It's Just a Game...

The Black Rat: Episode One: John Brown's Body

Sat, 01 Oct 2011 22:55:43 GMT

Please note I now have a separate journal for my fic, over HERE.

The two lads marched down the street, swinging their shoulders, cans of beer in their hands and long tartan scarves flowing out behind them, sloshing beer in their exuberance and shouting at the top of their lungs.

“B-A-Y, B-A-Y, B-A-Y C-I-T-Y, With an R-O-double-L, E-R-S, Bay City Rollers are the best!”

“SHUT UP!” Came a hoarse holler from further down the street, the shape of a naked, beer-bellied man silhouetted by a dim, flickering yellow light. “Some of us are trying to sleep!”

“Fuck of you wanker!” The lads shouted back in unison and then ducked into a side alley together, one of them stopping at the mouth to watch the street while the other vanished back into the dark and yanked a can of spray paint out of his pocket, spraying the wall, writing out the name of his idols one giant letter at a time.

He'd just finished the 'Y' when he stumbled against something in the dark, fumbling out his lighter and flicking it on, casting a shaky light over the alley. Half – or more – of the street lights were out, it was the only way to see, but you could get away with a lot in the dark. Swings and roundabouts.

The dancing flame revealed a pile of newspaper and cardboard, but there was something underneath it, something heavy that wouldn't shift. He crouched down, curious, and threw back the card and paper back out of the way, falling back with a little girly shriek as the light revealed the battered black face of a corpse.

“There's a dead wog back here Derek!”

The other lad came scrambling back and took out his pocket torch, flicking it on and playing it over the corpse. “Fuck me... check his wallet Alan.”

With the torchlight playing over the body Alan crouched down and started to rummage through the corpses clothes, plucking out his wallet. “Christ alive, there's a Henry and at least a couple of ponies in here.”

“and i am quite certain his family would like both back, if, indeed, they are his.” The voice was strange, quiet, muffled, but it had a way of cutting clean across your perception, right through the sound of traffic and the huffed breaths of the two youths.

They turned, as one, towards the end of the alley and Derek's torch played over a strange figure. He wasn't tall, perhaps five seven, five eight at the most. He was dressed entirely in black from top to bottom, a ragged figure in black leather jeans and a ragged old trench coat with a high collar. Even his hands were covered with black gloves. The only colour they could see were gleaming red circles in the dark like demonic eyes, but they weren't, they were lenses, lenses on a gasmask.

“Who the fuck is this spaz?” Alan stood tall, now he'd recovered from the surprise. Stepping towards the strange man at the mouth of the alley.

“what's wrong with you that you'd steal from a corpse? What's wrong with you that you'd have no respect for this poor, dead man?”

“What's wrong with you that you give a fuck you weird-lookin' nonce?” Alan stepped up to him and reached out to shove the short man's shoulder, unsettled by his strange appearance and wanting to feel strong in front of his friend.

The man in black twisted with the shove and balled his left hand into a fist, bringing it hard across Alan's jaw. It hit him like a steam train, the gloved weighted with lead filings. There was a crunch from his jaw and teeth parted company with jaw as he was bodily flung into the wall of the alley, spitting enamel and giving a strange, gurgling, bloody scream as he slumped to the ground, clutching his ruined mouth.

“Keep the fuck back from me!” Derek stumbled away, keeping the torch on the man as he slowly walked towards him, fumbling in his back pocket for his switchblade, clicking it open and holding it out threateningly in his shaking hand.

“you really don't want to do that.” The man pushed back his jacket to reveal a dark leather belt around his waist from which hung a half dozen 'holsters' each a different shape.

“Is that a utility belt? Do you think you're Adam West or something?” Derek laughed, nervously, stepping forward, jabbing threateningly with the knife.

The man feinted right with his fist and Derek slashed at him with the blade, scraping across leather only to get his wrist snatched in the man's other hand. He wasn't big, but he was strong and Derek was slammed against the back wall, his arm held in that iron grip as the man unbuckled one 'holster' with a fluid motion, snatching out a hammer and smashing it into Derek's hand, shattering small bones and making him keen like a banshee.

“no, it's a tool belt.”

The red-eyed man in black handcuffed the two men together – no points in wasting cuffs – and left them clinging to each other, weeping and swearing around their wounds and the blood, taking what comfort they could from each other.

Leaving them to their misery he stepped over to the body and respectfully uncovered it, pushing back his sleeve and playing dim red lights over it, plucking up the discarded wallet for a look at it. There was something off about this, the money, the drugs, the way he'd been killed.

The body was covered in long, straight bruises, clustered around the top of his body. A tentative touch confirmed broken, floating ribs, found swollen and bruised flesh, a softness here and there on the man's skull where the bone had been cracked and shattered. The man had been systematically beaten to death over the course of some time.

The man in black peeled back the gas mask, just up over his nose and his mouth, revealing a broad, bristled chin as he leaned down to sniff at the corpse.

“ganj, so he was a dealer after all,” he murmured to himself, pulling the mask back down and turning back to the wallet. Something didn't add up.

Opening it up there wasn't much in there, just some cards and paper, the only notes were crisp and new. The drugs, an eighth of an ounce of marijuana resin, were in a brand spanking new plastic bag, way too large for the small amount of drugs that was there. Something was absolutely, definitely, off.

There wasn't time right now to think it through, there was the roar of an engine and the squeal of tyres. The man in black darted his head around, the red lenses of his mask darkening in the suddenly harsh light of the beams. The doors flew open and heavy shoes slammed down on the pavement. He scrambled back away from the body but the alley stopped in a dead end, the heavy closed door at the back of a chippy.

“'Ello, 'ello, 'ello...” laughed one of the coppers as they strolled up towards him, hand thrust into his pocket, pushing through the sling on his truncheon and dragging it out, slapping it into his palm while his partner hung back a bit.

“i don't want to hurt you, but i will if i have to.”

“Are you threatening a police officer, squire?” His partner was paying attention now, taking out his own truncheon, the pair of them blocking the whole exit.

“Christ...” said the copper at the back, spotting the rollers and the state they were in. “A body and two beatings? Off to an early start today this evening aren't we Sir?” The two police looked to each other and their demeanour changed, subtly.

“body?” The penny dropped. Nobody would have managed to get word out about the body yet. They'd barely even looked down the alley yet. They knew. They knew already. They'd always known. “what I said earlier? I've changed my mind.”

He pressed back against the chippy door and braced his boot against it before springing forward towards them. They met halfway down the alley, and he brought up his arms, twisting side to side, blocking one truncheon blow with his arm, the other smacking into his belly with a solid thump that surprised the copper that swung it.

That was his chance, snapping out with his fist an spreading the officer's nose across his face, sending him sprawling with his cap flipping through the air to fall to the dirt. That was all he needed. Now there was space to run, where there were a couple of cops, there'd likely be more, especially if they knew about the corpse.

The man in black hunkered down and ran, heavy boots denting the bonnet of the Rover as he leapt up and over it, ragged leather coat streaming out behind him as he ran, the remaining cop in pursuit, dropping behind him as he wove through the darkened streets at breakneck pace, knowing them like the back of his hand.

When the policeman came to another alleyway and shined his torch down it there was no sign of the man in black. It was empty, nothing but a manhole cover and a piece of card fluttering to floor.

A piece of card with a sketch of a rat and the words “i know,” scrawled upon it.

Writing about writing... recursive much?

Sat, 24 Sep 2011 19:20:50 GMT

I'm going to take a break from the pulp writing today (Black Rat should start tomorrow I think) just to bare my soul about the act of writing itself, how I feel about it and why I have such a hard time believing in my own ability or accepting the praise and compliments of others.

I never wanted to be a writer originally*, I wanted to be an artist. I used to spend all my time drawing and would go through reams and reams of paper. I would copy things out of my comic books, draw the craziness out of my imagination. I got pretty good, I thought, and my friends and family all seemed to appreciate my artwork. I learned a lot, pretty rapidly and there was little I enjoyed more all through primary school. It didn't hurt that my dad had kinda stepped aside from his artistic side to go the mathematic route. I was good at maths and science but that wasn't something I wanted to do. Doing something different was the extra push I needed to commit to being creative. Not that I resent anything about my dad's choices. I am fiercely proud to have had an intelligent educator as a father. That dad had been a teacher was a massive benefit growing up and my mum's no slouch either. Best of all they, and my grandparents, were all massively supportive and encouraging.

That all changed once I got to Secondary School. I finally had an art teacher, something I'd not had before. The problem was that the art teachers at secondary school were extremely traditional, very arts and craftsy and they just did not 'get' me or what I was doing at all. When someone's all still-life and basket weaving, you're in a different world altogether when you're talking about Roger Dean, Tim White, Jim Burns or Rodney Matthews. I had a struggle even when I was referencing Rene Magritte or Roy Lichtenstein as well.

I didn't do particularly well in art, even though I loved it. Peculiarly though, in 'Design & Communication', in which I was using the same skills and many of the same influences (my final project was inspired by Roger Dean's experiments in architecture) I did amazingly well. Something that surprised the crap out of me.

Despite all the discouragement from secondary school I stuck it out, thanks to the D&C praise and the support of everyone except the teachers and somehow managed to bluff them into letting me take art at A level. That was much better and I was built up all over again. Hippyish, indulgent and non-judgemental tutors who encouraged me again and made me believe in myself. That was just a build up to the knock-down though.

After college it was a Foundation year of art to build up a portfolio, ostensibly to go to university. That was time for a second round of crushing indifference and criticism. These tutors weren't indulgent or interested and didn't give a fuck what you were interested in or what you wanted to do. They wanted you to do what they wanted, precisely, at least when they weren't showing you Maplethorpe pictures of swollen testes in wooden cuffs.

It was grinding and disheartening but I gritted my teeth and I stuck it out, I did what I wanted to do and damn the consequences but that wears you the fuck out when everyone's telling you that you're wrong, your crap, it kills the joy you might have otherwise felt in what you're doing inch by bloody inch.

Then it came time to interview for universities, degrees or HNDs and I travelled all over the country wherever there were illustration or other courses that seemed to fit. Tutor after tutor was an arrogant prick, not the good kind of tutor, not the good kind of tutor. Arrogant, condescending, stuck in their own rut. The couple of places I could bring myself to apply to rejected me and the only course I would have really liked to do was in a terrifying part of Salford. I'll make sacrifices, but that was too much and the tutor there wasn't encouraging, the course and the students were (bless 'em).

That was that, my desire and self-belief to make art died that year and I've barely touched a brush, a pencil or a pen since around 1996.

They ground the love of art, of drawing out of me. Killed it and all because I spent so many years and so much effort trying to better myself at it, to learn, to find places that could help me. They didn't, they stamped any desire to do art out of me entirely.

There's always been something else I've been good at too, spinning yarns. I had better lick with teachers in English though and I always single out Mr Kettle for some special love. He's dead now, but he was the best English teacher, the best teacher full-stop, I ever had. Encouraging, enthusiastic, if you were into something he'd take the time to learn a little about it and would show a genuine interest in what you liked.

I've always told stories, since I was a kid, reading to other kids and naturally that lead into role-playing games which is where most of my writing and energy has gone. The thing about roleplaying is that it's a cooperative story. You can constantly bounce things off each other, the actions and behaviours of the characters all have a genuine, different person behind them. You have instant feedback while you're running a game and when you're writing a game you're creating a context, not actually telling a story. In a lot of ways its a 'cowards' way of telling a story, you don't have to put that much of your own creative energy 'on the line'. Gaming and gaming writing is something I can be confident of for the most part.

Fiction writing, however, isn't something I've done a lot of - at least not professionaly or semi-professionally - until recently.

Why?

Because I'm fucking scared to do so. To put something out that's unalloyed me, that's all my creativity, my words, my mind is terrifying. I've got confidence in my writing abilities but because of my experiences with art and having my love of that annihilated I am incredibly hesitant to put my words out there through sheer terror at the prospect of having my love of words similiarly crushed out of me.

It's crippled my ability to take positive comment and feedback and it's made any negative feedback utterly devastating, far out of proportion with how negative those comments might be. My brain simply refuses to process nice things that are said about my work and is all too ready to latch on to an even slightly negative comment.

It's not like I haven't taken knocks. I've been on a promise for full time RPG work several times and it's never materialised. I've come in for some heavy criticism from some rather horrible fanboys on more than one system, had judgement passed on me and my corpus of work when it comes to licensing and these are all setbacks but with RPGs a lot of it is down to the reader's interpretation and what they put into it. That shields you.

With fiction writing, you don't have that mental shield to hide behind. It's all you and there's nowhere for your ego to hide.

I know I'm annoying people who are trying to say nice things and to be encouraging, but I wanted to go some way to explain why. I've had my love for one creative art form stamped out of me with extreme prejudice and I really don't want the same thing to happen with writing.

*I wanted to be a lumberjack...

Tessa Coyle: Science Police - The Obsolete Prometheus - Episode 4: Misanthropolgy

Sun, 18 Sep 2011 20:59:20 GMT

Tessa swam back to consciousness. She ached, her face felt two sizes two big for her head and she still couldn't see very well. Wherever she was, her glasses weren't and that wasn't a good sign. She tried to move and found that she was bound in place. Struggling against the cables that tied her made her feel the aches and pains in her body afresh and she let out a groan, squinting as she tried to see, one eye swollen shut, the other fuzzy.

“Ah... you're awake.” Werner's voice. This did not bode well.

“Barely,” Tessa mumbled past her swollen lips. “Why did you leave me alive?”

“I don't mean to kill if I don't have to.” She could barely see him, moving around, an indistinct blob of pink and blue, overalls she thought. Squinting harder, forcing him into focus from sheer force of will. He still wasn't clear but she could make out his mad eyes staring out of his pockmarked face. They were surrounded by old lights, incandescent bulbs on low power, casting shadows around it was they were, one or two flickering on and off with an electric buzz. Behind the madman was an offset plus symbol, bolted to the wall and there was something more in front of that.

“So what are you going to do? Dribble on me?”

He snarled and slapped her, fortunately not on her swollen cheek. “Watch your filthy mouth, sinne!.” She jerked in the seat and twisted her face back. With him that close she could make him out now and what she saw worried her. He was clearly, unutterably insane. What the hell had happened to him?

“What happened to you Werner? What happened out there?” She jerked her head, she had no idea which way was out, where they were in relation to the dome, but everyone knew that gesture.

“REVELATION!” He thundered and she rocked back on her seat, the shout was like being caught in the teeth of a gale.

“You're a scientist, you know that's no basis for anything.” She flinched as his hand raised again, but it did not fall against her face this time.

“Things have changed. God found me in the wasteland and took me to his bosom,” Werner paced restlessly as he spoke, working himself into a deeper frenzy. “Everyone else died in that church but I survived. The townsfolk didn't take to us, didn't like being studied. They made us undertake their rituals and my team died writhing in agony but I was spared! The serpent struck me again and again and I DID NOT DIE!” He was grinning now, ear to ear with ecstatic glee. “More, now I could hear the choir of angels, singing in my head!”

“Oh dear... neurotoxin. How did we miss that when you came back in?”

He didn't hear her, he was well into his rant.

“Pastor Scull helped me understand, helped me recover, explained the voices of the angels to me and what they wanted. To send me forth to bring the judgement that has fallen upon the rest of the world upon this place, this last testament to man's arrogant belief that he can defy God or his own sinful nature!”

Tessa startled slightly, something cold was creeping up the back of her leg, some sort of icy, spidery thing creeping against her skin. Werner was quoting from some ancient myth now, shouting numbers, thees and thous as though it meant anything to her, so she risked a glance down. Seeing the elbow joint of a familiar looking robotic arm vanishing up her trouser leg.

Tessa squinted hard again as Werner went on and on about seals and demons, the resurrected dead, plagues, floods, famines and fire. Across the way she saw her pistol laid out on a table, the shape familiar enough for her to make out despite her short-sightedness. The other thing that she saw was Robur's head, a grisly trophy, leaking oil and voltaic fluid, the eyes staring as blank as ever at her, but one still flickered, fitfully and each time it glowed the arm creeped higher up her leg.

She twisted her hands behind her, trying to reach her TeleBand without Werner noticing, fingers stretching, twisting in the cables, wishing she didn't bite her nails as she fumbled blindly at the controls. At the same time she set her one good eye on Werner, pretending to pay attention. If she could just humour him long enough she might have a chance.

“So!” He shouted returning to her. “I offer you a chance Miss Coyle, join my holy cause or be sent to your eternal judgement.”

“How would I join, exactly?” She grunted, fumbling again for the TeleBand. He noticed, frowning, leaning around her and then laughing.

“We're deep down here Tessa, your band won't reach the surface, so fiddle all you want. Nobody will hear you whether you scream or whether you transmit. I can see you would say anything to me, you're just humouring me.” He gripped her chin and tilted her head up, making her hiss with pain through her swollen lips. “Well then, we shall leave the decision to The Almighty.” He turned away, marching to his makeshift altar while Tessa scrambled with her fingers for the band, hoping she'd got it right as she tuned it through the frequencies.

Werner was moving differently now, slowly, reverently even. In his hands he held a great jar with a massive lid, holes bored through it. Tessa could see something coiled, green, lurking in the bottom of the jar and as he slowly paced even closer it resolved itself. A thick rope of scaled muscle, lurid green, a quivering rattle upon its tail sounding like a maraca as the snake grew agitated and worked its fangs against the side of the glass.

“What... is it?” Tessa swallowed nervously, but as her finger slipped against the dial on the TeleBand she suddenly felt the cold metal of the arm straighten and move with greater strength and purpose.

“They call them 'radlers'. They're native to the gorges around the Pastor's home town. A unique creature born of radiation and the desert and granted a gift from God, redeeming the serpent by becoming a crucible in which a man's faith can be tested and confirmed.” Werner set the jar down next to Robur's head and unscrewed the lid, thrusting his hand down inside, the radler striking and striking, sinking its fangs into his arm repeatedly, but he barely flinched, grasping it firm behind its head and drawing it forth.

“A remarkable creature Officer Coyle, a survivor. A nocturnal hunter that imitates a cicada or a cricket, that uses its glowing body to draw and hypnotise its prey. A creature so visible that it needs a venom stronger than any other to keep away even greater predators. If you survive... it awakens you to the heavens, the spirit... IF you survive.” He stepped closer still, holding the writhing serpent before him, swaying and waving it, imitating its motions.

Tessa could feel the hand yanking, pulling, scraping at the cables that bound her, she just needed another moment and she could be free. “ROBUR! NOW!” She shouted, giving it all the force and emotion she could. Werner turned, eyebrows shooting up his forehead in surprise. Robur's eyes lit up and from his damaged vox he began to emit a series of beeps, starting slow and getting faster and faster.

The cable came loose, her wrists were free, she grasped hold of Robur's disembodied arm just as Robur's bluff was detected and Werner turned back around.

Adrenalin was a good substitute for caffeine pills, she surged up out of the seat with Robur's arm raised high and brought it crashing across Werner's head as his eyes met hers. He fell like a stone, the radler spilled from his grasp, striking him three times and slithering away with a derogatory swish of its tail, vanishing into the ducts.

Tessa grabbed her belt from the table and cuffed Werner, fumbling to press her glasses back onto her swollen face, leaving him laying there, bleeding from the scalp while she picked up Robur's battered head.

“Maam,” he fizzed and crackled, sparks falling from his jagged neck stump. “I think you may have bent my arm striking the miscreant.”

Tessa laughed and then gasped, clutching her face with her free hand. “That's the least of your problems I think Officer Robur. To think they say you Metalmen don't have a sense of humour.”

“I was merely making an observation maam.”

“Let's find our way out of this hole and contact the precinct.”

“I concur maam. At least it's over.”

Tessa staggered unsteadily up the stairs, cradling Robur's head against her chest. “I'm not sure that it is.”

“Maam?”

“That town, they know all about us, they hate us, there's no telling what Werner told them. I'm betting we haven't heard the last of this 'Pastor Scull' and his merry band.”

“Ah. Well. All the more reason to get me repaired then maam. Turn left up here.”

“Have a little faith Robur, have a little faith...”

Tessa Coyle: Science Police - The Obsolete Prometheus - Episode 3: End Eternity

Sun, 18 Sep 2011 14:48:50 GMT

The Identification Toom was dominated by the huge visiscreen that covered one wall. Tessa sat at the small operator's desk and bent the microphone to her lips while Robur slotted the appropriate information reference cards into the slot. Tessa threw the switch and fidgeted with her hands, food and drink wasn't allowed in the Identification Room, even in pill form. Without the constant supply of caffeine and glucose she was rapidly tiring, adrenalin or no.

“MONOVAC, online.”

“ONLINE.”

“Process information cards and arrange by category, psychology, sociology, anthropology.”

“PROCESSING.” The screen glowed, illuminating Robur and Tessa in its greenish cathode rays. Three lists appeared, equidistant, divided by scan lines, lists of names of those who might have been involved in the sabotage at the Aubade facility and, perhaps, the BioVat.

“Combine psychology and anthropology lists under heading 'suspects'. Search records of entries under 'sociology' and combine those with biological knowledge with list 'suspects', remove the rest.”

“PROCESSING.” The screen went blank and then reappeared, a single, long list of names. Men and women, the cream of Science City Zero's minds in the human sciences.

“Still quite a list maam,” Robur interjected, electronic eyes fixed upon the electronic screen.

