Tales of the Parodyverse

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Dancer will try to keep these coming as long as people try to keep up with the answering
Sun Oct 09, 2005 at 05:46:55 am EDT
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Far Away #10
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    The gladiators had been promised rewards for bringing down the intruder. Food, women, maybe a chance at freedom. All they had to do was kill one ragged blood-stained warrior who had gone insane and attacked the slave pits for no apparent reason.

    The intruder picked them up, every one, and kept pressing forward like a quarterback under a dogpile.

    But he was slowed, slowed too much. General Steppenstoat aimed his disintegrator pistol at the intruder’s temple and fired a charge that would separate every atom of the man’s body.

    Except somebody flung themselves onto his arm and dragged his aim off. He annihilated a surprised-looking slave-drover instead.

    Steppenstoat flung aside the distraction. He vaguely recalled her as the new slave girl he’d seen earlier. He had more important things to do.

    Then one of the gladiators leaped on his back and flipped him neatly into a wall, calling “We who are about to kick your ass salute you!”

    Babyface! The fool who wouldn’t finish his own kills. Steppenstoat would teach him a lesson.

    Babyface wasn’t where he was supposed to be. He was everywhere except where he was supposed to be.

    “What’s the matter? Not as eager to see battle when it’s you getting the spanking, General?”

    Steppenstoat flailed at the fast-moving irritation a few times. The creature’s blows couldn’t hurt him, but he was becoming very annoying.

    A spray of objects fizzed and exploded around him. The escaped champion had stopped off at the guard room on his way and had retrieved his equipment.

    “Must be embarrassing, you looking like such a big pussy in front of all your Soldiers,” Glowing Bouncing Boy snickered.

    The General staggered back, his temper flaring. He touched his sleeve where his control pad gleamed. “Subject Babyface. Re-engage power dampeners.”

    In mid-leap the gladiator suddenly became far less co-ordinated. He flailed almost comically as he hit the wall hard.

    The General reached out and snapped his spine.

    The slave girl ran in again. Steppenstoat lashed at her with his full strength, a killing blow.

    It never hit. It was intercepted by a fast-moving palm that caught his fist. Another fist returned like a steam-hammer.

    The intruder was before him. Gladiators lay strewn across the arena. Part of the proscenium arch had fallen to block more entering for the moment. The intruder was scorched and torn. He shouldn’t even be breathing, let alone fighting.

    The intruder hit the General again. And again. And again.

    Steppenstoat was an accomplished combatant, although past his prime. Few enemies were strong enough to hurt him, or skilled enough to fight their way past his defences. This one did.

    The General felt his nose splinter, felt a tightness in his chest. And still the punches came, harder and harder.

    But General Steppenstoat did not retreat, ever. He willed his glaive to unfold from his left hand, a sinister black techno-organic device that replaced the appendage he’d lost in battle long ago. He brushed its anti-energy sheath against the intruder, searing his flesh and sending him away in agonies.

    The intruder staggered back to the fight. He kept himself between the General and that slave girl.

    And suddenly the General knew what it was the intruder wanted, and how to deny him.

    The next shot was at Katarina Allen.



___




    Power went out on the elevator that was taking Canada, the Runner, and Robogirl up to rescue Sarah, and in the elevator that Sarah was in making her escape. The emergency safeguards kept the gravity capsules from failing for perhaps half a minute before the cars crashed to destruction at the bottom of their shafts.

    “Do something!” the Runner shouted in the darkness. In the cramped space there was nowhere to run.

    Robogirl panicked as she was once again plunged into confining darkness.

    “The roof hatch!” Canada called. “We can climb out!”

    “We can’t see anything!” Robogirl screamed. “It’s dark! Dark!”

    Without thinking, Canada reached to the belt pouch at his side, flipped it open, and dragged out a plastic shape: a Con Ed safety helmet. There was no way it should have folded into that space. He hadn’t been able to open the belt’s side pouches earlier. He had the hat on his head and was shining like a light bulb before he even realised what he was doing.

    “Nice trick!” the Runner admitted. “How…?”

    “Later,” Robogirl said. “The hatch!”

    But there was no hatch.

