From an email by John Petropoulos on December 13, 2000
So, you wish to know what happens next eh? Well, buckle your seat belt, get comfortable and I'll give it a go, but bear in mind that this was all a long time ago and none of it was written in stone until it saw print.
When we left our heroes, Bug & Stump had stumbled onto the headquarters and staging area of the Lost New Moral Army (the really big room under the church). To Bug, this didn't mean didley squat. But Stump recognises the machinations of the Bewlay Brothers. Despite his dishonourable expulsion from the SIPs, he feels compelled to get word to his ex-employers. To this effect, they (together with Aaron and Cassandra) manage to steal a space craft and get off planet.
Incidentally, Aaron IS Elvis (if you hadn't guessed it already thankyouverymuch). He has been routinely abducted by aliens almost every night since his alleged death, who act as his agents, booking gigs throughout the galaxy and catering to the huge interstellar fan base. Naturally this gruelling schedule has left him a mere shadow of his former self. Furthermore, he is aware of all this, but the sheer absurdity of it all leads him to the conclusion that he is delusional, and so he doesn't actually believe that he is Elvis. All of this WILL be on the exam!
Anyway, Bug and Stump et al find their way to SIP HQ (after many hilarious escapades and high jinx) only to finally realise that the Commanding Officer who gave Stump his last mission is in fact a double agent working for the Illuminatum. In fact, he is one of the Chief Illuminati. Sound silly? Well, not when you consider that he is in fact a multiple personality kinda guy, who's SIP persona isn't aware of the existence of his Illuminati side. You see, SIP had for a great while been suffering horrible losses, being thwarted in their every move by the Illuminati. It was surmised that there was a mole in the SIPs. Stump's mission (yes, he is still a SIP) was to infiltrate the Illuminati under the cover of a disgraced SIP, and find the leak. However the mission was known only to Stump, his boss, and therefore to the informer himself. This is why most of Stump's work is sabotaged.
Wow, I'm amazed this is all coming back to me!
Turns out that Stump bumping into Bug was in fact engineered by the Illuminati. You see, Bug is actually an Illuminati agent, though he has no idea of this. He has been conditioned to make Stumps mission as difficult as possible whilst make everything look incidental.
In the second part which is a three issue story and incidentally has been written by Mark and I already and pencilled (beautifully I might add) by Chris Wahl, and currently residing in parts in the bottom of my drawer as well as in Mark's - Bug and Stump somehow have lost Aaron and Cassandra, and find themselves in the Illuminati HQ located on a planet. They hook up with a group of people called The Jigsaw. These guys are actually failed experiments by the Illuminati to create servile portals. As a result of the research, they can no longer exist in one universe at once, but rather in two (or maybe more). So bits and pieces of them are constantly popping into and out of existence. These guys help save Bug, who in a monumental cockup earlier in the piece, gets caught by the Illuminatum, who use some sort of conditioning device to turn him into a more active (and talented) agent. In a scene pre-dating the Matrix by several years, Bug instantly knows how to fight like a Karate Master, how to use any kind of weapon, and he develops a great love for the Illuminatum as well as a burning hatred of all SIPs, Stump included. They try to reverse the programming done by the Conditioning Device. After a modicum of success, they infiltrate the base once again, only to have Bug abducted by forces from the Universe of Order 3 hell bent on returning Bug to their universe so that he can sign about 100 years worth of release forms.
And that's about it.