“I think we can narrow it further. MONOVAC, search list and eliminate all of those without biology qualifications.”

“P-R-O-C-E-S-S-I-N-G.” The screen reset again, but it was barely shorter.

“MONOVAC, do any of those listed have a history of psychological problems or trauma?”

“PROCESSING. THREE ENTRIES HAVE TRAUMA NOTATIONS.”

“MONOVAC, create a new list and add those entries to it. Title the list 'prime suspects' and display it to the right of the current list.”

“PROCESSING.” The screen flickered briefly and divided again into two lists, one short, three names only.”

“MONOVAC, zoom in on list 'prime suspects' and expand to fill display.”

“PROCESSING.” There were three names now, prominently displayed. Doctor Taeger, Doctor Monroe and Professor Werner.

“MONOVAC, what is the current location of those displayed.”

“TAEGER IS A GUEST OF PSYCHE SERVICES. THE LOCATION OF MONROE AND WERNER IS CURRENTLY UNKNOWN.”

“Eliminate Taeger from the list.”

“PROCESSING.” That was it, down to two suspects.

“Any ideas Robur?” Tessa turned to him and scowled, the beginnings of a caffeine headache making her furrow her brow and squint in the glow of the visiscreen.

“Maam, our suspect does not act like a member of the city. They do not care what damage they bring. I do not believe either suspect would fulfil those criteria. My probability matrix still points to an outside influence, despite the evidence we have found to the contrary. I am afraid we will have to wait for another attack to be sure.”

Tessa's scowl deepened and then she leapt up to her feet, face lighting up, the headache forgotten. “Robur! You beautiful piece of precision engineering, that's it!” She turned swiftly back to the microphone and all but shouted into it. “MONOVAC, check records, have either remaining entries in the 'prime suspects' list ever been outside the dome?”

“PROCESSING. PROFESSOR WERNER HAS BEEN BEYOND THE DOME.”

“Display Werner's record in full.” The screen blackened and then filled again, Werner's image filling one side along with his finger and voice prints, blood type and other sundry data. In two other columns his biography slowly scrolled while Tessa and Robur feverishly devoured every piece of information.

“There, he was with an anthropological expedition earlier this year, investigating the wasteland townships and their people.” Tessa strode up to the screen and stabbed her finger against it, following the information line as it scrolled slowly up the screen.

Robur plugged himself directly into the terminal and he and MONOVAC ground circuits for a while as he downloaded the information on the professor to his internal memory tapes. “He was one of only two survivors from that expedition, the rest were dead from snake venom and wounds suffered at the hands of the townspeople. That township has been designated code black 3 for future expeditions. According to the trauma counsellors at Psyche he has suppressed his experiences and refuses to talk about them.”

“Bingo.” Tessa smiled in the way a cat might smile at having caught a mouse. “MONOVAC, put out an APB on Professor Werner, scan the city grid for his tell-tales and inform us immediately of any sightings.”

“COMMAND ACCEPTED.”

“And now?” Robur unplugged himself and wound the cable back into his chest cavity.

“Now I snatch a nap on the couch in the office and we wait until someone spots him.”

***

Tessa woke with a start to Robur's cold metal hand shaking her shoulder gently. “Whassafrazzit?” She blinked and straightened her glasses, running a hand back through unruly hair to get it back under some sort of control.

“Maam, we have a hit. Turing square. He was spotted by a civil spy-ray some moments ago but was lost almost immediately. He must be using countermeasures of some kind.”

“A privacy screen perhaps? Not many use those, we might be able to find him from the energy signature if we look for it, even if we can't spy-ray him. What buildings are on Turing?”

Robur clicked and whirred briefly and then rattled them off. “Museum of Mistakes, Transmetal Logistics, Curie Tower and the Elysium Compubrain Research facility.”

“Both other targets were involved in research, what do they do at Elysium?” Tessa hopped up, checking her weapons and beckoning Robur after her as she began to stride down the battleship grey corridors towards the floater bay.

“Some sort of mind-machine interface maam, based on telepathic principles gleaned from wasteland mutants.”

“That sounds like our suspect's sort of thing. Let's go bring this recidivist down shall we Robur?”

“I concur wholeheartedly maam.”

***

The floater hung over Turing Square now, spy-rays and energy detectors at full power as they drifted side to side, trying to get the maximum coverage. They didn't want to tip off Werner that they were there, that they knew, so the people below continued about their business, unmolested, unaware.

“Anything yet Robur?” Tessa hunkered down behind the windscreen, even in the dome it was cooler at this altitude and she huddled her arms around herself.

“Not yet... ah, I stand corrected. There's an energy signature consistent with a privacy screen at the back of the Elysium building.”

Tessa took the control sticks and drifted the floater into position, descending slowly at the rear of the Elysium building. A sleek, angular building in the new-futurist style. A Mondrian brought to life in white, black and primary colours. As they descended there was a bang from the delivery entrance and Tessa took the floater into a much steeper dive. “It's him, whatever he's doing it's started.”

The floater flattened out, throwing them down hard into their seats and they leapt over the sides, moving up either side of the door, ionic pistols at the ready, clasped tight in their hands.

“I'll go first.” Tessa hissed, dialling up the power on the pistol.

“Maam, regulations state that Metalmen go in first. We're tougher, more repairable, more expendable...”

“And about as stealthy as an elephant on roller skates. We need to get close.”

“As you say maam.”

“Follow me in in thirty seconds.” Tessa huddled low and ripped off her lab coat, the white would just give her away. She left it, discarded on the ground and crept inside, pistol ahead of her, scanning left and right as she moved through the shadows and the patches of coloured light that shone through the great square windows.

Werner was ahead of her, marching purposefully down the steps into the building's basement. There was nobody to stop him, little or no security to speak of. Clearly the money had been spent elsewhere. Tessa slipped her shoes off and in her stockinged feet crept after him, silent as a ghost.

Down he went, until he got to a great armoured door that sealed off whatever Elysium kept in this pit they'd dug underground. Daybulbs were here, but few. Tessa got the impression that not many people came down here, the research must take place upstairs, whatever it was. Telepathic machines? She wasn't sure what that entailed but the risks of messing with the mind were huge and whatever Werner was up to here, it couldn't be any good.

Werner had set a small charge while she was thinking and before she could stop him he'd blown the door, vanishing into the smoke. Quickly she darted after him, holding her breath so she wouldn't cough from the smoke, emerging into a massive circular chamber, a labyrinth of shoulder-high, anodised blue cases, all of them whirring and clicking, filled with memory tapes and switches going hell for leather in their calculations. It was sweltering in here, the sheer density of computational power producing a sauna-like heat. Sweat stuck her blouse to her back and trickled down her chest, fogging her glasses as she yanked them off, half blinded better than completely blinded.

Werner was winding his way through the labyrinth, up to the console for this dense mass of computational power. Tessa had never seen anything like it, the cross-linked power of at least a dozen MONOVACs, multiplied as they cross-processed, it was an unimaginable amount of power. She squinted, running her fingers along the tape stuck to one of the anodised casements. “Prof. H. Carbide, 1880-1945.” She mouthed, silently, brow furrowing as she tried to make sense of it. A grave? No. Elysium, the Greek afterlife. The Science Citizens of Zero had little time for mythology, but there was a respect for the Greeks due to their philosophy and mathematics. It clicked into place. The research here was a way to record minds for posterity. To transfer a conciousness from a biological machine to one of transistors, valves, tape and switches. Genius need never die! So what was Werner doing here?

She rounded the corner and lined up her ionic pistol on him as he bent over the console, twisting dials, throwing switches and turning a key, opening the box to the Master Erase button.

Tessa was outraged, that was mass murder, whichever way you looked at it. With a roar of anger she twisted around the corner and fired the ionic pistol, full power, a crackling beam of lightning that transfixed Werner, surrounding him with blue threads of light that leapt from surface to surface and grounded into the floor.

“SINNER!” he boomed, turning towards her, his face contorted in madness, she started back but kept her finger on the trigger, pumping an endless bolt of voltaic power into him, but it seemed to do not a thing to him.

“The bastard's wearing a faraday!” She hissed as he swept towards her, raising one meaty fist and as time slowed she saw his face was covered in scars a dozen puncture marks in pairs. Then he struck her, knocking her flying into one of the blueish cases, stunning her.

Tessa struggled to her feet, seeing stars, trying to remember her training, her pistol dropped, struggling to block his punches but he'd studied scientific boxing too and was bigger, stronger, it was all she could do to hold him off and she was worn down, punch by punch, beaten to the ground, bloodied and bruised.

As she sprawled he turned and raised his hand over the master erase, ignoring her, intent on his mission.

“In the name of the Lord I purge this false heaven of its trapped souls!” He cried out, raising his hands to the sky.

“That's quite enough.” Robur's voice cut, mechanical and even, loud even over the clattering of the computational matrix.

“He's wearing a faraday...” Tessa mumbled through swollen lips, trying to warn him.

Robur heard her and dropped his pistol, springing to the attack, metal arms stretched out towards Werner intent upon grappling him to the floor. The delay was enough though, enough for Werner. He twisted, a massive, impossibly crude firearm, tarnished and pitted, filled his hand and boomed, deafeningly. There was an almighty CLANG as the bullet struck him full in his chest and lodged there, denting the metal.

“How absurdly primitive...” There was a blinding flash and a green explosion of fire and radiation that burned Tessa's skin. Robur vanished in a ball of green fire and rained down in pieces all around the chamber, glowing fragments of shrapnel embedded into everything, his head landing with a sound like a tolling bell next to Tessa and rolling against her leg.

Werner hit the switch and the cacophony of clattering electronics stopped, abruptly.

“I was chosen for this mission. I will bring this city back to God! They shall take up serpents! It shall not hurt them!” Werner lunged down over Tessa, swimming into focus for a moment, froth at his lips, his eyes wildly staring. “Jezebel! Harlot of man's arrogance. I cast thee out!”

The last thing she saw was the sole of his boot, crashing down.

Tessa Coyle: Science Police - The Obsolete Prometheus - Episode 2: Into the Fire

Sat, 17 Sep 2011 22:23:46 GMT

The precinct hovered above Science City Zero and moved where it was needed, when it was needed. A massive silver saucer with a hooped spine projecting downwards, glowing with light as it hovered on its beam of force, suspended by the power of a dozen disintegration generators. Two were enough to keep it suspended, one in a pinch but the denizens of Science City Zero were a pragmatic sort and the Science Police knew the value of multiple redundancy.

Tessa's office was on the lower part of the saucer, sloping windows offering a panoramic view of the city below. It was morning now and the light filtered through the dome above, diffusing as it slowly replaced the light of the dayglobes in the streets and houses. Tessa sat on the transmetal window, seemingly floating over the city below, gulping back more caffeine pills with a glass of glucose water, so highly strung she seemed to vibrate as she wound through the evidence tapes on her TeleBand, glaring at the greenish projections as though the crime would resolve itself if she scared it enough.

“Robur... summarise... what do we know?”

Robur was standing in his recharge unit, humming slightly as his secondary systems charged and his main generator wound back up to full power. His hands moved a buffer over his new 'scars' as he did so and those blank and empty glowing eyes turned back towards Tessa as his switches clattered, processing her request.

“Person or persons unknown gained access to the BioVat facility late last night. The surviving scientists report a technician of medium height, medium build and brown hair. Not especially useful. We know that this person or persons replaced the punch cards with those from a cloning depot allowing the synth-men to develop a mentality and musculature that they would not normally achieve. This was done inexpertly, though it suggests at least a passing understanding of the technologies involved so we are looking for an educated perpetrator...”

“...In a city of millions of scientists, engineers and technicians.”

“If I may continue maam?”

Tessa waved away his concerns with a grumble.

“Well, sabotage is passing rare maam, everyone in the city knows we depend on the city and its infrastructure. Attacks usually come from outside, or are attempted from outside but as you well know such incursions are rarely successful, suggesting that the attack has to come from inside. Perhaps a stolen identity, a turncoat is preposterous. Who would give up all this for the radioactive wasteland beyond? Certainly nobody rational.”

“Not everyone has a set of valves, switches and circuits for a brain Robur. Even scientists can get wedded to their pet theories and follow them in the teeth of the evidence. It's a struggle for us all.”

“A terrible flaw in the human mind maam.”

“But essential to understand possible motives for our perpetrator.”

“As you say maam.”

“So, basically we don't know anything except that our saboteur could be almost anyone and doesn't care about the welfare of the city.”

“As you say maam.”

Tessa slammed her hand down on the transmetal, something that always gave her a frisson of fear, even though she knew the transmetal was nigh unbreakable. “Damn and blast. We've no option but to wait for the maniac to strike again and that irritates me. Without another incident we can't even begin building a profile.”

“It does, indeed, seem prudent to wait and it is not as though we have a choice maam. Perhaps you should get some rest.”

Tessa threw one of her pills at Robur and it clanged off his chest plate with a loud 'ting'.

***

Tessa was dozing at her desk, the electromassage lulling her – finally – to sleep, overcoming the surging chemistry of the pills the boiled through her veins. Robur was still plugged in, repeatedly churning over the evidence that they'd gathered, hooked into the precinct's MONOVAC for additional power, putting in various variables and calculating probabilities, but nothing was seeming to fit.

Tessa tumbled from her desk with a start as the TeleScreen leapt into life.

“Coyle!” Her master's voice, Captain Newton swimming into view on the screen and peering out at them through the electric eye.

“Sir!” Tessa clambered back up into view, rubbing the rheum from her eyes and straightening her glasses, trying to scramble back to reality from dreams of synth-men and violence.

“We've another incident. A containment breach at Aubade Power, another research institute. Very high tech, very well protected, very advanced. The director's called me in person and asked for my best agents. That's you. Get down there.”

“Sir.”

It was not long before they were there, taking a full scale floater this time, rather than a disk, in case they needed the extra power or swiftness it could bring. The Aubade facility was blindingly bright, surrounded by the proctors and their screens, flaring blindingly bright every colour of the rainbow as the blinding light within reduced the building to a mere shadow, slowly getting soft at the edges as the terrible forces within began to melt even the strongest of buildings.

The floater set down at the proctor line and they had to holler to be heard over the screaming of generators and the roaring air.

“Maam!” Shouted the proctor over the deafening sound. “The inner screens have gone down and we can barely hold it in with the screens.”

They moved into the shelter of one of the newly arrived screens, others being shipped in from around the city to reinforce the perimeter, so that they could be heard.

“There's no way I can let you in maam, we can't get close and the director told us they were harnessing the power of the sun. The Energy Commission is trying to find a solution but we may have to evacuate the city.”

Tessa growled and snapped at the proctor. “I can't deal with it without a closer look. Bring me a proctor suit, a fresh screen and some high capacitance cabling. Immediately.”

“Maam...”

“That's an order.”

The proctor scurried off to get what she wanted, after a brief glance at her badge and she turned to Robur next, so fast the otherwise implacable Metalman actually recoiled. “Open your chest plate Robur.”

“Maam?”

“We'll need the extra power.”

Tessa suited up, strapping the heavy armour-plating of the robotic proctor suit into place and strapping on heavy welding goggles beneath the helmet. The suit was too big and pinched at the joints, but there was little that was better protection in all of Zero. Behind her as she finished suiting up, the Aubade building was now all but impossible to make out, the light within so strong that even the most solid of walls was near transparent.

The screen was powered up and focussed to the minimum, all of its power focussed in a tiny space. Robur's chest was open and the cables ran from it to the screen, sending even more power into the field projector, threatening to overload it.

The proctors withdrew and Tessa flexed the hydraulic muscles of the suit, pushing against the screen and marching step by step into the bedazzling aura of the glow that was too bright for any to see how she was doing. The ground was wet beneath her armoured boots and pushing the screen forward was like wading through treacle. It wasn't treacle though, the ground was melted like magma. Metal, brick and ceramic flowed thinner and hotter as she got closer to the centre, having to throw her arm in front as the light grew too bright even for the goggles, the helm and the screen all together.

A warning bell rang inside the suit as she reached the epicentre of the light and the heat. A miniature, artificial sun, suspended in the air between massive presser rays, protected by their own screens that were flickering and faltering even now.

The warning bell rang louder and louder, increasing in frequency and volume as the suit began to buckle under the strain. There was only one chance and it was a long shot but the fate of the city was at stake this time. Forcing the suit to maximum power she pushed the small screen closer to the presser projector console. The suit was beginning to melt, a trickle of metal silvery as it ran down the faceplate and dripped from the chin.

There was one chance, one slim chance to end this. Tessa tore the panel from the presser controls, hissing as the heat began to bore through the suit, burning her fingers as she exposed the power connectors. A quick twist back and she snatched the power leads from the screen projector, thrusting them into the presser controls. The moment the screen went down she was seared, the suit seizing up as the joints melted but in the power of the supercharged pressers the miniature sun shrank in on itself and turned dark.

In an instant everything changed, the outward pressure of the sun energy abruptly reversing direction as the miniature black hole that had formed began to crush what was left of the building inwards. The suit wouldn't move and began to drag along the floor as Tessa struggled with the controls, whining hydraulics straining against the fusion-welded seams but it wouldn't move, grinding across the cooling floor as the rock began to set up solid again.

In desperation Tessa hammered on the inside the suit, straining with her wiry muscles against the chest plate until, finally, it gave way. She spilled out, snatching and grasping at the cables, floating backwards, spiralling inward towards that singular black point as it devoured the suit, stretching its atoms into infinity. She was white knuckled, clinging on for dear life as the cable drew taut and then slowly, implacably drew backwards, hauling her inch by inch away from the swirling void.

There was a scream of metal on metal and the great presser rays trembled in their brackets, suddenly tearing loose, sucked into their own creation and annihilated. Without the power of the ray the singularity could not maintain and with a thunderous clap of equalising energy and a rush of air it disappeared, blasting what remained of Aubade into smithereens.

Tessa blinked as the rubble was pulled from her, smiling up at Robur as he tossed aside the distorted remnants of a steel beam and helped her up to her feet.

“Are you alright maam?”

“Never better Robur... never better... though I think our chances of getting any evidence out of this place are pretty much zero.” She dusted herself down and stumbled out of the debris, leaning on her metal companion.

“You'd be wrong there maam. I believe we do have a lead. I was conversing by TeleBand with Aubade director while you were engaged in your heroics.”

“And?” She leaned against the floater, wearily popping a fistful of caffeine pills and dragging out the first aid kit.

“The only change of note was that they began a study into the psychological and social implications of true artificial sun control on the general population and its potential uses for impressing or intimidating wastelanders.”

“I see... so?”

“We have suspects. A list of suspects from the psychology, sociology and anthropology departments involved in those experiments. The only new people who would have had the opportunity.”

“Forget the sociologists, they're less likely to have biological knowledge.” Tessa dragged herself into the floater. “Let's get back to the precinct and crunch the cards. Maybe we can find this bastard and then I can get a decent night's sleep.”

Tessa Coyle: Science Police - The Obsolete Prometheus - Episode 1: Biogenesis

Sat, 17 Sep 2011 16:42:13 GMT

Boop-dee-dee-beep-deep-woop, boop-dee-dee-beep-deep-woop.

Tessa groaned and wound the sheets around her head, hoping the noise would go away, but it wouldn't, the clamorous ring of her TeleBand just keep going and going, the greenish light of its screen flashing as it strove to get her attention. She fumbled her arm out of the mummified cocoon of her sheets and groped for her glasses on the bedside fresher, fumbling them onto her face and falling with a thump onto the floor as she writhed like some bizarre linen caterpillar across the floor to the Teleband.

Cold metal and worn leather were felt against her fingertips and she sat up, the sheet falling around her slender, shirt-covered body as she hit the answer button and squinted through the thumbprint on her glasses at the tri-d, metal face that appeared, hovering, over her wristband.

“Maam.”

It was Robur, her partner, a 41st interation 124C model Metalman, not very lifelike, but an effective partner and a good 'man' to have on your side in a fight.

“Robur... you do understand that humans have to sleep right? I have to get eight hours natural a week rather than hypersleep or I'm no good to anyone.” Tessa pulled up the hem of her nightshirt and wiped the lens of her glasses so she could see more clearly. He was just a Metalman, he wouldn't care about a little flashed skin.

“I am sorry maam but Captain Newton was most insistant that I contact you. We have a Code Prometheus incident at the BioVat facility on the corner of Gernsback and Capek. The proctors are containing it at the moment but they want Science Police on site as soon as possible.”

Robur's voice became more and more annoying the longer he spoke for, that grating buzz of an artificial voicebox was especially irritating before coffee and breakfast.

“I'll be there as soon as I can Robur. Have the proctors set up a perimeter one block around BioVat and deploy Mag Screens for containment. I'm on my way.”

Tessa slapped the TeleBand and cut him off, stepping up out of the cocoon of sheets and peeling off her nightshirt.

“Lights!”

The daybulbs glowed dimly and slowly built up to full brightness as she crossed the room to get her uniform. She paused a moment and wrinkled her nose at the sight of herself in the mirror. Short curly hair, Buddy-Holly glasses, a figure so slim and boyish that if it wasn't for the way her hips moved everyone would think she was a man. She was strong though, despite being slight, flexible and fast and – most importantly – brilliant. They'd wanted her to go into research, her parents, but the Science Police was where it was at, safeguarding the advances of others and protecting the city from the terrors that lay beyond the dome.

