Hallie and the Sepulchre of Destiny, Chapter 5

Chapter 5

They do certainly give very strange, and newfangled, names to diseases.
--Plato

“Allow me to introduce myself…” a huge, frog-like thing slurred with its tremendous, slimy tongue. “I’m Bugga-Roffa. My colleague here is Digituss, and you’ll be our entrée this evening…”

“Must you talk to the food?” Digituss complained, his tentacles undulating with various hungers. “Even when we were regular ghouls about to eat someone’s brain for all of their knowledge, you’d still wanted to talk to them beforehand…”

“Well, what good is having new names if we don’t get to introduce ourselves?” Bugga-Roffa argued, turning one of his eyestalks to glare at his critic. “Don’t mind him…” he assured Hallie and Fleabot while watching them with the other eye. “He’s still a little miffed that he couldn’t be named ‘Marilyn’.”

“I tell you, it can be a man’s name as well! It would have been plenty scary!”

“Well… sure it would…” Fleabot offered gamely. “Marilyn Manson is a guy… of sorts… and parents find him to be a terrifying influence on their children.”

“Really?” Digituss asked excitedly. “And he’s really scary?”

Fleabot nodded. “Maybe not ‘Michael Jackson’ scary, but yeah… he’s up there.”

“See there?” Bugga-Roffa said triumphantly. “That’s why you shouldn’t always be in such a rush. A little civilized conversation never hurt anyone.”

That’s when Hallie unloaded an entire clip into both of them, and emptied the flame-thrower attachment as well.

“Are you going to eat his brain?” Dark Ch’mp’vski asked, looking at the corpse laid out in the sepulchre. It was much more intact than one would expect for a body that had supposed to have been rotting for a few hundred years.

“Please…” HV growled in disgust. “I have some standards.” Instead he rooted around the items laid alongside the body. “Ah!” he said, removing a long black feather.

“A crow quill pen?”

“No. Not crow. Raven” Next he removed a small lantern from the space by the body’s feet.

“This guy has been buried this long… and that flame is still burning?” the former ghoul asked curiously upon seeing the flickering candlelight from inside the glass.

“The probabilities involved are exceptionally slim” Vernold admitted. “How marvellous… I shall enjoy using that.” He dug about some more before he happened upon the treasure for which he was looking. An evil grin split Rasputatius’s stolen face as the time-spanning spirit removed a small tuft of purple fur from the bottom of the coffin.

“Could they have piled more junk into there?” Ch’mp’vski asked critically. “It’s like he was buried behind somebody’s sofa cushions. What is that?”

“Only what I need to unmake the man behind the myth” HV answered, smiling at his own cleverness. “A little bit of fuzzy thinking.”

“Which way did they go?” Digituss asked as the two former ghouls swept down the corridor.

“I’m not sure…” Bugga-Roffa admitted. “I ducked when she threw that cannon at me.” He caught the pointed stare of his partner. “What? Did you see the size of that thing?”

They came to a fork in the tunnels. “Right or left?” Digituss asked, his tentacles waving in anticipation of some serious rending and groping. “I’ve developed a taste for virgins since I received my nastier name, and I’m not above picking a green one that hasn’t even ripened yet.”

“Bad news then, Buggaboo!” Fleabot’s voice rang out from the left tunnel as a rock came careening out of the darkness to bounce off Bugga-Roffa’s portly shoulder. “She’s apparently not as virginal as you might have thought!”

“Now why would it go and give its position away?” the frog-shaped monstrosity posed to his fellow.

“Because she’s gone down the other corridor, and he’s trying to lead us away from her” Digituss noted with a nod.

“My thoughts exactly. Do you think she cares about the little insect?”

“Let’s find out.” Digituss suggested.

“Let’s” Bugga-Roffa concurred. With that he shot his impossibly long tongue into the darkness of the tunnels beyond, retracting it in flash. With a casual snort, he spit Fleabot’s body from his mouth onto the hard stone floor beneath them, where Digituss’s flagella descended to retrieve him.

“How much force do you think it would take to make him pop?” Digituss asked academically as he encased the tiny robot in his feelers.

“NO!” Hallie screamed, stumbling out of the darkness of the opposite tunnel with a wild look in her eyes. “Please… please let him go. Just don’t crush him… you can do anything you want to me… I won’t fight you.”

“Aw… But we were looking forward to the fight…” Bugga-Roffa complained. “Oh well… I guess we’ll have to skip straight to the making-up.” He extended his tongue out to lick the trembling former A.I. from toe towards head as he slowly approached her unresisting form, leaving a trail of slime across her clothes. “I admit, I’ve always wanted to say this since I ate the brain of that drive-in movie buff...” he confessed to her, bringing his enormous mouth up to her face. “...Gimme some sugar, baby” he croaked, enveloping half her head with his open lips.

His fellow former ghoul drummed all of his thousands of cilia against the wall in impatience as he waited for his partner to finish sucking face so they could begin the serious degradation that the Fairly Great Old Ones favoured. He was surprised, naturally, when Bugga-Roffa’s great frog eyes blinked open in shock, and his massive bulk violently reeled away from the comparatively tiny green woman. The toad shaped monster was making an incoherent gurgling sound as he dropped to his knees, raising his head to allow a trickle of sizzling foaming blood to slide from his massive fish lips. “Dear lord…” Digituss intoned in shock, watching the painful thrashing of his fellow reborn ghoul. “...Just how far from virginal are you?”