    “That’s cheating!” Canada complained. “There’s always an escape hatch…”

    And then the safeties failed and the car began to fall.

    Canada hurled the helmet off and dipped into his pouch again. He hesitated for a moment, trying to remember anything that might help him. What he needed was to be able to fly, to fly with this whole car. Like a rocket.

    His fingers closed on a flimsy denim cap. A Rockets cap.

    He dragged it on and slammed hard into the roof of the falling elevator. And he pushed.

    Robogirl punched her fist though the side of the car and began to rip an escape hole. She was surprised when someone dropped through the gap into the hovering box with them.

    “Hi. Can I hitch a life?” asked Sarah. Then she spotted Robogirl. “Huh?” Then she spotted the man who was jetting fire and black fumes as he held the car from plummeting to its doom.

    “He doesn’t know it’s a non-smoking elevator,” the Runner explained. “Hi. And you would be…?”

    “This is Sarah,” Robogirl explained. “The person we’re looking for.”

    “I thought you were dead,” Sarah admitted. She swallowed hard. “Mind you, when that car started falling I thought I was dead.”

    “You were in the other elevator?” the Runner asked. “How’d you get out.”

    “Escape hatch,” shrugged Sarah. “I was lucky there was one there.”

    “We have… to get… out of this… car…” Canada told them through gritted teeth. “I can’t…”

    “Right,” the Runner agreed. “Hold her steady. I’m going through the hole and I’m jumping for the side of the shaft. I’ll try and lever the doors.”

    “I’ll do that,” Robogirl said. “You can’t always be the hero.”

    “You were rescuing me?” Sarah checked. “Why?”

    The Runner grinned at her. “Have you looked in the mirror lately?”

    “Miles brought us,” Robogirl said as she jumped to the closed shaft doors that led out into the dome. “Your husband.”

    “Miles? Where is he?”

    The Runner looked a bit sheepish. “He’s on another rescue.”

    “Kat?” Sarah asked.

    “Well, yeah.”

    “Oh, thank goodness. That’s what I was trying for before the power failed.”

    “Speaking of… failing… powers…” hissed Canada.

    “These doors are made of something stronger than I am,” Robogirl said. “And there’s no mechanism on this side. They’ve been designed with security in mind.”

    Just then the sealed doors opened with a loud hiss. Robogirl braced herself for attack, but there was nothing on the other side except an abandoned lift lobby.

    “Get out of here,” the Runner told Sarah. “This is definitely our floor.”

    When they were all out Canada rocketed free himself, allowing the last of the cars to wreck itself below. He slumped on the polished lobby floor, shivering with exhaustion as he dragged his hat off.

    “How lucky was that?” Robogirl said as the shaft doors slid shut again.

    Sixty stories above, in domestic control systems, a puzzled operator wondered why he’d just opened then closed a set of elevator doors, and why he felt so happy about it. And why he wanted to pet some small furry animal.



___




    Doc woke up, wondering why he was still alive. He was convinced it wasn’t going to be a for a nice reason. His shoulder hurt like hell but somebody had patched him up.

    He hung in a translucent shimmering cube with Trickshot, floating on a gallery above some kind of machine on the floor below. The device looked like a warp-plasma funnelling vortex, folding space in an infinite recursion through a mathematically-stabilising 4-D reinforcement grid. Or something similar.

    In the centre of the electronic elder sign a constantly heaving biomass was being subjected to a barrage of strange particles. From the raucous bubbling that sounded almost like a primal scream, it wasn’t enjoying the attention.

    The man in the deep purple Ku Klux Klan outfit with the aviation goggles slid back a control and made a note on a clip chart. “Unsatisfactory,” he said. “The mundane matter bound into the entity’s matrix allows me to pump pain into it, but it does not seem to respond with the usual aversion behaviours. It truly is an alien life form.”

    Doc had seen the experimenter only once before, briefly, before his fellow slave had been dragged away for dissection. They’d believed they were dissecting him.

    “We’ll try something different,” the Minister of Torments decided. “Find me a dozen Soldiers with a Beta-Rho psyche profile and a strong sense of self. We’ll see if we can project their minds into the entity, give it a semblance of identity that we can exploit to train it.”

