Gang of the Green Gorilla
The Gang of the Green Gorilla, (PROSE: The Green Gorillas, etc.) occasionally the Gang of the Green Gorillas, (PROSE: The Salamandyrs and the Automata) were one of the Strangely-Colored Secret Societies of the Prime Universe, notable for their long-standing enmity with the Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids. They were made up of literal green-coloured, sapient gorillas whose principal purpose in life was to get the rest of the universe to believe that green was a normal colour for a gorilla to be.
History
Origins
They were among the creatures genetically engineered by Professor Scarper of the First Horde using a mutagen initially developed to create creatures loyal to the Horde. Even after the Horde stopped funding Scarper's experiments, erasing all knowledge of themselves from him or them, this meant that Scarper's creations were compelled to form Strangely-Colored Secret Societies of their own. The gorillas followed this pattern, arranging themselves into the Gang of the Green Gorilla. (PROSE: The Strangely-Colored Secret Societies) Having settled on making everyone believe that all gorillas were green as a goal, they adapted brainwashing technology to artificially instill this belief in ordinary people, (PROSE: The Green Gorillas) creating the Brain-Washing Machines. (PROSE: The Book of Evil)
First encounters with the Cupids
As early as 1978, the Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids encountered evidence of the Gang's activity in the form of people randomly abducted by the Crew on the Prime Earth who showed signs of Gorilla brainwashing. However, being unaware of the Gang's existence at the time, the Cupids didn't know what to make of them and released them back on Earth without reversing the conditioning.
In December 1986, a group of Green Gorillas took control of the town supermarket of Vanityville, emptying it of all Christmas paraphernalia and instead forcing the shopping customers to buy their green-gorilla merchandise, at gunpoint. They encountered a group of Clockwork Cherubs of the Crew, led by Commander Amadeo-378, by coincidence. Noting the affected humans' unhappiness, the Cupids decided the Gang's aims seemed oppose to their own and decided to defeat them, kicking off the Skirmish at the Vanityville Supermarket. The Cupids were victorious, although the Gang's scientists subsequently learned how to reverse Cupid romanticisation, (PROSE: The Green Gorillas) inventing a machine simply known as the Cupid Love Reverser. The Crew effectively interpreted this as a declaration of war. (PROSE: The Book of Evil)
Ongoing hostilities
Thereafter, the Cupids went on to oppose the Gorillas on many occasions, “from the depths of the Amazonian jungle to the very North Pole”. (PROSE: The Green Gorillas) When they received their first letter from the Society of the Rhyming Dove, the Cupids briefly feared it was a trick from the Green Gorillas, trying to lure them into a trap. (PROSE: The Society of the Rhyming Dove)
When the Mélange of the Mauve Muskrat began accumulating financial resources under the guise of “MuskCo”, they bought out and raised the prices on the companies which provided the Gorillas with the chemicals they needed to power their brainwashing rays. Deciding was enough was enough, a large force of Gorillas attacked the Muskrats' headquarters around the same time that a team of Scarlet Wings Cupids attacked them for much of the same reason (as the Muskrats had also bought the lumber mill which supplied the Cupids with the wood they needed to craft their arrows). After the Gorillas forced the smaller and less numerous Muskrats to sign over ownership of the chemicals, the Cupids ambushed a few of the Gorillas and romanticised them, thus getting them to be temporarily loyal to the Crew and further intimidate the Muskrats into giving the Crew control of the lumber mill. (PROSE: The Mélange of the Mauve Muskrat)
At some point prior to 2019, the Gang of the Green Gorilla tried to use the custom of trick-or-treating to their advantage, going door to door in the Prime Universeon Halloween under the guise of being costumed children and then brainwashing everyone who answered the door. However, they were foiled by the Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids. As a result, they weren't very fond of the holiday anymore by 2019 — nor indeed of most other popular holidays, “generally for reasons quite similar to this”. They did try to organise their own Halloween party in 2018, but it got out of hand, several brainwashing machines were destroyed, and the Gangs forbade further celebration once and for all as a result. (PROSE: The Ghosts and the Machine)
