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This message It’s the dramatic conclusion to the sheep saga - or, as it shall henceforth be known, Baa Humbug. dull thud #8. was posted by dt on Friday, January 3, 2003 at 15:23.
dull thud #8.
featuring Cressida, the Worm Wonder and - come on now, this is getting beyond a joke - Nats!
Little Bo Pepys: mysterious terrorist cajoling sheep into performing suicide-bomb attacks on city landmarks.
dull thud: enigmatic garage rock fan doing his best to track him down.
Nats: interdimensional delivery boy and dynamic superhero. The real brains of the operation, God help us all.
Fred Durst: cretinous, drooling, homophobic lead grunter of briefly-popular rock band Limp Bizkit. Doesn’t have any real bearing on this story, but his Parodyverse counterpart has, at this very moment, just been sodomised to death by a rhinoceros. Tell me whatcha gonna do now?
Cressida: psychic tapeworm. Don’t ask.
Ain’t Gonna Work On Maggie’s Farm No More
Nats and dull thud peered down at the collection of chromed tubes splayed over the workbench. The heroic helminth Cressida floated in thud’s small intestine, absorbing a range of amino acids, lipids and hexose sugars from a bacon sandwich he had eaten a few hours before. All three wished Professor Malmo Diphtheria would finish explaining his new device and just leave them to it.
“I had not foreseen zis application for mine work,” he was saying, “but if it will help in der location of der criminal ve must do all ve can. So.”
The idea of mathematically generated music has been around for years. Bored with improvisation - and believe me, it’s very easy to get bored with true improvisation, so it’s just as well almost nobody can do it anyway – composers had based entire works around assigning notes and rhythms to particular digits or number values. There’s a huge trashpile of pieces based around interpretations of pi, or the logarithmic constant e. One Californian musician releases CDs of music generated from the peptide sequence of particular proteins. Trust me when I say you do not need to hear it. Trust me.
Similarly, some boffins would devise computer programs such as KOAN, which used complex rules to generate music from user-input numbers. Algorithmic jazz madlibs, if you like. Though each piece might sound random, it would be reproduced note-for-note every time you used those values.
Anything that can be expressed numerically can be used in this way. Brian Eno and Robin Rimbaud have spent a long time on the interpretation of digitised images. Rimbaud, as his pop-art alter ego Scanner, took a double-decker bus around London generating an electronic theme tune for each district based on video stills of the local buildings. But then again he’s a bit of a nutboy.
As is the kindly old Professor Diphtheria. If you can generate music from someone’s physical appearance, he thought, what’s to stop me from interpreting their inner person-ness? Running a series of personality tests wasn’t what he had in mind though. Having read a huge quantity of literature on auras, Kirlian photography and the like, he had liased with a firm working on a means of quantifying some of these. I did mention he was a nutboy, didn’t I?
“Und to summarise…”
thud and Nats woke with a start.
“…by sweeping vith zis probe and listening carefully to the tunes, you vill be able to locate and identify people by virtue of their different personalities. Soul music, I suppose. A ha ha ha.”
“~~But,~~” beamed Cressida, “~~wouldn’t that require us to have tested it on Little Bo Pepys already?~~”
“It vould indeed. But my reasoning is zis. Sheep are boring, boring animals. Ja?”
“Ja,” said the other three. “Er, yes”.
“Zey tend to congregate as flocks, ja?”
He flipped a switch and coolant swirled around inside the mechanism.
“Zey spend most of der time chust standink around looking slightly stoned, ja?”
He turned some dials to HIGH.
“Zis is true also of fans of the progressive rock band King Crimson. In mine younger days I noted zat verever I vent, in every city zere vere fans of King Crimson. Zey vere tubby, slow-moving, and smelt of grass. Der parallels vere uncanny.”
“~~And, in turn, you think these sheep will have very similar traces?~~”
“Precisely. Allow me to demonstrate. First of all, Nats, you sound like zis.”
The hitherto top-secret equipment was ready for its first field trial. He powered up the device and trained it on Bill Reed. It gave a series of loud squeals, crashes and whoosing noises that could be taken as representing the delivery boy’s fiery, dynamic nature.