    Trickshot began to stir. Doc shushed him to silence. He was pretty sure that when the Minister knew they were awake things would get very painful. Doc liked his brain where it was, inside his unsawn skull.

    “What’s goin’ on?” Trickshot whispered. His hands groped for his weapons, but they weren’t there.

    “Some assassin called Kwatrain beat the crap out of us then kept us alive so they could do worse things than kill us,” Doc summarised. “It’s fair to say we’ve torked them.”

    “Good. Next time we’ll tork ‘em better.”

    “We’re in a cubic lucent restraint field with an ambient recursive containment wave. I’m not convinced there’s going to be a next time.”

    “There’s always a next time, Doc. These bad guys look like gloaters ta me.”

    Doc was aching and exhausted and his big revenge plan had failed. He should have settled for detonating just the one blister pit. “They look like unstoppable forces of evil to me.”

    “Sure. That why we gotta stop ‘em.”



___




    The General fired at Kat. Miles tried to block but he was too exhausted, too slow. Glowing Bouncing Man lay paralysed on the floor, unable to do anything but watch.

    Katarina somersaulted out of the way, kicked herself off the wall, and landed a double-footed kick to shatter Steppenstoat’s already-broken nose. She followed up by grabbing his forearm and ramming his glaive into his own face.

    “What?” said Miles.

    “Come on,” the girl called to him. “Picking of Glowing Bouncing Boy up and to be running, please!”

    The General was screaming in pain, clawing at his bloody, blistered face. Miles carefully picked up the broken gladiator who’d saved his life at such cost. There was a thick electronic collar around the man’s neck. Miles snapped it off.

    “Thanks,” the injured warrior said. “I feel better already. By the way, Knightfall sucked.” Then he passed out.

    “This way!” Katarina called, climbing lithely up to the General’s box. “Is to be a private elevator with own power system.”

    “Kat, what’s going on? Why are you talking like that?” He vaulted up after her. “I thought your ancestors were half French, not half Spanish?”

    Katarina blinked and looked around her in confusion. “Talking like what?” she asked. “Miles? Miles, it was you!”

    “I said I’d look after you. Not that you needed it, as it turned out.”

    “Oh Miles, I needed it. When you arrived… I can’t believe you came for me. You said, but… You came!”

    The private elevator hissed open. Miles and Kay bundled Glowing Bouncing Boy in and Miles hit the single button on the console. The private elevator doors closed on the mayhem of the Arena and the car zoomed upwards.

    “Where does this take us?” Katarina asked.

    “I have no idea,” Miles admitted. “I thought this was your plan.”

    “I don’t know what came over me down there, Miles. When I fought the General. I’m not usually violent. I never knew I could do that.”

    “Add that mystery to the pile, okay. For now we need to find the others and…”

    “Others? You mean Sarah?”

    “I came with three other people, all amnesiacs like me. Well, two people and… No. They were three people. They’re picking up Sarah, and then we have a rendezvous.”

    Katarina looked at the scored, scarred man who’d fought for her. She touched his chest where his chainmail had been ripped apart. “What’s going to happen, Miles? In the end?”

    “I don’t know. We’re trying to change things here. There’s a top man, someone called the Minister. He’s our target.”

    “But there are so many powerful people here. It’s so alien and terrifying. How can we change anything?”

    “How can we not try. I believe in life and liberty.”

    “And the pursuit of happiness?”

    “Yes. And the pursuit of happiness.”

    Katarina kissed him.

    The lift hissed open at level 118-A.



___




    “There!” Robogirl said triumphantly. “Vents. There are always ventilation shafts in places like this.”

    “How did you know?” the Runner asked, impressed.

    “Because people always like to breathe. We can climb up here. I’ll try and shut down the local security systems.”

    “Good,” Canada said. “You say this Minister is on floor 188-A, Sarah?”

    “That’s what I was told. Of course, there’s the possibility that Stuart is a lying scumbag, but I was threatening nail clippers at the time.”

    “Say what?” the Runner asked.