“So you write the spell on the shroud, bind the fur inside it, and then burn it in the flame?” Dark Ch’mp’vski inquired, watching as Vernold carefully traced the elegant symbols onto the mouldy yellow cloth with the raven quill. He noted the pen didn’t even need to be dipped in ink to produce the jet black letters of a sanity mangling language.

“To make a change in the narrative this major, this permanent, no other ingredients would suffice: A pen that could write in the august Book of Time. A piece of pure thought from the target himself. And a probability fire in which to burn it.” HV spoke slowly as he methodically reproduced the precise curve of his next stroke. “The key was the timing… finding a way to this, one of the most protected spots in the Parodyverse. All it took was the distraction of the impending end of everything at the hands of the Fairly Great Old Ones.”

“Yes... lucky break for you.” Ch’mp’vski noted over the weeping of the banshee.

Hallie fought the urge to retch after the disgusting creature fell away from her, and her flesh burned where it had made contact. But all in all, she noted that she had gotten the better of the encounter. Her assailant was on his hands and knees, vomiting a putrid black blood onto the natural stone floor of the tunnel. Most interestingly, the arcane calculations that writhed across his skin were negating one by one, impossibly resulting in null answers wherever his skin had touched hers.

She looked down at her hands and began to understand. Al had relayed his method of hurting the Fairly Great Old Ones through certain mathematics. Her mind… her very soul… what was it other than a most complex mathematical equation? And this body… When the mansion had needed a defender, Marie was given a voice with which to fight back…

“Yooh Bitchht!” Bugga-Roffa slurred through the mess that had once been his mouth. He drooled a black mucous as he struggled once more to his feet. “Ah’ll swhallohw yhour sssoul!”

His dark and swollen tongue lashed out at her once more, but Hallie was ready. In an amazing display of dexterity (for her) she caught it in her fist and wrapped it around her wrist before he could retrieve it. Where they touched, her skin burned… but his broke out into boils and pustules as a guttural screaming sound emanated from her attacker. “Swallow this” she quoted, charging his fat mass in order to personally ram his tongue back down his throat.

She left the toad-shaped ghoul lying face down, clutching his neck and making a popping, wheezing sound, while she turned to face his partner. Digituss stood in slack jawed shock at the image before him with every one of his tentacles frozen in disbelief. “Let. Him. Go.” Hallie commanded the demon in a voice filled with rage.

The former ghoul blinked as he snapped out of his stupor. “Yes ma’am” he agreed quickly, flicking the tiny body of Fleabot across the cavern tunnel to crash into the wall alongside the island’s defender, and then raising his many-appendaged hands in surrender.

“Fleabot!” she cried in concern, bending to retrieve his unmoving form. She didn’t manage more than half a turn towards him, however, before the stalactite, thrown with frightening force, completely impaled her left thigh. Hallie screamed in pain as she collapsed to the floor, her own blood splattering them both.

“Always with the talking” Digituss chided his still writhing partner as he snapped another stalactite from the ceiling above to heft as a weapon. “See what happens when you don’t hold your tongue?” This one he gripped in a tentacle and whipped around to club the crumpled women in the ribs. He nodded at the satisfying “snap” that accompanied the impact.

Fighting to maintain consciousness, Hallie tore the sleeve from her shirt and wadded it over her profusely bleeding leg wound. The pain wasn’t yet unbearable, despite the obviously broken ribs and the shockingly gory flesh wound. Apparently the human body did have a toggle switch after all, as she had no doubt she was going into shock.

“This whole adventure just isn’t funny anymore” Digituss complained. “I suppose that may be an offshoot of this whole “Necronastycon” business, or maybe just because I’ll have to forego the groping of you, but it's true none-the-less. I don’t think I’m content to simply eat the brains of your friends up there any longer. They’ll need to suffer. They’ll need to know just how much of their painfully slow deaths they can attribute to you and your failure to do things the way they were supposed to be done.” He shook his head sadly. “Now hold still while I beat you with this rock.”

Hallie waited until he raised the stalactite above his head with both root tentacles before flinging the blood soaked cloth into his face.

“I have no idea why you’re quite so distraught” HV mentioned to the disembodied crying of the banshee as he began the last line of the necessary spell. “This is all for a better world, I assure you. Better for me, certainly… but a change like this will ripple outward, changing many fates, and yours is just as tied up in this whole thing as anyone’s. Imagine… not being chained to this dismal island, keening away for fallen heroes. You might have the full life you were denied. We just need to rub out one little blot on history and rewrite the correct version.”

He paused in his writing to listen for an answer, but the banshee’s lament went on unchanged.

“The audience never appreciates a good editor…” he noted with a sigh.

Footnotes and Epitaphs:

Visionary briefly served as the Chronicler of Stories, keeper of the august Book of Time, when the current Chronicler took a holiday. This raven quill may be the one given to him by the Raven of Destiny named Quoth following their adventure in “Surplus to Destiny”.

For those not in the know, Yo’s purple rabbit Rabito was formed from Visionary’s pure thought energy in “A Parodyverse Christmas”. Having seen how that bunny sheds, it'd be amazing to find a tomb within a thousand miles of Parodiopolis that didn't have some purple fluff drifting around the corners.

Post By from Visionary and the Hooded Hood Wed Apr 06, 2005 at 06:44:10 pm EDT	Subject Hallie and the Sepulchre of Destiny, Chapter 5

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