A fraught 2019
When the Faction of the Fooling Fish fraudulently edited their own Cupid Fact File in 2019, they claimed to be “the greatest of mysterious organizations, better than those marauding magpies or gangrenous gorillas”. (PROSE: The Faction of the Fooling Fish)
At some point, one Green Gorilla was captured by the Drove of the Database-Compiling Dromedaries and imprisoned at Research Laboratory 6. When Pessimist-242 was captured, he ended up in a cell opposite to the Gorilla's, and the Gorilla managed to convince the Cupid to aid in a Laboratory-wide escape plan, putting his intelligence and his ability to highjack the electric locks to good use. The plan ended up succeeding, with Pessimist parting ways with the other escapees just after the Gorilla used his superior strength to pry open the ceiling hatch that would allow the rest to escape the building. (PROSE: Pessimist and the Dromedaries)
By the time Bibliophile-962 wrote the Gorillas' entry in the Book of Evil shortly thereafter, one of their “more recent” inventions was “the Cupid Sandwich Stealer, designed to steal the sandwich of any passing Cupid” (apparently a “response” to the Cupids' own creation of the Gorilla Fur Dyer). The Gorillas had pride of place in the Book, constituting the second entry, immediately after Director Darius. (PROSE: The Book of Evil)
When the Cupid Suggestion Box was put up for public use in the Cupid Homeworld by the Copper-Colored Council of Elders, Celebration-665 left a suggestion to invite the Gang of the Green Gorilla, who he'd heard were “real party animals”, for a party in the Homeworld — with no apparent awareness that the Gorillas were sworn enemies of the Crew. The Elders naturally rejected the idea. (PROSE: The Cupid Suggestion Box)
Conspiracy-1263 once travelled to the Prime Earth just to accuse the Green Gorillas, to their faces, of being “a bunch of fakes in gorilla suits”. Angered, the Gorillas captured the Cupid and left him tied up in a rack of carnival prizes, from which other Cupids had to rescue him. This incident made the headline of Issue 1034 of The Cupid Courier. (PROSE: Conspiracy-1263 Publicly Accuses the Gang of the Green Gorillas)
On Halloween 2019, the Gorillas were skulking listlessly in their secret headquarters when their doorbell was rung by what turned out to be the Great Ghost's legion, who possessed all the Gorillas, having finally found enough sturdy vessels for all their numbers. However, the ghosts were soon foiled by Madame Tarsa and the Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids, with Tarsa using her Conjuring Gloves for the Magically Inept to temporarily transform the possessed ghosts and other vessels into harmless objects, soon forcing the spirits to abandon them to fight more effectively. (PROSE: The Ghosts and the Machine)
A wanted poster for a specific Green Gorilla was printed on Page 2 of Issue #1056 of The Cupid Courier. A note specified that it really was this specific Gorilla who was wanted, but gave no details as to why, nor any specific name or distinguishing feature by which to identify the Gorilla save its pretty standard-looking picture. (PROSE: The Cupid Parliament Destroyed?)
The Cupids in attendance at the first screening of The Death? Planned It! and The Moonbeams were described by a connected Incident Report as relishing the escapism because they were “so tired by their work of traveling the multiverse and thwarting green gorillas”. (PROSE: Plagiarism of the SavageMen)
The Gang were one of the groups to whom Darius sent invitations to Manik via the Interdimensional Post Office in an effort to gather all his foes in one place and get his revenge on them. He had failed to account, however, for the Gorillas' complete lack of interdimensional engineering knowledge; they didn't even recognise the dimensional coordinates in the margins of the invitation for what they were, and misinterpreted the plain text of the invitation as telling them to go to Antarctica. However, this ended up working out for them, as they stumbled upon an abandoned research centre which they adopted as their new base, replacing the dilapidated building on the edge of the city that they'd been using so far. (PROSE: The Frost King's Treasure)
