| #181: Untold Tales of the Transworlds Challenge: Theological Debates and Ethical Quandaries Previously: As Earth’s team in the cosmic Gamesmaster’s Transworlds Challenge recover and fix up their vessel Aunt Sally, many of the galaxy’s dominant races find common cause in their dislike of the human race. An ad-hoc alliance of interplanetary religious leaders prepares to organise a jihad to eradicate the Terran stain from the cosmos. Meanwhile, Xander the Improbable continues his preparations against the Chain Knight and his Hellraisers, and the Librarian is returning from a rescue mission with survivors from the Lovetoad’s slaveship. Who’s Who in the Transworlds Challenge  Falcon made a crackling noise into his SPUD-issue communicator then slapped it against the table top a few times. “Sorry, Special Agent Garrick, you’re breaking up. Hiss. Crackle.” “Wilson, you listen to me. I’m directly ordering you to…” “Oops.” Falc said, dropping the device into his breakfast cereal. “Damn. Now I’ll never know what the Head of the Department of Tightasses was going to order.” “Isn’t that mutiny?” asked Ebony mildly. “Or at least defacing of government property.” “Nah. Garrick’s not my chain of command,” Falcon answered. “And it’s SPUD property, so technically it belongs to the UN not the US. And anyway, if they don’t make this stuff to operate in a lactose environment what the hell use is it?” “What did the esteemed Presidential Advisor on Metahuman Affairs want this time?” Hatman wondered. “Oh the usual. Alien technology that can be filtered into covert government programmes, alliances with powerful intergalactic allies to help in our war on terror, that kind of stuff.” “Exactly the stuff we agreed we wouldn’t be doing,” Amazing Guy pointed out. “We can’t let Earth technology run ahead of our ability to use it wisely. We can’t let Earth culture be overwhelmed with alien contact until it’s ready for it. I’ve seen too many of these interplanetary contacts go bad.” “Yeah, it’s a great principle,” admitted Trickshot, chowing down his Cheerios, “but try telling that to a kid dyin’ of cancer that we didn’t bother looking up a cure.” “Um, actually we did,” Visionary admitted. “But it seems like there’s nothing that easily translates to human physiologies. It was the first thing Uhuna checked when she got here.” “Before the fashion stalls?” Amy Aston asked sceptically. Miss Framlicker entered the breakfast room carrying an armful of printouts and glared at the people round the table. “Why aren’t you working?” she demanded. “We have people missing and an Abhuman exploration vehicle to repair. The Librarian will be back from his rescue of Dr Blargelslarch and I’m going to want the calibration figures for him to cross-check.” “And we’ll be doin’ that as soon as we’ve had some breakfast after our all-night shift, lady,” Trickshot promised. “Gotta stoke the engines.” “Yo is to be pleased that everyone is working so hard and is not to be bickering like naughty childrenings,” Yo intervened firmly, smiling at each person in turn. “Is to be finishing breakfasting and then to be finding cute-friends and saving of planet, yes?” “Works for me,” agreed Hatman. “While you’re checking the scanner logs and fixing Aunt Sally I’m going to try some diplomacy on the outraged alien races that want to wipe us out,” Ebony suggested. “It might just work if Falcon can find a way of keeping Nitz from the conference table.” “Where is Nitz?” Visionary wondered, looking round. “I was kind of looking forward to finding out how he ate cereal through that metal mask.” Nitz the Bloody, high priest of Zeku, wasn’t there. Falcon swore.  “Okay,” Nitz the Bloody told the Eyrie-Father of the Shee-Yar. “Let’s go, you and me. Right here, right now!” The supreme religious authority of the massive star empire lowered his breakfast spoon and looked up at the angry young man looming over his table. “Why do you wish to die?” he enquired. “Because we know what the hell you’re up to, buddy,” Nitz warned him. “You come and warn us about some of the alien races putting together an alliance to wipe out Earth after this Transworlds Challenge is done and all along you’re the one arranging the lynch mob!” “We prefer to think of it as a holy war,” the Eyrie-Father noted with a little smirk. “A jihad to correct a disturbing heresy.” “Yeah, well we prefer to think of it as a buncha slapheads trying to wipe us out, and I’m not gonna stand for it!” “I see,” the patrician cleric replied, somehow managing to look down his aquiline nose