Posted by The Hooded Hood, inspired to rip-off Visionary's rip-off of a well known TV show phrase, presents this entirely-nothing-to-do-with-the-current-world-tour-storyline special since it seemed like the thing to do at the time on May 02, 2001 at 14:30:01:
Untold Tales of the Parodyverse: Where Everybody Knows Your Name (but not your True Name)
The hammering on the doors of the Halls of Destiny woke Jury. She winced as
the thunder echoed through her head. She noted, on an intellectual level, that
conceptual beings were not prone to hangovers. It didn’t help.
“What’s a nice
girl like you doing in a place like this?”
The nice girl looked up.
“Actually, I’m not a girl,” she said. “I’m one of the principal anthropomorphic
personifications of narrative principles, the greatest of the offices within the
standard Parodyverse. I am the Shaper of Worlds, and at my behest histories come
into motion.”
The man shrugged. “So what’s a nice anthropomorphic
personification like you doing in a place like this? And what are you
drinking?”
Jury, the Shaper of Worlds, looked over at the Paradox Stranger
who has just reversed a chair opposite her and straddled it. “I don’t drink. I
no longer require conventional sustenance.”
Dox pointed to the décor. “I
think you’re missing the point. This is a bar. People drink here. Admittedly
it’s an excuse for all sorts of other activities, but it starts with ordering
something in a glass. Or having someone else order you something in a glass.”
Before Jury could object, the Stranger had hailed a barmaid and ordered two
Parallax Apocalypses.
“Aren’t you banned from here?” the barmaid asked. “You
started that bar-fight with the Parody Master didn’t you?”
“That was probably
my evil twin,” lied Dox with a winning smile. “And anyway, I’m on my best
behaviour tonight. I am with a Lady.”
“You aren’t with me,” the Shaper of
Worlds objected. “I was just sitting here and you sat there.”
The Paradox
Stranger looked down at himself and his chair. “So I am. That seems to meet the
definition of being with you under most spacio-temporal definitions. We can
discuss what sort of date it is later.”
“This is not a date. You are merely
bothering me.”
“The two aren’t mutually exclusive,” grinned Dox. “I take it
you haven’t had much experience of dating.”
Jury bristled at the comment. “I
am a high cosmic office holder. It is not my function to ‘date’.”
“Then what
about those rumours about you and the Hooded Hood? Or was kissing him just
business?”
“It was… necessary,” blushed the Shaper of Worlds.
The waitress
appeared with a tray bearing two drinks radiating in the ultraviolet spectrum,
with logical conundrums stuck on cocktail sticks with umbrellas at the end. Dox
pushed one of the Apocalypses over to Jury. “Poor kid. I guess you haven’t
enjoyed a real night out since you were mortal, right? Back with, what’s his
name, Jarvis?”
The Shaper of Worlds’ face grew blank and cold. “I don’t
date,” she repeated.
The Stranger wisely changed the topic. “I haven’t seen
you in here before,” he noted, gesturing round the Bar at the Centre of the
Universe.
Jury cautiously sipped her drink. It didn’t seem too bad. “I
haven’t been here before. I’m not really a bar person. It was just
whughphumphgh!!!”
“Kicks in after a moment or two, doesn’t it?” Dox chuckled
as the effects of the Parallax Apocalypse made themselves known.
“Yes,” Jury
gasped.
“Well if you’re new here let me introduce you around. You probably
know a lot of the regulars anyway in your professional capacity. You won’t see
many strangers. Except me of course,” the Paradox Stranger preened.
“That
won’t be necessary,” Jury told him. “I’m not stopping.”
“Hey, everybody!” Dox
shouted across the bar. “Say hi to Jury, the Shaper of Worlds! It’s her first
time at the bar.”
“Hi Jury!” the patrons called, causing the Shaper to blush
a deep red.
“Come and say hello,” the Stranger insisted, dragging the
embarrassed creator of narratives across to the bar-counter. “That big fat guy
at the end of the bar is Mron. He’s been here since about the time the gases
started cooling into planets. You should see the size of his bar tab. You
probably know Quetzalcoatl the Feathered Serpent. He’s mostly retired now, hangs
out here a lot. The woman he’s chatting up is Lusting of the Pointless. She’s
really one of the most popular regulars. That’s Eggo the Living Waffle playing
darts with the Dark Deliverer, and the Phantom’s scoring. Over there in the
corner is…”
“The Chronicler of Stories,” Jury recognised her mentor and
fellow cosmic office holder. “I didn’t know he came here.”
