Author’s Note: Big Pharma Troll Bingo

My experiences on various natural health sites and Facebook.

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22: Not Exactly Superheroes

“You know what she’s thrown at me during her judgy mood swings?” Holly asked Shakira, as they were waiting for Strawberry to get ready to go out.
“No…what exactly?” Shakira adjusted her headscarf, which she decided to wear in a more fitted style for today.
“An empty can of tuna, a lit joint, an apple core and a cat.” Holly sighed. Normally, when an ex-Domes/New Washington woman got pregnant, she would have the baby transferred to one of the incubator jars in the crèches at about 4 months, but Jessica 6 and several friends decided to give birth to and raise their children themselves. Holly was a target for their bitchings, because until 3 days ago she was 18 weeks pregnant with twins and had them transferred.
“Why would she do that? You were pregnant too.”
“I’m different and that’s bad. She doesn’t understand that for me, motherhood isn’t freedom because I value my independence like you…and if being a mother is freedom then I don’t want her freedom.”
Shakira smiled a little. “Now you know a little of what it is to be judged for wearing hijab. Jessica judges me too, for both this and my choice to not have children”, she said, touching her scarf.
Their conversation was interrupted by Strawberry bursting into the room. “AAAAAAAAHH! I was just checking my email and someone told me that there is a dirty video of me on SpaceTube!”
“Strawberry this is why I told you-“
“No Shakira. This was one of me and Elvis; I don’t film myself having sex and neither does he!” She half-jumped onto the couch, a little like a rag doll. “I remember that day, it was the day I met Farrah, then Elvis found me…” she trailed off. “The channel belongs to some people who call themselves the Medikidz.”**
Shakira was shocked. “The Medikidz? I know them, they’re a group of 5 ‘superheroes’ from some physics-defying planet who cannot comprehend anything outside of conventional medicine, but they still give medical advice to kids! And then there’s the stalking and property damage!”
Elvis then entered the room. “Wait you know these people? And they do this all the time?”
“Unfortunately yes”, Shakira said. “I also know where to find them if you want to confront them about their behaviour.”
“Sure! They have dozens of stalking videos and it’s time they stopped!”
“I wanna be known again for my music, not for having sex with an old friend!” Elvis added.
“Well step into my TARDIS and we can end this nonsense” Shakira replied, getting up.
Once they were standing at her TARDIS console, she entered the co-ordinates and explained, “They live on a planet that resembles a human body, but this is in a galaxy where the laws of nature do not always apply so for them this is normal.” As soon as they took off, the TARDIS walls began to shake.
“Ow!” Strawberry said as she fell to the floor, unable to hold onto anything due to her lack of arms.
“That would be the lightning. I always have trouble going to this galaxy” Shakira sighed.
They landed somewhere in the non-sentient human body’s brain, just outside their ‘enemies’ headquarters. Strawberry then walked up to the front door, and knocked it with one foot. “Hello? Helloooooo?” There was no answer. “Maybe they’re not home.”
Holly paused. “Wait, I can hear something…it sounds like some guys with big egos!” She led them to the source, which wasn’t very far, actually in a nearby sinus cavity.
“Salaam aleikum, where are the Medikidz?” Shakira asked. The only…’people’ around were some squishy looking aliens in uniform. These pointed down to four left over zip lines that seemed to lead to wherever these so-called superheroes were.
“We have to go down those?” Strawberry sighed, as her lack of arms was currently bothering her.
“Baby what about that thing you did with the stripper’s pole? You locked your feet together to slide down it” suggested Elvis, enjoying this memory.
“Sure if I don’t mind going head first…oh fine” she said, and continued, “if I land on my head Shakira can have me healed in three days!” then stuck her tongue out.