at Nitz even though Nits was looming over him. “And what do you propose to do about it? Cry? Wet your vestments? Or do you wish to start a conflict and have your team eliminated from the Transworlds Challenge and your planet deleted to save us a lot of trouble?” The young priest of Zeku realised he hadn’t thought this through. He was still fuming when Falcon and Ebony caught up with him. “You started a war yet?” Falc demanded, dragging Nitz away from the Eyrie-Father. “He’s the one who’s planning a war, and hiding behind the rules of this stupid challenge to keep himself from getting his ass whupped!” The Eyrie-Father looked on with a detached amusement. “Yeah, he’s a smug sonofabitch,” Falcon admitted, “but he’s gotta be sweatin’ now our team’s in the running for the Starseed. We’re in third place, one point behind his Shee-Yar Imperium thugs, yeah? That’s why he wants to provoke you.” “Even if I wasn’t bound by the rules of engagement here on the Gamesship you would hardly be able to overcome my power, little priest of a little god,” the Eyrie-Father noted. “Want to bet?” Ebony asked quickly. “On that?” The Shee-Yar cleric looked suspiciously at Ebony of Nubilia. “What do you mean?” “I mean I do my homework,” the young woman answered. “That Gamesmaster, he loves bets and competitions of all kinds. I’m thinking that if we asked him to allow a challenge match between your clergy and ours, Nitz, and I, and maybe Falcon or somebody to help out versus three of your Earth-stomping consortium, the Gamesmaster would be happy to allow a variation in his rules just to see what happens.” The Eyrie-Father looked surprised. Nitz began making a noise like a chicken. “Very well,” spat the high cleric of the Imperium, colouring in anger for the first time. “Arrange your contest. And prepare to meet your gods in death.”  “He’s found us!” Temporary Death panicked as the Chain Knight smashed in the doors of Extraordinary Endeavour Enterprises. “The thing that killed my sister and has become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” “So he’s a bad guy then,” Nats recognised. “Okay.” And he hit Sir Lucian with a telekinetic pulse that should have knocked him out of the building and across the black void beyond. The Chain Knight’s bloody armour refracted the blow. “There is no point surrendering,” the intruder advised them. “You will all die slowly and painfully no matter what you do.” “Nice to see honesty in a raving psychopath,” Al B. noted. “You just don’t get that enough in serial nutjobs these days.” The Manga Shoggoth rolled over the Chain Knight and enveloped him. “And that’s that,” breathed Nats. Then fragments of Shoggoth sprayed across the room. “D-death,” stammered Uhuna, looking wide-eyed at an enemy she had battled all her life. “He’s death!” “That phase fold inducer against the wall weighs about nine tons,” Al B. told Nats. “The main magnifying coil is pretty much shot anyway.” “Gotcha,” the flying delivery boy answered. He grabbed it up and hammered it into Sir Lucian. “Refract that, chain boy!” The Chain Knight was propelled out of the firehouse by the law of conservation of momentum. “Miss, um, Temporary Death,” Al B. called urgently. “You can call me Tricia if you want,” Temporary Death told him shyly. “Lovely. Tricia it is. Well, Tricia, you brought us all here to the realm of temporary death through that vestigial portal in the EEE building. Can you maybe reverse that now and get us home? Fast?” Temporary Death considered this. “I guess so. But he’ll follow us.” “But at least we’ll have somewhere to run,” the scientist suggested. “Good point,” moaned several thousand droplets of Shoggoth goo. “Also I don’t think that hitting him with a heavy engine trick will work twice,” worried Nats. “Please, just get us out of here!” screamed Uhuna. She hadn’t been this terrified when Maximess was planning to dissect her. “We’re gone!” Temporary Death announced, and the firehouse blinked away. With Temporary Death abandoning her realm the Chain Knight took what he needed and returned to his Hellraisers to plan the next phase of their conquest.  “Does anyone mind if I kill Nitz for the good of the planet?” Falcon checked with his teammates as they met to consider the upcoming duel. “Anyone?” “Hey, those bozos are planning to take out the Earth!” Nitz the Bloody objected. “Somebody’s gotta stop them!” “There’s always someone trying to take out the Earth,” the Librarian pointed out. “I think there’s a waiting list.” “It’s true that the Resolution prophecy taking control of the minds of most of the major galactic civilisations a while back skewed a lot of folks’ perceptions of humans,” Miss Framlicker admitted. “Plus we’ve been involved in a few cosmic events that have caused soiled pants across the universe.” “Like the Hooded Hood tryin’ ta end the Parodyverse cause he struck out with Lisa,” Trickshot suggested. “That is not seeming to be very likely,” considered Yo. “The point is we don’t have many friends out there,” Amy said. “I think we do,” Hatman argued. “Folks like the Klayhog, and the Crystaxians. Not the major conquer-the-universe races we’ve had to slap down in our time, but the little folks. The ones who get bullied by the big kids. The ones who support us quietly because they don’t dare be seen to support us openly.” “An awful lot of them didn’t make it through the first round of the Challenge,” Hatman worried. “They’ll be wiped out when the contest ends if we can’t figure a way to save them.” “Yo is knowing there is to be being a plan for that,” the deputy-leader of the LL answered enigmatically. “But meaningwhile is to be problem of duel, yes?” Ebony frowned. “If it’s such a problem, I don’t see why you asked me to find a way of setting it up, Yo,” the priestess confessed. The Yo-being smiled and told them what s/he proposed to do.  Amazing Guy opened up his shimmering force bubble and set the kidnapped humans down in their own village square. “Home safe and sound,” he promised them. “Sorry about the trauma.” The Burgomaster of the community taken by the Z’Sox Assassins as leverage against Earth’s competitors shook his head. “We’re very grateful,” he said. “And glad to be home, of course. We have a lot to demolish.” AG looked around the picturesque Balkan tourist village. “Demolish?” “All these cruddy old buildings,” the Burgomaster explained. “They’ve all got to go.” “Being abducted by aliens was the best thing that could have happened to us,” another of the villagers explained. “Now we stop being a crappy third-rate postcard stop, take down these wormy old-world gift shops, and set up a giant silver space dome packed with all the attractions of a death-defying journey to the Transworlds Challenge.” “I was negotiating the sponsorship deals even while you were carrying us home,” the Burgomaster beamed. “We’re estimating three million tourists in the first year alone. We’re going to be very rich. Best thing that ever happened to us!”  Falcon retired to the Earth team common lounge to calm down some. His SPUD training told him it was considered bad practise for a bodyguard to murder his principal. The sucker punch took him in the gut, and the knee jarred his chin as he want down. Shazara Pel, last member of the Thonnagar team, glared down at him. “You are weak,” she frowned. “Unfit to wear the wings of a warrior.” Sam Wilson wiped the blood from his split lip and dragged himself to his feet with a sudden grin. “Sister, you have no idea how glad I am to meet you right now,” he said, activating his weapons package.  Visionary trudged back to his chamber and keyed in the door code. It was a fair trek from Aunt Sally’s maintenance bay but it was the nearest bathroom he even half trusted. His room was occupied. The green-skinned slave girls didn’t all fit on his bed. Some of them had to kneel before him on the floor. Vizh quickly checked the room number. “Hail,” said one of them, bowing low and displaying far too much cleavage for a man desperate for the lavatory to deal with. “Er, hail right back atcha,” the possibly fake man nodded manically. “Can I help you?” The girl gestured to her companions. “We are here for your pleasure.” “I see,” Vizh answered. He pointed to the bathroom. “Excuse me a moment.” “Do you require assistance, master?” “No, that’s… that’s fine thanks. I’ve been able to go to the bathroom on my own for quite a while now.” Nine pairs of soft green eyes watched him pick his way into the lavatory, and waited for his return. It took Vizh some time before he was ready to come out. Finding nine near-naked green-skinned slave girls draped across one’s bed wasn’t conducive to going to the bathroom.. “Okay,” he breathed when he finally came out (he was worried when the girls looked like they might give him a round of applause). “Whose little joke is this? Trickshot? Nitz?” The girls looked puzzled. “We do not understand, master, but instruct us and we will learn whatever we must to please you.” Visionary remembered that the Librarian had rescued some two dozen or so of the Slimy Slaver Lovetoad’s