Tessa pulled on her foil cap and stepped into the ion shower. There was a hum and a tingle as the electric stream and a gust of air blew away the top layer of dead skin cells and she hopped back out, pulling on her uniform. Royal blue trousers a size too big for her, a black blouse and white tie, her gunbelt with its ionic pistol and her long white lab coat. Lastly she strapped her Science Police band to her other wrist and checked herself in the mirror. It would do.

Tessa threw open the window and stepped out onto the balcony, pressing the button on her TeleBand to summon a police disk. Below her the whole of Science City Zero was laid out, a glittering panorama of lights and sounds, the shining beacons of cars, planes, disks and balloons. The spires of the banded towers, the web of their skywalks and transit tubes. Above it all the great arch of the dome, the night sky barely seen beyond it, only The Moon bright enough to compete with the scintillating, kaleidoscopic glow of the city.

The disk arrived, swooping up to her balcony on dim pencil beams of force. Tessa leapt aboard and swept down over the city, heading as fast as she dared towards the incident.

***

Tessa swept down out of the sky and jumped from the disk, leaving it to flit its way to another appointment with a sudden surge in velocity. Fishing in her pockets she popped a caffeine and a breakfast pill from her dispenser and strode purposefully up to the line of proctors, waving to Robur as she did so.

“Ah, greetings Maam.” The Metalman waved to her, his chassis gleaming beneath the daybulb streetlights, all burnished blue-steel and armoured rivets. He was surrounded by proctors in their heavy armour, lightning guns in their hands as the finished establishing their perimeter.

“Report?”

“The cordon has been thrown around as you requested, the incident appears to be contained but there is ongoing violence within the BioVat building. Spy-Ray examination reveals several unidentified hominid-like forms and several scientists inside, perhaps hostages. There's interference from the fires and electrical shorts, so that information is only seventy-percent accurate, for which I apologise.”

Tessa turned to the proctor captain, looking up, her neck aching as she looked into his faceless helmet.

“We've surrounded the building with ten megawatt energy screens and have deployed three units in a cordon around the building, there to back you up should things go pear-shaped maam. Captain Newton has ordered us to cooperate fully, but we're only to enter at your behest.”

Tessa popped another caffeine pill, she had a feeling she'd need it. As she swallowed she unbuckled her holster and hoisted out her ionic pistol, checking the charge and the settings, nodding to Robur to do the same.

“What do we know about BioVat Robur?”

“Independent biological research and development company maam. They research into synthetic life but their bread and butter is creating synth-men for biological experimentation.”

“Brainless clones for medical research... who'd attack a medical facility?” Tessa scowled and marched up to the line, gesturing the proctor on duty to take this screen down when they went through. Robur pulled his own pistol and stood beside her.

“Three, two, one...”

The crackling screen faded out with a low buzz and the two ran forward, the light slap of her All-Stars contrasting with the heavy clank-clank of Robur's feet. He wasn't exactly stealthy. The screen came back up behind them, sealing the area behind an impenetrable screen of force and they slammed up against the wall, either side of the door.

“Ready?”

Robur's steely head nodded, once, the glow behind his eyes intensifying and then he stepped around, kicking the revolving door out of its housing and sending it sliding violently across the foyer to smash the reception desk to smithereens.

Inside it was chaos, full of smoke, fires burning here and there, showers of sparks as cabling burned and shorted. The ground was slippery with a pinkish goo and the cause was readily apparent. Deformed, cancerous, muscles ballooned to ridiculous proportions, the synth-men had broken free of their containers. Twisted, like hairless gorillas, veins pulsing, rage in their eyes, the handful in the entrance turned their incoherent anger on the interlopers and leapt to the attack.

“Does not compute!” Robur cried with what sounded like genuine anguish. “Synth-men have no brains... no conciousness!”

“Worry about that later!” Tessa darted inside, sliding on a slick of the pinkish goo and ducking under the tree-trunk arm of one of the synth-men. Her ionic pistol hummed in her hand as she twisted, sliding on her bottom across the chequered floor and firing, a blue beam of coherent electricity striking the synth-man and hurling him to the far wall with the stink of ozone and bacon.

The remaining synth-men bounded and leapt, roaring like jungle apes as they moved. Tessa scrambled out of the way as one landed on the spot where she had just been. Thanking blind chance that she was as small and slight as she was. Where it landed the floor cratered, muscle so dense it must have weighed twice as much as it should and been in unspeakable agony, crushed by its own muscles. Robur shot the other out of the air deftly with his pistol, playing his beam across the creature's chest until he was sure it was still.

By then the third had gotten its meaty paw upon Tessa and had her by the ankle, hauling her upside down before it's face, ape-like fangs bared as it roared, spattering her glasses with spittle. There was a crash nearby as Robur slammed into the remaining synth-man before he could recover, bearing him down to the ground and pounding his neanderthal brow with fists like hammers while Tessa twisted and struggled.

Blinded by the spit she felt its other hand grasp her around her head, the span of its fingers sufficient to pluck her cranium from her spine as though it were plucking a grape. She tried to calm herself, to remember her scientific boxing lessons and then she lashed out with all the strength she could muster, slamming two of her knuckles one side of the synth-man's head and the butt of her pistol the other, just between the ear and the jaw.

The creature roared and dropped her, she landed awkwardly on her shoulders and back, upside down, lifting the ionic pistol and blindly firing between the creature's legs. The roar became a howl, high pitched almost beyond hearing and this time the ozone stink was mixed with burning hair as the thing dropped like a felled tree.

The bone-crunching noises of Robur's fight also came to a halt and he strode over to help her up.

“Are you alright maam?”

“No thanks to you. Why didn't you attack the one that had me?”

“I knew you could handle it maam, within a ninety-three percent probability anyway. Taking the remaining problem out of the equation seemed the best course of action.”

“There'll be others, we need to get to the lab where the spy-ray saw the scientists.”

They nodded to each other and ascended the stairs two and three at a time, heading back through the offices, blasting left and right as more of the synth-men emerged from the side rooms, blinded by pain and rage there was nothing they could do but put them down.

“This is monstrous, whoever did this is a sociopath.” Tessa growled as they stood back to back, blasting away at the tide of muscle that dogged their every step, climbing over the bodies of dead office workers and the remnants of destroyed desks as they finally got back to the factory doors.

They burst through and slammed the metal doors shut behind them, standing on the gantry that lead to the control chamber, beneath them a sea of tubes, many of them broken, filled with the pink plasm that supported the synth-men growth, but there was only one inside. A brute bigger than any other they had seen, towering over the cowering scientists in the control room.

“Hold the fort Robur, I'm going to get the scientists.”

The Metalman nodded and slid his arms through the handles, bracing back against the door as it rang like a bell, massive fists hammering from the other side, roars and snarls of frustrated as the iron and steel of robot and door refused to give, though it began to dent.

The hulking synth-man turned, one eye massive and yellow, larger than the other, one whole side of its body larger than the other. Clumsily it turned and loped towards her as she marched towards it, ionic pistol raised.

“Science Police, surrender to impartial justice!” She gave the warning, even though she knew it couldn't understand. The body of a monster and the mind of a newborn.

Predictably, it ignored her and began to run, a lopsided lope towards her.

Behind her Robur channelled his own power into his chassis, electrifying himself and the door, shocking the synth-men hammering on the other side to death, his whole body arched and glowing, heating up from the power coursing through him.

For her part Tessa kept marching on the giant synth-man, depressing the firing stud on her pistol, the blue coruscating light struck the creature full in the chest, burning its flesh, charring its skin, but still it kept on coming, teeth bared, marching into the ravening beam as though walking into the wind.

Tessa stared, disbelieving as the massive creature came closer, closer, closer and reached into the beam, burning off one of its own fingers to snatch the pistol from her hand. It grinned in triumph as it crushing it like a drinks can in its maimed fist but Tessa didn't miss a beat, swinging her leg back, then forward and planting the very toe of her boot into the mass of dangling flesh between the things legs. It grunted and she grasped, and pivoted, using its own off-centre weight to hurl it from the gantry to plummet to its broken-necked doom amongst the shattered tubes below.

The fight was over, the scientists in shock and useless as witnesses. They called in the proctors to guide them out and put out the fires, that left them free to look over the control room without interference. It was a wreck, a mess, evidence was hard to come by in such a disruption of blood and wreckage, but they divided it up into sections and went through it methodically, despite Tessa's aches and pains. This was where a Metalman came into his own, they couldn't experience boredom and his mechanical precision was an inspiration.

It was Tessa that found it though, breaking open the feeder mechanism to the MONOVAC she ran her fingers down the mass of punch-cards and felt the hard edges of newer cards inserted into the sequence.

“What do you make of these Robur?” She plucked the newer cards out of the feeder, tucking torn pieces from her notebook into the gaps to mark the spaces.

The Metalman took the cards and fed them into his universal slot, shuffling them like a stage magician as they flew into his slot and his tubes and switches cogitated with a noisy flickering, digesting the information.

“They're plasm codes maam. I am no expert but according to my interior library these sequences relate to muscle, bone and nerve tissue growth, including brain tissue. I conjecture that...”

“...someone introduced a little Mr Hyde into our mindless Doctor Jeckylls.”

“Indeed maam.”

“So then, there's no question.”

“None at all maam.”

Tessa tossed the remaining punch cards angrily onto the floor, spilling them everywhere, kicking the pile so it fell between the slats in the gantry and turning back to Robur, stabbig her finger into his impassive face.

“Sabotage!”

Mimsy Burogrove: Psychedelic Detective - The Prison of Concentration - Episode 4: đ Partesoum

Sun, 11 Sep 2011 16:18:21 GMT

St. John stirred sexily in his sleep, the satin sliding from his sleeping shape. Mimsy was restless, despite their reciprocal rapture. Sweat still slicked her skin, stinging the scrapes she'd suffered in the psycheverse. She kissed and caressed his chest, creeping from the cot so as not to concern him. Naked she nimbly nipped across the nest and knelt, lotus natured. A backward look at her languid lover and she lidded her lamps, leaning into the lunatic land of luminosity. She felt the world whirl away as she went, wilful to seek the wickedness within.

The psycheverse here was hers and her mind was filled with the scattered remnants of recent thoughts. St John's face, massive, carved into the red rock of her imagination, contorted in remembered ecstasy. This island in the void smelt of sweat and sweetness, butter and incense, a low note of old spices, warm and christmassy. Her mind was never the same landscape twice, wide open to the world this island in the void was always hers but always different. Her fears were manifest here too, a tinge of yellow – primrose rather than mustard – laid here and there. Cracks in the firmament beneath her feet, a chill wind of disquiet fluttering her diaphanous salwar kameez around her body as her unease made her manifest clothing.

If the deaths were to stop, if Mr Mustard were to be stopped, she would have to sacrifice herself. Her mind, her essence, her energy, her vril, her prana was stronger than others. Her third eye a blazing beacon in the psycheverse. If he took her mind he would have to take no others. He would be real and it would only cost her, not however many others he killed in his quest. It was a worthwhile sacrifice.

She turned out, towards the teeming sea of minds and opened her third eye wide. It blazed as the prismatic light shone out deep into the psycheverse, a beacon, a line of rainbow light that slowly tightened down to yellow, calling her enemy.

There was a creeping sense of dread, of terror, she swallowed it back knowing the sacrifice that she was going to make – assuming that he took her up on her offer. She felt him approach, the world around her turning yellow, save for a little patch under her feet. A stink like a Friday night stairwell, rot and piss and nicotine smoke and he appeared again, riding on a tide of jaundiced light until he alighted at the edge of her mind, wary, flexing his mental muscles, a yellow steam wafting around him as she shuffled closer, step by step, that hideous face snarled into a contemptuous sneer.

“You called?” The laugh that accompanied the comment was grotesque and utterly humourless, it was the laugh of a boy plucking the legs from a spider one by one and watching its hopeless struggles.

Mimsy nodded gently and inclined her head, looking humble, even though her stomach was convulsing in terror. “I have an offer for you.”

His greasy fingers cupped her chin and lifted her eyes to look into his mustard glare. It stung all three of her eyes to look at him that closely and stroboscopic tears crept down her cheeks from the pain and the fear. “I can eat you up the moment I choose to. What can you possibly offer me?”

She wetted her lips with her tongue and tried to close her eyes, feeling his ragged nails scratch as he tightened his grip, stopping her. “My mind is more powerful than most. If you take me you can become real without having to kill anyone else. You can leave, through me, enter the real world and it'll be over. You'll get what you want.”

The disgusting tulpa raised his other hand to his own chin, mirroring the way he was holding her as he scratched and thought, flakes of dead yellow skin falling like snow and clinging to her, making the bile rise in the back of her mouth. “Maybe I like killing. Maybe that's the way I want to do it.”

“Can you wait that long?”

The creature pondered a moment longer and then simply nodded. “I accept. Open wide.”

Mimsy's two eyes closed and her third eye gaped wide, blazing with light, wider and wider, brighter and brighter. Mr Mustard laughed over and over and over, louder and louder, his paper clothes rattling in the wind as the portal grew wider and wider and he was reduced to a sallow-edged silhouette.

Through the coruscating light her room could be seen beyond, the vague shape of St John, asleep in the bed, not that Mr Mustard cared. This was his promised land, the really-real, a place to be physical, set, to experience everything first hand through his own senses rather than through anyone else's. He began to shuffle forward, into the light, closer and closer to the other side.

A burst of cardamom scent and an inverted flash of darkness behind him and he was caught between two Mimsy's, one blazing light, the other blazing dark, hauled in two directions between them. “What? What's going on, what are you doing?”

The two of her spoke as one. “She is my self image, that is a memory, a recent one, a short term, forgettable memory, a night of passion with a man, one night of many. Forgettable in its detail, part of a continuum, a memory that will not last. Once you're in there and its forgotten, you are forgotten.” The two of her began to slowly pace together, sandwiching him between them.

“You forget Miss Burogrove... am I stronger than you.” His own yellow light began to glow anew and he began to grow, bigger and bigger, reaching out his hands to deflect the light and dark in scattered rays from his tawny, stained fingers.

“Anywhere else in the psycheverse you are stronger than me, but this is my mind and you came here willingly. The more real you become, the more like me you become. The playing field is levelled and here, in my mind, my memories, my dreams. I am more, I am stronger.” The mirror twins grew as fast as Mr Mustard, faster, dwarfing him, rejoining, flowing into a swirling taijitu as her palms closed together around the fading yellow light. “I'm sorry, you deserved a chance to be real, but not like this... I love you.”

And he was gone.

Mimsy stood, shakily, a single shed tear shearing from her chin and sliding down the slope of her breast in the shadows. Timidly she tottered across to the trundle and tipped into it. St John stirred and stared as she slipped against him.

“Everything alright luv?” He murmured.

She nestled her noggin in the nook of his neck and nuzzled at him. “It's over. He's gone now. I dealt with it.”

His hands hold her, hug her, her hips hove back and she hooks her heels behind his shanks. “Make me forget,” she says.

Eyes meet and for a moment he has misgivings, a merest mote of yellow in her gaze, but lips meet, bodies move and immediately all is marvellous, magnificent and mean Mister Mustard, but a memory, melting away.

Mimsy Burogrove: Psychedelic Detective - The Prison of Concentration - Episode 3: Yellow Brick Road

Sun, 04 Sep 2011 14:58:20 GMT

Art by Tamara Gray on Elfwood

Mimsy trod the chequered ground beneath her feet and raised her hand to shield her eyes from the blazing sunflowers in the sky. She couldn't fly here, the world was resisting her, the traumatised woman didn't want her here prying into her secrets and the yellow man didn't want her here either. He hadn't left – yet – but his influence was withdrawing, like water slowly flowing backwards, back to where he was standing, barely visible in the far distance.

The landscape curved and undulated, it was sculpted and lined as if made by brush strokes, colours alongside one another to give the illusion of a third colour, rather than mixed. It was rough going on Mimsy's feet and where it wasn't abrasive lines it was soft, squishing like wet mud between her toes and leaving a trail of multicoloured footprints across the landscape.

Here the ground was cracked open and crumbling, like two halves of a mint cake, snapped in half. Beneath the post-impressionist landscape the ground turned to shreds of torn canvas but here, where the land was torn apart, a river of blood, tainting the air with a coppery scent, flowed down in a roaring torrent. Mimsy turned, brushing an errant strand of glowing hair from her face and looked to where the blood was coming from. A man's head, his face, gigantic in the landscape, twisted in pain, bleeding from a terrible wound in his forehead that gushed down his face and made the river.

Mimsy tried, again, to unfurl her wings but the world, the mind, the imagined reality of this place resisted her. There was a brief flicker and she rose up to her toes, but that was all she could manage. There had to be another way to cross the river of blood, there had to be, time was running out tick by unrelenting tick as the yellow stain withdrew. She cast around, looking, desperately for something, anything that might help her across.

One this side of the river of blood stood a wilting stand of trees, up, closer to the bleeding head, pink and brown with hear-shaped leaves that were fluttering in the wake of a sudden autumn. She could see the leaves wilting and drying before her eyes. She sprinted up along the crumbling banks of the crimson flood and into the trees. They smelled of sweat, of sweetness, of salt and resin. She ran her hand across their smooth bark and felt them tremble, the surface breaking away in crumbs, the wood beneath fading, failing, rotting.

Mimsy wrapped herself around the trunk and laid her cheek against the bark, her body pressed to the quivering, disintegrating tree. It solidified, became stronger, more real again as she held it, bleeding a little of her own reality into it, murmuring affection into its bark, caressing its desiccated, vascular, leaves. A push, a kiss and the tree shuddered again, leaves falling around her as it leaned over, over, over until its crown of branches struck the other side of the divide and, with another kiss, she was able to walk her way to the other side, arms outstretched like a tightrope walker, the bitter-sweet taste of the bark upon her lips.

The ground on the other side rose up, a hill, a mountain, a cliff, abruptly reaching up into that inky sky and the blinding sunflowers so steep and sweeping that to look in any direction was vertiginous. Up and down, left and right, the moment Mimsy looked up at this cliff they lost all their meaning, like laying on your back in the grass and looking up into the sky when the panic seizes you that you might fall off the world.

Here, that could happen.

Mimsy clung, desperately, to the surface of the wall, six hands and two feet digging into the surface with desperate strength, clinging to the ridges of the paint and the hanging strips of canvas. Looking around her now every single direction seemed to drop away into infinity, but she could see the yellow stain, withdrawing in each and every direction so she simply closed her eyes and scrambled, like a spider across the impossible cliff, an ersatz Arachne in an impossible world.

It seemed like hours that she climbed, eyes closed, refusing to see the strangeness around her until, finally, one of her many hands came over the lip of the cliff and opening her brown eyes again she hauled herself over the lip onto the xanthous crown of this place, the redoubt of the yellow man.

She'd seen him before, but now they studied each other. He seemed more powerful, more real, bigger than glimpses she'd had of him before. He was a vile, sulphurous yellow, skin, clothes, hair, all of it the same eye-bending shade, a colour so strong it made her face sting as though she'd eaten a spoonful of mustard, making her eyes stream and her face screw up with near physical pain. He was hairy, naked, his face twisted in a mean smirk, eyes blazing with hatred and contempt for anything, everything, everyone. His face was lopsided, a monstrous carbuncle disfiguring his nose on one side, painful looking and suppurating, another reason looking upon him was a pain.

Mimsy found her voice. “Who are you? Why are you doing this? What have you got against these people?” She tried to keep the outrage out of her voice, tried to stay calm, loving, respectful even though the man was such a frightful shock, simply to look at.

When his voice came it was a chafing, snide, whine, nasal and whistling around that unsightly growth. “Me? I'm nobody, and who are you exactly to be asking, to be pursuing me or trying to stop me?”

“Mimsy, Mimsy Burogrove and this is my job, things of the mind, the imagination, the strange, things that don't make sense.”

“You're real.” He groused, raising himself up on his arthritic toes, the yellow landscape contracted now to mere veins that bled into the painted landscape. “You come here from the real world and interfere with this one.”

“The psycheverse, I'm a guardian.” Mimsy took another step towards him, all six hands palm-up, talking low and calm and quiet.

“You're a doorkeeper, a prison guard. You are real but I am not. I am from here, from the rambling imaginations the people you seek to 'protect' and oh... they imagine such terrible things, such strange things. Things like me.” He reached out to her, his ragged, cracked, parchment nails scratching with a rasp against her cheek. “I want to be real. You come here from there, can you really deny me the right to go there from here?”

His touch disgusted her, she couldn't help but recoil, his nails on her skin made her think of maggots, of turned-over stones, of the gunk in the plughole, anything and everything that made her flesh crawl. It was the touch of insects, the clammy paws of an 'uncle' and it turned her stomach. “You're killing people.”

“And you, my dear Mimsy, are an interloper in my world.” He stretched and flattened, like a giant paper cut-out, enormous and terrifying, a lutescent tower of parchment that reached for her with paper-cut hands that writhed like flatworms, making her gorge rise just to look at them.

Curving blades of bilious disgust sprang into her hands as she went to battle with the murderous yellow spectre, the knives of her abhorrence for the very essence of him slashing and swiping at his fingers as he reached for her. It was in vain, they struck from the surface of his papery flesh in a shower of sparks and his ribbon-fingers bound her up like a mummy, bringing her up to that leprous maw as she struggled and twisted in that grip, paper-cuts opening on her skin where it was bared between his fingers.

