The Book Cage Episode 72: The Hardy Boys Casefiles ™️ #65: The Phoenix Equation #2: No Mercy
Time to continue to unravel the secrets of the Phoenix Equation. An equation we have not yet been introduced to. Fenton Hardy is dead. I mean, not really because we've read passed this, but just pretend. On to Sweden, and spy shenanigans after the poacher shenanigans from last time. Why are all of the books I have in this series British? Find out this Friday, 5pm eastern.
Still holding out hope this is one of Fenton's pranks
He's quite the famous prankster
Based on that one prank that one time
Threatening your children with a firearm while in disguise is the kind of prank that you only pull when you don't fully mean it as a prank
Under an hour until The Hardy Boys Casefiles ™️ #65: The Phoenix Equation #2: No Mercy. Here is the preview, which seems more exciting than the cover indicates
This one was not nearly as possible with the British children
Tag yourself. I'm "SOHAM"
MAMOB
EMOB
If BUTT is available, what other choice is there.
I'll be a few minutes late to the read on account of needing to go buy drugs
I'm glad I remembered to pick up some drugs yesterday.
I don't know how I feel about performance enhancing drugs
Time to begin the process
Let's settle down, ghostwriter.
Starting somber and horny. A rare combination
Frank and Joe tie on their matching red headbands and rack the slides on their machine guns.
Basically
HARDYS DEMAND VENGEANCE
I'm not hoping but it would be awesome if this became like an 80's revenge movie.
Frank and Joe raiding a strip club, Frank and Joe ramping a muscle car while firing uzis.
Welcome back Ranger Pope
The Full Continuity is new and strange. Usually side characters just disappear into the void.
Frank Hardy is a loose cannon cop on the edge
Frank is like five minutes from putting a gun to Saids' head and pulling the trigger only for Said to find it was empty.........this time.
Frank is done pretending to have human emotions.
It's all blowtorches and steel wire now
Said might become more familiar than he'd like with the taste of gunmetal.
Sorry for the delay, I was playing with a wiggly puppy.
Pupper delays are inevitable and delightful.
JELLICOOOOOOOOOOEEEE!
Discord thought those two pictures were over 100MB together
Joe thinks "Jellicoe" means "sandwich"
SKI GUNFIGHT?!
Say, aren't you the guy who, uh...my wife?
Everyone heard that Joe, you were NOT whispering.
Frank is deaf in that ear anyway from all the explosions.
Now it's personal
You'd be stupid not to. It pays for itself the first month!
JELLICOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOEEEE!
Meanwhile, the elephant's family is struggling to get funeral arrangements made
The elephants have to plan their 500 mile walk to their ancestral burial grounds and which bones to take.
Assuming they can find any.
Aw now Im sad.
JOE SMASH
Turns out Discord thinks any two files are larger than 100 MB
Ranger Rawji was the gritty early draft of Ranger Rick
Joe this is why you keep a knife.
holy shit, Joe remembered Iola's name
You could have slid a blade between his ribs and been ten feet away before anyone even realized he'd been stabbed.
That's a good sign
Not in the part of New England I'm from.
Very consistent tone
Frank and Joe firing M-16's out of a gondola. Frank and Joe ducking shurikens from Swiss ninjas.
Frank and Joe seducing and forgetting about spy babes
One dead human is a really fair price to end all poaching in Kenya.
"I must take the law into my own hands."
...
"Thank you, and here's your tip. These are very nice rooms, I must say"
Frank and Joe cauterizing their gunshot wounds with gunpowder.
VENGEANCE WILL BE OURS! Please don't fold the towels while we're gone. They're still clean.
Frank and Joe ordering room service and watching French porn.
OOOOOOOOOOHHHHHHH
WE HAVE DECLARED A BLOOD VENDETTA, MOM
"Also, Dad's dead"
"Don't worry Mom, your teen sons will avenge your husband."
"Also don't worry about getting his body, there wasn't one."
"Oh did you not get told that?"
"Yeah we get some real savings on caskets."
"Fuck off, Mom, I'm a high school junior and I shall have my revenge!"
"What do you mean 'you already heard this joke'?"
"The small placard pays for itself, really."
Barbarella Hardy always knew when she married a Fed that one day he would die in an explosion in Kenya.
So it took the death of her husband for her to think her children might die
NO MERCY, NO RULES
Yes. YES.
Nah, just to care.
A MURDER OF HARDYS
Momma Hardy finally heard something through the valium haze
NO RULES! But smalltalk shall remain
Please call in Chet. Pleeeeeaaaase call in Chet.
So, nothing has changed then
Chet is going to dig the local cuisine while the Hardys fulfill their blood debt.
Chet arrives with a bare, muscular chest with crossed bandoliers and a belt of hand grenades.
And the boys are like "What the fuck Chet, we thought you were fat!?"