“Okay, let us see where this goes” mumbled Shakira, and then grabbed the coat-hanger-ish thing attached to one of the lines. Holly was next, for although she was a little timid, Shakira did make her feel safe; then it was Elvis’ turn, and finally, Strawberry’s, after she fit her legs through the hanger-thing and held on tight as gravity did its work. It seemed that everyone could hear the loud “AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!” coming from the four; Strawberry was screaming the loudest. They fell/glided around the midbrain and into the spinal column, zipping down the body’s neck, and after this they slowed down as they ended their trip in one of the arms. “Ow!” Shakira exclaimed as she let go and fell to the ground (it appeared to be a bone), then Holly faceplanted on the ground/bone, and so did Elvis. Strawberry horizontally faceplanted onto the side of a muscle and was pushed back a little. “Hey can I have some help here?” she asked, so then Shakira and Elvis picked her up and let her get back on her feet.
Holly got up, walked over and rested her head on Shakira. “So…we’re in a giant arm?”
Shakira scanned their surroundings with her sonic screwdriver. “Yes we are, and this defies the laws of nature as I know them.”
“Hey there’s a sign…it says ‘this way to bone marrow’ and it’s pointing to those stairs!” Elvis said.
“I assume they’ve gone down there”, replied Shakira as she headed over to the stairs. “I think the ground is vibrating, they are probably doing something silly.” The others followed her, as she seemed to know these people and their antics quite well.
“Oh COME ON!” Shakira yelled once they were inside the bone marrow. The Medikidz, an assortment of freaks and some human kid were singing – something to do with leukaemia.
“And they do this, all the time?” Strawberry asked flatly.
“It has been known. They are idiots after all.”
“Why is that something to sing about?” Holly asked.
“They have their own brand of education. That is all I can say about it.”
Strawberry rolled her eyes. “Hey listen! Why are you using chemo when you have cannabis oil, you have nutritional therapies which go great with the oil, and what about antineoplastons? Burzynski is a sweetie pie and a genius!”
The freak-things and Medikidz weren’t having any of it. They answered with:
#“No, no, no, noooooooooo
No, no, no
Stick to the stuff you know
It is better by far
To keep things as they are
Don’t mess with the flow, no, no
Stick to the status quo”#
“Hey! We don’t see cancer as often as, say, Earth, but this IS what we know and losing patients more often than once a decade makes you a bad doctor by our standards!” Shakira added, getting pissed off by the weirdos that inhabit Mediland. Said weirdos responded with a “Stick to the status- Stick to the status- Stick to the status quo!” and an assault of pies to all four of their faces.
“What the hell is your problem?” Elvis demanded to know. He was usually patient, but who could maintain that around people like this?
“We’re the Medikidz!” the offending ‘superheroes’ announced.
“I KNOW!” Strawberry interrupted them before they could start their corny introduction. “You filmed me and Elvis having sex in my car and put it on SpaceTube!” she explained. Holly scowled at them while eating the residual pie still on her face.
“Hey you’re the hot bum doctor in one of our videos!” the stupid fat one said.
“Bum doctor? Does anyone ever punch you for saying that? The word is ‘proctologist’” Strawberry corrected him. “You’re gonna take that video of me and Elvis down, or, umm, or we’re gonna get all the police who’ve tried to arrest you for vandalising stuff and bring them here!”
“The TARDIS is bigger on the inside so yes we can do that!” Shakira threatened. “And I have done it before!”
“Alright if you promise not to come back here, we’ll delete it”, the stupid blonde one said.
“Only if we see you deleting it”, Strawberry added, and Elvis agreed.
“Okay, deal then.”
They all went back to their headquarters, where Strawberry and Elvis watched them delete the video off of both their SpaceTube account and their computer. After this, they parted ways, as the Medikidz went back to their shenanigans and the four went back to Shakira’s TARDIS, to do something a bit more sane then the brainfuck that their day so far had been.