He was too strong.

“I will become real little bug, little spider, my dear Miss Burogrove. You cannot stop me, you're not strong enough here. You think this is your world, you think you're special, but this is my world. Not yours.”

He squeezed, tighter and tighter, crushing the breath from her body, her bones began grind together, she couldn't breathe, her breasts were crushed flat, painfully, to her chest. Not a single arm could move, about all she could do was to clench her toes, some small action to relieve the pain.

The world rocked, abruptly, stars exploded in the sky like fireworks and both of them looked up, a snarl of anger on the yellow man's face. “No!” but it was too late, she felt his grip loosen, his fingers fall away from her body as the pair of , them faded away and the really-real replaced the psycheverse before her rheumy eyes.

A perfect paragon of perplexity and perturbation, St. John stood, sentinel, over her as the slumped in the slanting drizzle of the street. His gun was gripped, held high in his hand, the woman unconscious, unfeeling, unseeing on the ground. “I had to knock her out, something strange was happening, the way you were grasping each other, the yellow light in her eyes. I hope it's alright.”

She smiled, sapped and sickened by the scrap within the sister's sentience and simply nodded. “You did the right thing St. John... but I don't know what we're going to do about Mister Mustard, I can't beat him.” She hung her head, humbled by the hurt.

Mimsy Burogrove: Psychedelic Detective - The Prison of Concentration - Episode 2: Dead Reckoning

Sat, 03 Sep 2011 20:22:49 GMT

The scene of the crime was a sad little studio mere steps away in Soho, superimposed above a salacious store front whole seductive stock stimulated the shopper with synthetic sexiness and skin, stripped starkers. Above this gaudy Gomorrah the gutted gudgeon of the latest grotesquerie was laid gaping on the ground in his garret.

St. John helped our heroine into this horrific home and held back, leaving her to hem, haw and hash out her hunches.

“The previous victim was a businessman, is that what you said?” Mimsy leaned her three-lensed Lennon's back upon her locks as she looked.

“Yeah, that's right luv.” St. John poked in a perturbed process at the piecemeal possessions of the person (now deceased), placed on the parquet.

“Well, this one was an artist.” Mimsy certified, confident, conspicuously so, in her certitude.

“How on Earth do you know that?” St. John saw no reason to reach such a robust result in reasoning so readily.

“Poor, but honest. Dressed shabbily, but carefully repaired. Cheap food to eat, cheap accommodation to live in, surviving on sugar, caffeine. I can smell the clinging smoke of marijuana all over the few furnishings that he's got.”

St. John sighed, surprised and stirred by her show of solid speculation, saddened by his own slapdash study.

“If I get shot of the constables here, can you work your particular brand of special magic to find anything out?”

“On a dead man? It's a bit dangerous but if you really want me to do it, I can have a go at it.” Mimsy crouched, catlike, concurrent to the corpse and considered the conspicuous crater in the cadaver's cranium. “Stabbed in the head again, same spot.”

St. John shooed away the shower of sheriffs intent on showing their own skill and stood sentinel for the sorceress of the street.

Mimsy sank with great delicacy into the remnants of the mind of the dead man, following the drifting piano-key steps, ebony and ivory, down into the man's wilting subconscious - or what remained of it.

The brain's cells starts to die off a few minutes after the flow of oxygen stops, but bits and pieces, dribs and drabs, a few scintilla of mentality remain for some time and it was into this storm of Escher shapes and fragmentary memories that the less wise call 'near death experiences' that Mimsy stepped, flitting from crumbling dreams to hard and glassy regrets in her search for any trace that remained of the man's memories of the brutal attack upon his person.

Everything was flaking away, disintegrating into the darkness of death like the burning edges of a film in a grindhouse projector fire as she tried to stay one step ahead. Lévy curve wings sprouted from her naked back in plastic-fantastic black and white as she leapt the gulf of death to the last bastion of the dead man's naked consciousness; the fragmenting memories of his childhood home, scorching away with a scent like burnt toast and petrichor.

Soft, bare feet touched down upon the grey-scale grass and the rings on her toes glittered in the light of the nostalgia-sun that beat down from the herringbone-clouded sky. She could hear the desperate sobbing of a child within the crudely recalled house and folding her wings behind her like a monochrome ladybird she turned the decomposing door handle and stepped within.

The inside of the house smelt of plasticine and daffodils, mingling with the meaty undertone of something delicious cooking in the kitchen oven. The man, the boy, all that there was that remained of him, sat in front of a half-remembered television, staring at the flickering screen and crying. The tears streamed down his face and ran away in a river, an image from Alice in Wonderland that had, apparently, made a lasting impression when he was a boy and lingered even as the light of his mind went out, inch by inch.

Mimsy trod gently forward down the luridly patterned carpet of the hall but before she could get close to him a monstrous, spidrous thing, all limbs and scissors and chattering, broken, teeth, blindingly yellow came juddering and stuttering towards her. Canary, mustard, jaundiced, sickly, painful to the eyes in this place without colour it was a thing pieced together from childhood nightmares and given life, a creature designed to stop her, shadows and sharp edges and a desire to snip and cut.

“Snicker-snack.” It said, and went for her thumbs with a clamorous snipping that rent the air.

Mimsy fell back before it's assault, surprised and terrified to find such a thing here, lurking in his mind, so powerful when everything else was fading.. Everyone had personal demons, she'd fought many, cured people of their afflictions, addictions, hang-ups and madness. This helter-skelter creature was something new, something worse, something unnatural; empowered by some other force from outside this mind.

“Snicker-snack.” It said. She bled paisley from a dozen cuts as the thing span around the corridor, chasing her back towards the front door like some crazy Meccano gecko, leaving ink-bleeding marks in floor, walls and ceiling in its manic, crab-like gait. Hissing with pain she reached into her belly through her navel and drew forth her roseate uterine pistol, arming it with the mother-load.

“Snicker-snack.” It said, again, the great curving shears of its hands surging forth for the killing blow.

She fired.

The nightmare was engulfed in a warm haze of kisses and hugs, of soft bosoms, of the reassuring warmth and sweet smell of a mother's arms. It shrieked and shrank as it fought, growing smaller and smaller and smaller until it was nothing more than a shrunken, angular foetus, a glimmer and then nothing at all.

Wary now, Mimsy kept the gun held tight in her hands, warily covering herself with the three-pointed weapon as she crept closer to the boy. Already the outer walls of the room were crumbling, the fight had done more damage to the dead man's mind and there was little left.

She drew the sobbing boy to her breast as she looked past him to the television, there in black and white, flecked with snow, were the last things he had seen. His girl, his lover, his truest one, eyes mad with hate and lust for something other than him, striking at him with her scissors, a yellow gleam behind her eyes that was now disturbingly familiar. The Snicker-Snack had been this thing's familiar, it knew she was onto it, it was protecting itself, trying to ward her off.

She held him into his tears stopped and his body crumbled to ash, leaving her hanging, alone in the darkness and then she went back to her body, sadness dogging her every metaphorical step.

Mimsy felt febrile, her flesh factually flensed, as well as in the fantasy of the now completely dead. She held up her hands in horror, hesitant as sanguine humour ran down from her hurts.

St. John's hand found her fingers and fetched them close. “You're hurt. I've never seen that happen before. What happened, are you alright?” His eyes were effusive with empathy.

“Bad trip,” Mimsy whimpered, wiping away the blood with a washcloth “But I think I know a few things more about our murderer now. I just have to be sure and that means we need to find this man's girlfriend, before the killer leaves her.”

“I have, absolutely, no idea what you're talking about.” St. John fumbled a fag into his face and fed upon the fumes, drawing fortitude from the feeling it gave him.

“The murderer isn't from this world, it's something inside them, in their minds. It left a blue meanie to try and stop me. It's powerful and dangerous, a native of the psycheverse. We're going to have to be more careful and can't hurt the girl, or the other 'murderers'. It's not their fault.”

Together the tenacious twosome left the tenebrous tenement, tracking the terrified sweetheart. Mimsy could smell the fear, like a fog, rising from the filly and in fleeting time they found her, frightened and frenzied in a foxhole. Surrounded by rubbish and wracked with regret, bloodied, blubbering and batshit she was not the best beholder to the battle.

Mimsy held St. John back and bit by bit beseeched the barmy bird to becalm herself. Jaundiced eyes gaped at her. The lemon light in that limpid leer made her leery. Fingertips touched and in a solitary second Mimsy was transported for a second time.

Disoriented, blinking, Mimsy found herself in the ruined landscape of the poor woman's mind. Everything was yellow and red, the yellow colour draining out of the landscape towards a distant Dali landscape, rendered the sickly colour of stale piss by the corruption of the presence, squatting in her mind and growing stronger, yes, definitely stronger than it had been before. This was Mimsy's world, her playground but the yellow man in the distance, the power he had, not knowing what he was, made her... scared.

Mimsy Burogrove: Psychedelic Detective - The Prison of Concentration - Episode 1: The Tenth Gate

Sun, 28 Aug 2011 18:58:42 GMT

Mimsy Burogrove: Psychedelic Detective
The Prison of Concentration
Episode 1: The Tenth Gate

Deep in the devilishly decadent district of Soho, above the luminous light of the lanes and the inebriated intonations of the imaginative industry that calls it home lays the flat of that most flirtatious and fiery fighters for freedom, Madu Bandara, also known as Mimsy Burogrove, perhaps the world's only psychedelic detective. See her now, safely sat upon silks and satins, silently supposing and mute as she meditates upon the mysteries of the mind and this mortal coil.

Mimsy is a small woman, perfect and petite, charming and comely in her coffee-coloured cut-off kaftan than blends with her caramel skin until it looks like all is one. Laying upon the cushion in a lotus, her limbs aligned languidly, the lissome lady of love and learning, sable shorn, has no reasons to suspect the scandalous scoundrels that slip and slide through the shadows toward her sanctuary.

The Hashishin are heralds of the hate that her hirsute rival, The Guru, now feels for our famed feminine figure. Silently they shimmy open a shutter and slip within, sharps shivs held in sure hands, eyes shining as they slide towards her. Their steps may be virtually soundless but she is aware of them and, as they approach her, intent on assisting her into the afterlife, her eyes open and bindi that she bears upon her brow begins to burn with a brilliance that blinds and baffles the brutes who have come to bleed her.

She floats, she sees, through their minds as though she were rooting through their pockets. She sees the hatred that they have for her, instilled in them by their mentor. She sees the promises that they have been made, the heaven that they have been promised. As they hesitate, she strips out of her body and steps naked into their minds.

Wadi was a pleasant little boy, until his father shut him in the hut with the spiders. All night long he could not sleep, feeling the webs brushing his face, hearing their skittering legs – imagined or not – feeling them dance across his skin. He is grown now, a man, a thug, a killer, brave in the face of almost any danger but...

Wadi's mouth opens wide in a wail. Under his skin swarm a slew of spiders and he screams as he slaps and stabs at them, sprawling backward through the sash and down to the street below with a sickening splash so high is our siren's shelter. Her impossible iris turns its ire upon the other interloper and infiltrates his intelligence.

Haider on the other hand... Haider just wants to be loved. In the secret gardens of The Guru he has met the dusky maidens who serve in the afterlife and he wants to carry out his missions so that he can be returned to their embrace He doesn't know that this heaven is a fake, he doesn't understand that no right-thinking deity would never accept a murderer, however much they thought they were doing the right thing. Mimsy takes pity on him. She breaks apart like a kaleidoscope of curves and lips, of soft eyes and warm kisses and she enfolds him within her, she tells him she loves him and her one becomes many, surrounding and stroking, murmuring sweet word in his gullible ears.

Haider slides to the floor with a subtle and serene smile and sighs as he stares into the stars only he can see. These two thugs are not the only transgressors though. Their task to trouble her, to throw her off, to tempt and taunt and turn away. At her door the deadliest of the dangerously deranged dealers of death delays, determined and – he thinks – destined to kill her. Luck is with our lady at least as he leans in, a latecomer looms large over the lowlife.

Detective Inspector St. John is an imposing individual, intent upon ingress when he identifies the ingrate intent upon inflicting iniquity upon our illustrious ingénue. Maddened at the malice of this malcontent the man makes his move, laying his mitts upon the miscreant and mashing him against the marmalade-coloured mass of the door until his mandible is mincemeat and his muzzle is mushroomed across his mug. With that accomplished, the agent of the law seeks access and admits himself to the scene of anarchy and amour that has become of her accommodation.

“Mimsy;” St. John nods, wiping his hands, leaving the unconcious body of the Hashishin assassin behind him. “Trouble?”

She uncoils from her crouch over the barely-conscious cur, and crosses the carpet to give him a kiss upon his cheek. “Nothing that I couldn't take care of Christian, but thank you for your help.” She smells like jasmine and jam, honey and hashish; she's warm and wonderful but he's here for work, not women.

“Well, we do have trouble, down at the station. A murder that seems like your sort of thing.” He screws a cigarette into his kisser and sighs as he sparks it, taking a deep and soothing suck upon the slender cylinder. “Gruesome business, but strange. If you're finished playing with religious fanatics and cults, we'd like you to take a look at it. For payment of course.”

The psychedelic princess pouts prettily. “It's always business these days Christian, never anything fun. If I am going to help you with this, you have to agree to let your hair down.” She fondles his follicles and he must confess that his fine features have been flattened by the cutting of his flowing locks, but he falls in with her feeling.

“Agreed.” It was no hardship to hang around the happening with this hepcat, she was honest and happy and had to be humoured, at least here and now.

“Did you see the victim? Investigate the murder yourself?” Her hand hesitates over his and her eyes turn heavenward, as he hesitates.

“Yes, I did.”

“Then we don't need to go anywhere.” A touch and her ten digits tingle at his temples.

She slips into Christian's mind, they know each other, they've been lovers. It's like sliding into a warm bed next to someone you care about. For a moment he's alarmed, but she's done this before and he tries to relax. She walks through his structured and ordered mind, bare feet slapping against the hard surfaces of laws and duties, of honour and decency, leaving little footprints of chaos in her wake.

She stops, a moment, a glittering barrier around his thoughts, cutting her off from his memories, his fantasies, though trough the shield she can make out the shape of herself and hear words they once shared together. He's so nervous, she finds it sweet and skips on, giggling, deeper into his mind.

A giggle is not appropriate here, not in this dark corner where he buttons down the bad things that he's seen, the bad things that he's done. Here the horrors and the guilt wait behind walls far stronger than those used to keep her out but these are to keep these memories in, suppressed, hidden.

Mimsy closes her eyes and steps through and what she sees she can scarcely believe.

A man stands naked in a room as the ghost of her astral body watches. A screwdriver in his hand, the body of another man before him, dead and bleeding, his skull stabbed through and bleeding, right above and between his eyes, deep into his ajna chakra, into the pineal gland, the gate to the higher planes and the imagination.

She dissolves into a cloud of butterflies and returns to her body, opening her eyes to her friend, the Inspector.

A moue of disgust marrs her marvelous mask as, in a moment, she opens her mouth and mumbles. “A horrible murder, but you know who did it. Why do you need me?”

He shrugs his shoulders and with a shudder speaks what has been unspoken. “The man we caught claims not to remember anything. The man he killed is his friend, his business partner. They have no reason to kill each other. It's motiveless and if it wasn't for the fact it happened, we would never have thought it would. We need you to look inside him and to tell us if he is telling the truth.”

She taps a fingertip, marking time against her top lip and as time passes she takes in a terrible something in the man's eye. In his eye, as though perched in an aerie is an eerie entity. A yellow man yells at her, a man she has a yen to understand. Determined she decides to dive once more into his dreams, this derangement indicative of something deeper than the dead man at work, but the little man is gone.

She realises then that St. John's radio is unwrapped and he is ranting. The radio is rushed away again, rapidly and he reaches for her hand. “We really do need you.”

“Oh?”

“There's been another murder, the same method, a different man, a different victim.”

“Curiouser and curiouser...”

Flash Fic Challenge - Plucked from History

Sun, 28 Aug 2011 12:57:15 GMT

“It went on for years, I must have had a thousand trips. Literally a thousand, or a couple of hundred? A thousand - I used to just eat it (acid) all the time.”

-John Lennon

“Wherever and whenever the ego function began to form, it was akin to a cancerous tumor or a blockage in the energy of the psyche. The use of psychedelic plants in a context of shamanic initiation dissolved-as it dissolves today-the knotted structure of the ego”

- Terrence McKenna: Food of the Gods

I'd lost faith completely in the counter-culture 'revolution' of the 60s as we approached the 1970s. Everything seemed to be going to shit faster than a diet of stewed prunes and roadside chilli-dogs. For a decade that had started off so well we'd seen it end with Kent State, the break up of The Beatles and Manson and The Family doing their nasty little business. What was left of the counterculture movement was holed up in Fortress 'Frisco, wrapped up in their own bullshit and a fluffy haze of drug-induced euphoria as if they were trying to will Nixon into non-existence simply by ignoring him.

It was a big, huge, enormous, giant, shitter of a comedown and like oh-so-many I'd become just another disillusioned hippies and revolutionaries. Spitting out what venom I could in Rolling Stone, criticising, blaming and throwing tantrums while drowning my sorrows in fifty kinds of pill and any kind of booze that came across my path.

Those of us old enough to remember know where we were for important events. Events used to be important, miracles used to be rare. I remember where I was when Kennedy was shot, when Nixon wasn't and when we landed on The Moon – which back then was a big fucking deal, like something out of a trip. I also remember where I was when the miracle happened and the first of the new gods came to walk amongst us.

I was in a diner in San Fran, chewing the inside of my face to a bloody pulp, trying not to dig the ants out from under my skin with a fork and trying desperately not to gouge the eyes out of the self-righteous hippy who was trying to lecture me about my breakfast of bourbon, codeine and a three-patty murder burger, rare as pandas.

That's when it happened.

Somewhere in Los Angeles, and we'll never know the full alchemy of it, some mix of creative genius, a normally lethal dose of LSD, the screechy pretension of Yoko Ono and Dr Janov's bullshit primal therapy led to a genuine transcendence and it rolled across the world like a tidal wave. Colours became brighter, light more profound, we heard music in the wind and everyone poured out onto the street to watch. It rained diamonds, the clouds sang to us, in Vietnam the fighting stopped as every soldier found himself naked, home and carrying a single daisy. In Northern Ireland there were suddenly two versions of the same place, mirrors of one another, one for the Catholics, one for the Protestants. In South Africa blacks and whites were all the same colour and it was neither black nor white.

John had become something else, something more, something that so many of us have become since. The first real superhero. A god-man, something that we've all become – those of us who were able. He switched us on the way he'd been switched on, turned us on to the wellspring of the godhead. Anything we could think, anything we could want, we could make, limited only by our own imaginations. For so many of us, that was so very small a thing.

Even me. I'm 'writing' this into what looks like a typewriter in the library of the Mind of Mankind, something that only exists in our collective imagination. How do I spend my time? Writing about the way thing were before we got our godhood, before we remade the world, before we did away with the swine and the jerks and the republicans, the violence and the pain and the agony, the death the disease and the hate.

Life's nothing without a little pain, without a challenge to overcome. The children of the new gods don't understand this and they're never going to change. They're spoiled, to the ultimate degree, nothing to be denied to them, nothing they cannot do, nobody to tell them 'no' or 'stop', no challenges to overcome. Just peace and love forever and for a man who runs on bile and vitriol, that's no life at all.

I'm going to make one last, stupid gesture, I'm going to see if I can die. That might put a thought or two into the heads of this universal pantheon of indulgence. I am so very, very bored.

We'll see.

- R.D. Library of the Mind of Mankind, Seventh Heaven, Jupiter, 2005.

The Speech I Gave at Steve & Maddie's Wedding

Sat, 27 Aug 2011 22:06:10 GMT

Friends and family, English and French, old and young... and I've gotten gravy on my speech.

No pressure then.

It's traditional, when giving a best man's speech, to embarrass the groom.

Conventionally one might go on about the groom's past, his less-than-stellar girlfriends, cast aspersions about his character and give the bride reason to regret her decision to marry the poor sod.

I've never been much for tradition.

There's really nothing I could say or do to embarrass Steve in front of this august company any more than he has already done himself in the past and will doubtless do again, either today or in the future.

Steve had me organise his stag do, which was a bit like asking a trout to cross the Gobi desert in a shopping cart a nest, but fortunately that wasn't traditional either.

I could embarrass Steve by saying that all we did was stay up and play board games, while drinking, but then you all know Steve and that'd be no surprise.

Nobody ended up naked or handcuffed to anything.

More's the pity.

I could embarrass him by mentioning that we met through a live-action roleplay group, where we all used to meet up, dress up as vampires, wizards, werewolves and other sundry things and scheme against each other.

You all know that already though and if you don't, I'm sure there'll be words exchanged later.

Perhaps I could embarrass him with stories of how he used to cheat at Diablo II, or how he met his wife through a computer game.

That's not as embarrassing as it used to be though and many would consider it quite normal these days.

Can't say as I've had any trouble with my internet bride... she'd hit me if I did.

The other problem that we have with a best man's speech is that we have both friends and family here and the kind of stories I have about Steve, the kind of things I can say about him will simply not make sense to some of you.

If I joke about how he must have 'rolled a critical on his Charm skill' to get Maddie to marry him, some will laugh, others won't know what the hell I'm talking about.