victims along with Dr Blargelslarch. Some of the prisoners had needed medical attention, but had all been returned to their respective worlds' representatives on the Gameship. “You were on the slaver ship? You’re free now.” The girls blanched. “F-free?” one of them stammered. “We have no master?” “Sure. Free as birds. You can go home.” The green-skinned beauties exchanged horrified looks. “Home? Without an owner? With no-one to protect us from shame and starvation, and no status except as non-persons not fit to be owned?” A couple of them started to sob. Vizh realised there was going to be a cultural difficulty here. “Why are you… here?” he asked desperately. “In my room, I mean?” “Where do you want us, master?” “Why me?” The woman who had spoken first looked puzzled. “Do you not wear the yellow mantle of clan leadership amongst your people? Do you not speak with the voice of authority, commanding those around you? Did not your chattels rescue us from the Slimy Lovetoad?” She looked as if she too might burst into tears. “Don’t you want to keep us?” “Please don’t send us away outcasts!” another pleaded. “We’ll do anything!” promised a third. Visionary fled back into the bathroom and bolted the door.  ManMan lay on his belly looking down at Off-Central Park by night, and tried to keep the pixies from obscuring his vision. “What the hell was that stuff you gave me to chew?” he demanded of Xander the Improbable. “Leaves,” the master of the mystic craft told him. “It was herbal.” “And in no way hugely illegal and narcotic.” “Not enough people know about what you had to ban it,” Xander comforted him. “It’s too poisonous.” Knifey chuckled. “At least it gets Joe to be able to see stuff that’s not there that could kill him anyway.” The mage nodded. “The enemy has cloaked their undead guardians in illusion and invisibility so as not to draw attention to the dimensional portal they are protecting. We need to find a way to slip past the zombies and other, nastier guardians without alerting our adversaries that we have passed through the portal to reconnoitre.” “And how do we do that?” ManMan argued, looking at how wonderfully the light played through his fingers. “There’s only about a zillion of them. And is that an undead dragon they have stomping about over there?” “Technically that’s an undead wyvern, Mr Pepper,” Cleone answered him from the other side of the mage. “Only two legs.” “Good to know exactly what’s chomping me,” Joe Pepper noted weakly. “Ever killed an undead wyvern before, Knifey?” “I hear it’s best to saw through the knot of animating energies at the base of their skulls,” the talking knife answered casually. “So they say.” “How the hell are we going to get past all of those?” ManMan persisted, gesturing to the myriad shambling guardians he could now perceive. “Really?” “A minor diversion,” Xander the Improbable replied, and pointed to the girl in the red hood and cloak who was skipping down the path towards the portal, carrying a basketful of goodies.  “I’m delighted to see some of the contestant races entering into the spirit of the event,” the Gamesmaster proclaimed, standing in the centre of the giant arena created especially for this conflict. “And now the clerics of Earth have challenged all comers in a theological contest to the death.” “Hey, hold on…!” Nitz objected. “When did we…” “The Eyriemaster added that bit in,” Ebony explained. “But we slipped in an unconscious-is-okay clause.” “Us or them?” Nitz worried. “And where’s Falcon? We don’t want to be outnumbered three-to-two.” “Falcon isn’t joining us,” Ebony explained. “I picked a different spiritual leader from our team.” “Hello!” Yo called to the crowds, waving happily as s/he emerged from the players’ tunnel to join the others. “Hello galactic-beings! Is so nice to be seeing so many of you are to be coming to be watching today!” “Yo?” Nitz asked. “Yo’s a religious leader?” “Well, maybe a lifestyle guru,” Ebony suggested. “Look, we’ve got an elder beast and an invisible rhino between us. You really want to bench a pure thought being who can do anything she thinks she can?” “Point.” “Yo is also hoping that all cute-races will be to be watching how Earthing peoples are to be nice and then not to be coming to Earth to be wiping out of all living beings there,” the genderless Zorro-impersonator explained to the throng. “You die, then your planet dies,” the Shee-Yar Eyrie-Father promised. He was hefting the sacred power staff of his forebears, which could rip asunder mortal flesh of any who were