did you begin your life of Subterfuge and Assassinations and all this we've heard about?"
"Oh... Well That's Interesting that you mention it. It all Began on a Sunday Afternoon in Paris..."
A Sunday Afternoon in Paris
"Well you see, my brother and I had to flee the country of Iceland after our fiasco with the First Bank of Iceland and that herd of Wildebeast that stampeded through the middle of the town. We were fairly new at the whole "Blame-other-people-and-make-up-new-names-and-disguises" thing so our aliases and albis were slowly catching up to us. We took off to Paris, France. We loved to sit on the balcony and throw tomatoes at silly French people and yelling random phrases in French at them! HAHAHA! That was the time... But then one Sunday Afternoon, my brother and I had convinced the head waiter of a prestigious restaurant that I was a wealthy business man from Berlin and that my brother was his personal assistant and that they had told him that there were reservations and we worked our way into the restaurant! Little did we know that we would meet a high ranking official in the Soviet KGB who was eating dinner with his subordinates. He told us that our ability to disguise and infiltrate a place in plain sight was uncanny and that we were the best spys he had ever seen. A month later we were special classified agents for the KGB!"
"Wait, you were apart of the KGB? You worked for the Soviet Union?"
"YES! Good grief! Hold your horse there, Amanda, Dear! I'm not finished with my story just yet! We have done so many mission that it would litterally BLOW YOUR MIND! I'm really doing you guys a service here by not going through all of these classified special missions that effect your lives even at this very moment! But after all of that the Russians turned on us and tried to "Tie up loose ends." As a secret agent it happens alot. So we decided to go Rogue and turned our sights on the Soviet Union! The two of us distracted the KGB by faking our own deaths in an Airplane crash and infiltrated a nuclear Reactor in the Ukraine... It was near this little town called Prypiat... ohhhh what was the complex called?... Butter... No... Buttermilk... CHERN... Chern something!"
"Are you trying to tell me that you were responsible for the infamous Chernobyl Disaster?"
"Well, Yeah! We had cased out the place and started to slowly sabatoge different componants of the reactor. Then once we were sure the thing was doomed to explode we high-tailed it and ran! It eventually led to the fall of the Soviet Union! So you're Welcome folks!"
"Wow... You've got quite the back Story, Sir. I've heard that you and your twin brother have the ability to mimic voices. Hav-"
"Oh! OH HO! Ms. Amanda Vines. Sit back and listen to THIS one!"
This One
"So. My Twin Brother and I can mimic the voice of ANYONE! Just name it and we'll sound just like it! So after we did the whole Chernobyl thing we went over to the UK for a few years! We wanted to master all of those crazy accents they've got! I mean think about it! Scottish, Irish, Brittish... There's alot of Ish's and every single one of them has a different accent! Anyway! We were just sitting around in a Scottish pub in Inverness when, BAM! After watching these loser identical twins perform in front of us we decided. MAN! What better way to get people attention and then slip through the back door of anything we wanted to than to be a One-Hit Wonder!"
"So... You became a One-Hit Wonder? Would you be anyone that our viewers may know?"
- Sounds just like Charlie/Craig Reid from the band 'The Proclaimers'* "And I would walk Five HUNDRED Miles and I would walk five HUNDRED more just to BE the MAN Who'd Walk a Thousand MILES to fall down at your Doooor!"
"...You're here... Telling me and the rest of the world... That you and your Twin Brother are really The Proclaimers... Okay..."
"Yep! And let me tell you it was SO much fun to be those guys! I mean all the strange Head motions! And that song... Funny thing it actually has a code inside to be able to tell you a combination of a vault in Belarus! Cool Right? I know.
ANYWAY! We used this whole Famous-thing to get us to be able to play during a charity concert in Galaxy City's Freedom Corps' Headquarters! Little did they know that we had covinced the REAL Proclaimer dudes that they were really these world renowned rock stars!... Through Hypnosis of course... But it still worked! As they were up on stage and the Security was down in the HQ we snuck in and erased our names from every database we could get ahold of and stole a TON of super-cool Blueprints and stuff. We planned on selling it on the Black Market... But we got Caught... Dang boys in Blue had figured it out after the guys we hypnotized were acting like Race Car Drivers... Evidently the Hypnosis went all haywire with all the flash Photography... No one listens to the Instructions at concerts, do they?"