I know many Steves. So many Steves, in fact, that we had to start giving them extra names to distinguish which Steve we were talking about.

There was Big Steve, Little Steve, Medium Steve, London Steve, Baby Steve, even Quantum Steve for a while, so called because he only ever showed up in the interference pattern between two others Steves.

This particular Steve though, amongst a bunch of reprobates that includes gamers, programmers, LARPers, console junkies, MMO players and other assorted nerdery, managed to gain the honorific of 'Geeky Steve'.

That shows a degree of effort and dedication which, I believe,is to be commended but also shows how difficult it is to say anything about Steve and, to a lesser degree Maddie, that anyone will understand.

No, I don't think the traditional route of embarrassing the groom with stories of epic failure and silliness is going to cut it here. So instead I'll have to embarrass the groom, and the bride, by saying nice things and making them bashful.

So then, I'll say this.

Steve and Maddie have been great friends to us. They have always made effort to maintain our friendship, to stay in touch, to see how we
were and to take care of us – and vice versa.

If they put half as much love and effort into each other as they have put into their friends, then they're going to do well and have a wonderful future together.

Friend or family, across the generations, no matter where you're from, I do believe there is one thing that all of us here present can agree on and understand and that is this...

That in marrying Maddie, Steve is punching way, way, way above his weight.

And good on him.

*Raise glass*

Doc Osmium: Synchronius Maximus - Part Four: Order & Chaos

Sat, 20 Aug 2011 21:50:24 GMT

The Museum was only fifteen minutes from closing when they arrived. The Doc bounded up the stairs two and three at a time, leaping towards the entrance as fast as he could as Susan rummaged for change to pay the parking fee.

“Leave it!” He shouted back at her, his voice carrying surprisingly loudly given the distance and how hard he'd been running. She sprinted to catch up with him as best she could but he was a powerhouse. She only caught him at the turnstile because he paused to cram a fistful of dollars into the donation box before moving in.

“We shut soon!” The woman called from the entrance booth, but the Doc only gave her a cheery wave and kept on running with Susan drawn, apologetically, along in his wake.

The Doc was well ahead of her, out of sight, by the time she reached the genetics exhibit, losing him amongst the giant plastic helices, posters about heritability and the stuffed examples of ring species. Susan wandered, a little lost, they were almost the only people in here, the last few visitors filtering away as the time to closing counted down over the intercom.

Flustered she turned this way and that, looking for the Doc in every shadow until his massive mitts closed on her and dragged her back into an exhibit, huddling her down behind a string of ape-men that roughly delineated the ascent of man.

“Seems as good a place as any,” he grinned, he seemed to be enjoying this far too much, the game, the chase, even though people had died. She was tempted to say something to him but knew it would be futile to try and sway his opinion. The man was as stubborn as he was... interesting.

The museum closed, the lights went out and they were alone in the dark. She was bored and, frankly, she needed to pee. Every time she went to open her mouth the Doc hushed her, pressing a finger against her lips in a manner she found patronising. She took a deep breath to remonstrate with him and he clamped his hand over her mouth. She bit down, hard and he scowled at her, pointing to the exhibit hall ahead of them.

Two shadows moved, a pair of low rent security guards on their night shift. Chattering about television as they shone their torches left and right. Nothing for them to really be worried about so she bit him again, harder, then stopped. There was a 'plink' noise as something bounced and rolled along the floor. One guard went flying, treading on something, his feet flying out from under him, shrieking like a little girl as his arms flew out and caught his partner in the temple, both of them falling down with a sickening 'thump' and laying still upon the ground.

What were the odds? She didn't know, couldn't think to calculate but this whole thing had been a long series of coincidences, extreme chances and strange circumstances. This was just another in the list and she was beginning to get numb to it.

Whoever it was that had thrown that bauble now stepped into the exhibit hall, a stalking shadow, tall and somehow freakish, his long coat sweeping around him.

“Doctor, show yourself!” The man's voice was harsh, filled with contempt, hatred, a seething animosity that twisted his voice and his features. “I know you're here,” he snapped his fingers and the lights came back up with a flicker and a crackle. Another coincidence? In the light the man was revealed, a gaunt, skeletal figure with a strange, wedge shaped head and a pronounced widow's peak, a pinched mouth and a permanent sneer.

The Doc waved his hand downward, telling her silently to hide as he drew himself up to his impressive height and strode purposefully out of the stand, between Homo Sapiens and Neanderthal Man.

“Here I am. As you wanted. You've killed people to get me here. So why don't you tell me who you are and what you want, why you've done all this. Why would you do this?”

The man folded his hands neatly behind his back and that sneering face broke into a smile, it didn't look like it belonged there. “A man who calls himself 'Osmium' has the temerity to ask me my name? Well, you can call me Augury,” He ran his hand down the great, plastic double helix that dominated the exhibit. “As to why? It's because of this. You're an abomination Doctor, an unnatural thing, every advantage you have you've been given but an artificial thing such as you cannot evolve, cannot change. Only given the natural order can we succeed and progress as a species.”

The Doc frowned, deeply. “That was not my choice. I can hardly be held accountable for what my parents did to me before I was even born.”

“True, but you do remain an example of the process and, given your exploits, a temptation for others to follow in their wake and a key that others might seek to replicate the process that they invented.”

“And your stake?”

Augury pulled a ball from the helix model and without looking, tossed it back over his shoulder. Miraculously it hit a strut and stuck in place. “I am a mutant, a product of nature. You are artificial, a tool, a device, an unchanging machine. You're not even human while I – and those like me – am the future. I must prove my superiority over you.”

Susan could bear it no longer, she stood up and cupped her hands around her mouth, calling to the Doc. “It's no good Oz, he's insane. He's not listening to a word you're saying.”

Osmium bristled as she showed herself, but the odds were Augury already knew she was there. His massive six-digit hands curled tight until the knuckles were white. “Maybe he'll listen to REASON.” The Doc twisted with that unnatural speed he'd shown before, that sledgehammer fist moving in a blinding blur towards Augury's face. Impossibly Augury moved, the very slightest amount and the Doc's fist went wide, missing him by a hair and smashing into the podium upon which the helix stood. The blow was so powerful that it collapsed, scattering balls in all directions and Susan had little doubt that the Doc had shattered his own fist with that mighty blow, though he didn't flinch.

“My mutation,” continued Augury as though nothing had happened “is that I can prognosticate. From a set of starting information I can see the permutations, the possibilities, everything that is going to happen. Like a chain of dominoes, events one after another. I have seen this fight, I know exactly what you and your little friend there are going to do. I have seen it all before.”

The Doc snarled and swung out with his booted food, a blow that would shatter rock if it connected but Augury merely flinched back and gave the Doc's foot a tap with his own, skeletal hand, overbalancing the bigger man and sending him tumbling to the ground.

“It's futile. You've already lost.”

Susan's mind churned, ran, there was something about the Doc, he was a patronising bastard but he was smart, remarkable, unique. She realised that for all his insistence, all his attitude and bravado in this instance, he was screwed. Augury was right.

Or was he?

The Doc stumbled to his feet again, nursing his broken hand, clenching his jaw in frustration. His indomitable will wouldn't let him admit defeat, even when he was apparently fated to lose and he lifted METHOD, hoping – against the odds – to crack Augury's skull, a man to whom everything was a game, a puzzle, the mere numbers of probability, of chance.

“Wait!” Susan shouted out.

The Doc's fist halted just before swinging, Augury's smug face waiting for a blow that never came.

“There's a paradox! He thinks he's superior to you because he's a natural mutation and you're made.” Susan strode forward, picking her way through the balls and struts that now littered the ground, her finger jabbing, accusative, into Augury's face. “But your mutation, your ability, you see everything as unbending fate. A chain of events following an inevitable pattern. If that's the case then what's the difference between you? Everything merely unfolds according to mathematical certainty. You're just as engineered as he is!”

Augury's face fell. “What?”

“Turn your talent on yourself and tell us what you see.” She spat and watched as his eyes glazed over, twitching left and right as the numbers swam in his head.

The Doc wasn't one to wait though and his fist, suspended in time during Susan's diatribe, snapped out and cracked into Augury's skull as doubt flickered in his twisted features. He collapsed like a bundle of coat hangers, his nose spread over his face as the Doc stood triumphant over his unconscious body and shook out his hand, cradling his broken fist against his chest.

“Thank you Susan,” he said after a moment, with a great weariness and a genuine humility and sincerity. “I couldn't have beaten him without you.”

Susan just nodded and supported him as he staggered, the pain finally cutting through his will. “You were the same. Both Newtonians. I remembered what you said, back on the flats.”

“Not any more.” The door opened before them as they stepped out into the cool night air and the glow of the city lights.

“A man who can admit he's wrong?” Susan laughed as she helped him down towards the Corvette.

“I'm a scientist Susan, first and foremost. You test a hypothesis and if it is wrong you revise it. That we beat him... well, that demonstrates that the universe is too complex and random to be predicted in this way.”

Susan nodded as they reached the car. “Perhaps I'd better drive?”

The Doc nodded and then smiled in the streetlight, looking down at his massive six-digit fist and lifting it to his mouth, kissing his knuckles. “METHOD...” He laughed, deep and booming and slid into the passenger seat. The roar of the engine herald of further adventures to come.

The Black Blade

Sat, 20 Aug 2011 18:04:46 GMT

Blackhawk from 2000AD

This is an entry for Chuck Wendig's genre-mashup flash-fiction challenge, 'Southern Gothic/Sword and Sorcery'.

The chains weighed heavy on his wrists and ankles, dragging through the dust. He glowered from beneath his heavy brow, eyes like a bull; deep, brown, simmering with aggression. He was a broad and powerful man, a slab of ebony muscle and scars. To look upon him one could only imagine how he might end up in chains. The magic of the ghosts was powerful and could bring low even the strongest, so it seemed.

He lingered a moment too long before the wooden gates, head turning, always alert. The ghost behind him lashed out with his whip, opening a broad stripe across the man's back that stung and bled down his shadowed skin.

“Git yer ass in thar slave.” The ghost drawled, spitting a brown stream of tobacco juice onto the ground. The grey uniform they all wore made them look alike to the chained man. His thick lips curled back from his teeth, feral, but he took the step into the stockade, allowing himself to be shut into the dark with the other slaves whose fates would soon be discovered.

Those soulful eyes adjusted to the darkness slowly. He arched his back, feeling the flesh sting afresh along the line of the whip with a new trickle of blood. Through the cracks in the beams lines of light shone, swimming with dust motes. It did little to disperse the stench of fear and shit from the cell. Most of the others he dismissed with but a glance. Ghost criminals, broken slaves, only one drew his eye.

A woman of the redskins, beautiful and proud. She was almost naked, her modesty covered by a beaded necklace and a waist mat of soft doeskin. He took in her proud mien - she stood when the others huddled - the way she paced like a mountain lion, testing the boundaries of their cage relentlessly. She noticed him the same moment he noticed her.

“You look like you can fight.” She said in the ghost-tongue they shared. She stepped close, her scent of fresh sweat, a feminine tang that was stirring after the perfume stink of the ghost-people's 'ladies' and the stench of the other slaves.

“I can fight,” he admitted, his voice a rumbling growl. His hands pushing up his face, through the thick beard that framed his mouth, up into the tight ball of curls that crowned his head.

“So can I. I am a daughter to a great war chief of my people. I am Nizhoni.” She said, with a toss of her hair, as though he should know who she was - and be impressed.

“I am...”

They were interrupted, the gates at the other side opening. The ghost-people with their fire-staves standing guard as the slaves were ushered out, their chains unlocked from their limbs. He flexed his hands and rubbed his wrists as they were freed, testing his body, ready for the battle ahead.

“Whut's yer name slave?” The older ghost snarled, looking down at his board covered in the chicken scratches his people called writing.

“Wano.” Rumbled the man, glowering at the functionary, grunting as a whip fell for a second time across his back.

“Yer slave name, ya uppity bastich,” the man snarled through crooked, brown teeth.

“Jon.” Came this time, reluctantly. He was ushered forward, a heavy sabre pressed into his hand. It was no spear, but it would do for the grim work of spilling blood.

Together they entered the arena, surrounded by the grey-adorned ghosts and their strange womenfolk. Afraid of their own bodies they swathed themselves in tents of fabric, hats and gloves, hiding from the life-giving sun beneath umbrellas. They might as well be veiled as the women of the desert-folk were. There was one amongst them all, men and women, who looked different. Clad in white, leaning on his fire-staff. The master slaver. The White Wizard of the people from across the sea.

Harland.

A cheer went up from the crowd, even as the 'ladies' averted their eyes in shame from the red princess' bared breasts. Harland raised his staff and stood, gesturing to the gate on the other side of the arena. With a glow from that rod the wooden doors slammed open with violent force.

A lean man in grey stepped forth to the bloodied sawdust. His hair and beard were long, neat, he was whiter still than the other ghosts and he held his sabre like it was part of him. Wano watched him, tensing his fist around his own blade. The ghost-magic could hollow out a man, take his weaknesses, his emotions, his pain, but it left him with a need to fill that hollow. That made a man dangerous beyond imagining.

Harland's staff struck the ground with a flash of sparks and a peal of thunder, the fight was on. The lean man moved like lightning and almost immediately one of their fellow captives was gurgling his lifeblood onto the sawdust. Wano growled, this was no fair match, who could stand against the ghost magic?

Nizhani backed up against him and even in this fight for his life he could not ignore the curvaceous press of her hips as they stood together, the other slaves and prisoners dying around them one by one. The ghost's beard stained with blood as he tore the throat from one of them to sate his need.

“We cannot win.” Nizhani hissed, a hint of fear giving her voice a tremulous flutter.

“They have their magic,” Wano rumbled, waiting for the inevitable attack “we have ours, drawn from the land. What makes land other than the blood, sweat and tears of our brothers and sisters? Distract him. I will do the rest.”

The ghost came upon them then, seeming to fly over the sawdust without touching the ground. Fast, almost too fast to see but Nizhani was barely fast enough to meet him. With every sinew and muscle straining to the task she could – just barely – hold this creature off.

Wano sprang, built like a bull but with the grace and speed of the panthers from his native land. Too late the ghost realised he was no longer slaying the broken and the helpless. These were warriors of red and black.

Overconfidence was his downfall. Wano's blade carved the ghost's neck clean through, a spray of blood, unnaturally dark, lost against the
darkness of Wano's flesh even as he was drenched. He finished his wild swinging circuit and snatched the severed head from the air,
still alive, blinking, mouth working silently as Wano held it high. He fixed Harland with a wild glare, beating his chest with the fist
that held the sword, Nizhani proud at his side.

“WE WILL BE FREE!” Came their roar, together, man and woman, red and black, so powerful that the silent, shocked audience rocked back in their seats. Afraid, perhaps for the first time ever.

Doc Osmium: Synchronius Maximus - Part Three - Falling Into Place

Sun, 14 Aug 2011 16:15:22 GMT

Osmium's Corvette screamed across the city like a barely-tamed tiger with Susan clinging hopefully to the seat, not trusting to her harness given the Doctor's erratic driving and devil-may-care approach to the rules of the road. She didn't really want to distract him, but things were nagging at her.

“I still barely know anything about you.” She screamed over the guttural roar of the engine and the whipping of the wind about her face, streaming her hair out behind her.

“Do you really need to?” The Doc shouted back, turning left suddenly, throwing her body back and forth. One of his eyes was on the road and another on his lap where a map of the city and a business directory jostled for primacy.

“If I'm going to keep helping you, yes!” Susan yelled, leaning back to him and gripping onto his arm to hold herself steady.

“If?” The Doc turned and grinned to her, taking his eyes off the road and steaming past a parked car with barely an inch to spare. “I think you're going to be with me a while, we can get to know each other after the mystery is solved. Alright?”

“But...”

“Over dinner at the Lamb's Grill Cafe?”

Susan's mouth fell open. He still wasn't paying attention to her questions but the tone of his voice. That was the first time he'd treated her as a woman, rather than a colleague or someone just along for the ride. Her mouth opened and closed several more times but he's completely derailed her with a simple comment.

The Corvette screeched to a halt in a downtown side street, right in front of an old shop that had definitely seen better days. Without waiting the Doc scrambled out of the car and strode into the shop, the bell chiming and the door slamming shut before she'd even gotten out of her harness. Damned, impulse, great, galoot that he was. She slammed the door turning from surprised to annoyed on a dime before she followed him in.

The bell above the door chimed and she found herself surrounded by a wonderland of boardgames and old wooden toys. The kind of thing nobody gave a damn about any more, at least not the kids. The Doc was deep in conversation with the grey-haired owner at the counter, gesturing with the little plastic dominoes, so she took a little time to look around by herself.

There were boxes of finely crafted wooden bricks, imported sets of Mah-Jong, chess and chequers, there were puzzle boxes, play-chests, rocking horses and all manner of carved toys from nodding ducks to spinning tops. She was too young for much of this to mean much to her, but she ran her fingers over the smooth wood and admired what she saw, though her hands came away with a thin coating of dust. Business can't have been good.

The old man shuffled into the back, disappearing from view, leaving the two of them alone in the store for the moment.

“So why are we here?” Susan asked, drifting up behind the Doc as he leant over the counter.

“Those weren't just any dominoes. They might be cheap plastic, but they're also old. You can tell by the yellowing. More modern plastics don't age like that. Wherever they came from also had to be old and there aren't that many places that can be selling old sets of dominoes can there? Not in a modern city like this. This seemed the most likely place and if our missing 'friend' is as clever as he seems to be then he would have anticipated that this would be the place I'd come to.”

Susan baulked. “So... the one who caused the crash and set the police on us... knows we're here?”

“Or at least knew we would come here.”

“Is it safe?”

The Doc opened his mouth to answer but was interrupted by a sudden and terrific crash from the back of the store. Without pause he vaulted over the counter, Susan not far behind, as they rushed to find the old man.

There was a smell of smoke as the Doc smashed through the door into the back room. The room was lit by flickering orange light, no bulb, just a length of flex hanging from the ceiling. The old man had tumbled from a ladder, candle in hand and the dust and papers strewn about the floor had caught almost immediately. He lay, his leg twisted, close to the flames, a box of old, cheap, imported dominoes still clutched in his hand even as he writhed and twisted in pain.

The Doc gathered the old man up in his muscular arms as the flames leapt from shelf to shelf. Susan took off her jacket and tried to beat out the fire, but it was moving too fast. Sweating and blackened she tried to keep the flames away from Osmium and the old man, beating them back though they were spreading so damn fast, almost unnaturally fast.

The Doc stopped at the entrance, silhouetted by the flames that were already spreading through the front of the store and turned back to her. “You pick, which way out?” The old man was limp now in his arms and his face was a mask of frustration and annoyance.

Susan blinked, pausing a moment from her beating of the flames. The Doc was normally such a take charge guy and suddenly he wanted her advice? She shook her head, they couldn't afford to think about it, to wait. “Out the back, less fuel for the fire there and the fire's not going to be as hot.” The Doc nodded and let her lead the way, beating out the patches of fire spreading across the walls as they scrambled for the back door.

It was locked, she put her shoulder to it and then gave it a kick but didn't have the strength. “Doc!” She cried. He was their only chance and she'd seen how strong he was. Without even putting the old man down the Doc slammed his foot into the door, propelling it off its hinges and out into the street, smoke sucked out with it as they emerged, coughing, into the light.

They lay the old man down, Susan's scorched jacket as his pillow. The Doc prised the scorched domino set from his hands while Susan checked him over. “His leg's broken, at his age...”

“The paramedics can deal with him.” The Doc showed little compassion, tearing open the domino box and dumping the little pieces onto the ground with a clatter, triumphantly hauling out a folded pamphlet hidden behind the pieces.

“What? You didn't know how to play before?” Susan looked up angrily from the injured man and waved to the paramedics and firemen that were running into view. “This man's hurt!”

The Doc thrust the pamphlet into her face, it wasn't instruction, it was a flyer for the Utah Museum of Natural History. “He's one man and he isn't dead. Whoever is behind all this has killed at least once, hurt this man and put both of us in mortal danger. They're a danger to far more people than one old shopkeeper. The greater good must prevail.” He actually sounded irritated and she couldn't argue with his logic when it came to it, but she could argue with his lack of compassion.

“Every single person is valuable. That shouldn't have been in that box sure, but why do you think this is part of this master mind's scheme? If there even is a master mind.”

Osmium tore open the leaflet and stabbed one gloved finger down at the page. “There's a display about genetics. I believe that's where we need to be, after closing.”

“How can you know that?” Susan moved away, leaving the paramedics to deal with the old man, the firemen starting to do their work as she and the Doc began to pace back around the burning building, back to the car, which was in the way of the fire department.

“Because,” the Doc said with a sigh as they clambered back into the Corvette. “I think this whole thing is about me somehow.”

Susan snorted at his ego and arrogance.

“About you? It might be about me for all you know.”

“No, I'm not normal Susan. My parents were scientists. Far ahead of their time. The museum, the display, it's a clue that this person knows my secret. I was my parent's greatest experiment.”

“Preposterous.”

The Doc sighed and pulled his heavy gloves from his hand, stretching them with a groan of palpable relief. “Look.”

Susan frowned and looked down at his hands. Like so much of the rest of him they were tattooed.

“And?”

“Look closer, read.”

She read, each finger and thumb was tattooed with a letter. When he held his fists up two words could be seen.

REASON.

METHOD.

