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Extract Twenty: Correspondence from Ms Asil Ashling to the great and noble Visionary: In which Mumphrey’s amanuensis finds spiffy but loses his eyebrows, the barbarous Bone sends in the clones, and the Abandoned Legion is deported from Iceland Friday, 12-Nov-1999 06:41:06
Extract Twenty: Correspondence from Ms Asil Ashling to the great and noble Visionary In which Mumphrey’s amanuensis finds spiffy but loses his eyebrows, the barbarous Bone sends in the clones, and the Abandoned Legion is deported from Iceland Dear Visionary Thank you for your last letter. It was an inspiration to me in the dark hours after I discovered that Sir Mumphrey had vanished from the runway while we were waiting to board our flight to Manila. I wish you would let me send you half of my salary. Sir Mumphrey is very generous, and I don’t really need $9,000 per month. But as usual you are right and noble and it is clear that I do not yet understand the wisdom which makes you live in your humble condominium on the money which Cheryl earns. It has been a most difficult and disturbing few days, and as always I wish I could have had your wise counsel and guidance through my trials. That way the Icelandic government probably wouldn’t be so terribly cross, the man from the gun club wouldn’t need all that therapy, and spiffy would still have his eyebrows. Back to my story. When Sir Mumphrey vanished I did not know what to do, so I tried to telephone you, but you were out. It was wonderful to listen to your profound answering machine message but, although I tried to fathom the deeper meaning of “leave your message and I’ll get back to you if I don’t accidentally erase it” I am not yet capable of understanding the profundities of your wit. So I telephoned Banjoooo, who was working on the other end of our case trying to track down a nasty man called the Bane who killed spiffy’s father because he (spiffy’s father) had stumbled upon the secret of the strange device that everybody has been chasing recently. Banjooooo agreed to deliver the computer information we got from Peter von Doom’s secret base to somebody who could find out what the old villain knew about the UFO crash where the device came from. He suggested that the Bane might have snatched Sir Mumphrey. Banjooooo said that spiffy was in Rekyavik. This was because the last known advert for the Bane’s services (in the July 1979 edition of Domination & Devastation) was paid for in kroners, and he was following the payment trail. Spiffy thought he was very close to finding this Bane. I felt that it was probably important not to leave something so important to a boy with a fern on his head, so I took it upon myself to fly out there and see if I could find Sir Mumphrey. After all he is a very kind man and almost as great as you are. Iceland is very cold. A man at the Rekyavik airport offered to warm me up but I explained that I had packed many useful jumpers. I went to the hotel where spiffy was staying but the clerk at the desk said that “the bizarre floral gentleman” had not been back for two days, and his rental four-wheel drive vehicle was overdue. I told him that spiffy does not have a drivers’ license anyway so it did not matter. I asked to go up to spiffy’s room, and the porter had a funny look on his face and asked if I wanted to give him a ‘special surprise’. I said no I wanted to see what the last number spiffy dialled on his telephone was. Then he looked worried and asked me if I was spiffy’s wife. I can see why he would be worried for me if I was married to spiffy. I explained that spiffy was a superhero on a case looking for a master-assassin. The clerk seemed very confused after I explained about Mumphrey and Baron Zemo and the vampires and HERPES and the mummies and Moo and the Men in Black and the Sempiternus Singularum and the Bone and the Hooded Hood and the Yurt and Elvis, but in the end he gave me the room keys and asked me to go away. The last place that spiffy telephoned was a private shooting club up in the hills. I got a taxi to take me along the bleak road which rings the whole island of Iceland and up a steep single track to the exclusive range. I asked the man who ran the place about spiffy and he got very upset. He asked if I would like to leave now but I said no I’d prefer to stay and ask a few more questions about spiffy thank you if it was all the same. Then he snapped his fingers and these two big men came and tried to grab me for some reason but I did not want to be grabbed so I threw them into each other until they laid on the floor. Then the man who ran the place pointed one of his guns at me and said if I was that desperate to find my boyfriend then he’d take me to him. I thanked him politely and explained that this was a common misunderstanding and that spiffy and I were just good friends. He seemed very agitated by my attitude for some reason and kept on waving the gun at me so I took it off him before it went off or something and asked if he would take me to spiffy now please. He took me out to the back of the range and opened up a very clever secret door. We went into some old lava caves and past some interesting underground hot springs. I wish I had brought a camera because I would have liked to send you some nice photographs. Eventually we came to an area which was done out rather nicely with wood panelling and things. I can, of course, spot another clone a mile off. The big chaps with the four-foot field artillery strapped over their shoulders were undoubtedly clones. They wore a sort of purply-black body armour and they had little metal implants on them. It wasn’t Moo’s work, because she is very distinctive in her designs and never does the same one twice, whereas these were all the same. And none of them had milk stains on them. They took me to a cell where I found spiffy. Four of the big clone guards were pointing their guns at him all the time. I thanked the gun club owner and said we would be off now. He said not. Spiffy wondered what I was