    “Less exposition, more climbing,” Robogirl told them. She began to heave herself up the pipes in the long vertical shaft. Normally this would be effortless, but she was diverting much of what remained of her damaged processing power to cancel the alarms, and her damaged body’s energy levels were close to redlining. She was almost dead.

    The Runner took the lead, climbing like some kind of speeded-up spider, checking ahead. At two points the vent opened out into a landing with security guards, but the alarms below had stripped away all but a token force. By the time the others climbed to those points the Runner had already subdued resistance.

    “What’s the plan when we actually get to the Minister?” Sarah asked Canada as they hauled themselves upwards. The Canadian always seemed to exude an air of competence, as if he knew what he was doing.

    I don’t have a clue what I’m doing, Canada almost answered. But these people seemed to be looking to him. “If we can capture this Minister we can demand that Miles and Kat are returned to us. We can walk out of here in one piece.”

    “We can get some answers,” added Robogirl.

    Sarah’s arms ached, especially the one she’d gouged that inhibitor disc from. “I hope my powers include flying,” she said wistfully. “Or weightlessness. I’d settle for being able to transform into a helium balloon.”

    The shaft terminated at level 117.

    “I’m accessing the building schematics,” Robogirl told them, dragging a lead from her neck and jacking it into the security console. “Level 118 is pretty secure. According to the plans there’s no way into it.”

    “That is pretty secure,” the Runner admitted. “So we’re thinking secret passage?”

    Canada was rummaging around inside his impossible belt pouches, dragging out hat after hat then stuffing them back. “There’s got to be something in here that lets me spot secret tunnels,” he said. “But there must be hundreds of caps here.”

    “Secret passage,” mused Sarah. “Now if I was a secret passage, where would I be?” She experimentally tapped a half dozen places on the wall. On the seventh the wall slid open.

    “DNA recognised: Splendiferous Stuart,” droned the security door. What were the chances of Sarah having traces of Stuart’s DNA still on her after her interrogation of him?

    “Let’s go!” the Runner said, streaking ahead.

    Kwatrain’s pre-set quantum bolas caught him round the neck, shocking the fast-moving black man into unconsciousness.

    “An attack!” Robogirl warned. Her energy levels were too low to avoid the EMP disc that hit her smack on her forehead. Kwatrain had taken down half the group in under four seconds.

    Canada opted for the Gunners hat, and suddenly he was armed and dangerous. Kwatrain’s first pair of daggers jammed his weapons, the third ripped the hat from his head, and the fourth sliced his cheek just enough for the neurotoxins to put him down.

    Sarah avoided Kwatrain’s attack, slid low with a spinning kick, and knocked the assassin back to become tangled in the ends of the same quantum bolas that had downed the Runner.

    “As if I wouldn’t shield myself against my own equipment,” Kwatrain said scornfully. But he approached the last of the fugitives with renewed caution. Something was very strange here.

    Sarah fought him harder and harder, but he was moving carefully, leaving nothing to chance. Slow and steady. And finally he caught her with a nerve-pinch that dropped her paralysed across the fallen Robotgirl.

    “You are all invited to a little soiree with the Minister of Torment,” the imperial assassin told his victims. “It’s time to end this.”



___




    “Monster!” shouted Miles as he went in against Torkemahda. If he could only take down the leader he’d have leverage to get his allies out of whatever trouble they’d landed in.

    The Minister of Torments tapped a button on the console where he was working. He didn’t even look up.

    Force fields formed and imprisoned Miles, Kat, and Glowing Bouncing Boy together in a cube of force similar to the one holding two other captives up on the gallery.

    Miles slammed his fist to break the barrier. Kat screamed as the force was seared back through them.

    “You could probably break free,” the Minister admitted, checking the impact this subject was capable of. “But the feedback would kill the woman first. Carry on.”

    “Carry on,” said Katarina fiercely.

    But Miles knew when he'd been beaten. He slumped down, the dozens of wounds on his body finally taking their toll. It had all been for nothing.

    Torkemahda gestured and the imprisonment cube floated up to the gallery to join the other. Shortly two more arrived, containing Sarah and Robogirl, Canada and the Runner.

    Torkemahda pulled off his gloves and rubbed his palms together with anticipation. “And now,” he announced, “the unpleasant part.”




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