Wait... he had an extra finger on each hand. No, not fingers, an extra thumb, in opposition to the other one. Thumbs that functioned. Susan's head swam looking at him, this was impossible, even mutation, even freaks of nature... the odds of such a thing happening to someone were astronomical.

“Impossible.”

“Not just the thumbs. My intelligence, my lifespan, my strength, my immune system. I was made, not born. My parents uncovered the secrets of human germ plasm and they used that knowledge to make me the best I could be.” He gripped that strange steering wheel and she understood now why it was the shape it was, his strange hands fit the grip perfectly, tighter than any normal person could manage.

“Our enemy knows. They're sending me a message. Let's go and say hello.”

The Corvette roared anew, the blazing shop left in their wake as the grim-faced Osmium and the stunned Susan sped across the city to, finally, meet their foe.

Doc Osmium: Synchronius Maximus - Part Two - Domino Rally

Sun, 31 Jul 2011 14:23:11 GMT

Doctor Osmium
Synchronius Maximus
Part Two: Domino Rally

The Corvette roared like a lion, the race-tuned, three-hundred-and-twenty-seven cubic inch engine thrusting the car along at terrifying speed. The sound of that snarling motor was almost loud enough to drown out the wail of sirens from the police cruisers swarming behind them like a battery of barracuda. The Doc hurled the car into another bone-shaking turn, leaving long stripes of rubber on the road and a burning smell behind them before rocketing down into another street, headlong into traffic.

Susan didn't know why she'd come with him, she didn't know why she hadn't run screaming at the sight of his car once they'd reached it, all chrome and blower and a strange-looking steering wheel, she certainly didn't know why she wasn't screaming for help or hurling herself bodily from the car to take her chances, rather than waiting for the inevitable crash.

“I have no idea why they're chasing us!” Hollered Doc Osmium, terrifyingly taking his eyes off the road to look at her. Her nails dug into the leather of the seat and she squeaked, raising her hand to point at the road ahead as a bus whistled past her right ear, inches away.

“Might it be something to do with the speed you're driving?” Susan screamed over the roaring engine, the wailing sirens and the honking of distressed car horns.

“We're supposed to have an understanding!” The Doc swung the car into another corner with a banshee wails of protesting tyres and hurtling forward again, weaving through the oncoming cars with unerring accuracy.

“They don't seem to think so!” Susan leaned across the car, close to his ear as she yelled, trying to make herself heard.

“Another strange coincidence! We should get to the bottom of it!” The Doc grinned his easy grin and swerved left without looking, almost clipping a police cruiser that darted out of the side road to try and cut them off.

“Hard to investigate anything with an APB out on you!” Susan twisted her head, hair whipped into her face by the airflow around the convertible, there were still three, maybe four cruisers, doggedly on their tail and, hair stuck to her face or not she gave the doc a frown.

The gave a throaty growl and hauled forward again with even greater speed. Now the doc was paying attention, eyes fixed rigidly to the road and she could see his lips moving, counting down. Then he turned and she finally screamed in terror, he was turning too fast, too soon, there was a blur of brick and concrete and she flew forward against her harness, her scream choked as she felt as if she was being crushed into the harness and then as she flew back into her seat doc's hand slammed like steel over her mouth and stopped her from breathing in and screaming again.

They were in an alley, inches to spare either side of the car, stopped now, engine off, the metal of the engine pinging and clicking as it began to cool down. Behind them she heard sirens wailing and rushing past, one after another until all their pursuers vanished, chasing their imaginary route across the city. Once they were clear, the doc's hand moved from her mouth and she gasped for breath.

“You bastard. I thought we were going to die!” She gasped, balling up her fist and punching the doc hard in the shoulder, it was like punching a wall.

“We had to lose the police and get some space to think and to formulate a plan.” He explained, calmly. “I think if we're going to get them to stop chasing us...”

“Chasing you.” Susan folded her arms and gave him a glare.

“As you wish, chasing me then. Now, where's the last place they would look and the best place to find out why they're after me?”

Susan knew, but she wished she didn't.

***

The door swung in front of Susan before the shove of her hand as she strode into the police station and slapped her hands down upon the sargeant's desk with a loudness and determination that felt utterly unconvincing to her. She swallowed back her nervousness and stared at the surprised policeman behind the counter, raising her voice to a shrill and ear-piercing shriek of indignation, trying to ignore the breaking squeak of fear.

“I demand to see a senior officer, I have a complaint!” She screamed into the dace of the man at the desk, drawing eyes from every corner.

Behind her, moving in plain sight, came the doc, barging through the door of the station and striding confidently, as though he belonged there, across the entryway and through a door to the back marked 'No Civilians Beyond this Point'. Now he was inside, her outrage and nervousness lost their convincing edge and she began to bluster before the sudden attention of several police officers, some of whom seemed to be trying to judge whether they knew her.

“Oh dear.”

***

The door swung shut behind Doc Osmium and he strode forward through the desks as though he belonged there, an attitude and a conjurer's trick that he found tended to convince people that you did belong there, more than any badge or ID card you cared to mention. Head held high the people at the desks couldn't get a good look at him and he swept by with no indecision, snatching up a pile of papers as he strode forward and tucking them in his arm as his confident pace took him deeper and deeper into the heart of the thin blue line.

The Doc didn't know where he was going but if there was one thing about public building you could rely on it was clear signposting. Left, right and left again and he was striding into the records office, slamming down the stack of papers on a desk with a thump that startled the poor desk-jockey sat there nearly out of his seat. The Doc made his gamble.

“You sent the wrong record up to traffic, they're pretty pissed.”

Panic clouded the man's mind and he swallowed nervously, springing up from his seat and dashing off in the direction of the traffic department offices. The Doc slide down into his chair and began rifling through the records, looking for anything that could tell him why they were after him. They'd been supposed to have a deal, the Doc would help on certain cases and, in exchange, they would leave him alone most of the time. Something had clearly gone wrong with that.

Even as he flipped through the records, relying on his superior peripheral vision to alert him if he saw something relevant, he noticed something about the record-keeper's desk. The peeled back plastic from a sticking-plaster, tucked to one side, brown with specks of blood. Almost the same instant he found the references to himself and frowned at the number thoughtfully, not even a glance over his shoulder – that would look nervous – as he got back up and wandered over to the stacks.

His file wasn't where it should be, the lazy desk jockey had filed it in the wrong place, the last digit of the reference number obscured by blood and then wiped away, the pencilled in number faded to near illegibility, the misfiling placing him on Salt Lake City's most wanted, rather than being flagged up as a friend to the force.

The Doc suppressed a growl of frustration that so much could come down to a stupid mistake, another coincidence like the ones at the crash site but he needed a city's resources to uncover what was going on. This was correctable though, a few strokes of a pen, a refiling and note on the clerk's desk and things should be sorted out in a matter of hours, briskly efficient for the police force.

Now there was just the matter of Susan...

***

It had been some time, maybe two hours, maybe more, since she'd first walked into the station and once they'd worked out that she was the passenger in the Doc's car she'd been manhandled, cuffed and bundled into a holding cell to await questioning. At least they'd taken the cuffs off once she was locked up but there was nothing to do in here, unless you fancied reading The Bible or The Book of Mormon and, well, she didn't. Instead she paced the cell and went over everything in it, every inch of wall, every scratched bit of graffiti, the little sleeping bench, even the toilet, just for something to do, comfort in being methodical.

Tucked into the edge of the mattress her fingers found two tiny lumps of plastic and she plucked them out, a pair of dominoes – of all things. What was the use of that? You couldn't play a game with two dominoes, these cells were for one person so you couldn't play a game or gamble. Susan flipped them over in her hands, they were nice little things, very tactile, weighty for their size and she wasted a minute or two just turning them between her fingers until there was a cough from the door.

The eyes peering through the slot she recognised, the Doc, the very man who'd gotten her into this mess in the first place. The eyes were replaced by a grin and the door swung open to reveal perhaps the least inconspicuous man in the universe, unmolested by the police and walking about, free as a daisy.

“Your chariot awaits my lady.” The big man bowed ostentatiously and Susan sniffed haughtily an strutted out, pausing only to give the big man a punch on the arm.

“We hardly know each other and you're using me. How'd you get them to free me?” The answer presented itself in the form of two unconscious police slumped over their desks with bruises on their necks.

“They'll be fine, just a little pressure-point tap it'll just take a while for everything to get sorted out and there's too many coincidences here too.” The Doc got her up to speed as they slipped out the back through the garage and out onto the street, keeping off the main streets as they made their way back to the Corvette to wait for police bureaucracy to catch up with events.

As they sat down in the warm leather of the seats again, Susan fished out the dominoes that she'd pocketed from the cell and tossed them onto the dashboard. The Doc froze, instantly, staring at them with an intensity so fierce Susan could almost hear the gears whirring in his mind.

“What? They're just dominoes.”

The Doc reached across her and stood them up on the dashboard, tapping one so it fell into the other and knocked it down. “No, someone's sending us a message. None of these coincidences are coincidences. Not the crash, not Jose, not the police, not these dominoes, not even you. Someone is doing this on purpose, stretching my credulity, making a challenge and it's one I have to answer.”

“And you just assume I'll go along with it?” Susan folded her arms and stared at him challengingly, though his gaze was hard to meet.

“You wouldn't be here if you weren't going to come along the rest of the way.”

Susan opened her mouth to argue with him, but then snapped shut again. He was right damn him. “So... where to Osmium? We know someone's sending you a message, but how do we find them?”

He held up the domino between his thumb and forefinger. “We go back to the previous domino in the chain.”

Doc Osmium: Synchronius Maximus - Part One - A Twist in the Tale

Sat, 16 Jul 2011 15:22:16 GMT

Doctor Osmium
Synchronius Maximus
Part One: A Twist in the Tail
Heat haze shimmered over the salt flats making the surface look like water. Doctor Green took a swig from her bottle of water, grimacing at the tepid warmth of it, and she'd only been out of the car for a short while. You could see for miles on a good day but today the view was obscured by smoke. Wreckage lay over some distance, wheels and foil-thin aluminium and titanium. The kind of thing yokels might mistake for a UFO crash. She sighed and flipped open her notepad, rechecking her notes while the medical team zipped up the body bag and the police hovered around her.

“Can you tell us anything yet?”

The depressingly and ostentatiously Mormon sheriff had been a pain in her backside since she'd arrived, standing over her shoulder while she examined the body and the wreckage of the Swift IV, the latest foolhardy attempt at a land speed record with a rocket powered cigar tube on wheels.

“Anything I tell you is only going to be preliminary.” She sighed, pushing her hair back from her face, the sweat slicking it out of her eyes. “I think it's safe to say he died almost instantly when the steering column pierced him, speared his heart and broke his spin in two places. That seems the most likely cause of death. As to the vehicle's cause of failure, you're better off asking the mechanics.”

“How fascinating.” This new interruption was a deep, basso rumble of a voice that almost made her jump out of her shoes. It seemed to come out of nowhere and she and sheriff Bralan turned as one to look at the source.

He was a towering man, unbelievably not sweating in the noon sun as it glared off the flat. He wore a thin white shirt and tan-coloured trousers, heavy walking boots, his only concession to the sun a pair of classic, black, aviator sunglasses and a white cloth tied as a bandanna around his neck. Inexplicably he wore heavy gloves over his hand, one of them holding a slung pack over his shoulder. There wasn't an ounce of spare fat on him. He didn't look like a gross, overblown caricature, not a body builder, more like an anatomical diagram or a classical Greek statue, though the look was marred by the strange tattoos that covered his cheek, jaw and neck, vanishing down beneath the shirt.

“He with you?” The sheriff drawled, hand going down to his gunbelt, a move that the giant reacted to with only the barest flicker of a smile.

“No.” She said. “I'd remember him. He's not part of the car crew either.”

The sheriff drew his revolver and levelled it at the big man. “We got to account for everyone here mister...”

“Doctor.” The big man interrupted.

“...and this might well be sabotage. So you're going to have to come with me.” The sheriff finished, undaunted.

“A crashed supercar, a dead driver – judging from the bag – the police are suspicious and what I take to be a scientist or doctor already on the scene and you want me to waste my time coming with you to answer tedious questions?” The big man stared at the sheriff as though he were something one might find upon overturning a rotting log. “I am Doctor Oswald Stone and I was out walking. If I am to get to the bottom of this intriguing mystery I cannot afford to waste time with you.”

She went to open her mouth and interject but, his authority questioned the sheriff was in no mood to play nice. He cocked back the hammer on his revolver as his deputy crab-scuttled behind the giant man, hand to his own gunbelt.

The big man give her an apologetic look and then there was an abrupt blur of motion. One muscular leg snapped back as straight as a laser beam and hit the deputy just beneath his ribs. There was a brief, loud, woof of expelled air as he flew back several metres and slid to a halt, slumped over himself desperately trying to breathe.

The sheriff did no better. The big man's gloved hand grasped his pistol with impossible strength and tore it from his hand in the same motion as he kicked the deputy, flicking the gun away with a casual gesture that sent it flying out across the flats, vanishing into the heat haze.

“If you can find your gun, you're welcome to try and take me in for questioning.” The big man said, returning to his casual, relaxed stance and turning to her.

“If you're a doctor as well this could get terribly confusing. Call me Doc or Osmium, and you are?”

Her heart pounding in her chest with fear she swallowed it back and answered him. “Doctor Susan Green, pathology mostly, but I dabble and do medical support for things like this. What are you a doctor of?” She felt like an idiot saying that, given what just happened, but banal pleasantries were better than being kicked.

“Oh, life, the cosmos, everything and anything interesting. I'll call you Susan then, if you don't mind.” Doc shifted his pack back into place on his shoulder and began pacing over towards the wreckage. With the sherrif swearing a blue streak and chasing after his gun and the deputy trying to work up enough breath to vomit, she followed hurriedly in Doc's trail like the tail of a comet, finding herself babbling about the accident.

Eli Grange has been the best driver, on paper, three previous record attempts, jet fighter experience, inhumanly good reflexes. The car had been checked over a dozen times. The safety harness and other life-preserving equipment was all in good order. Everything had some form of redundancy and safety and yet... something had gone wrong. On the first proper run the rear end had drifted and the car had tumbled end over end, side over side until it was completely wrecked.

The Doc crouched amongst the main body of the debris, listening, asking questions, technical questions about the wheels, about the chassis, about the engine. Intelligent, seeking questions that she couldn't always answer, but he seemed to be finding his way. She glanced about her in a panic and saw the rest of the pit crew heading over, angry, curious, wondering who the hell this man was perhaps, just as she was.

“Who the hell is this guy?” Mick, the chief engineer on the project lumbered up, a big guy but heavy with it, unlike this 'Doc' person.

“Doc Osmium.” Susan answered, without a trace of humour, still unsettled from the brief fight. “He's dangerous.”

“AHA!” The Doc shouted, emerging from the debris holding a tiny piece of metal, startling them both as more of the engineering crew arrived.

“You can't go messing with that! We need to work out what caused the accident.” Mick thundered, stamping towards the Doc with a look of murderous intent. The Doc thrust the tiny piece of metal beneath his nose bringing him to a halt.

“The lox regulator valve. There's a tiny grain of sand between the washer and the nut, keeping it fractionally open. I surmise that this caused a tiny fluctuation in the fuel feed to the car's rocket which was enough – at full acceleration – to throw the tail off, leading to the crash. As to the rest, the abruptness of the crash and the fact that it was side on seems to have tumbled the car in such a way as your safety precautions were only minimally effective. An enormous string of bad luck...”

Mick stared at the washer as the others arrived. “Bad luck?”

Before the question could be pursued any further the Doc abruptly froze, slowly raising his hands from his sides. Susan's head jolted around, expecting to see the sheriff threatening the big man again but it wasn't, it was Jose from the pit crew, an ugly slab of an automatic pistol in his hand, levelled at the Doc.

“Couldn't just let me get away could you Osmium?” Jose's voice was different, hard-edged, he meant to use the gun, she could tell. “Had to follow me, all the way out here, track me down and put me away. Madre de dios man, they were only samples.”

The Doc's face twisted into a feral snarl. “Irreplacable samples collected by Charles Darwin himself, priceless. Would you believe me if I told you that I wasn't actually here for you? This is all the most terrible coincidence.”

Jose shook his head and laughed. “That smooth tongue might be a hit with the ladies Osmium, but it's not going to get you out of this.”

Susan saw his knuckles tighten around the trigger and she acted. Her boot caught Jode – if that was his name – in the back of the knee and sent him down to the ground. The pistol barked, the bullet going wide, sparks flying as it ricocheted off the car's wreckage. With Jose down the Doc moved with that unnatural precision and speed again, grabbing a blackened piece of metal and hurling it like a discus. The heavy sheet slammed into Jose's throat with a sickening 'Chud!' and he fell back, stone dead to the flat ground, the metal embedded halfway through his neck.

Susan stared wide eyed at the Doc as he picked his way out of the debris, the rest of the crew keeping well back from him now as he crouched over Jose's body.

“Carlos Ortega, a thief and a murderer, wanted by Interpol for theft to order. The funny thing is that I wasn't here looking for him at all. I really was just walking.” The big man looked up at Susan and frowned, his face creasing, the tattoos on his cheek twitching as his jaw muscles worked.

“I happen to be walking here, he happens to be here, there's an accident that is wildly unlikely stemming from a tiny flaw in an otherwise perfect machine... and you're here.” His steely eyes settled on Susan.

“So? It's just blind chance, isn't it? Things like this do happen... synchronicity they call it don't they?”

The Doc stood up again. “Synchronicity is what we call it when causally unrelated events occur that seem to hold meaning beyond coincidence. In a truly random universe we might brush it off but I'm afraid I'm still a bit of a stuffy old Newtonian, clockwork universe fan. I'm a big supporter of cause and effect, even in quantum physics, and this seems to stretch the odds a little too far for me. Something more is going on.”

He stepped forward, those Olympian features twisting into a wry and enticing grin as he offered her his massive, gloved hand.

“Let's find out what that is, shall we?”

One of these things is not like the other

Sun, 10 Jul 2011 14:10:19 GMT

A doesn't bother me at all. B does.

A B

I have been trying to work out, since this morning, why it is that all this continual fuss about portrayals in fantasy bothers me so much, because it does bother me, quite a lot.

Portrayals in more everyday media do concern me. I'm fairly secure and confident in my own physique etc for the most part, largely because I consider my attraction to people to be my mind, but I do worry now and then when I 'pudge out' a bit who doesn't? Equally I don't want to devote myself to spending the sort of time needed to be Captain Six-Pack above and I'm OK with that, really. That's not to say the pressure isn't there so I do empathise with women who feel the social/media pressure to be the size zero model and who get complexes about that. I really do. Women aren't the only ones to suffer due to media portrayals, either in terms of looks or behaviour.

There's a massive disconnect for me, however, between making legitimate complaints about fashion portrayals and complaining about portrayals in comics, games, books etc. There's a huge difference for me between reality and fantasy. While I might feel a twinge not looking like Captain 6-Pack, he's a real person. Thor isn't. Of the two I'd much rather be Thor if it came down to it but at the same time I know Thor is entirely fictional and I can never be Thor. I don't feel even the slightest twinge of regret that I'm not Thor because he's fantastical, fictional. Fictional characters may inspire and entertain, you might aspire to some of their characteristics - a sense of justice perhaps, a level of honesty or confidence - but you surely don't aspire to BE them unless you're mentally ill in some way.

Demands to represent 'ordinary folk' in fantasy also strike me as odd. I don't really want to project MYSELF into a game because I am largely boring and ordinary and can't do anything cool. The only games I can think of that are exceptions are Silent Hill, Alan Wake, my Eclipse Phase character and the themes of a game I, myself, am working on. When I play a game I generally want to play something beyond myself, the superhero, the assassin, the secret agent, the starship ace. I want to play someone who is NOT like me. Why enter a fantasy world to just be yourself?

Heroes in fantasy and SF generally aren't normal people, they're archetypes. The word 'hero' is used for a reason. Go back to the folk stories, the Greek legends, the tales of gods and demigods and that's just what you find powerful archetypes, handsome, beautiful, strong, cruel. Sure, there's a place for the everyman hero now and then, either for comedic effect (Jack Burton), succeeding against the odds (Deeba) or for grounding the story in a more realistic way for empathy (Dagmar) but for escapist fantasy? Not so much.

In short, it jarrs, to have people want to de-hero the heroes, to remove the very thing that makes them noteworthy, larger than life, interesting, engaging characters that are fun to read about or to play. The vicarious greatness or capability that goes beyond the ordinary.

That's not it though, that's not the central nub of what bothers me about it.

Go back, mentally, in time. Think about the way horror comics were demonised and how they were defended. Think about BADD and the way D&D was treated as satanic and dangerous. Think about the campaigns against computer games. Think about the fuss over Elvis' hips or Iron Maiden's lyrics and album covers. How have we defended these hobbies in the past from the accusations made against them? How ridiculous do people's concerns about these things look now?

We've made great pains to point out that these are fantasies, that they are not real. That there are differences between reality and fantasy, that D&D doesn't involve worshipping strange gods or casting real magic. That you don't have to be a Satanist to like Heavy Metal. This has been backed up by psychological research, particular in gamers which shows that as a demographic we tend to have a heightened ability to tell reality from fantasy and treat them as separate things. I'm a big believer in this evidence and the point that reality and fantasy are distinct. Anyone who isn't a nutter can tell the difference between the two I reckon.