stained with heresy. “You have not yet been to be introducing your friends!” Yo beamed at the angry cleric. “I am the hierophant of Frammistat Eight,” the bulbous frog creature covered in ceremonial amulets hissed. “You are offal o be offered up to the gods of mastery.” The huge old woman in the scaled combat armour beside him didn’t seem impressed even with her teammates. “My orphans on Apuffylips call me Granny Grimness,” she warned, charging up her uber-rod. “There we worship obedience and pain.” “Kind of like the Fox channel back on Earth,” Nitz observed. “The rules are simple,” the Gamesmaster explained with glee. “Each side attempts to destroy the other. Magics, sacred items, and occult manifestations are permitted.” Ebony’s mouth twitched a little as her fingers felt for the amulet around her neck that contained a fragment of Shoggoth-essence. “Neither side may leave the arena until the contest is done,” the Gamesmaster added. “Is it just me, or does he really remind you of Elton John?” Nitz wondered. “The contest begins… now.”  “Where are you going, little girl?” demanded a creature that only in the nightmares of a drug-induced hallucination could have been described as a human in a trenchcoat. “I’m taking this basket of goodies to my grandmother’s house,” answered Mad Wendy, smiling up innocently at the being that loomed over her. “She lives just on the other side of that concealed dimensional portal. But I’m not supposed to talk to strangers.” More of the dark shapes drifted round the little patch of life and colour who stood waif-like in the darkness. “Did she say anything about screaming for strangers?” the dark thing asked her. “She said strangers might try to get my goodies,” Mad Wendy worried. “Are you Bad Men?” “We’re not men at all,” snickered the guardian, shedding all semblance of human guise. “But we are very, very bad.” “Oh goodie,” beamed Mad Wendy, her eyes flashing with malice in the darkness. “Then my invisible friend will stomp you into ittle bits. Ittle teeny pulpy squishy bits.” Then Mad Wendy stopped cloaking the Yurt as the villains had cloaked their undead. “Bad things try to hurt dream-girl?” the inconceivable Yurt demanded, rising up to his full height and unfolding arms the size of house-wings. “Yurt will smash!” Mad Wendy watched admiringly as the gamma-irradiated Russian peasant hut began slamming into the undead guardians with a slow-building fury. She casually reached out to the enchantments guarding the portal and began absently ravelling them like a ball of wool. “My hero!” she called out to the Yurt as he ploughed his way into the army of death. “Yurt not like dead-things! Yurt pulp!” “Good idea. Then later we can get some ice cream.” The Yurt slammed another half-dozen under a rocky limb. There was an unpleasant squishing noise. “And maybe some jelly,” considered Mad Wendy, watching the gore with interest. “Yurt want Cherry Garcia!” “Mmm. And I’ll have Puppies and Pickle!” “Is there such an ice cream?” ManMan asked from concealment as he and Xander edged closer to the portal. “You can bet there is now,” the mage replied. He turned back to Cleone. “You know what you have to do? Take care.” “You too, Xander,” the sleek swanmay answered. “And try not to get Mr Pepper killed unnecessarily.” “I promise he won’t be killed unnecessarily,” the master of the mystic crafts assured her as he led ManMan towards the undefended portal. ManMan looked at the carnage around them. “This was a minor diversion?” “You should have seen the direct method,” Xander told him. So as to keep the ichor off their clothes they skirted the edge of the circle where the Yurt and mad Wendy were decimating the opposition. So the secret battle raged between two extraordinary individuals and an army of undead. And when Xander and ManMan had slipped through the concealed portal, and before the enemy could unship it’s big guns, Mad Wendy and the Yurt simply vanished, their part in the campaign done. Cleone watched until it was no longer safe to do so, then slipped away to make preparations for what was to come.  “Right,” Nitz the Bloody hissed, facing off against the Eyrie-Father. “Time to whip out our gods and see who’s got the biggest. Splateku!” The power of Zeku did not render the Shee-Yar archcleric flat on the arena. In fact nothing happened. “Uh,” worried Nitz. “Okay, Burneku! Stompeku! Fainteku!” The Eyrie-Father watched in satisfaction as Nitz discovered his powers didn’t work here. “You serve an earth-deity, a nature god,” he advised the young man. “His power is drawn from the biosphere around your world. You are a very long way from that world right now.” “Ah,” worried Nitz, backing away. “Crapeku!” The Eyrie-Father powered up his sacred staff. “And now let us commence the ritual of the flagellation of the heathen,” he announced. Ebony of Nubilia was facing off against Granny Grimness, the terrifying headmistress of Appuffylips’ Obedience Academy where Dark Thugos’ Hog-Soldiers were forged into pitiless killing machines. As Ebony reached for her amulet Granny moved with lighting swiftness and tossed something towards the priestess that hammered her to the ground. “Ah ah, my dearie,” the old woman cackled. “Granny does her homework, as all good warriors should. She knows all about that amulet with a little bit of Shoggoth in it and got her lovely boys to prepare for it.” Ebony rolled aside from an electro-lash that would have ripped her arm off and she scrabbled for her necklace. It felt cold and slimy and it hurt to touch it. There was a shimmering around it in the form of a star that had more points than were possible in mundane geometry. “An elder sign!” the priestess of the Manga Shoggoth recognised in horror. “A traditional way of binding elder creatures to conform with mundane physics,” Granny Grimness lectured, lashing again and again to tire the dodging child out before moving in to deliver chastisement. “Your master can’t escape the amulet, and you can’t escape me.” Ebony dodged desperately again, scrabbling to unpick the elder symbol, but she knew she’d need hours with books and ritual to have a chance. Granny had indeed caught her. “And now we shall begin to instruct you in pain,” the mistress of Apuffylips told her. And Yo was facing the Hierophant of Frammistat Eight. “You are no cleric,” spat the huge armoured toad. “The spirit of no god moves through you.” Yo brandished his/her rapier. “Yo is still to be stopping you, uncute slavery-thing!” “But the Great Frog… he moves through me,” the Heirophant boasted. “Possesses me… fills me and uses me as his slave…” And as he spoke he twisted and swelled up, becoming a great bloated thing twice his normal size. His voice changed too, and he was surrounded by a bleak darkness that Yo could sense before ever the creature lashed out and tore into him/her. “Is not good,” Yo admitted, leaping free. S/he had just enough time to see her two fellows in similar trouble before the Great Frog himself descended on her, lashing out a great long tongue to capture Yo’s arm and drag her towards his gaping maw. In the stands the rest of the Earth team watched in horror. “The Great Frog,” winced Dr Blargelslarch. “The Hierophant is possessed by a full-blown god.” “Overblown, I’d say,” judged Trickshot. “We have to do something!” gasped Visionary, rising to his feet to be restrained by Hatman and Falcon. “They’re getting killed out there! The Reptiloids have brought along an actual deity to fight for them!” “That’s true,” agreed Dancer, appearing at Visionary’s shoulder. “That’s why Yo arranged the same,” Lisa explained from Visionary’s other side. “Lisa?” Vizh goggled at the unexpected arrival. “Dancer?” Sarah Shepherdson gave Vizh a happy little wave. “But not just Lisa and Dancer,” she noted. “We brought a guest star too.” Lisa smirked at the possibly-fake man. “Yo felt if they were going to drag gods into this, well…” And the arena became bright with lightning. A huge noisy goat-chariot appeared from nowhere and slammed directly into the Great Frog’s bulbous midriff. At the same time a baseball bat with a nail in it hammered into Granny Grimness and hurled her away from Ebony. And leaping from the chariot, a red-tressed warrior with an unkept beard and a battered horny helmet rose up like the tides of revolution and called to the battlefield. “Ho, alien deities and foul servitor thereof,” he called. “Thou hast challenged the gods of Middlegard for the nonce, and now shalt thou be smitethed most wrothfully!” “Now that,” grinned Trickshot leaning back as Donar, Ausgardian hemigod of thunder, made good his promise on the Great Frog. “is what I call old-time religion!” “What?” screeched Granny Grimness, pointing her uber-rod at the interloper. “Die!” Ebony hurled her amulet into the powerful blast beam that would have seared into Donar’s back. The necklace vaporised, and the elder sign enveloping it was shattered. Something gelid and many angled flickered angrily then multiplied into a vast gelatinous blob. “By the way, the Shoggoth is allergic to Elder Signs,” Ebony