Posted by dull thud on November 25, 2001 at 09:35:50:
In Reply to: The story continues. It's dull thud #6: Sheep go to Heaven. posted by dull thud, Master of the Plummeting Arts. And if you haven't read it, #5 is just down there. *points* on November 25, 2001 at 09:30:19:
dull thud #6.
featuring
Cressida, the Worm Wonder and... Nats again!
Sheep Go To Heaven
Nats leant across the air hockey table and effortlessly went six-nil
ahead. "No, I wouldn’t worry. We get these mad bomber guys all the time."
"And what do you do about them?" thud fired off the puck. At six points to nil, and eight games to nil, he was beginning to seriously doubt whether flight really was the delivery boy’s only power.
"Usually nothing. Most of ‘em are just cranks."
"But how do you tell who’s serious?"
"Generally you wait for an explosion, then you put on CNN."
"Doesn’t seem very proactive."
"Sorry, I didn’t mean it like that. It’s not that we’re blasé about it, not at all. We just prefer to let the police deal with them. If the Lair Legion followed up every mad bomb threat we’d never have any time for actually saving the world. Priorities." The machine gave a series of electronic BLANG noises as Nats scored his seventh and took the game. thud threw up his hands in disgust and they went over to the corner table.
"So it’s a lot of work, is it? Being a Legionnaire?"
"It’s not that bad, no. There were a couple of days last week when nobody tried to reduce the city to rubble, or perform mind-transference experiments on a major public figure, or wake a slumbering Elder beast with dire consequences or that sort of thing. And it’s a good few months since a race of alien aggressors tore a rift in space-time and threatened to enslave the people of Earth and/or plunge us into intergalactic war. I’m enjoying it."
Right on cue, the insistent bleeping of his Legion communicator cut across thud’s jukebox selection - Flint Michigan and the Earthly Remains’ paean to life on the open road Gonna Buy Me A Big-Ass Truck. Nats flipped open the device and read from a text display. He shrugged. "Ahhh, right. Looks like that rift in space-time thing is going off again. I have to go. Thanks for the drink." He stopped in the doorway and spoke over his shoulder. "If anything does happen about your sheep guy, we’re in the book under L. See you around."
thud watched the orange-clad man blur off into the sky. He swilled the ice around in his glass and wondered what to do next. The jukebox switching over to some blippy nonsense made "leave" an attractive option.
"~~I still think you should go look for him,~~" said Cressida.
"But where? We don’t know anything about him." Nats had checked with
E.D.W.I.N., the Lair Mansion computer. There was no record of this Little Bo
Pepys. For that matter, he couldn’t say with certainty whether it was pronounced
peeps or peppis. Cressida, on the other hand, was an expert on
seventeenth-century* English writers, as you might expect
of a psychic tapeworm with the uncanny ability to turn nearby objects into
things that rhyme with them.
*regardless of numerical typos
elsewhere on the board
"~~Use the head. Pepys needs somewhere to hide a stagecoach, right? He needs somewhere to keep two horses and nine sheep, and they’re not the sort of thing you easily overlook in a big city. We’ll just have to root around. Come on, I thought you liked detective books?~~"
"No, I like Raymond Chandler books. Where you can solve the mystery by getting drunk, talking to beautiful ladies and finding random corpses in your office."
"~~And you accused the Legion of not being proactive?~~"
"Hm. Alright then. I was hoping to go buy some music today, but..."
"~~thud, if there’s one thing you don’t need...~~"
"...apart from..."
"~~...yes, apart from that, it’s music. So get to work. And buy me some food while you’re at it.~~"
The gaunt scuzz-rocker stood on the corner and looked around, litter blowing round his ankles. He put in his earphones and walked in the wrong direction for several hours. Then he leapt off tall buildings until he got bored. Eventually he went back home to his dying cacti, his boxes of three-chord party-rock singles on purple vinyl and his bed, which was covered in pieces of drum machine. He couldn’t be bothered clearing it and slept on the floor, where he dreamed of being eaten by a giant sheep with whisky on its breath.
* * *
ye nexte daye
The oldest, largest and most respected department store in Parodopolis is Roslie & Sons. On the ground floor are dozens of perfume and cosmetics concessions. The wealthier women of the city wander around, dabbing things on their wrists or being convinced that this brand-new ultra-modern liposomal gunge formulated and controlled by Laboratoires Tresexpensif really will make them look twenty years younger. With their attention on such important matters, it was a long time before anyone noticed what had wandered through the door. But eventually -
"What on earth..."
"Why is there a..."
"What’s that on its back?"
"What’s that ticking noise?"
"Baa," said the sheep. Then it exploded.
* * *
thud dialled the number. After four rings it clicked into a message
recorded by a voice he recognised but couldn’t place.