I think, having thought long and hard about it, that this is why people complaining about depictions in fantasy and SF (whatever the medium) bothers me so much. It's a betrayal of that defence made all the worse because it's the same nonsensical arguments but coming - this time - from within the hobbies. It's an 'admission' (and a false one) that there's no difference between reality and fantasy. It's agreeing with the Jack Chicks, Jack Thompsons, Pat Pullings and Andrea Dworkins of the world that fantasy cannot be separated from reality and that it can corrupt and pervert people's viewpoints. It's saying a comic book can make you a murderer, that a computer game can make you a criminal, that a jazz mag can make you a rapist.

This is bullshit.

I do not accept that viewpoint and I object to the fantastical being hemmed in and neutered by people's RL hangups about this, that and the other. It's no longer escapism if you let yourself get tied down to reality. Bucking a genre conceit only works if there's a genre conceit there to buck. Cohen only works because of Conan. Nite Owl only works because of Batman. So it goes. Not everything has to be all things to all people and it's possible to innocently enjoy Twain's tales despite 'Nigger Jim' or Barsoom despite the fawning (if not entirely helpless) Martian princesses. It's possible to recreate what made the pulps great without being racist, to enjoy a pinup without being a misogynist. It bothers me to see otherwise intelligent people making the same mistakes as the aforementioned pompous arses and, even worse, to be taken seriously in so doing.

Aurelia's Adonis (Steampunk Erotica)

Sat, 25 Jun 2011 20:58:33 GMT

Image from Parliament & Wake
Model's Deviantart Gallery

It was raining when Jaggers arrived at The Manor. The steam-carriage halted in a muddy rut, clacking and chuffing. He eased himself down, precariously balanced upon the stones so as not to dirty his shoes. He turned to his driver, who seemed nonplussed to come to such a place. “Keep the boiler hot my man, I shan't be long.” The driver nodded beneath his oilskin and hauled back on the brake, holding the carriage in place while Jaggers attended to his business.

Jaggers tugged his hat down to shield his face from the fine rain and pushed his way distastefully through the rusting gates. His feet crunched the patchy gravel as he picked his way, fastidiously up to the paint-peeling doors of the once great house. It was pointless pulling the chain, so he prodded open the rotting wood of the door with one gloved finger and stepped, damply, inside.

It was dingy and reeked of mould, the floor was littered with scraps of paper and the leavings of many cats. Covering his face with his handkerchief he headed inward, towards the lamplight glow.

There she was, squatting on the floor in bloomers and bodice like he didn't know what. He turned his head away, as common decency demanded. “For God's sake Aurelia, it's worse than last time!”

“Jaggers. Do you have it?” She said, turning towards him and peering through her goggles. She was pale as a dove these days, hadn't seen the sun in years. Her figure had become lean and tight, he was uncomfortably aware of that right now. Her hair was stringy and wild and, disgustingly, she was always dirty with oil and soot.

“You were ruined, before this madness Aurelia, I beg you, stop.” He held out the package despite himself and she clawed it eagerly from his hands.

“That's quite enough Jaggers. Show yourself out.” She might look like the gutter trash of the East End, but her clipped and perfect tones still showed her to be a lady. Nose wrinkled, wiping his fingers with another 'kerchief he did as he was told.

Aurelia barely noticed him leave, her attention was upon the package. She lifted it to her face, her pale and dirtied lips pressing to the brown paper as she inhaled. A hint of spice, the tang of hot metal, a hint of a lady's perfume. With trembling hands she untied the string and opened it.

Within was a box, and a note. “May this give you what you need, love, L.A.B.” The note barely warranted a glance. The box's hinges creaked slightly as she opened it and gazed within.

Simply finding someone to cast such an improper image had been an adventure. She had been forced to enter into correspondence with disreputable men until she found what she needed. There, cast in bras and wrapped in oilcloth was the fruit of her labours. A priapic 'lingham', made in distant Hindoostan where the stifling clutch of Christian morality had not yet reached. She could not ship it directly to herself, people had come to know of her obsessions. So it came via Lady B and from her also came the other half of the box. A sleek case, full of hole-punched cards.

She tucked the case under her arm and reverently lifted the golden phallus from its case. Smooth, shining, discoloured in an instant by the heat and the oil of her fingertips. She didn't mind. She held it close, seeing how it gleamed in the warm light, the breath from her budded mouth misting its perfect surface.

She carried both, down into her workshop. There, amongst the detritus of years of experimentation was her masterpiece, complete save for the things she now held in her hands. Her Adonis of brass and iron. A man of fire, wrought from science, who would endure. A man who could not help but love her and would never leave.

She set the last piece before him and langorously arched her arms back to unlace her bodice. It fell from her light-starved flesh. Dainty breasts, tipped the palest coral pink, lean legs ending at the tufted shadow of her belly and the rounded curve of her muscular rump. She pushed her goggles up and stepped to the god she had made, bending to her work, completing him with a kiss that left the print of her lips upon his unflagging length.

She climbed, pressing her body against the cool metal of his and pressed the case into his back. Her hips rocked against the sculpted back of him leaving the shape of her body stained against his polished surface. Her arms came around him as she found and turned the valve that would stir him to life. “Awaken my Compuson.” She murmured as he began to tremble.

The brass Adonis shuddered and gave a hiss, golden skin warming, a dull glow appearing in his eyes. The hiss was a sound of passion. She felt his heat against her and kissed his mask. His hands clutched her, grasped her, pulled her to him and she gasped as their bodies met with a watchmaker's precision and the heat of a forge.

He was cool within her, atop her but she was aflame. She writhed beneath her self-made man with the eagerness that only years of desire and imagination could bring about. She oiled him with the slickness of her need, she moved with him like fine engineering. The fire within his boiler paled into next to the fire in her belly.

They were made for each other.

Her nails clutched and broke against his skin, her legs wrapped about his waist and crushed to his unyielding form as he pistoned and she arched, a reciprocating engine of lust. He never tired, never flagged, never paused. She screamed and shuddered in unalloyed joy, hysterical paroxysms of bliss rendering her senseless.

Faster and deeper he moved in his rolling, liquid gait. Papers, gears, tools, all of it fell to the floor. His body moved so eagerly, with such passionate force that a coal, glowing hot, fell from his boiler, scorching Aurelia's leg before it tumbled to the ground. She cared not, he was all she'd hoped for, tears streaked the soot upon her cheeks and she didn't see the papers began to burn.

They were consumed by the fire of their passion.

Havisham Manor was to be their pyre.

She did not care.

This was heaven.

More Pulp Characters

Sat, 18 Jun 2011 16:29:54 GMT

Doctor Osmium: Two Fisted & Six Fingered Scientist-Adventurer (with thanks to @Ms_Entropic)
His lost parents uncovered the secrets of human germ plasm before they were killed. Some of their secrets he has inherited, others remain a mystery. Engineered for perfection Doctor Oswald Stone is a perfect biological mechanism. Born with a grand physique, a near-unequalled mind, an unknown degree of longevity, perfect and extended eyesight and - most unusually - an extra thumb on each hand he explores the world trying to understand the normal human condition and the rolls of genetic chance that gave rise to the only genius that outstrips his own - that of his father. In the process he battles inhuman threats, chases cryptids and battles the unnatural and twisted intellects and physiques that nature throws in his way. One to each hand are tattooed the letter 'Reason' and 'Method'.

Mimsy Burogrove: Psychedelic Detective
The 60s is bit out of the pulp era, but what the hell. Mimsy Burogrove is a half-Indian, half-British psychic who solves crimes and mysteries of the mind despite being a tiny, tiny woman almost entirely swallowed up in her voluminous kaftan. The best things come in small packages and

Tessa Coyle: Science Police
Originally conceived of for a comic strip - that I still want to write - this comes from the background of the '45 game where Science City Zero is a hidden redoubt of science and civilisation in an atomic wasteland. The science police deal with runaway experiments or those who transgress The Rules. Partnered with a robot she deals with these problems in a city that's one third The Jetsons, one third Gernsback Continuum and one third Frankenstein.

The Black Rat
A 'masked avenger' whose knowledge of London's literal underworld aids him in his endless battle against the metaphorical one. Clad in black he is almost invisible in the night and the fog, his origins a mystery, the reason for his war lost to time. He haunts the sewers and The Underground, turning up - unbidden - to wreak vengeance on the criminal and the cruel.

Ace Slamm: Space Bastard in... Turn on a Dame (Part Four)

Sat, 18 Jun 2011 14:10:09 GMT

Ace Slamm: Space Bastard
Turn on a Dame
Part Four: What a Maroon
After all their efforts they finally swung around the searing ball of atomic fire at the centre of our solar system and the great purple bruise that was Dyzan came into sight. A giant world, the lost triplet to Jupiter and Saturn, swarming with moons and asteroids, each a world in its own right and crowning them all, the imperial worldlet of Rex, now ravaged by civil war since the fall of the Emperor.

Ace's nostrils flared as the planet came into view. This was the last place he really wanted to be, since the war had come to these moons and him along with them. It was a horrible, grim time for planet Earth, under attack from this distant world and then fighting back, only to find the place in chaos. The whole thing was a mystery that nobody had yet unravelled – why had they been attacked in the first place? Was it just the nature of Dyzan's people to conquer? Whatever the case, it wasn't save here now. The Dyzan princes of the scattered moons were at war, squabbling over the corpse of the once-mighty empire while the rest of the solar system fell into ruin, directionless and ungoverned.

It wasn't safe here.

He flicked the switch to his radio, calling back to the hold where the trio were hiding since the run-in with Rosie. “We're almost there.” his voice crackled over the tannoy. “Where – exactly – are we going?”

There was no reply, but not much later the Professor joined him in the cramped cockpit. “There.” His rough fingertip pressed against the glass of the screen.” We're going to Rex.”

Ace rolled his eyes, hard, just his luck to be taking them to the worst spot of them all in this whole benighted zone. He grasped the controls and took them in, swooping towards the moon of Rex over the lurid and turbulent atmosphere of Dyzan itself. Soon Rex swam large in the screen, a battle-scarred world of gold and ash, the imperial city – or what remained of it – visible even at this distance, a massive structure on a scale previously unimaginable to the human mind.

Ace's radar pinged, warningly and he turned to the little green screen, three blips, incoming. Maybe they'd leave them alone, maybe they wouldn't. He set his jaw and flipped on the broadcast radio. “This is Man's Ruin to incoming vessels. We are on a mission of... exploration and mean no harm. Please divert your course.”

This hiss from Dyzan's magnetosphere almost drowned out any reply but he managed to tune it to hear their crackling missive: “Repeat... Avians – scree! - claim this sector. You are intruding. This is Matloch of the Vulcan's Claw, turn around or be destroyed!”

Ace turned questioning to the Professor whose thick brow was now set in determination. “We're paying you well, punch on through man.”

Ace nodded and his own brow furrowed. “Strap yourself down.” He muttered and turned Man's Ruin towards the oncoming vessels.

This close to Rex's atmosphere the atomic turbines couldn't blast full speed, they'd burn up like meteors in the wisps of atmosphere but, at this terrific speed, the flaps and rudder on the ship could get a little bite and that gave Ace the edge. He swooped in lower, biting deeper into Rex's atmosphere, the ship glowing at the nose as it picked up heat. Distantly he could see the silvery cigar shapes of the Avian vessels with their distinctive back-swept wings barely visible. He flipped up the catch on his control stick and the battle-joy came over him. This was what he was good at.

He thumbed the stud as he roared up out of the atmosphere in a corona of burning plasma, the atmosphere clinging to the ship like a shroud. The vickers opened up with ravening beams of atomic fire, lancing out across the void towards the 'V' formation of the Avian rocket ships. Classic formation, the bird-brains never learned. Great scars opened up along the side of one of the vessels and its wing melted away like butter in a hot pan. Venting atmosphere and the distant, doll-like bodies of Avian soldiers it began its death-spin down towards the planet.

The remaining vessels peeled away, one going high, one going low. The higher vessel swept up, then down, barrelling towards Ace's ship in a hawk's dive, blazing away with its own cannons, hot ions slapping into the plasma shroud and impacting the crackling lightning shield, but they weren't going to get through, not in time.

Ace pushed the thruster control forward and headed for the ship dead on. At this speed there were no earthly reflexes that could avoid a collision and both vessels blazed away with their energy beams, gun against gun, field against field in a battle of competing technology that would result in the death of one, or the other.

The Avian's vessels had been kept weak by the Emperor, not wanting to risk an uprising that could not be crushed by the Imperial fleet and Ace was hoping they hadn't been retrofitted. His luck held. There was an explosion as the Avian lightning field collapsed and as it did the coruscating beams from the Vickers blew it into a cloud of vapour. Ace's own field was dangerously low though now and as he dove back towards the planet his lightning field began to register hits from the one remaining ship.

“Hold tight!” Ace shouted, holding on for dear life as he pushed Man's Ruin to its absolute limit, every bolt and plate rattling as he dove towards the planet's surface, down towards the rocky outcroppings of the Plain of Misery and it's ashen wastes. The Avian ship dived after him, following in his wake, but it's beams couldn't penetrate the corona of hot gas that plumed behind Man's Ruin, her hull vapourising from the heat and the ship baking like an oven.

At the last possible moment Ace pulled up, the planet spinning sickeningly beneath him and the controls cutting the air as we drove Man's Ruin into a desperate set of jinking manoeuvres through the rocky outcroppings of the surface. The Avian was hot on his tail, explosions of melting rock going off like firecrackers beneath them as the Avian ship stuck to them like glue, intent upon their tail and that, that was what Ace was counting on.

Man's Ruin turned, desperately, and swept towards a rocky arch, sliding through by the barest of margins at dangerous speed. So intent on the hunt were the Avians that they followed, but the great, swept back wings of their ship would not fit where the sleek, penial design of the Spite could more easily go. There was a terrific crash behind them and the Avian ship's wreckage blasted out of the collapsing arch like the pellets of a shotgun blast. They were safe, for now.

The Professor clapped Ace on the shoulder. “Well done that man, well done! Bang himself couldn't have done better.” Ace didn't doubt that and wasn't about to argue with the man.

“Where to then Professor?” The reward they'd promised him would be half gone just fixing Man's Ruin, he wanted this job done, now.

The Professor leant of the scope and read out coordinates, it wasn't far. Man's Ruin, scarred and battle worn, swept through the smoking skies and landed on her struts, the grey sand sinking beneath her weight as, pinging and crackling, the vessel began to cool.

They descended, Ace first, onto the grim surface of this ruined world. Ace's hand was on his Eliminator, ready to draw at the first sign of trouble. The trio seemed, oddly, almost at home here. Gail was even smiling as she looked out across the wastes. Bang looked pantherish and confident, in stark contrast to his bullish overcompensation at other times. Even the Professor stood straight backed and confident, all too at home in this alien landscape.

They walked, perhaps ten score yards over the rough terrain until they found a great scar in the surface of the planet, melted rock and sand turned to glass, fragments of wreckage. A rocket ship had smashed down here and as they followed the scar to its end Ace began to feel more and more uneasy.

At the very end were the skeletal remnants of a rocket ship, oddly primitive in design, unlike any other vessel Ace had ever seen but to the trio, it seemed familiar.

“You SEE!” Roared the Quartus triumphantly. “It's still here! Proof! Evidence that we were here first! That we discovered them! That our story, OUR story is true!” He scrambled a camera from his backpack and began to take shots as Bang clambered over the wreckage and hauled out a metal plate, inscribed, in English.

Ace's mind reeled and he literally swayed at this news, dizzy with all its implications. He didn't have enough time to organise his thoughts however, a rock tumbled behind him and he swung around hard, Eliminator at the ready.

“HOLD!” Roared the sneering voice of the man in the silver mask, a plasma pistol grasped in his gauntlet. “I mean you no harm Captain Slamm. I wish to talk a moment and, if you still wish to kill me, we can have it out after that.”

“Kill him!” Roared Bang, tensed to jump, but there was no way he could reach Siltar without being cut down. Ace kept his hand tight on the Eliminator and nodded to Siltar, accepting his proposal with a taciturn gesture.

“Predictable bloody Earthlings.” Muttered Siltar, stepping with distaste down the slope of the scar, as though the ground were not worthy to sully his feet. “This trio came here in the thirties, by your primitive measure. Barely had they been here a day when they began to foment revolt against the Emperor. This brainless lump even turned the eye of the Emperor's daughter.” He gestured to Bang and, judging by the way Gail reacted, that was a sore point.

“Go on.” Ace growled roughly, without taking his eyes off Siltar, though he could sense the unease of the trio at what was being said.

“It's because of them that the Emperor launched his war against your Earth, thinking them the vanguard of some invasion, some rebellion. Your armies beat us, but not because of your might, but rather because of what these bumbling fools accomplished against all odds here. The Empire is ruined, but at least we were beaten – so people think – in honest contest of arms. If this... crank...” Siltar pointed with the barrel of his gun at Quartus “...has his way that legend, for both our peoples, will be shattered.”

“Is this true?” Ace and Siltar shared a nod of understanding and he allowed his attention to drift to Quartus.

“Yes!” Proclaimed the man of science. “I invented space travel for our people! I discovered this place! Bang freed her people and Gail infiltrated the palace! We liberated the solar system from Dyzan's rule!”

Ace lowered his gun and holstered it. “Millions of people died and all because you couldn't stay out of it. All because you had to interfere. They didn't care about Earth until you made them care.” He turned and began to trudge back towards Man's Ruin.

Gail darted after him, recoiling as Siltar blasted a rock to atoms beside her, calling out to him. “Ace! Please! No! People have to hear the truth!”

“No, they don't need to hear it's our fault.” He kept on trudging.

“We had a deal! What about your reward? What about me? I've seen you looking at me, you're twice the man Bang ever was!”

“Hey!” the sportsman bristled at the slight, clenching his fists.

“You can stick the reward where the sun don't shine love.” Ace growled, without turning around. Grinding the ashen soil of Rex beneath his boots as plasma flared, three times, behind him.

***
Fin

Ace Slamm: Space Bastard in... Turn on a Dame (Part Three)

Wed, 15 Jun 2011 21:02:11 GMT

Ace Slamm: Space Bastard
Turn on a Dame
Part Three: Ace in the Hole

Hanging by his wrists from magnetic cuffs, deep in the bowels of Rosie's scrapship Ace had plenty of time to think about everything that had lead up to this point. He glowered across the rusty cell at the three misfortunes that had stepped into his life and tried to work out where he'd gone wrong. Had it been taking off at such a haring rate? Had it been being willing to take these jokers to Dyzan at all? Perhaps his mistake had been shattering the arrogant German's teeth, after all, that had attracted their attention. Going further back perhaps his mistake had been marrying Rosie in the first place, the witch knew how to bear a grudge that was certain, just his bad luck to run into her here.

They had been dragged in by the magna-beam, spiralling in to the iron moon despite all their best attempts to break free. The ship had rattled and sang as though hit by hammers, disintegrating its stores of lead in the futile struggle to escape but it was no use. The scrapship had more mass, more power and Rosie's smarts behind its rays and beams. They had been dragged into its rusting bulk and the power had gone out. Rosie must have rigged up that power suppressor she had always been banging on about. Girl was a genius, for all that she was a bitch.

Once they were down the robots had come trundling on their wheels, raising their laser-torches threateningly and – not wanting to see harm done to Man's Ruin and with his Eliminator refusing to work – Ace had no choice but to go along with them, stripped of his weapons and dignity and forced to elbow Bang in the gut to stop him doing something stupid. Now here they were, all hanging alongside each other and making the old adage about hanging together or separately all too accurate. Now if Gail would just shut up they could wait until Rosie calmed down and came to talk to them. She always talked in the end, despite how little good it ever did, they just had to wait a while down here until her temper abated, perhaps a year at the most.

“Just what, the hell, did you do to this woman?” Spat Gail, dangling – rather fetchingly Ace thought, in her manacles. It was hard to stay too annoyed at a broad who seemed to be doing her level best to burst out of her jacket, though his appreciative stares only seemed to drive her to further fits of apoplexy. “Let me guess, you couldn't stay away from other women, right?”

“More like she couldn't stay away from machines.” Ace grudgingly answered her, for a fleeting moment Gail almost looked sympathetic, that wouldn't do. “Also she got fat.” That did the trick.

“For God's sake, the pair of you, we need to find a way out of this. Stop bickering with this thug darling!” Bang strained manfully against his bonds, muscles bunching, sweat breaking out on his body. Ace couldn't help but notice a wistful and far off attraction in Gail's eyes when she looked at Bang in such a state, as if that was the man he fell in love with.

“Aha!” Professor Quartus hadn't been paying the blindest bit of attention to the rest of them and spoke, as if nobody was there. “I could easily reverse the polarity on these cuffs and undo them... if only I had a piece of wire.”

Ace took that in and his gaze returned to Gail's fetching bosoms. A switch clicked in his head and he pulled hard on his own chains, dragging them through the bulkhead bit by bit, making Bang's efforts look pathetic. He strained and pulled and yanked inch by inch, staggering forward, one foot in front of the other until with one last, massive effort he grabbed Gail's blouse and pulled.

Fabric rent and tore, Gail screamed deafeningly and there was a triple pistol-crack of snapping elastic and the magna-cuffs yanked Ace back across the cell, slamming him into the wall with Gail's brassiere in his mitts as she twisted and turned, trying to cover herself.

