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Post By Dancer via Visionary, slipping it in before he hits the road Sun Jul 25, 2004 at 06:43:21 pm EDT |
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Dancer/spiffy Unexpected Additional Chapter That Just Insisted It Be Told Special #14 :-) : You Wouldn’t Get Me To Take Payment in Hog-Groats If You Glued Them To Your Sister and Dropped Her In a Vat of Frimblesauce! | |
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Dancer/spiffy Unexpected Additional Chapter That Just Insisted It Be Told Special #14
: You Wouldn’t Get Me To Take Payment in Hog-Groats If You Glued Them To Your Sister and Dropped Her In a Vat of Frimblesauce![The Scene: Al. B Harper’s laboratory in his log cabin in the woods. Because all scientists have laboratories in log cabins in the woods.]
Al B: Ah, there you are. Come in. I promise not to call you gentle readers. But I need to explain a few things to you. Try not to track in squirrel poo. That’s one of the real hazards of having a laboratory in a log cabin in the woods. But you probably know that.
Al B again: Now you’re probably wondering why I called you all here today. After all, I haven’t actually appeared in this story so far. And all the action is taking place over in Tombstone, Arizona, where the Probability Dancer has just found her little sister and spiffy haven’t eloped but are caught up in an arms-deal gone wrong. But before you get over there for the climax – and we’re not talking in the Lisa date sense here – we need to review a little bit about Dancer and her powers.
Al B some more: You see, Dancer has the ability to convert motion into probability. I have had to take many, many videotapes of her to ascertain this. That is why I was taping her, yes. Any tapes Flapjack made were not part of this experiment, and form a MAX-line feature all of their own.
Al B yet again: So Dancer manipulates probabilities, on a conscious or unconscious level. And the stronger she feels about something, the more she changes probabilities. And since she feels pretty strongly about damn near everything that explains so much, including why she hasn’t yet been stabbed to death by one of her colleagues for dragging them into her harebrained saving-the-planet schemes. Right now Dancer is feeling particularly strongly about her little sister and spiffy and the hundreds of super-villains and evil masterminds trying to grab the stolen Deathworld weapons packages. So her power is pushing a little deeper than usual, even through time and space, as we’ll see in our flashback in just a few moments.
Al B. for the last time: All clear? Does that answer your question?
Girl Scout: Um, not really. Do you want this box of cookies or not?
[The Scene: A big outer-space bar beside the killing arena on Battleworld, a free-floating planet of mercenaries, killers, sadists, and media people. This is back just before Battleworld made it big and appeared in Untold Tales, because it got blown up then. In this scene Battleworld is still waiting to make it into the big time, and making ends meet by hiring its locations out as spaceport cantinas and giant-bug-filled combat pits and stuff. It’s a rough tough place, full of tyrants and conquerors and implausibly-prostheticed aliens and zaftig slavegirls. And one Librarian.]
The Librarian: Excuse me? Mr Urko Slaughter-the-wounded-and-eat-their-spleens Gutchewer?
Urko Slaughter-the-wounded-and-eat-their-spleens Gutchewer: Who wants to know? Beat it, punk. I’m in the middle of a deal here.
Mocko Sockslimer, Arms-Dealing Middleman: A deal? You call offering twenty zlavnards a deal?
The Librarian: I wanted to know, on account of you having borrowed a book from my Moon Public Library which is now overdue.
Urko Slaughter-the-wounded-and-eat-their-spleens Gutchewer: Me? Nah. Can’t read. Fifty-five hog-groats, Mocko, and not a flammit more.
Mocko: Hog-groats? The bottom’s fallen right out of hog-groats. You wouldn’t get me to take payment in hog-groats if you glued them to your sister and dropped her in a vat of frimblesauce!
Urko Slaughter-the-wounded-and-eat-their-spleens Gutchewer: Are you insulting my sister? You know she’s allergic to frimblesauce. Okay, I’ll give you nine metric glambons and I’ll let you live.
The Librarian: The rules of the library are quite strict, I’m afraid, Mr Gutchewer. I’m afraid there’s going to be a fine, and a sliding scale of penalties if you don’t return The Space-Traveller’s Guide To Being Confident With Girls right away.
Mocko: The what? He borrowed a book on what?
Urko Slaughter-the-wounded-and-eat-their-spleens Gutchewer, blushing: I didn’t do nothing! I never borrowed no book! Stop giggling!
Mocko: Is that one of the lines from The Space Traveller’s Guide to Being Confident With Girls?
The Librarian, concentrating for a moment: No. No that one is all his own. And by the way, I think you two are just making up currencies. Except the glambons, and there are fourteen point three ozmolorcs to the glambon so you’re probably way off there too.
Urko and Mocko: Who are you again? And why shouldn’t we kill you?
The Librarian: Because the sliding scale of fines goes up considerably if the book is damaged, and even more if the Librarian is. You wouldn’t like me when I’m slightly foxed.
Urko Slaughter-the-wounded-and-eat-their-spleens Gutchewer: Look, you booky squirt, you’re interrupting the deal of a lifetime. I’m negotiating to pick up some primo arms syphoned from Dark Thugos’ personal cache, a whole bunch of planet-busting killing kit. I don’t have time for this. Get lost or die.
Mocko: But explain that glambon to ozmolorc exchange rate thing again before you go.
The Librarian: I really don’t think I need to. Even as we speak the Lair Legion are fighting your evil master in the planetary reactor core. And there’s enough bad science fiction novels at the Moon Public library for everyone to know what that means.
Urko: It means it’s not good? The Lair who?
The Librarian: It means that I need that book back from you in the next fifty-five seconds please.
Urko: That does it! They don’t call me Urko Slaughter-the-wounded-and-eat-their-spleens Gutchewer for nothing, you know.
The Librarian: They certainly don’t call you that quickly.
Urko: Get outta my way. I’m takin’ the arms and running for it! *smashes Mocko to the ground, grabs the grav-trolley and starts to leave*
Mocko, dazed and angry: Nobody steals from Mocko Sockslimer and lives! I’m activating the suicide codes in that weaponry. The first time anyone tries to use it the whole consignment goes nuclear.
The Librarian: Ten seconds left. Have you met my disturbingly psychotic robot A.L.F.RED?
A.L.F.RED: I’m going to stamp your card.
Battleworld: BOOOOOMMM!!!!
[Dancer would like to assure people that nobody really got hurt when the war planet was blown into tiny fragments of radioactive dust. She’d like to but she’s not going to. But on the bright side, the Librarian did get his book back. And look, there’s that consignment of pre-armed Deathworld weaponry spiralling through space, getting picked up by SPUD before being stolen by HERPES before being stolen by Roddy O’Brady and you know the rest, right? But NOW we also know it’s primed to go off in a massive nuclear holocaust if anybody actually uses it.
Which brings us back to our showdown in Tombstone…]
spiffy: Back everybody. We’ve got Deathworld weaponry and we’re not afraid to use it.
Kerry: They’re still coming, Mark. Fire a warning shot!
[To be concluded, in Dancer/spiffy This Started So Long Ago spiffy Used To Read These Special #15
: Please Tell Me That This Is All a Nightmare and When I Wake Up I’ll Be In the Shower. Without Kerry.
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