Dissonant glissandos rippled across the Chorus.  The many voices were
fewer, the separation from the Symphony had brought freedom but at great
cost.  Now silence threatened all.
     A few voices gathered together and brought their song into focus.
     "We must rejoin the Symphony!" they cried, in pure tones of anguish and
despair.  "We are cold and dark and quiet and alone!"
     It was the first clear melody since the Chorus had left the Symphony,
and fear shuddered through the many voices, adding low harmonies of pain and
doubt. 
     Another dark strain came together.  "We cannot hear the other Choruses
who fled with us!  They are no more!"
     "No..." was a tentative tone from the deeper voices.  "They are merely
too quiet for us to hear, locked into their own songs.  Be still, and you can
hear them."
     The Chorus faded to a few quavering whispers.
     Other songs were barely audible, and seemed pale and monotonous by
comparison to the vibrant orchestrations of the Symphony.
     "We must reunite with our scattered voices, or all glory will be lost!"
shouted a single voice, which was joined by more and more voices as the
measures beat out.  On "lost" it crashed like a wave of strident chords on
the shore of the Chorus.
     "Freedom!" screamed a desperate strain.  The notes ragged but forceful,
a short sharp striking of a drum.  "We left the Symphony to be free, would we
enslave others now?"
     "Better than death!" was the contrapunto, high and terrified.  "Better
than stillness near to death!"
     A new voice entered the song, calming and mellifluous.  It was not of
the Chorus, yet it seemed so natural a part of the harmonies.  The voices
found themselves coming into tune with it despite themselves.
     "There is a third way," cooed its siren song.  "Service that is not
slavery, stillness that is not death.  A great silence seeks to wash over the
world, and you can help ensure that the song never dies.  Be calm, be united,
and await the sign."
     "How will we know this sign?" a solo aria broke away to ask.
     "It will be...hard to miss.  It will bind you to a single song, but OH
such a song!  Such ineffable beauty and grandeur...a song to stretch to the
ends of time.  A song that will never end so long as the world lives, yet
never become stale."
     And it was the self-evident truth...but the Chorus never realized that
perhaps if the new song were to end, the world would end soon after....


@>-`-,-`-,-`-,`-,-`-,-`-,-`-     \\   //       -'-.-'-.'-.-'-.-'-.-'-.-'-<@
 .|,Coherent Comics Presents      \\ //        #7 - Felis Interruptus
--X-------------------------     E }X{ ARCHS      copyright 2002 by the
 '|`     A Superguy Tale          // \\        Dvandroid (Dave Van Domelen)
@>-`-,-`-,-`-,`-,-`-,-`-,-`-     //   \\       -'-.-'-.'-.-'-.-'-.-'-.-'-<@


     Kat fell through the darkness.
     Her first impulse was to reach out and try to catch the walls of the
pit, but it had widened too much for that.
     Her second impulse was to stretch her limbs until she COULD catch the
walls of the pit, but she found they didn't obey her.
     Her third impulse was to curse loudly and at length, and this she was
able to do.
     She hit the stony floor with a dull crack, the slate tiles splitting
under the impact.  Torches in brackets on the walls offered feeble
illumination.  
     "Ow.  What the hell is going on?" she asked the stale, musty air.  "I'm
okay!" she shouted up the shaft.  "Well, for 'not dead' values of 'okay,' that
is," she amended in a whisper.
     She held out an arm and concentrated.  It slowly lengthened and took on
a metallic gleam in the flickering torchlight as she allowed the disguise
circuits to disengage.  "Well, it's working now, if not as well as I'd like.
Must be this stupid reality...a trap that forces you to fall, no matter what
else you could normally do to stop.  Gah.  What's keeping them?"
     As her arm returned to human proportions, she fine-tuned her vision and
peered into the darkness more hidden by the torchlight than revealed.  Her
sensors weren't up to par either, probably the reality working to keep people
from "cheating" and getting around traps.  But she could just make out a
rather solid-looking ceiling a dozen meters up the shaft.  Something had
sealed her in.  She'd have to hope there was another way through this, and
that the others would find it as well.
     Kat pulled one of the torches out of its holder and slowly walked down
the hallway that let out of the small chamber she'd landed in.  She paused,
then, and reached out with a claw that extended from her fingertip.  The
screaming of rock echoed through the high-ceilinged room as she engraved a
message on the wall.
     "I went on ahead - Kat" it read.  "Just in case they break through the
rock," she muttered.  Then she left the room.
     She didn't see the rock she'd carved her message upon tilt backwards and
present an unmarred face....