"Alright! And with that we must go to commercial Break! When we come back Agent Double-Take will take a break and his brother, Agent D. Skies will come out and tell us HIS side of the Story!"
Super Reflexes
Interpol, Arachnos, Longbow, Vanguard, Paragon Police Department,
Ect.The *Censored* Under the Hat (WIP)
"Amanda Vines here with part two of our special "The Disguise Duo: Twin Villainy." With me this time is Agent Double-Take's sibling, Agent D. Skies in a lovely black and... neon green tuxedo. How about we begin with where you grew up?"
"Starting with the very beginning, eh, Ms. Vines? How bold! I love it!"
The Very Beginning
"You see, it all started in the middle of the worst heat wave in Venezuelan history. It was March 23rd, 1945 when the doctors recovered me, and then my brother a few minutes later from that hospital room. It would not be long before my mother followed our native village's naming traditions dubbing my brother José and myself, Carlos. This made us the the Disfraz Twins.
The problem with the Disfraz family, and in fact all the families in our village, was that they were incredibly poor. I don't just mean we barely managed to scrape a living out of the land, (Which we did do once. Road kill tastes awful, even if you're starving.) I mean that not a single person made more than the value of two US dollars a year. To offset this, José and I would frequently steal from the landowner that kept us all as farmhands. Unfortunately for the other families, we were pretty good at laying the blame on them. By the time my brother and I had reached adolescence we were the wealthiest men, let alone teens, in a thirty mile radius. We bought out the farm with money stolen from the farm's owner. How's that for a rags to riches story?
Later that year, even our modest wealth could not save our mother and father from their tragic fates. Our mother, bless her soul, fell ill with botulism from a can of old refried beans. I remember the look on her paralyzed face as she passed from this world... She was yelling at José for putting his muddy shoes on the couch, so it was a look of terror and rage all rolled into a picturesque visage. To this day, we have been unable to lie on a couch with shoes on. It just brings back so many... sad memories. Oh, and my father, upset with the death of his wife of thirty years he retired from the farm life and went on to participate as one of the least celebrated bull fighters of all time. Bull fighting still hadn't really gotten a foothold in Venezuela yet.
After all this tragedy, my brother and I went on a spiritual pilgrimage to Tibet, where we met with the Dalai Lama and were taught the ancient art of Canned Butt-Whup. You see, this style was big in using a mystical can opener to release all the evils and turbulence from your body and then quickly resealing the "can" before all of the ancestral martial arts training leaked out, thus creating a pure, enlightened warrior... Also, skilled at opening canned food with can openers."
"What a story, Mr. D. Skies. What about your life of crime? What about the spy intrigue we've all heard so much about?"
"Oh, that little story? Well..."
That Little Story
"It's interesting, actually, to recall these facts. It began, I believe, when we met the Russian spy that tried to infiltrate the Dalai Lama's sanctum while my brother and I were on guard duty. Using our superior, enlightened warrior minds we detected his malicious intent and apprehended him. Of course, the Dalai Lama is a pacifist, so we weren't allowed to hurt him, which was unexceptable, so we left the Dalai Lama that day. We then proceeded to give the Russian a beating he would never forget. I suppose this was our first violent crime, ah, memories.
We came to the quick realization that Russia was bad for everyone, thus making the Kremlin our next stop on our tragedy tour of the world. After successfully infiltrating the Kremlin, my brother and I devised a plan to doom the Soviet Union, and it would only take about 30 years! I began with an impersonation of Khrushchev, threatening to "bury" people and use nuclear weapons for total annihilation while the real Khrushchev tried his very best to run clean-up of my speeches declaring "bury you" meant communism over capitalism and that he really just wanted peaceful coexistence. While I ran interference in Moscow, my brother staged revolts in Hungary, created the Cuban Missile crisis and then assisted myself in eventual rise of Gorbachev's power. After such hard work, my brother and I retired to a small jungle home on the Argentina side of the Iguaza Falls. From that location we launched an international crime spree as the world's gift for us defeating the Soviet Union. So far, they only have three of our aliases as suspects!"