Chet walking around cramming pickled herring into his face.
This is when they found out that both of them are Jason Bourne.
"FAT WITH VIOLENCE!"
More bald men, more!
At least the government is wasting all their bald men on this
They think that until Chet cracks a man's skull open with a car door.
"Human skull isn't that different from a walnut."
"What...are you, Chet?"
You boys are important material witnesses. But, you can still fuck around in Sweden for now
ICE Capades 2: The Stockholm Gambit
Oh cool another Customs agent.........Not like the last one was dirty and blew up their dad.
And I dont think Customs agents get to tell people where to vacation, Frank. Wink. Wink.
You can just leave a country, white males. It's fine.
"You Americans watch too many spy movies..."
"Just like me!"
Sweden is very fine to VACATION to in the summer, Frank and Joe.
This driver rules
Right?
No questions, just accelleration.
"You two are clearly fucking with me, but I'm down with it"
This cab driver was waiting for someone to say that his entire career
Everyone drives a Volvo 240DL, I assure you it's a 3-minute acceleration to 60.
I know from personal CT yuppie experience.
Zero to sixty while you wait
How could I forget such a memorable name?
Those unmatched wire services
"How could we forget this guy who's name has never come up once!"
You could count to sixty faster.
Redhead check: does Mike Ryan count?
It'll do. For now.
Yeah lets say "provisional."
That commodore is going to explode, isn't it?
"Tell me who to kill"
It didnt describe him as "willowy" or "statuesque" so........
Oh fuck yes. Are they assembling a team?
Mike opens up a hidden panel behind the stacks of newspapers, revealing a massive arsenal
Frank and Joe firing RPGs out the back of a truck Mark is driving.
Go orsenb yourself
The Swedish Chef is going to be the wild card in their group
Prediction time: what was wrong?
He's got knives.
The taxi isn't a taxi
Sniper is drawing a bead on one of them.
Or a car bomb goes off.
Car bomb would be very on brand
Or a rando shoots at them with a pistol and runs off.
Winner, winner, chicken dinner
Hahahahah nice.
It's fine tho, Joe took it in the plate.
Tho how rad would it be if Joe died and Frank had to get DOUBLE VENGEANCE!
Anticlimax achieved
Lol what the fuck did Joe have in his backpack that stopped a bullet from a rifle?
Wow. Shitty sniper.
I DECLARED T-SHIRT VENGEANCE
Carrie
I'm not really sure what the fuck actually happened there
Joe wears t-shirts made of kevlar
The hell kind of rifle did this sniper use that some wadded up shirts stopped it?!
Nerf gun
Oh shit it was a .22!
IT WAS THE MOSSAD!
One of those wadded up kevlar vests.
Did they know what they were doing, Frank?
Fortunately the sniper was a dipshit and used a laser sight for no reason.
And no shit a mugger wouldn't use a sniper rifle
How the fuck would that even work
"Give me your money or I'll make a cat go crazy"
"I'll ruin your vision, temporarily!"
Get up on a billboard and pick off people who wander down an alley, the cop's AI can't reach you on the billboard so you can wait up there til the stars go away, and then go scoop up the wallets lying around.
Very curious what Mike told the organizers of this fancy party to get these foreign teens in
by law, one of these exclamations every 100 pages
Mike showed the organizers pictures of their children at school
I'm guessing this has happened at least five times already in these books
It happens roughly every third book
When you live the fast paced lifestyle of a Hardy Boy, you can barely remember all the black tie affairs you attend.
Yeah, but they all end with Joe being concussed and losing his memory of the event
Very interesting. Our dad is dead
Maybe Joe is like Kazuki Fujita and his head is indestructible but his brain is mush
It's all a blur of Frank making awkward attempts at small talk and Joe having to be physically restrained from eating a waiter.
Bunch of owls in these protestors
"Anyway, any of these locations would be a great setting for a shootout with lots of doves flying around. Just so you know."
Eleonara Grunewald is a name you give to either a smoking hot duchess or a withered wraith covered in ancient jewels
This is the scenery porn part of the movie, shortly before Frank and Joe ride a motorcycle thru a priceless cultural landmark firing shotguns.
I thought it was the villain in Fantastic Beasts.
Grunewald and Khoo, this fall on CBS
If ts not the surname of at least one Wolfenstein boss I would be surprised.
Phoenix rising from the ashes of the innocent is too metal to be a protest
It's bothering me more than it probably should that they keep using "blond" for the ladies
Don't try to split the difference, ghost writer. I said one or the other
This woman is tall, elegant, and sharp
Just say slender, ghostwriter
I KNOW YOU WANT TO
Ashes of the Innocent is a great band name.
It's code. They're all dudes. Blonde is the feminine version
"She had a face like a hatchet and a body like also a hatchet."
"In fact, Frank and Joe were in a wood shed talking to an axe."
"In Detroit."