It was
Troia, whom he met in a laundrette at the beginning of dt#2. True.
"Hello, you have reached the Lair Legion. If you are currently under threat from a superterrorist force, please press 1. If a large area of your country has been lain waste by a natural disaster, press 2. If a giant monster is levelling your city, please press 3, unless it’s Paris in which case you should call someone who gives a shit. Good luck.
"If you are a supervillain seeking to arrange a grudge match in downtown Parodopolis, press 4, unless it’s with Donar or Foom in which case you might as well call 911 for an ambulance now while you still can. If you’re trying to sell us something, you can bite my lily-white ass and call it pudding, cockwad. Otherwise, please hold."
thud held.
Eventually the infernal muzak stopped and the same voice said "Go."
"Um, hi," said thud. "Is Nats there, please?"
"This isn’t about a grudge match, is it?"
"No, exploding sheep."
Troia sighed. "I’ll put you through."
A brief blast of muzak... no, that’s not right. You can have a brief blast of AC/DC, or of Atari Teenage Riot, or Albert Ayler, or the cannonades of the 1812, because they’ve got balls, you know? A short piece of muzak is less a blast, more a squelch. So there was a slimy, flesh-crawling, worthless squelch of muzak. Then the extension was picked up. "Hello? Nats here."
"Hey. It’s dull thud. How was your alien invasion?"
"Bit lame. Turned out their Hive Mind took on the corporeal form of a forty-foot plate of fettucini, and before we knew what was going on Finny had eaten it." In the background thud heard a room-shaking reptilian belch, followed by a tinkling Xnylonian giggle. "What about your sheep? Any developments?"
"You could say that. A suicide sheep just went off in Roslie’s cosmetics department."
Nats gasped. "Was anyone hurt?"
"Not badly - a Lauder counter got the worst of it - but the whole area reeks of roast mutton and eau de things. My mate at the Trombone says this Little Bo Pepys penned ane miffive to ye edytore, saying there would be more soon. Police baffled, and so on."
"I’ll see you there in ten."
The phone went down.
* * *
As Nats landed outside the cordoned-off department store, he clapped shut his LL communicator.
"Everything alright?" asked thud.
Nats sighed. "More alien stuff. But the Legion can probably cope without me for now. I just hope the aliens don’t look like reindeer this time."
This sailed waaaay over dull thud’s head.
"So what’s the deal?" Nats continued. The heroes ducked under a length of crime-scene tape; fragments of glass crunched underfoot.
"Sheep trots into store, explodes. Apparently it was carrying several pounds of plastic explosive and a time fuse. It’s a miracle no-one was killed."
"Did Pepys show?"
"A whole lot of people saw a man in ludicrous antiquated dress pegging it down an alley. The wig, cloak and everything."
Nats took to the air again, but saw nothing. A team of police dogs failed to pick up Pepys’ scent from his letter - no surprise given the all-pervading, eye-watering miasma of a hundred perfumes. After a while the dogs got bored and started snacking on little gobbets of smouldering sheepflesh.
* * *
Minutes later, at a downtown studio, pneumatic pop muppet Christina Aguilera was recording a complicated dance routine for her latest video. Halfway through she straightened up and waved her hands to signal STOP.
"No, I’m sorry. Can we start again? My breasts aren’t falling out enough." She adjusted her garments, such as they were, and a pack of make-up artists descended upon her and the backing dancers, fluffing their hair and re-glossing their lips.
From a darkened corner, Little Bo Pepys looked on. He raised his olde fafhionede fhepherd’f crook above his bewigged head and gestured toward the irritating toothy starlet. Performers and crew alike turned to stare at the sheep wandering towards them, apparently minding its own business. Pepys made good his escape.
The sheep stopped twenty feet in front of the stage. Aguilera’s eyes widened as the timer ticked down. There was a searing explosion.
* * *
The emergency services were on the scene within minutes. thud and Nats weren’t far behind. The studio’s occupants were led out, very shaken but again without serious injury. If you don’t count having all their hair burnt off.
"This is no use," said thud. "We’re not going to find him like this."
Nats stuck out his chin. "And it’s going to spread panic across the city. But if nothing else, at least no-one has been killed... yet." He shivered; suddenly the hero felt uneasy. "Ever get the feeling you’re being watched?" He looked up.
Out of a cloudless sky came the sheep. Plummeting as if from a thousand feet up, it spun lazily around the y-axis, gave a single plaintive bleat and landed squarely on Nats’ head, knocking him to the ground. Weighed down by twenty pounds of gelignite, it looked thud in the eye as the tasteful clock display counted down 002, then 001, then flickered to zero.
Next: exploding sheep, frankly. It may be
unpleasant.