explained as Granny disappeared inside the goo. “They put him in a really bad mood.” The Eyrie-Father of the Shee-Yar growled angrily and brought his sacred staff round to envelop the Shoggoth in a disruption net. Nits took his moment and headbutted the cleric. Nitz might not currently have the power of Zeku but he did have a heavy metal helmet that did no good at all to the Eyrie-Father’s patrician nose. “Are your balls in the same place as a humans?” Nitz wondered before conducting empirical tests with his boot. “Vile frog of slavery!” howled Donar, getting himself rather worked up. “Come and have a go if thou thinkest thou art hard enough! Taketh that! And that! And that! And that! And that! Yea, verily, even unto takething that! ” “Yo is hoping Yo-friends are showing that is to be not good to be plotting and planning to be attacking cute-Earth,” Yo announced to the crowded auditorium as the object lesson continued. “Yo is hoping is to be everybody reconsidering, yes? Yes.”  All was once again silent in Off-Central Park, with no sign there had ever been a horde of undead plastered underfoot. “Magician and Knife-man gone. What we do now, dream-girl?” asked the Yurt puzzledly. “Oh, we’ll find something, I promise” Mad Wendy replied, taking the walking peasant hut by its massive hand and leading him off down a yellow brick road. “Something fun!”  Coming Next: The final leg of the Transworlds Challenge tests the endurance of man and machine to the limit and pushes some of our cast towards hard choices. Add in the fate of the Clan Klayhog, a mysterious intruder in the Gameship, dark deeds in New Orleans, more on EEE and Temporary Death, the sinister Super-Skunk, and a few other goodies and we might get our usual 6000 words in. All served up for the sports fans in UT#182: Endurance, or Dangerous Choices
Those wishing to follow the fates of nine nubile green-skinned slave girls may wish to read Visionary's further tales of their adventures and the ramifications thereof, presented in Untold Vignettes of the Transworlds Challenge #1: Master Negotiator and Untold Vignettes of the Transworld Challenge #2: How My Light Is Spent.
 That Is Not Footnoted Which Can Eternal Lie... The only thing that really needs mentioning this time is to remind folks of the strange existence of the Manga Shoggoth. Created as a servitor race by the Fairly Great Old Ones at a time when they were active and had warped the physical laws of the universe to accommodate them, in many ways all the Shoggoths were one Shoggoth. In these modern times when the FGOO "sleep" and physics is different the remaining Shoggoths that rebelled against their masters and helped ekect them from reality (for now) still have a somewhat imprecise relationship with time/space. The Manga Shoggoth, the only such creature we have encountered - and possibly the only such creature there is to encounter - can divide his consciousness between different parts of his bioplasm, even if they are separated by space or time, and can shift "himself" to concentrate on any of his matter, making it replicate quickly to grow to whatever size he requires, dissolving it when it is no longer needed. At the moment the Manga Shoggoth has a "family", consisting of his wife Sh'Ron and daughter Cthandra, both of whom are other aspects of the Shoggoth himself. However, the fragment of Shoggoth that is in the Lair Legion is currently isolated from the main biomass of Shoggoth. When that fragment needed to replicate sufficiently quickly to protect the Legion from death by nuclear fire it had to draw upon mundane matter as raw material; and not just any matter but matter from Parody Island, a rather special bit of real estate touched by the Celestian Space Robots and many other cosmic forces. This matter has somehow "contaminated" this bit of Shoggoth, and has not yet be exorcised. Hence the Legion's Shoggoth cannot return to his main biomass without contaminating the whole, and is not able to communicate with the rest of itself in the way that other fragments can. This may limit its power, but it certainly isolates it and makes it a little sad. The fragment of Shoggoth Ebony carries with her in her pendant is from the main Manga Shoggoth. That's the aspect that responded at the end of this story, not the biomass the Legion is more familiar with, who was also in this chapter in the realm of Temporary Death (and could only get there because he was corrupted by mundane matter).
Who's Who in the Parodyverse Where's Where in the Parodyverse |