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Dancer/Non-Visionary Special Slightly-After-Easter Edition #3: After Dark in off-Central Park - the version with the line spacing in it Now I remember why I decided not to post here till the board was fixed! Read this one, please. was made by the Hooded Hood on 4/24/2003 at 6:30:31 AM. It was made in response to Dancer/Non-Visionary Special Slightly-After-Easter Edition #3: After Dark in Off-Central Park posted by The Hooded Hood on 4/24/2003 at 6:25:18 AM.

Dancer/Non-Visionary Special Slightly-After-Easter Edition #3

Author’s Note: Since I have been blackmailed into contributing to Dancer’s latest narrative, I thought it might be fun to try doing a story using some characters I haven’t written before much or at all. I hope the owners of said characters don’t mind me borrowing them to plunge them into life-and-death games of destiny. I hope this impromptu contribution doesn’t affect Visionary’s forthcoming main-arc chapter either. I’ve tried hard to pass the ball forward. And now the world need never know the story of Ms Russell and the Blanket, right, Shep?

_______


The young man carried a briefcase, and his red and grey tie was loosely knotted around his pinstriped shirt. He moved with the worried pace of somebody who has to somehow balance the Hakimoto budget projections by 9am tomorrow. He took a short cut through Off-Central Park just after the sun went down.

The vampire golfers were getting very hungry, lurking by the Jarvis memorial waiting for breakfast. They leapt out as one, their five irons at the ready. First they’d club the victim to semi-consciousness, then pin him to the ground with their tees, and then do bloody things to him with their trenching tools.

Except it didn’t go like that. As Binky went in with his club, the young man caught the blow with the flat of his briefcase, whirled round, and kicked the vampire into the rhododendrons. And nobody likes being kicked in the rhododendrons.

“Get him!” shouted the Colonel, waving his Greens Etiquette Rulebook for emphasis. The golfer vampires surged forwards.

“You think you have me outnumbered,” the young man shouted, “but I will teach you to count differently!” Then he powered Mort into the fountain. Vampires don’t do well with running water.

“What he just said didn’t make any sense at all,” Herb complained, fending off a head-blow from the briefcase. “And is it just me, or do his lips move out of synch when he’s speaking?”

The young man pulled an unfeasibly large wakizushi from beneath his coat. The sword was curved and wickedly sharp, and he demonstrated it by taking off Josh’s head.

“My caddy!” growled the Colonel. “D’you have any idea how hard it is to get good caddies?”

“Now you’re in trouble!” the young man cried, although his lips were saying something different. He caught Mort and Herb as they lunged from behind by raiding both his fists backwards above his shoulders, then he ran up the side of the Jarvis monument, somersaulted over the vampires, and dusted them from behind.

“What? What are you?” the Colonel gasped as he too felt the blade penetrate his chest.

“You should never have attacked… the Ninja Accountant!” shouted the young man as the Colonel burst into air pollution.

And then four creatures in shining white robes appeared all around the victorious ninja, blasted him with rays of pure white force until he fell unconscious, picked him up, and vanished.

“Now that was probably the sixth weirdest thing I’ve ever seen,” noted Indiana Gnome from the bushes.

“Really?” Gunthar, his gargoyle companion checked. “So you’d rate it weirder than the exploding chimney sweep plague of Newcastle-upon-Tyne?”

“Well, maybe the seventh weirdest, then,” Indiana admitted. “But it was damned weird.”

“Is three exploding chimney sweeps really a plague?” a gravely voice from the shadows asked. “I’d have said it was just a minor infection.”

Gunthar and Indy swung round quickly, the gargoyle’s stony wings spreading in a defensive arc, ready for trouble. When they saw the speaker, they knew they were going to get it.

“A troll!” hissed Indiana Gnome. “A big one. I didn’t think there were any of your kind left outside the Mythlands.”

“I’m not here to fight you,” Wangmundo told them, assessing the enchanted warrior of stone who loomed right up to the middle of the troll’s chest, and the gnome that loomed up to his kneecap. “I haven’t eaten a gnome for centuries. The bits get in my teeth. Besides, you want another one half an hour later.”

“Are you behind the weirdness that’s going on in Paradopolis?” Gunthar demanded. “Is this some kind of evil trollish plan?”

“No,” said Wangmundo patiently. “A typical evil trollish plan is to hide under a bridge and jump out on goats. One of my typical plans is for a quiet evening in with a good book, and maybe a game of solo whist. I’m just here trying to find out what’s happened, like you are.”

“Why should we believe a troll?” Indy demanded. “You don’t have the best, how can I put this, the best safety record.”

“Look, if you know anything about trolls, you know we hate high magics – of the sort your granite friend there reeks of, by the way. Some sort of curse-geas? Thought so. Anyway, given the current high weirdness that’s preventing anyone from seeing any of us, or any of us from interacting with ordinary humans in any way, I thought perhaps we should pool our knowledge. It shouldn’t take long.”