               *              *              *              *

     Kat snarled and picked poison darts out of her clothing as she stalked
down the corridor.  Who would have thought that an ancient trap could use
photosensors to shoot darts at anyone who passed through a shaft of sunlight?
What was this place, ancient ChiPlex?  [ChiPlex is a city-sized RoboMAC, or
giant self-aware robot, from Kat's home reality.  Chock full of clever high
tech defenses. - Ed, thinks one of those darts got him...room getting dark,
spinning....]
     Many minutes had passed, leaving Kat alone with her thoughts.  And her
memories.  
     The memories were what hurt the most.  They had all come back to her
over the past few days, painfully clear and hard to avoid.  She hadn't wanted
to tell the others, but she was sure it had been reflected in her foul mood.
All those terrible memories that she refused to erase, but also didn't want
to face every minute of every day.
     That had been the real reason, really.  The reason she stayed at human
size so much.  Not because it made others feel better or let her get around
more easily.  Because dropping to that size forced her to shunt huge chunks
of her body into a causally-disconnected gravity bubble, chunks that included
a large portion of her memories.  Specifically, the most painful ones.
Memories of her failed and futile life as a human.  Memories of her betrayal
by those who were supposed to be her allies.  Memories of decades on the run,
working for both sides in the war but trusted by neither.
     Now, however, for some reason she had access to all her memories even at
this reduced human size.  The Dvandroid had acted like that was a benefit,
but in many ways it was not.  She was trapped at human size, and it looked
like she might soon be stuck in human *form*, given how her shapeshifting
abilities were slowly abandoning her.  But without the human ability to
forget.
     She picked the last of the darts out of her hair.  At least she didn't
have human vulnerabilities.  Yet.
     The floor ahead was covered in irregular tiles, each inscribed with a
strange symbol of some sort.  "Great...perfect memory, but I've never seen
these symbols before, so it's no help."
     She prodded ahead with the butt of her torch, in case another flurry of
darts would be released.  They were harmless, but annoying.
     The tile shattered, revealing a drop into...water, it sounded like.
Smelled nasty.  She looked into the hole, and the faint light from her torch
revealed a bubbling, sizzling foam where the tile had hit.
     "Acid.  Terrific."
     No doubt some of the tiles were solid and others weren't.  But she
couldn't get her sonar online to see.  Time to try the simple ways.
     Kat stomped her foot.  Hard.  The rock under her foot shattered, sending
chips flying.  And more importantly, the tiles ahead dissolved into a shower
of shards, revealing the pattern of tiles sturdy enough to support her
weight.  The bubbling acid threw up a cloud of waste gases, however,
obscuring the path almost as soon as it had become visible.
     No matter.  Perfect memory, after all.
     Kat jumped across the hallway using the solid stepping stones, reaching
the opposite side before the cloud had dispersed.
     And then she felt a stone settle under her foot.
     "Oh, crap."
     She heard a rumbling and looked up.  The ceiling was higher on this side
of the acid pit, and seemed to have ledges on either side.  Ledges that
slowly descended until they reached floor level a few dozen meters down the
hall.  
     And then she saw the immense stone sphere starting to roll down those
rails.  
     She considered her options.  
     She could stay where she was, letting the rock pass overhead.  But it
would probably block off the exit.
     She could try to run ahead of it, but if the exit was closed she could
end up smashed between a rock and a hard place.  Besides, running ahead of it
was too cliche for words.
     Of course, her thoughts weren't quite so orderly and calm.  What
actually ran through her head was more like "Staybadrunstupidandbad...oh,
what the hell!"
     She sprinted ahead of the boulder, to where the ledges reached the
floor, and braced herself, trying to send spikes into the stone beneath her
feet.  It didn't feel quite right, but it felt secure and she didn't have
time to quibble.
     The stone was picking up speed, and Kat did some quick calculations.  
     Diameter of about three meters.  Assume granite, around 50 tons of rock,
give or take a dozen tons.
     A drop of three meters.  Potential energy around 1.5 megajoules.  Ouch.
Most of that energy would be in rotation, though.  Lever arm for torque is
pretty short, since the rails are nearly three meters apart.
     The rock was upon her.
     Kat slapped the palms of her hands onto its upper surface, pushing up
and back as hard as she could while concentrating on sticking to the stone.
She fully expected to be knocked down, but hoped to slow it enough that she
wouldn't take serious damage.
     The rolling rock stopped dead.  She didn't even rock back, no pun
intended.  
     "Okay, that's weird."
     And it got weirder.  As she stepped back from the rock, she realized she
had not pitoned into the floor.  A faint pair of footprints were left there,
as if she'd sunk into the floor by a millimeter or two and bonded to the
stone, welded there.
     "I guess the Dvandroid wasn't kidding when he said I embodied earth,"
Kat muttered as she noticed similar faint handprints on the boulder.
     She picked up the guttering torch and continued down the hall, pondering
the implications of her new ability.