(**A/N: a fucking weird comic series where the MK’s get away with everything stupid they do and ignore alternative medicine. I had to make fun of them)

21: E Is For

“Hey Shakira, can we go back to Earth this afternoon? To my timeline?” Farrah asked. Shakira had the afternoon off, well, once she rescued Farrah from a mild but inconvenient healing reaction, and so did Farrah.
“Okay…why do you want to go home?” She re-secured one of the hair pins that were keeping her enormous pink scarf wrapped around her head.
“I want to sneak into the head of the hospital’s office to do some investigating, because I want to know exactly what their plans are”, answered Farrah, partly because she had been quite shaken by the false allegations that she was dying and planning her own funeral.
“So do I, actually. Wouldn’t the truth about your life sell better? A false positive diagnosis that was made to protect the corporations is much more interesting than someone dying.”
“Even when you take out all the space and time travel and aliens!” Farrah agreed. She ran to get her camera, and once she returned, put it in her handbag.
“You are not going to film all of this are you?” asked Shakira as she unlocked her TARDIS.
“No, just put any pictures I take online.” This was a safe thing to do now, since Farrah was living with Ursula on the almost exactly Earth-like Kos III. Shakira opened the door so that Farrah could enter, and then closed the door once she had followed her.
“Alright your timeline is the 1st of June, 2009, location…Los Angeles…” Shakira trailed off, finishing the co-ordinates. She let her TARDIS fly on its own, but once they were almost there she took control to land it perfectly in the corner of the head’s office. “And we are here!” she announced.
“Are you gonna turn it off again?” Farrah asked.
“I think that would be the safest option”, she said, “and you don’t mind me speaking in sign language?”
“No, actually you’re really loud so I was gonna ask if we could just use sign language here.”
Shakira laughed. “I get that all the time”, she agreed, as she switched off her TARDIS and decided to keep her hearing aids on for safety purposes, as well as not locking her TARDIS in order to save time if they got caught.
Farrah was the first of the two to step into the head’s office, looking around and taking in everything. It was on the top floor, and had a massive window that almost took up the entire wall. There was a big, fancy desk near the window, and a near-matching bookcase up against another wall; both of these were the same colour of wood that Shakira’s TARDIS appeared to be. Farrah paused to enjoy the view before going straight for the desk drawers. Shakira guarded the door. After what seemed like forever, Farrah walked over to Shakira, and signed, “I found nothing in his desk, but I found this key for the filing cabinets…Can you look in the bookcase for anything he could be hiding in there?”
“Yes, I can use my sonic screwdriver to warn us about anyone who’s coming.”
It turned out that Shakira did not need to scour the bookcase for any documents detailing dastardly plans, for Farrah let out a tiny gasp after five minutes of searching.
“Shakira look! I was going through E, I don’t know, I was just thinking ‘E for Evil Plans’, and then I found this!” Shakira’s star patient/dear friend was holding up a thin cream folder, with a paperclip securing its contents.
“What does it say?” she signed back. The noises coming from the sonic screwdriver suddenly changed to something more urgent sounding. “Someone is coming! We can read them in the TARDIS!” she sign-yelled, and then the two ran a few steps back into the TARDIS.
Shakira locked the door from the inside. “I am taking us back to your house”, she spoke, as the head of the hospital scratched his head and exclaimed, “WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS CLOSET DOING HERE?” He had another surprise, as the ‘closet’ dematerialised in front of him on its way back to somewhere safer. “FUCKING HELL! Cocaine is NOT in my plans again for tonight!”
“Now, tell me what you found”, Shakira requested as they were still in flight. Farrah removed some of the pages and placed them on the console for them to read.
“They’re going to reduce the world’s population by 90%, by poisoning everyone.”
“You mean eugenics? Like the Nazis?”
“Yeah, the strongest 10% survive to start a Master Race. They’re not like Nazis Shakira, they ARE Nazis!” Farrah explained as she pointed to a swastika in the corner of the page.

19: Invasion

“How many views does it have now?” Kate asked, as she and Farrah were on her roof. Lawrence was there too, looking through his telescope at the stars.
“My channel has thousands of views from outer space 4 years from now, but only a few dozen from here and now on Earth”, Farrah answered. Earlier that week, Ursula had shown her how to transmit her videos through time and space, from her galaxy’s internet in 2013 to Earth’s internet in 2009. That way, no one could delete her uploads or suspend her account again. Most comments were in support of her, but one was a flat “INFORMATION_RECEIVED” from an unverified date and by a strange group of metal men…

Meanwhile, the metal men just mentioned were floating on a massive ship through space, having originated from the planet Mondas.
“INFORMATION DOWNLOADED HAS CONFIRMED MATURITY OF CHEMICAL WEAPON KNOWN ON EARTH AS CHEMOTHERAPY, PURPOSE: TO IMPROVE COMPLIANCY RATE OF UPGRADES…TO DELETE INFERIOR AND NON-COMPLIANT LIFEFORMS…” one said, in its robotic voice. Years earlier, in the 1940s, the metal men known as Cybermen had planted a shipment of mustard gas where the German army would find it, and then planted the idea of creating a dangerous ‘medicine’ from it into the mind of a Nazi scientist. Thus chemo was invented, less than 10% effective at saving lives but incredibly dangerous and exactly what the Cybermen wanted to fulfill their plans.
“MATURITY CONFIRMED BY: OBVIOUS DAMAGE TO FEMALE, FEMALE’S DESCRIPTION OF CHEMICAL WEAPON” the first one continued.
Another added: “OTHER INFORMATION SUGGESTS FEMALE IS AN IMMORTAL BEING KNOWN AS AN ANGEL”, taking the name given to Farrah for her beauty and sweetness way too seriously. “COMMENCE PREPARATION FOR THE OBTAINING OF THE NOW MATURED CHEMICAL WEAPON AND THE UPGRADING OF THIS WORLD KNOWN AS PLANET EARTH!” it said, completely emotionless. The first one then left, to prepare the weapons and get all the other Cybermen into combat mode. A Cybermen never invaded a planet alone, no, there were thousands of them travelling aboard the ship that was approaching Earth.