“He’s right about the humans,” Gunthar admitted. “I mean, I know we’re good at hiding, but for the last twenty-four hours nobody has even given us a second glance. And then the vampires…”

“What about the vampires?” Wangmundo checked.

“The vampires are going slightly nuts,” Indy reported. “Hunger-insane. Whenever they try to feed on a human, they pass right through. Mortals can’t see them at all. They can’t see us any more. And none of us can interact with the human world.”

Wangmundo thought wistfully of the illuminated copy of La Morte D’Arthur that awaited him back in his Municipal Library lair; a book he could no longer touch. “Somebody is doing something very wrong. The humans have changed and they don’t even realise it. All of their silly super-heroes have ceased to be, for example. Well, nearly all of them. The ones that are borderline…”

“Like that, um, Ninja Accountant,” reasoned Indiana.

“Yes, anyone that can still interact with both worlds is being taken.”

“Those golf vampires were so pleased to find some prey who could actually see them that they never stopped to think why he could see them,” mused Gunthar. “And then those… angel things came and got him.”

“They’re called Acolytes,” another mysterious voice from the shadows explained. “They serve as, well wing-men, for a greater power. They’re being sent out to collect and abduct beings that can still interact between the mortal world and ours.”

Gunthar scented the undead even as it shifted, a compound of ancient flesh, ancient grave-soil, ancient books, and strangely of ancient carpet slippers. “A ghoul!” he hissed.

“He’s the Abyssal Greye, of the clan of Scholar-Ghouls beneath All Saints, Gothametropolis,” introduced Wangmundo. “He… knows stuff.”

“Good evening, Gunthar. Good evening, Indiana,” Greye nodded politely. He looked like a 1950’s college professor in a ragged dressing gown, or at least like a 1950’s college professor would look if he’d been buried in the back yard for a couple of weeks by irate students who’d had one pop quiz too many. “I must ask you to overcome your racial prejudices for the moment and join our little think tank.”

“I prefer not to have my brain eaten right now, thank you very much,” Indy answered quickly, glancing around for the rest of the pack. One ghoul was easy enough to take down. A well-organised coven of ghouls, backed up by a powerful troll, was a much more serious matter.

“Our academy only adds brains of the finest quality,” the Abyssal Greye assured him. “You have nothing to worry about.”

“Hey!”

“What?” Gunthar hissed, nudging his little friend. “Now you’re gonna argue that you brain’s good enough to eat?”

“Since Wangmundo brought the problem to our attention we have been trying to work out what strange enchantment the mortals have fallen under,” the Abyssal Greye explained, adopting the pose of a lecturer. “We have traced the reality shift back to some kind of interdimensional upheaval in the so-called Happy Place, and the main cause probably goes back to the mayor of Gothamteropolis. But mainly we are concerned with what has come afterwards. A minor consequence of the disruption appears to have cascaded catastrophically.”

“The ten word answer?” Wangmundo prompted.

“Magic and super-science have been eliminated from the Parodyverse,” summarised the Ghoul-King.

“So we’re… edited out?” Indy worried.

“Yes,” Wangmundo agreed. “And soon we shall fade from reality altogether, unless we find some way of reversing the effect.”

“This doesn’t have anything to do with the big black void in the sky in the shape of a letter A, does it?” Gunthar wondered. Gargoyles have a lot of time to stare at the stars.

“Only inasmuch as it is a sign of the coming of a great power that doesn’t have benevolent intention for the world,” Greye shrugged. “Right now though we have to do something to try and reverse the changes.”

“By working together, gnome, gargoyle, troll, and ghoul,” Indy frowned. “What is this, a supernatural buddy movie?”

“It’s a sign of how desperate we are,” Wangmundo pointed out. “Anyway, all we need to do is find one of these people who still exists in both sides of the separated reality, the mundane and the supernatural, save him, her, or it from the Acolytes, then use that link to alert somebody who can do something about it.”

Gunthar wasn’t convinced. “And where exactly do we find somebody who can sort this out? Or somebody that exists in both worlds, for that matter?”

“Well, the Scholar-Ghouls’ divinations suggest there’s three waitresses in Parodiopolis who could affect reality given the right nudge,” the Abyssal Greye explained. “And as for the other…”

There was the sound of combat from down by the boating lake.

“I do so love summoning magics,” he sighed.

“I hate magic and all who use it,” growled Wangmundo, knuckling himself up and streaking towards the combat. “Come on!”

Gunthar looked down at Indy for a lead.

“What, we’re going to let the troll take all the credit?” the gnome shrugged.

Indiana and Gunthar sped down the hill to join Wangmundo in rescuing Dead Boy from the Acolytes of the Apostate.

To be continued