“Myself…” Turning the probe round, Diphtheria produced a horribly complicated chromatic piano run over a German oompah-band tuba.
thud was the source for a disquieting rumble, overlaid by occasional grating slabs of feedback.
“And I vould expect der other sheep to sound much like zis one.” He turned the probe on the nonplussed creature Nats had carried in earlier. The sound generated was of a self-indulgent massively-overdubbed noodly guitar solo that just seemed to drag on and hideously on without ever fucking getting anywhere. “Aha! King Crimson. I told you so.”
* * *
Outside, on the Music School steps, Nats slung the sedated sheep over his shoulder. “Duty calls,” said Nats. He indicated the sheep. “And we can drop this off on the way.”
thud buttoned up his leather jacket and hugged the Professor’s musical personality-probe to his chest. “You’re sure this’ll be alright?”
“It’ll be fine. My flying is a telekinesis thing, so you’ll be as light as a feather. Lighter, in fact. In any event, even if I drop you it won’t hurt.”
“A’right. Let’s go.” Out on the steps, thud watched Nats rise a few inches into the air. He looked down at the slowly increasing gap between the ground and the delivery boy’s toes. “I hope you know that is really, really cool?”
“Yep.” Nats took hold of thud’s collar, and they sped off into the gathering dusk towards Hell’s Bathroom, and to Carla Virkin’s petting farm.
* * *
Little Bo Pepys took stock of the situation. He had five sheep left, and twenty minutes to cause a whole mess of trouble, leave the area and cover his tracks. This would be cutting it fine, but if it worked...
And there was no reason why it wouldn’t. So far, the whole scheme had gone better than he could have hoped. The streets were empty, the populace terrified. Things were moving fast and he merely had to get rid of these last few animals. Tweaking the controls on his psionic crook, he grinned cruelly under his mask and ordered two sheep to waddle into the Phantomhawk Memorial Hospital. Two more took up positions in the doorways of financial organisations further down the street. The last wandered into a deserted subway station.
The clock of a nearby church struck the quarter-hour. Pepys ran to the stagecoach he had parked down a shadowy alleyway. It was convenient for supervillains - and for Messenger, DarkHwk and other similarly hardbitten heroes - that the city’s street lighting budget didn’t allow for the narrow trashcan-lined lanes to be anything beyond gloomy and forbidding, even in broad daylight. I wonder who’s in charge of that?
Pepys unhitched the two powerful black horses and gave them an affectionate rub. Then he reached into the curls of his towering Restoration periwig and withdrew a small remote-control handset. He pressed a button. The horses whinnied in surprise as the coach slowly transformed, through the magic of rotating panels and clever hydraulics, into a large white van. Pepys swung open the back doors and gently ushered the horses in. He clambered into the driver’s seat, careful not to trap his flowing coat in the door, and roared off in the direction of Hell’s Bathroom allowing himself a single bwahahahahaaaa as five exploding sheep spread debris in his wake.
* * *
“~~I don’t believe it,~~” said Cressida, as they soared over the streetlights, “~~thirty seconds?~~”
thud shook the probe and cursed. “Rats’ cocks. It’s shoddy workmanship, that what it is.”
“~~I warned him. I did. Don’t give thud the expensive kit, I said. He’ll just try to play Gories songs on it.~~”
“Um. Sorry folks.”
“~~Or make it talk like Donald Duck. Or hook it up to four hundred watts of chopped Ampeg stacks and get the whole thing confiscated by the FBI.~~”
“I said I was sorry.”
“No matter,” said Nats, over the whistling breeze. “We’ll think of something.” There was a moment of silence. “Dude,” he said, “you have got to wash this coat.”
“Wash it? No danger. This has got a history. See, that’s where the singer out of Empress Deathturd spilt his mescal on me. That bit’s blood from Cinnamon Rain cracking a guy’s jaw with her guitar.” He held out an arm. “That one’s brake fluid from the Corrs’ tourbus... and that patch, the one shaped like Alaska, that’s where Flint Michigan boaked over me backstage at the False Address.”
“Boak?”
“~~Scottish word meaning to vomit.~~” sent Cressida, eager to promote cross-cultural understanding.
“Ack. No, I promise you, you have so got to wash the coat.” Having covered the distance from the music school at a frankly ludicrous speed, Nats now swooped low over the fields of the Petting Farm. “Oop,” he said, “look at that.”
thud looked. “What?”