“Best not to
disturb him while he brooding over his coffee,” the Paradox Stranger advised.
“And try not to trip over his drunken ravens.”
“I used to have ravens,” the
Shaper of World admitted, “but they made a hell of a mess in the pools of
destiny and ruined the carpets. Eventually he explained that ravens weren’t
really necessary. So now he keeps the corvidae and I have goldfish. Goldfish are
far less trouble.”
“And they’ve got the memory span of a Hollywood starlet,”
muttered one of the birds lying round the Chronicler with his talons in the air.
“Who ever heard of goldfish of destiny?”
“Each of the Triumverate is allowed
to redecorate their conceptual demirealm however they like,” Jury told the
Paradox Stranger defensively. “I’m thinking of adding windowboxes,” she confided
in low tones.
“Homely,” Dox replied. “I guess you know Santa, and his chief
technical officer Zebulon? They’re talking business with Mr Limpqvist just now
so we won’t disturb them. After all, Santa’s got some huge delivery problems to
very tight timescales. I think he’s having problem with the Elf unions as
well.”
“Ah,” Jury nodded trying to look sympathetic.
“And playing cards
over there with an avatar of the Infrequent Aardvark are Space Ghost, Baron
Munchenhausen, and Blackhurt, Prince of Fibs.
“Excuse me,” Blackhurt said to
the Baron politely. “Your cards are showing.”
“What?” Jury puzzled. “You’re
the embodiment of evil. Why should you tell him that?”
The Prince of Fibs
shrugged. “It’s my night off,” he explained.
“Game’s over anyway,” Space
Ghost announced. “I’ve got a full arcana.”
“Beats my partial revelation,”
Infrequent Aardvark admitted, throwing down his hand. “But I’m still ahead by
seventeen realities.”
The Paradox Stranger guided his companion away from the
ensuing squabble about a reality that the Aardvark owed Blackhurt from before
the Dawn of Time and had never paid back. “One they get on like that they’ll be
at it all night,” Dox explained. “Another drink?”
“I’m not sure I should be
accepting drinks for you, Stranger,” Jury answered. “For one thing I’m not used
to them, and for another everyone says you can’t be trusted. Well just a small
one then.”
The Shaper took her seat again and looked around the bar while her
companion went for the drinks. In some senses it stretched to infinity, and in
others it terminated in the jukebox, the pinball machine, and the male-oriented
gendered beings’ toilet. Over at the piano Samhain, Destroyer of Tales, was
entertaining an admiring crowd of valkyries with showtunes. By the fireside
Lisa’s indestructible ginger cat had curled up on the best seat in the house and
neither gods nor cosmic beings dared try and move it from its nest.
“Keeping
dangerous company these days, my dear,” a dry Latvian-accented voice spoke in
her ear. She turned round to glare into the green glowing eyes of the Hooded
Hood.
“What do you mean?” Jury demanded.
“The Paradox Stranger,” the Hood
intoned. “I wouldn’t say he was a particularly safe friend to have.”
“What I
do is my own business,” she answered crossly.
“Is it?” the cowled crime czar
wondered. “I thought you had a cosmic office, and that what you did was
therefore everybody’s business. Or did someone rewrite the Charters of the
Triumvirate while I wasn’t looking?”
“It’s my night off too,” Jury answered
stiffly.
“Really?” the Hood mused. “So who’s minding the office?”
“Don’t
you go trying anything, Hood. You bamboozled me when I was new at this but
now…”
“Now you’re ready to let someone else bamboozle you? I see.”
“No.
You know what I mean. Don’t go trying any grandiose plans to restructure reality
and overthrow the multiverse just because I’m having a little personal time. I
am omniscient you know.”
“Then you’ll know I’m here for a spot of dinner with
a guest,” the Hooded Hood replied, pointing over to the candlit table where Lisa
Waltz was examining the menu, “and you’ll already have worked out what the
Paradox Stranger is up to. Good evening.”
“Was that the Hooded Hood?” Dox
asked as he returned with two strange cocktails in non-Euclidean highball
glasses. “I hope you told him you were with me tonight.”
“I said no such
thing,” Jury answered, regarding the Stranger and his drinks with equal
suspicion. “What is this?”
“It’s Temporal Banana and Kiwi Punch with a dash
of Synchronicity,” Dox told her. “Drink it down fast before the Kirby dots all
effervesce away.”