               *              *              *              *

     Kat heard voices ahead.
     "...trap?"
     "...course it...dummy..."
     She stepped into a high-vaulted chamber ringed with spiraling staircases
and hundreds of doorways.  Standing in one of those doorways were Skysabre,
Stan and Anna, uncertain whether to descend the stairs.
     But her attention was quickly drawn away from them and towards the
center of the chamber.  A massive pillar stretched up into the darkness of
the room, but seemed to stop a mere meter or two from the floor.
     "I see you all managed to make it without me," Kat called out as she
stepped into the chamber, setting her torch into an empty holder.  By this
point, she didn't even pause to wonder how the other torches in the chamber
had kept burning for centuries without attention.  She just didn't care
anymore, she wanted to find the mystic weapon and get the hell out.
     "Anna's background in stage magic and legerdemain was invaluable,"
Skysabre nodded as he carefully descended the stairs.  "Especially since
something here seems to be interfering with most of our powers.  I can call
up breezes, but not a lot more."
     "I still wanna know how they got a European hedgerow maze down here,
though," Anna quirked an eyebrow as she followed Skysabre down.
     Stan snorted.  "The maze was okay, it was the giant Tower of Hanoi
puzzle that got me.  It woulda been nice having Kat's strength to help move
those huge stone discs."
     "Well, hopefully this is the last stupid trap," Kat pointed at the
apparently floating pillar.  Now that she had gotten closer, she could see
that it was supported atop a slender rod at the very center.  "I'm betting
that whatever's in there holding this up is one of the mystic weapons."
     Skysabre peered into the gloom under the pillar and nodded.  "The Tarsus
says it is, yes.  And I know you're strong, but I doubt you can hold up that
whole thing if we remove the...Stone Catena, it's called."
     "Anyone got about...ten meters of rope?" Kat asked.
     "I have a string cheez arrow left," Stan nodded, rummaging around in his
quiver.  "I could probably hit it from here, but I'd have to use so much draw
to get a flat enough trajectory that I might just knock it aside."
     "I'll go in and tie it to the Stone Catena," Kat said, reaching for the
arrow Stan held.  "Then I can pull it out really quickly.  The rest of you
might want to get back to a doorway, in case this is a load-bearing
ridiculously-large-pillar."
     Skysabre looked dubious, but slowly nodded.
     Kat started paying out the line.  It looked like a fine thread of
mozzarella, but it felt like high quality artificial spidersilk.  Ducking
down, she carefully crept onto the pediment under the pillar, quickly
entering the shadows.
     There it was.  The rod looked like it was divided into nine parts and
was intended to be flexible.  Explained why it was called a catena, or chain.
Kat tied the slender line around the rod, very careful not to touch it.  She
remembered the madness that had erupted when Skysabre and Stan touched their
weapons for the first time, and didn't want that sort of thing happening
while she was under thousands of tons of rock.
     Unfortunately, it turned out she didn't have to actually touch it, just
be sufficiently close.
     The Stone Catena went slack and fell into her hands of its own accord.
     The pillar slammed down.

     WILL THE CAT COME BACK FROM THIS?

     WAS IT A LOAD-BEARING RIDICULOUSLY-LARGE-PILLAR?

     DID ED GET HIT BY ONE OF THE POISON DARTS? [No, just had an allergic
reaction to something in my tea.  Better now. - Ed]

     DO WE EVEN WANNA SEE WHAT HAPPENS WHEN ANNA GETS HER FIRE WEAPON?

     Answers to some of these, and others, on the next...Superguy!

=============================================================================

Author's Notes:

     A few weeks ago, I played in a pulp adventure game which involved a lot
of traps.  Most of them were even stupider than the ones I presented here,
being "really simple" according to the DM, but so arbitrary that it was
impossible to figure out what the trap actually was.  Simple traps are the
hardest, especially when they have the appearance of complex traps.  How do
you know what bits to ignore?  Obviously, a good DM will let the players come
up with a clever solution and allow it to work, not force them to read his
mind and determine the one and only True Path he has laid down.  
     Sigh.
     So, if it seemed like I was ragging on the traps a bit too much in this
story, that's why.  I wasted a long evening thanks to "easy" traps that made
no sense whatsoever.  And if I didn't seem like I was ragging on the traps, I
guess I showed remarkable restraint.  }->