“Looks like stagecoach tracks. There, there and there.”
They touched down gently at the entrance to the empty sheep enclosure. Nats inspected some of the tracks and whispered “they look… recent.”
thud bit his lip and looked around. “Apache tracking is another of your newly-manifesting skills?”
“Hardly. The ITC had me take a few packages to England once... but the jump-generator was playing up and left me in this bizarre sub-dimension based on Matthew Hopkins: Witchfinder General.” He knelt down and prodded at the disturbed soil. “Lots of busty wenches, but otherwise kinda nasty. A month passed before they worked out how to get me back. It’s amazing how much you can learn when you’re trying to avoid hordes of unwashed peasants intent on burning you at the stake.”
“I’m sure.” thud tossed the useless music-probe into a hopper of cattle feed and cracked his knuckles.
Hell’s Bathroom is not an area known for its preponderance of stagecoaches. In fact, they only knew of one in the whole city. If it had been here again, Carla Virkin might not be in any shape to welcome back her lost animal. thud crept up to the office building and peeked through a couple of the unlit windows. “Definitely no-one about,” he said.
Nats left the sheep dozing by a doorway. “Alright. Let’s keep looking for - ”
He left the sentence hanging as a series of body-shaking cracks echoed across Hell’s Bathroom; the unmistakable* sound of sheep exploding. Without a moment’s hesitation he was off in the direction of Carrington like a bullet from a gun.
This may not be strictly accurate. Parodyverse stories are, of course, intensively researched in order that the reader may have confidence in their scientific, sociological and psychological plausibilty. In this particular case, the author was not able to investigate whether the sound of a sheep disintegrating under the force of several kilos of C4 was qualitatively distinct from that of - say - a goat. That’s the Medical Research Council for you. We now return you to your scheduled story, where dull thud is alone in the dark. On a farm.
“Wait for us...” thud called, waving. He let his arm fall by his side and muttered something rude. He broke into a long-limbed lope toward the Petting Farm exit.
Before he could reach it, the farm gates ratcheted open to admit a white van that had seen better days. It crunched across the cinder driveway to the main building, headlights sweeping round to pick out the garage door. This rattled up and the van rolled in.
“~~Carla,~~” said Cressida. “~~She’ll give us a ride down there.~~”
thud trotted over and banged on the door. He heard a muffled curse, and then silence. “Oi! Carla!” he shouted. Nothing happened. “Hello?” Still no reply.
“~~Huh. You don’t suppose it’s …someone who’s not supposed to be here?~~”
thud looked over his shoulder. A faint plume of smoke was rising from Carrington, and time was a-wasting. “Don’t know. But if... ah. Hmm.”
The stagecoach tracks Nats had seen from the air now curved round the gravelled area and passed on either side of thud into the garage. He bit his lip. “Cress...”
“~~Dealing with it.~~” The steel door seemed to vibrate, then in a flash of light was replaced by a woman in a short skirt, a fur coat and too much make up. She asked thud whether he fancied a nice time.
“Ugh,” he said. “Bad one.”
“~~It was vice-girl or vice-president.~~”
“Fair enough then.” He smiled politely and looked past her to the towering figure of Little Bo Pepys.
thud shivered.
Pepys was clad all in black, and looked even more deranged than before. A large beauty spot seemed to crawl over his face as it twisted into an ugly snarl. He stared back at thud. “Fie,” he growled, “what devilry is this?”
They faced each other for what seemed like an eternity, until Pepys’s wig, squashed slightly out of shape by the low van ceiling, popped back to its full height.
“Alright bucky,” thud spat, “you’re for it now. Cress, mince him.”
Nothing happened.
“Cressy..?”
She sounded exhausted. “~~Nothing doing. That last transmutation has worn me out. Your fault for skipping lunch.~~”
Ordinarily, this would have prompted an argument. Right now the best he could manage was “Oh dear.” He backed out of the garage in the face of Pepys’s impassioned staff-waving and Restoration invective. Out in the open now, the adversaries circled. thud made a few feints, then charged him. The villain leapt away, but caught a passing blow from thud’s elbow. He sagged visibly. Surprisingly agile, given the weight of the costume, but also surprisingly frail?