Jury had intended to send the Stranger away. Really she
had. But the Hood’s words had made the whole meeting a kind of challenge, and
she was determined not to back down because the Hooded bloody Hood told her to
beware. “I don’t mean the drink,” the Shaper frowned. “I mean… this. You sitting
there buying me alcohol. Talking to me.”
“You really don’t get the hang of
bars, do you kid?” the Paradox Stranger smiled. Jury noticed he had a rather
nice lopsided grin. “The way it works is this. People come into the bar for all
kinds of reasons. Maybe they’re bored and they want some entertainment, a game
of planetary pool, or Destiny and Dragons or something. Maybe they’re miserable
and want to get away from it all and drown their sorrows. Maybe they’re looking
for a chance to let their hair, fur, tentacles, or other accoutrements,
extremities, or random bodily parts down with a few friends. Some even come
because they’re thirsty, and this is the Bar at the Centre of the Universe,
which means it keeps a pretty good cellar. And maybe some people are a little
bit lonely, and they come here to spend time with someone else, maybe find a way
to fill that void in their cold, precise professional life, even if it’s just
for a little while. See?”
“And which am I?” Jury asked.
“Doesn’t matter,”
Dox told her. “All that matters is you’re here. And although you know all kinds
of omniscient stuff there’s things you don’t understand, and why people like us
get together in bars is one of them.”
Jury drank her punch. “And why is
that?”
“It’s probably one of the cosmic laws of the universe,” the Stranger
answered. “A pretty girl alone in a bar isn’t going to be alone for very long.
And you are pretty.”
“I am?”
“Of course. And this law says that somebody
has to come and offer her a drink and see if she wants to dance.”
“I see. And
does she have to? Dance, I mean?”
“Oh yes. Otherwise the immutable laws of
time/space would be shattered and everything would fall into chaos and ruin. And
that wouldn’t look good on your resumé.”
“I guess not.”
“So let’s
dance.”
“I don’t know how.”
“It’s simple. Use your omniscience.”
“Oh.
Yes.”
The Paradox Stranger led Jury over to the small, infinite, dance floor.
“We need music,” he called over to the Destroyer of Tales at the piano. “Play it
again, Sam.”
“All right,
all right,” she called at the persistent knocking. “I’m coming.” She dragged
herself out of her tangled, sweaty bed and willed herself some clothes. “I have
got to train a goldfish to answer that door,” she muttered.
“Never mind,” the
Chronicler of Stories frowned, shimmering forward to stand beside her. “I let
myself in.”
“What is it?” the Shaper of Worlds asked brusquely. The
Chronicler had been a great help in showing her the ropes since she had been
granted her cosmic office but sometimes his attitude annoyed her. “Why all this
unholy row at… at whatever time in creation this is?”
“I need to talk to
you,” the Chronicler scowled. “About the Paradox Stranger.”
Jury glanced
guiltily at the wrecked bedroom and the rumpled bed but there was no sign of
another inhabitant. “What about him.”
“You know why he was originally exiled
by the then-Triumverate?” Chronicler demanded.
“Something about him doing
dress rehearsals of the upcoming Resolution War, wasn’t it?” Shaper remembered,
forcing herself to focus past her throbbing head. “He kept creating
pseudo-historical versions of the Lair Legion throughout history, and the
Triumverate had to keep carving wedges out of narrative causality to stop the
whole timeline collapsing under it’s own continuity.”
“Right,” the Chronicler
agreed. “And he was gone until the Hood’s meddling brought him back recently
during the Dark Thugos incident.”
Jury had overlooked that insight.
“The
one thing we couldn’t figure back when we exiled him, the one thing he wouldn’t
tell us, was how he got the creative material to forge all those parallel hero
groups throughout history,” the Chronicler concluded. “Until now.”
The Shaper
went pale. “No,” she whispered. “He wouldn’t have…” She rushed down into the
Halls of Destiny. Goldfish swimming through the air wriggled out of her
way.
On the lip of the largest of the pools of reality was a little note from
the Paradox Stranger:
Jury screamed.
Her servitors were
scraping goldfish off the metaphorical walls for weeks
afterwards.
Meanwhile, in the Bar at the Centre of the Universe, or the
Bar with No Name, or the Vortex Arms, or whatever aspect it was using today, the
Paradox Stranger placed a couple of Parallax Apocalypses on a polished table.
“Hi,” he grinned. “You must be Pegasus. Nice to meet you. Is this seat
taken?”