Target acquired
Target acquired?
"None of any of this was real, Frank and Joe are hallucinating from ergot poisoning."
The fashion model cheekbones, sadly, are being worn as earrings
Wait.........ANOTHER woman? Like........what other woman?
Sure. Humans think like this.
"Please hide your erection, please"
Most women seem to think Joe is a dork, his exploded GF must have been either attracted to that or had real low self esteem.
I mean, they do. But anyone that thinks that way has a meat box in the basement
That's where they keep the other women Joe 'charmed'.
Uh-oh thought Joe, Frank has seduced yet another middle aged graying father with his charismatic charm.
If daddy Khoo is Thai, I have some doubts about how similar his eyes are to his green-eyed daughters
Oh they don't mean color.
Murderbot might be on the fratricide path
DO IT
That's what this has all been leading to.
It's the only way it can end.
Now Frank. He could be pumping her for information.
SLEEENDERRRR
Linska is looking for a Mr. Baggins of the Shire
They all but say "Linska looked like a total nerd."
Laser gun?
Like a radar gun?
Frank remembers shootings very differently.
Because otherwise, that's an incredibly shitty laser
Ghost writer momentarily forgot he was writing a mystery and not sci-fi.
I guess that's what they're calling a sniper with a laser sight
Rutger is so lonely
"Please come view my military secrets, teen!"
"I have Fresca!"
"And Mario Party!"
When a European man asks you to visit his laboratory, you say no.
Just no.
At best, you are going to get involved in some wacky hijinks when his sister barges in to fuck with shit, and at worst you are going to be sewn into a meat golem.
It really depends on the lighting
Frank is the most naive man in the world
Its even worse if you bring a sibling, thats how you end up cut down the middle and sewn together.
Maybe this is prejudicial, but when you just left Kenya after dealing with a bunch of smugglers. Maybe don't trust the poorly dressed, sweaty Middle-eastern guy at the fancy Swedish party
Frank, do they automatically speak English in Sweden?
"Why of course, mysterious stranger, I will of course walk into the hedge maze with you where no witnesses can see. Wilikers, that gun looks heavy, would you like me to hold it for you?"
What? No!
The red-haired woman doesn't count if she's fake
Great detective work, Frank
47 strikes again!
GASP! That's why there are so many bald men!
Having fun, kids?
Does Sweden have its own Haardy boys?
Sorry, @Horse Boxing Flippant Sausage both of your guesses split the difference.
They did, but Das Haadi Boys ran into the Russian mob and now they're just torsos
Oh wait that was shark
and scooped, too!
Yes, probably should have
I'm catching up, sorry. my friend called.
Frank and Joe team up with Franke and Joseph Haardi for Squared Dragon.
Oh no. The idiot criminals are becoming self-aware
The action in this book is very strange
I mean a good garroting is never to be passed on.
Burst. Crouched. Sprang. Popped. Throbbing.
It's like the writer is trying to communicate something
The real problem is you fucked up so badly that you failed to lock in the wire and pulled, my dude. Very sloppy.
This is why I only assassinate with chainsaws
If I can't kill that teen, I'm killing somebody
Rutger naturally draws gunfire. It's a quirk
I am mad at the world now that I never dated a 19-year-old Swedish-Thai Olympic skier when it was appropriate to do so. Go to hell, Dixon.
Yea-
Wait, "when it was appropriate"?
I also want to run over Swedish tech nerds working for the defense industry. It's natural.
Goddammit, ghostwriter, dove. It's dove. This is the second time
Yeah, this scene needs some doves.
i mean you age out of dating 19 year olds pretty quickly at the very least.
That's fair
I mean if I met one now, it would be pretty creepy that she's younger than my nieces.
You make software for missiles, Rutger.
But counterpoint I was dating 40s in my 20s by preference, so...
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
"I'm just an innocent architect of mass murder!"
Once again, you are my hero
What I'm saying is I will entertain olympic skier offers if they're old enough to drink.
When you get over 30 most 19 year olds are like plants anyway.
Frank wants that blood on his hands
Isn't that a British/American thing?
Eleonara is starting to win me over
I use dove a lot and dreamt
there are some subtler differences that stick around more in the colonies.
That's a good question
Frank goes back for the gun
Frank........you know what you are going to do with that gun.
Hardys being practical? What is this?
Sell it for information on who tried to kill him
Cut to Frank doing a monologue in a mirror, shirtless.
Why are you acting like her involvement is new information
"Are you talking to me, Carrie? I don't see anyone else around, so you must be talking to me."
Frank draws his newly acquired firearm
"Joe. Get the rope."
Frank are you going to just accuse anyone who was in Mombasa for a bit recently?
Next, Frank brutally tortures a group from Doctors Without Borders
Joe's bloodlust has been replaced by regular lust
Which is really the ultimate "fuck you, Dad"