“You bastard!” Screamed Bang, his face as red as a Martian's buttocks. He went on to swear more and more, but Ace wasn't paying attention. He bit and tore and twisted at the bra, looking for all the world like some kind of pervert but, just as Bang was running out of breath Ace, triumphantly, raised the extracted underwiring aloft.

“This do you Prof?”

The Professor clapped his bound hands together with childish glee. “That should be more than adequate!”

Ace held the wire between his boots and suspended himself from his cuffs, grunting in pain, passing the wire across to the Professor. A little fiddling and one by one they were all free, rubbing their wrists. Gail turned into the corner and tied her torn blouse under her bosoms, a sidelong look at Bang, wondering why he wasn't protecting her honour perhaps but the truth was, the success of the escape had taken the wind out of his sales.

Ace shouldered to the door, rusting junk like the rest the ship, it gave way pretty quickly before his efforts. “Prof, can you do the wire-trick to the magna-beam as well?”

“I don't see why not, provided we can get back to the bay. Yes, that should be simple enough, provided the matrix is of a reasonably standard configuration. High school physics really.” He grinned his superior grin and rubbed his rounded temples. “If you can get us past the robots of course.”

Ace tore piping from the walls and tossed one section to Bang, who caught it out of the air. “Can you smash a robot Bang?” The sportsman nodded and the pair of them took to the corridor, charging bullishly ahead of the Professor and Gail.

The door to the hangar cranked open, bit by bit, smoke billowed through, followed by Ace and Bang, covered with oil, bent cogs and scrap rolling ahead of them. They slouched into the hangar with battered pipes in hand, bloodied, torn, piles of scrapped 'bots behind them, fizzing and hissing, crackling and flashing with shorting power.

Ace groaned and rolled his eyes. There was one obstacle left, Rosie.

She was still an impressive woman. Amazonian in her physique, albeit a bit broader in the beam than she had been when they'd married – he'd told the truth about that. Her red hair was tied back with a polka-dotted handkerchief and she wore heavy gloves, a black-stained pair of dungarees and heavy steel-toed boots. Ace's Eliminator was in her fist, aimed squarely at them and her eyes – set in a face where freckles and oil competed to dominate. “Hello Ace, I think that's far enough.”

A screen flickered into life behind her, a great looming presence appearing in it, black hooded and cloaked, his face hidden behind a silver mask. Only one person ever wore a mask like that, ever, the second in command of the dead Dyzan Emperor, Commander Siltar, a man whose immobile face was etched into the nightmares of so many soldiers. “Well done Miss Stone. I trust they'll give you no more trouble now.”

Rosie swept the eliminator back and forth across the group, covering them. “It will take a while for the robots to come up from B deck, but I'll have them back in a cell soon enough. You'd better keep your side of the bargain though.”

“I will tell you where the imperial fleet graveyard is once the problem is dealt with.” The man with the silver face steepled his fingers before him. “By 'dealt with' I mean kill them. Now.”

Rosie faltered, the Eliminator swayed a fraction. “Kill them? Ace too?”

“Yes.” Siltar sighed, he was used to being obeyed instantly by lackeys. Things had gone to pot since the fall of the Empire.

“You don't want to kill me.” Ace said, palms raised, his eyes like a hawk, trained upon the wavering barrel of the Eliminator. “You still have feelings for me... don't you Rosie. We can make it work again, I know we can.” Step by step he paced closer, edging to striking distance.

“What?” Rosie looked at him like he'd just turned into a green hippo, eyes wide, lip curled in a sneer, her hands going to her hips like the always did when she got in a strop with him. “If I kill you, how the hell am I supposed to gloat and torture you for everything you did to me?”

Ace sprang, as much to shut her up as to escape. His ham-hock fist smashed her full in the face, crunching her nose under his knuckles and sending her sprawling to the deck with a face full of blood. The Eliminator span into the air as it fell from her grasp and Ace snatched it in his fist, blasting Siltar's screen into a thousand shards of burning glass.

“Professor?”

“Already way ahead of you.” Smirked the professor, worrying away at the innards of a bulkhead with the bent piece of bra-wire. There was a subtle change in the hum around them as something switched over.

“Bu doke by dobe!” Rosie gargled, spitting blood and bits of teeth.

The gantry slid down from Man's ruin and they began to board quickly, running up the steps with a clatter of feet on metal. Ace turned at the top, levelling the Eliminator at Rosie as she struggled to sit up.

“I should vape you where you sit.” He muttered, grimacing as he stared at her bloodied face. “But I'm not that much of a bastard.”

The hatch swung shut and as Rosie crawled away on her hands and knees to get away, Man's Ruin blasted away on a column of atomic fire, sweeping away from the iron moon and out once more into the big black.

Back at the controls Ace brooded, brow furrowed, grinding his teeth in agitation. The others had the sense to stay out of his way, but not Gail. She'd found his old engineer's coveralls and changed into them, since he'd torn her blouse. She leaned against the cabin door and fixed Ace's reflection in the glass with a curious look. “Just what the hell did you do to that woman besides marry her?”

Ace twisted in his seat and sucked his teeth, his fists clenched the arms of his seat as he looked up into her eyes and for once, told a woman the truth. “I got her pregnant.”

Ace Slamm: Space Bastard in... Turn on a Dame (Part Two)

Sun, 12 Jun 2011 14:29:22 GMT

Ace Slamm: Space Bastard
Turn on a Dame
Part Two: Lair of the Iron Witch

With three ashen corpses and a melted alleyway behind them, even Ace had to admit that getting the hell off the planet was a good idea, especially with those three having been footsoldiers of the deposed Dyzan Emperor. The mysterious man in the black cloak was out there too and whether he went for more soldiers or for the police, Ace didn't want to be around for that.

“That wasn't very sporting.” Bang sneered as Ace rejoined them

If he hadn't been a paying fare Ace probably would have punched him in his perfect white teeth, but that would have to wait until after they paid him – call it a surcharge. He could feel Gail's disgusted eyes on him, clearly she didn't think much of his tactics either, he winked at her and give her a kissy face, hearing her all but gag in response.

“War ain't sporting.” Ace sneered, chivvying them along towards his ship. “You kill the bastard, or you get killed yourself.”

“Well that isn't my experience.” Grumbled Bang as Ace cranked the armoured door to his spaceship berth.

The platform was little more than a rusted hulk, but Ace's ship, Man's Ruin, was in near perfect condition, despite his frequent abuse and rough landings. She sat perched on her landing rockets as though tensed to spring into the air, there was something hawkish, classic about her lines. Painted racing-green with a toothy grin upon her snout, an obscene and classless pin-up painted with exquisite care upon her side.

“At least you've got a nice ship.” Bang grunted, folding his enormous biceps across his chest. Gail buried her head into Bang's side, blushing as the naked imagery so brazenly showing on the fuselage.

The Professor only had eyes for the ship itself. “My word, a Supermarine Spite Mk24. I haven't seen one of those since the war! Twin Merlin Atom Thrusters, Aldermaston Projects Type Three power core, quad Vickers 500 kilowatt energy cannon, high capacity Zenith lightning field. Top of the line at the end of the war. How did you get it?”

“That's my business.” Ace set his jaw, disliking company at the best of times, especially when they asked difficult questions.”

“Disarmed. Of course.” Smiled the Professor, folding his arms behind his back.

“Of course.” Ace took the radio control from his utility belt and thumbed the red button. The signal woke the rocket up and the gantry unfolded, clanking into place beside them. He sprang up the gantry three steps at a time while the others fell in behind, climbing into the cockpit and warming the engines.

In back they settled into the scant accommodation, military craft weren't built with comfort in mind, it was going to be a crowded trip, even if it was going to be a short one. With Dyzan in the same orbit as Earth you really just had to blast towards it and let it come to you.

Switches clicked, the ocilloscope glowed to life, the radar hummed and filled its own little screen. Ace pulled the radio mic onto his chest and dialled into Space Traffic Control.

“Tower, this is Man's Ruin, I'm taking off.”

“Not without clearance you're not. There's a...” Came the terse reply.

“That was information, not a request.” Ace cut them off before they could finish, switching off the radio and grasped the stick, pushing the power lever up. The ship sprang to life, deep in its guts the Atomic Core awoke, disintegrating the store of lead and converting its mass directly into energy. Power flowed through the ship and the lights came up, bright and powerful, the ship shuddered and in a blast of atomic fire leapt for the sky.

There was a shriek from back in the passenger cabin, someone hadn't strapped themselves down and there was rattling as everything that wasn't bolted down fell to the back of the ship. On a plume of glowing exhaust Man's Ruin shot into the sky and Ace leaned back hard into the creaking leather of the seat. They were away.

Ace's mouth dropped open and then set into a grim line, jaw muscles knotting as the side of his windscreen darkened with a massive shape. A great rocket-liner appeared, making its ponderous way on landing jets, down towards the Manhattan spaceport, and it was right in his way.

Ace grasped the handle tighter and arced the ever-accelerating ship away from the liner. He wasn't going to make it. The nose of Man's Ruin glowed under the relentless acceleration, wisps of cloud streamed by, almost too fast to notice. He throttled back as best he could and the anodised hull of the liner came into all too clear focus.

Man's Ruin lurched as he wrenched her around, every bolt, every plate, screeching in protest as he swung his ship around the liner's massive frame. Pushing it to the limit of its acceleration as a gap opened in the larger ship's superstructure.

There was a massive clang as Man's Ruin clipped the other vessel, a section of plating tore free of the ship and spiralled down through the atmosphere, cleaving a hapless ground-car into two halves and embedding itself in the street like some defiant metal flag. Ace hung on for dear life as Man's Ruin spiralled dangerously, tumbling end over end, every tendon, every muscle standing out as the bile rose in his throat and he strained to bring the tumbling ship back under control. Through the thick crystal of his screen sea and sky strobed in a sickening blur until he shut his eyes and yanked back with every ounce of strength in his body, aiming her back into the sky and roaring up out of the atmosphere like a torpedo. Finally they were free of Mother Earth's embrace and space was theirs.

“Guess I won't be going back to New York.” he growled to himself as he unstrapped, setting the Turing Machine on course for Dyzan at a constant acceleration of one gravity and swinging back on the hand straps to check on his passengers.

“You crazy son of a bitch!” Gail thundered at him, smacking him across the face. It'd been a long time since a woman had hit him and it took Ace completely by surprise. Face stinging and eyes black with anger he caught her wrist on her second attempt and twisted it behind her back, holding her tight. She hissed and writhed in his grip as he looked at the other two thirds of this trio he'd been lumbered with.

Bang had hit his head, so it seemed, and he'd though the shriek had been Gail's. The Professor was tending to it with the first aid kit and that gash on his head didn't seem too bad. Keeping his grip on Gail's writhing body despite Bang's murderous look he glowered, and spoke.

“We had to get out of there. Whoever it is that's after you isn't messing around. They mean business. I got us away and I'll get you to Dyzan within twenty-four hours. If you don't like my methods, you're welcome to leave.” He pointed his free hand at the airlock and then shoved Gail towards Bang with an open handed slap to her meaty rump that echoed in the tight confines of the ship with a metallic clang. “Hit me again and you'll get more than a spanking. Hear me?”

Gail took in a breath as she recovered her equilibrium, her lip quavering on the edge of tears or a screaming fit, but Ace was spared her shrill complaints by a sudden lurch of the ship that threw them all off balance. “Jesus! Yelped Bang, smacking the other side of his head against a metal locker.”

“Perhaps the ship is more damaged than you thought?” Offered the professor, a frown deepening his heavy brow and crinkling his forehead.

“No... this is something else.”

All three of them crowded into the cockpit and looked out of the thick glass upon the black void of space, still tinged blue with the light of Earth behind them. Man's Ruin was drifting, off course, faster and faster being turned, pulled, towards something.

“There!” Professor Quartus stabbed his finger at the glass, pointing a distant, silvery dot.

It took a moment but then Ace's steely gaze saw it too, a spherical something, glowing in the reflected light of the Earth and growing bigger. He grasped the stick and tried to turn Man's Ruin away, but the attraction was too strong, he couldn't pull the course away.

“A magna-beam!” Quartus stroked his beard. “A powerful one. We're being pulled towards that moon.”

The silvery sphere grew larger, they began to make out details. A jumble of parts, metal, wrecked ships, ore-rich asteroids, shattered space stations, clumped together in one gigantic ball of scrap. Ace's stomach sank and while he was a man beyond fear, this was as close as it got.

“It can't be a moon!” Gail's anger had given way to consternation. “We're still near Earth, Earth only has one moon.”

“That's no moon.” Ace's fist gripped the stick even tighter, white knuckled. “That's my wife.”

Ace Slamm: Space Bastard in... Turn on a Dame (Part One)

Sat, 11 Jun 2011 14:38:31 GMT

Ace Slamm: Space Bastard
Turn on a Dame
Part One: Pour me Another

Ace slumped over the chipped formica of the counter and gripped another full glass of scotch in his scarred and meaty fist. He was a great bull of a man, swaying slightly in his drunken haze and running his hand through the thick beard and tangled locks of a man who'd spent a long time in space. His battered flight jacket had a faded RAF roundel on the back and his denim was worn thin from wear and stained with oil. Low on his hip hung an Eliminator pistol in a worn-smooth holster, but nobody in The Proxima Bar seemed to pay it any heed.

A gloved hand smacked down on Ace's shoulder, starting him, making him spill a little of his scotch over the filthy bar.

“Mein Herr, you are Englisher, yes? I recognise zer badge on your jacket. Royal Marines, ya?”

Ace grunted and started licking the spilled whisky from his fingertips, giving the German a sidelong glance. The German, and his two friends behind him, grinning and muttering to each other. That was all the response he gave them, not a single word otherwise.

“Kriegsmarine.” The German said, pointing to himself and his friends. “Picked up your mess on Gelida, ja? When you broke and ran?”

Ace tossed back the scotch and span the squeaking stool around, setting his jaw, grinding his teeth until his jaw muscles bunched, staring deep into the German's eyes with an unwavering stare. The big blonde man wilted slightly under Ace's drunken glare, but couldn't back down in front of his friends.

“Run and hide. Like little girls. While we fight and die, like men.”

Ace sized him up, ignoring his words and his fruity accent as the German regained some of his courage, puffing out his chest like a strutting cockatoo. Huffing and puffing as his friends laughed behind him her jabbered away like it meant anything. Ace ground his teeth harder and then with the power and speed of a tiger, he pounced, lashing out with the glass in his hand and ramming the base of it into the German's big mouth.

Teeth crunched, glass shattered. The barman studiously ignored it all, turning away and intently polishing his glass. The man choked on blood, and shards and fell back, clutching his ruined mouth with both of his hands. His friends were stunned, standing there with their mouths open as the stream of invective has cut off in an instant.

Ace wasn't above kicking a man while he was down and slipping from the stool, reared back his steel-toed boot and drove it with uncaring force deep into the bleeding man's crotch. His eyes bulged near out of their sockets – at least he was distracted from the ruin of his mouth. He toppled with glacial slowness, sideways onto the ground as Ace jabbed a finger at the other two Kriegsmarine.

“Want some you crumbs?” Ace finally spoke, his voice like someone gargling gravel.

One of the Germans turned and ran, his tail between his legs, the other one grabbed a bottle and smashed it against the side of the table. Ace sighed and clenched his fist but before the two could join battle a burly, blond haired man smashed a stool over the top of the German's head and he went down like a puppet with its strings cut.

“Could of handled him.” Muttered Ace, turning back to his drink.

The blond muscled up to Ace and offered his hand. “Damn Mister, but you can fight. Put 'er there. I'm Bang Donnybrook. These are my friends, Gail and Professor Quartus.”

Ace didn't take his hand, but he turned his head and gave all three of them the once over with his steely eyes.

The blond was a big, broad man but too clean shaven and picture-perfect to be a veteran, though he had a couple of scars here and there and clearly thought of himself as a capable man. He was grinning his perfect white teeth, hand still thrust out, trying not to look insulted that Ace hadn't shook it, but he was.

The Professor was a mischievous imp of a man with strong Semitic features and a wicked, mirthful intelligence behind his eyes. A slide rule was tucked into the pocket of his patch-elbowed jacket and he managed to exude, all at once, the confident intellect of a genius and the louche arrogance of a hop-head. “Given your skills...” He said, smiling at Ace's snubbing of his blond friend “...we have a proposition for you. If you might be interested.”

Ace considered, licking the taste of the scotch from his teeth as he turned his eyes on the last member of the trio. She was a raven-haired beauty with a great rack, hidden away though it was in a severe professional woman's dress. Maybe a reporter or something? Nice gams too, skirt hugging them like a glove. She shifted a little uncomfortably under his eyes and it was clear by the wrinkle of her nose that his raggedy looks and brutal nature disgusted her.

“Say your piece.” Ace rumbled, setting his haunches back on the worn barstool and signalling the barkeep for another glass.

“We'll need you sober.” The woman, Gail, sniffed, tugging her purse tighter to her body.

“If he says yes.” The professor remarked with a snort of laughter.

“Let's hear it, once I say yes I'll be sober on your time.” Ace grabbed the glass and held it, waiting to hear what they had to say.

“We need a pilot.” Said Bang, the blond giant.

“So hop a passenger ship. You don't need me.”

“We're going to Dyzan.” The professor said, leaning forward in an arch, conspiratorial whisper.

“In the post-war chaos and with the civil war going on there?” Ace stared at the trio like they were retarded. “Why the hell would you want to go there?”

“That's our business.” Said Bang, trying to reassert his leadership and dominance over the Professor, who was clearly his intellectual superior. “We'll pay you well.”

Gail opened her purse and stepped forward, showing its contents to Ace. Gold glittered inside, and more, the unmistakable lustre of Gelidan sapphires and the golden gleam of a Dyzan slave harness. Perhaps not a King's random, but at least a Prince's ransom, more than enough to risk the war-torn planet Dyzan, Earth's hidden twin behind the sun, the exotic and deadly world that had invaded the Earth and brought an end to the war, until they were overthrown. The last thing Ace wanted to do was go back there, he'd killed enough of the Dyzanian people to last him a lifetime. Then again... money and even though Bang and Gail wore matching rings she wouldn't be the first married woman he'd seduced away from her husband – if he managed it.

Ace stroked his stubbled chin and downed his glass. “I'll do it. My ship's in the dock. We can leave whenever you want.”

They were in a hurry and grabbed their bags, all but hustling Ace out of the bar and then letting him take the lead, barrelling down the crowded street in a drunken swagger and shoving people out of his way, swearing like a sailor as a jetpack swooshed little too close overhead.

Even drunk Ace could tell they were on edge and that put him on edge. He could tell they were being followed as they made their way to the off-shore private spaceport. It was a rusting hole, but Ace couldn't land at Manhatten Spaceport any more. Not after that 'incident' with the customs patrol.

Paranoid as years of war and betrayal had made him, it didn't take Ace long to spot the men who were following them. Trenchcoats and hats, they couldn't look any more suspicious if they were trying to. Ace took a roundabout route and turning a corner, wheeled around. “Hide.” He grunted to the trio and turned back, peering his head around the corner.

The three men were walking abreast with grim intent. Ace wasn't the type to take any chances and drew his eliminator, thumbing the safety. The sleek and deadly blaster hummed in his hand and he stepped out into the alley, levelling it at the man in the centre.

There was a whip-crack of annihilated air particles as he depressed the firing stud. The ravening beam lanced out and struck the man full in the chest, burning a glowing hole the size of a football through his chest and melting the bricks behind him.

To their credit the others didn't scream, didn't run, they drew their own weapons and sprang to the sides of the alley, their hats falling from their heads, revealing the polished domes and horseshoe moustaches typical of imperial warriors from Dyzan, some remnant of the Emperor's guard intent on revenge perhaps. Their golden fist-guns cracked and sparked, invisible bolts of energy striking the wall behind Ace and exploding the brickwork into red-glowing fragments.

Ace calmly stood as the bolts struck around him, dialling the Eliminator's emitter to maximum apeture and levelling it down the alleyway, thumbing the firing stud for a second time. There was no snap-crack this time, the dispersed energy was nowhere near as powerful. He kept the stud down as the air shimmered under the power of the beam. Scraps of paper burst into flame, paint peeled. The men from Dyzan screamed as their clothing smouldered and caught, lighting them up as human torches. Ace calmly paced towards them, narrowing the apeture as they screamed and rolled on the ground, playing it over them like a hose until they melted like candles thrust into a hearth. Finally the last, bubbling scream came to a halt and he took his finger off the stud.

Almost immediately he sprang to a ready stance again, a whirl of black robes ducking back around the corner out of sight, an enemy he had missed. A skilful one. All the more reason to get away and all too good an indicator that there was much more to this than the trio had told him. Wasn't that

just his luck?

NEXT EPISODE: Lair of the Iron Witch!

NB: I'm going for a Pulp feel to this story in structure, nature etc, but with a bit more of a modern sensibility it some ways. I'm trying to use some of the spiel (some of it a little racist) and slang from the time but also going for a bit of a postmodern re-examination of the genre. What I am doing, though, is giving it a similar work process to the pulps. That is, churning it out, little/no editing and, essentially, this is a first draft and ever will be unless someone points out some glaring error.

LOL Author

Sun, 24 Apr 2011 10:45:49 GMT