doing there and advised me not to try and fight them just then. He pointed out that the clones were very powerful and their blasters were more powerful and asked me to trust him. We sat in the cell. Apparently the clones were called Death Warriors, and they had been created by the little bit of the Sempiternus Singularum that the Bone had taken from spiffy’s father after murdering him. This complex belonged to the Bone, who had retired on the fee paid him for that one last job of killing Leonard Hopkins. We stayed as prisoners for quite some time. It was rather sweet how spiffy was so protective of me but I do not understand why he blushed every time we talked. I asked why did we not escape. Spiffy said he hadn’t come all this way not to meet the Bone, who he intended to kill by the way. I said that killing was not a good thing to do, and he said what should he do since the man killed his father and I said he should put him in prison and he said that wouldn’t bring his father back and I said neither would killing the Bone and then spiffy started to cry and I gave him a cuddle and for some reason we found our lips touching which was not as gross as you would think. Then there was this sinister laugh and this really muscly man about eight feet all was in the doorway. He had a sort of skull motif on his t-shirt and tattoos of skulls and things on his arms. It was the Bone. He said he understood we were looking for him and I said yes and asked him where Sir Mumphrey was but he had never heard of Sir Mumphrey. Then spiffy also said yes and explained that he was there to bring him to justice. I was proud that he did not say to kill him. Then the Bone laughed and pointed out that we were in his stronghold, surrounded by his Death Warrior clones, and that he had admantium bones and a healing factor and could snap spiffy’s spine in two before spiffy could even flex his weed. I wish you or Sir Mumphrey had been there because he was quite scary towering over spiffy like that, especially when he pointed out that we were all alone with him and his slaves. Spiffy asked was he sure? Then there were lots of explosions. Two men and two women were suddenly in the caves, fighting with the Death Warriors. There was one with a triangular shield who kept on jumping between Death Warriors so they would shoot each other. Death Warriors are more stupid than Lisa. Occasionally he would flick something into their eyes. I picked one of the bullets up and it seemed to be a peanut. The other man used a sort of cane with a pointy bit at the end, but whenever the Death Warriors got in too close he made bits of wall explode at them as well. The woman in the green snake outfit started out by shooting some kind of fruit gun at them, and when she had exhausted her supply of bananas she started demonstrating 1001 unpleasant things to do with a sink plunger. She was very creative. The lady in red just pointed at the Death Warriors and they fizzed and fell over screaming. Of course you will have already used your razor-keen brain to realise that these were the Abandoned Legion, who owed spiffy a favour and who were his back-up. They had been lurking about waiting for the Bone to show up so they could bag him. Unfortunately the Bone did not want to be bagged. He shouted out some command words – like the ones that Moo once put on me before I got rid of them – and the clones began to replicate. Every Death Warrior became two, then four, then eight. I guess the mechanical bits must have included some sort of matter growth machinery or something. Anyway the poor Abandoned Legion was soon outnumbered 50 to 1, and it was looking pretty bleak. Then I had an idea. I did not know the command word to kill the clones (like the one Moo put in me) but I had heard the one to make them replicate. So I kept on shouting it more and more. As the Abandoned Legion retreated the cave filled up with Death Warriors. Lots and lots of them. Piles of them. They jammed the corridors and the chambers. Eventually they spit the roof above them which did not do much good to the city block above. Suddenly Rekyavik town centre was full of fighting clones and things.. And eventually those devices that were providing the power to replicate exhausted even their charge and they all disappeared with a sort of squelchy pop. Later we found that the Bone had secretly copied his little bit of the Sempiternus Singularum all those years ago before returning it to the person who had hired him to kill Mr Hopkins, a man called Thugos. Since each of the Death Warriors had copied the original copy when they’d replicated we had lots of bits of the missing component – about 11,000 of them. Hunter Victorious insisted that we gather them all together and destroy them, except for the one we kept for NTU-150. Meanwhile spiffy was chasing after the Bone, but the Bone was more interested in getting away just then because while he thought he could snap spiffy like a twig he didn’t want to take on the entire Abandoned Legion. Actually I’m not sure just then if he could have snapped spiffy. There was a sort of expression of spiffy’s face which suggested he was not going to snap easily. Anyway, the Bone triggered off a rockfall explosion trap to kill spiffy, and by the time spiffy’s fern had dug him out the villain had run away. That is where spiffy lost his eyebrows, by the way. spiffy intends to keep looking for him (that is, the Bone, not his eyebrow). So in the end we found the missing bit we were looking for, and we learned the name of the nasty man who commissioned the assassination of Leonard Hopkins, and we wrecked the Bone’s stronghold and got deported from Iceland, but the trail ended there. Fortunately dear Mumphrey had gone on an entirely different adventure which helped us to get nearer to the solution of the riddle. But that’s another story. Lots of love and respect and very best wishes from Asil In the absence of the kidnapped Sir Mumphrey Wilton his companion carries on the narrative |
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