At half-past-six on the dot, a police car cruised to a halt at the farm gates. Meanwhile, the crack squad of extras from dt #5 had parachuted onto the scene to provide a more colourful backdrop to the supershowdown. Nats, satisfied that the fire department had the Carrington situation under control, landed neatly beside thud’s left shoulder.
Little Bo Pepys backed against a wall, his eyes blazing. “Nay,” he said, spying the sheep Nats had carried from the Music School, “thou wilt not take Pepys alive, not while one of mine flock dost live.” He gestured with his crook. “Attack them, my pretty!” The animal leapt to its feet, bared its teeth and advanced on the heroes with malicious intent. Then it stopped, stared around a bit, and proceeded to behave much like any other sheep, i.e. just stood there looking slightly stoned.
Sheep: Baaa.
thud: ...
Pepys: *shaking his crook* ...fie, I place many curses on this modern technology. ‘Twould appear mine batteries are spent. Gadzooks.
Nats: That was a bit of an anti-climax. *he strides toward the villain* Give it. *he snatches the crook and breaks it over his knee* Seems like everybody’s got some sort of power-stick these days. I remember when that sort of thing was a novelty.
thud: And now all that remains to be seen is... who are you really?
*he reaches behind Pepys’s left ear and pulls off the inevitable latex mask*
All: Not... CARLA VIRKIN?!
Nats: *wearily* My, who would ever have seen that coming.
Carla Virkin: *sobbing* All I wanted was to scare people... it always brings communities together... it would drum up support for the farm. And I would’ve gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for -
thud: Yeah, can I just stop you there...
*he reaches over again and pulls off Virkin’s face to reveal...*
All: Not... YO?!
A rabbi in the crowd: No, he am not being Yo. *he peels his face off*
All: Not... ANOTHER YO?!
Sheep: Baa.
thud: *no words, he just whimpers in the manner of a man rapidly losing control of the situation*
the second Yo: Yo am having been returned from the Dreary Dimension. Yo is being undercover.
A gap-toothed, freckly schoolchild: *pulls face and shirt off, suddenly stands eight feet tall, covered in scales and carrying a huge club* And I’m here to take you back to the Dreary Dimension. Grragh!
thud: *hits him in the face with a spade, knocking him out cold.* Shut it. Before we go any further, who else is wearing a mask?
*Six people tentatively raise their hands, and turn out to be two investigative journalists, a Mafia informer, someone who’s seen the first Mission:Impossible film too many times (i.e. more than never), Robin bloody Williams and finally Werner Gutenberg, agent of M.U.L.L.E.T., who had been planning to assassinate thud with a poison dart. thud takes him out with the spade too*
thud: Ooookay. And the real Yo is...?
Nats: That one. *points to the one still picking off bits of false beard*
thud: *to the former Pepys* Which makes you... *he reaches behind her ear again, and finds it’s yet another mask*
Carla Virkin: It’s a fair cop, guv.
*she is led away in handcuffs*
thud: Like I say, what is wrong with this city?
Nats: Beats me. But now that’s done I can finally get this off.
*He tugs at his face. Underneath he has cleverly concealed a black cloak and a beard. Two green-glowing eyes stare menacingly out*
All: Not... THE HOODED HOOD?! Aaaargh....
*they run away. Meanwhile Nats is removing this mask too*
Nats: *mopping his forehead* Wow, those things are hot. Where did everyone go?
thud: Why on earth...
Nats: Sorry, Legion business. Top secret. But people running in panic is a good way to end an adventure, isn’t it? See any James Bond film.
thud: That would also explain the chain-reaction of resounding explosions and the way all the surrounding buildings are collapsing?
Nats: I suppose it would, yes.
thud: And does that mean that we’ll shortly be set adrift in a liferaft and I’ll say something witty, then we have sex?
Nats: Well, y’know.
*There is a truly cataclysmic explosion. The smoke clears quickly and our heroes’ faces are now stained with comedy soot. Everything else is aflame.*
thud: Perhaps we should go.
Nats: Indeed.
*Nats flies off, thud runs away. There is a final explosion, bigger even than the last, and a caption appears against the flames:*
THE END
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