“Hey Farrah, what do you know about spaceships? I can see one, and it’s coming closer, I think”, Lawrence asked while peering through his telescope.
“Really?” she replied, and got up to check out this apparent UFO. A few seconds after she found the ship, she jumped back. “Shakira told me about those! That’s a Cybership and they’re always full of Cybermen!”
“Uhh…what’s a Cyberman?”
“They’re basically robots with human nervous systems who want everyone else either killed or converted into one of them”, Farrah explained. She sent a message out to Shakira, Strawberry and Ursula on her now modified phone. Shakira was spending some time with about two dozen relatives, and Strawberry was delivering a baby, so only Ursula was available and able to hear her phone going off. A few minutes later, something that appeared to be a blue Chevrolet but was actually a ship capable of travelling through time and space landed safely on the roof, then Ursula stepped out of it. “Hello there Farrah, I got your message…how far away are they?”
Lawrence looked through his telescope once more. “They’re closer but not by much. How are you gonna fight these things anyway?”
“I have various Sontaran weapons. My father fought the Cybermen so I know all about them.” She opened the back door of her car. “To destroy the whole ship, we must plant this bomb somewhere inside it, but because it detonates quickly I will keep the trigger. My car has a built-in cannon-“ Kate was shocked by this – “What? I am half Sontaran! And I have a pair of rheon carbines, they are guns which can easily kill any Cyberman.”
Farrah stepped forward. “I guess I’d better get going then.”
“And try not to get killed!” Kate yelled from behind her.
“Good luck!” Lawrence added.
“Thanks…Kate I’m sure I’ll get out alive”, Farrah said, and got into Ursula’s ‘car’. They passed the clouds, then the stratosphere and the outer reaches of Earth’s atmosphere, and eventually reached the cybership, enormous and comparable to two wheels skewered onto half of a bicycle handlebar, but fortunately it was still only a quarter of the way between the Moon and Earth. Ursula slipped them behind the ship, turned to Farrah and said, “I was going to shoot a hole in the ship, but these idiots have automatic doors. They’ll let anything in.”
“Don’t you think that’s a trap? Like maybe there’s gonna be hundreds of them waiting for us?” Farrah asked.
“Then you just throw the bomb out of the car!” Ursula flew the car up close to the automatic doors, which let them in just as expected.
“See? I told you”, she said, and as they landed the car, neither of them found any Cybermen. “You press that button”, she continued, pointing to something on the rheon carbine, which looked like a silver magic wand with a blinking yellow light on the end that it fired from. Taking the bomb and locking the doors, she noticed how absolutely everything on the cybership was silver. No indoor plants to give it a more home-ish feel, or any décor of any kind, just functional silver machinery in a ship more sterile than an operating theatre.
“Hey do you think that’s a good place to plant it?” Farrah asked, putting a stop to Ursula’s observations as she pointed to a metal closet up against a wall.
“Ja I think so too, if it’s locked then the bomb will fit nicely in the corner next to it.” After Farrah nearly going blind, all because of the chemo she had in the past destroying her immune system, Ursula was surprised she could pick out distant objects when everything was not just silver, but the exact same bloody shade of it. Unfortunately, they couldn’t walk three steps without being noticed. “ALL INTRUDERS WILL BE UPGRADED OR DELETED”, threatened one of the three Cybermen, who seemed to have appeared out of nowhere.
“Oh really…and what is this upgrade you guys like to threaten people with?” replied Farrah, as she made it obvious that she was armed. Just fucking shoot them!! Ursula thought, and hissed: “They remove your body parts and replace them with machinery WITH YOU WATCHING!”
“So my options are either something agonisingly painful or death? That doesn’t scare me, since I’ve already been there!” she yelled, firing the rheon carbine several times. She managed to kill all three of the Cybermen, who fell to the ground dead and making horrible metallic half-choking and half-screaming sounds as they did so. “Okay I’m done, let’s plant this bomb and get out of here”, she continued.
“Good…Sontarans do not tease their enemies; we just storm in and attack.” They ran to the closet in the distance, and when Farrah opened the closet they were intending to hide the bomb in, a shell of a Cyberman fell out and produced a loud crash that reverberated throughout the massive chamber they had landed in.
“Great, that’s really gonna buy us some time!” Farrah said as Ursula hid the bomb in the now empty closet. She closed the doors, then they both raced back to the car. More Cybermen were approaching as they began to fly out of the ship, but they weren’t shot down because, as a Sontaran, Ursula had her car reinforced against weaponry. They slipped out as the poorly-thought out doors opened again for them and Ursula pressed the trigger. “One…two…three…four…five…six…seven…eight…nine…ten!” she counted while flying at top speed, and just on time the cybership exploded, wiping out all Cybermen. Sure, Ursula could have just teleported them home, but she did want to see the ship get blown up. She then looked over at Farrah, who had just fallen asleep after making her so proud once again, and soon landed to find Lawrence and Kate watching the cybership explosion.