Mairi awoke with a start, staring at an unfamiliar ceiling. Where was she? What had happened? Why did she feel like someone had rented her skull out for use as a racquetball court? "Good morning!" a cheerful voice called out. Of course. Jack. She closed her eyes. Not that this answered her questions in any great detail, but the very fact Jack was in the room with her meant she could probably trace the root answers back to one of the threads of weirdness he dragged behind him like a streamer of toilet paper stuck to the shoe of an inobservant traveler forced to...God, she was thinking like that lunatic Kartoffelkopf now. She really hoped Hans wasn't in the room too. "Eeerrnggh," she offered, although she had meant to say, "Hello, Jack. What fresh hell have you gotten me involved in NOW?" "We saved you from a hell of your own making, ungrateful girl!" an elderly voice replied. "How did you understand that, father?" Jack asked. Mairi didn't really feel up to opening her eyes again, but she knew that tone of voice well enough to be able to place a slightly befuddled face on it. "I have subtitles turned on. Was getting headache from your baaaad dubbing!" "Y'gotta teach me ta do that trick, Uncle," a squeaky voice she recognized as belonging to Louie the squirrel piped up. "'Member...light?" Mairi muttered. "Namuch 'fore." "You had been enslaved by a very bad man," Jack explained. She could feel the warmth of his breath and the slight shifting as he knelt by the bed and propped his elbows on the mattress. It was oddly comforting. "We freed you by waking you from the spell, but you passed out almost immediately from the strain. Heh. Irony." Mairi groaned. Too damn much irony. She was starting to remember her capture in Topeka, although her time of enslavement seemed to be blocked. Mercifully. She'd gotten herself involuntarily employed by someone not unlike Satan T. Lucifer Jones with a more baroque sense of style...not too long after Jack had gotten out the contract she'd been instrumental in him signing with Jonesy himself. [Jack spent most of his own title as an employee of Hell (TM) Inc. Hell later disincorporated, or whatever you call it. You'll just have to wait for details of how Jack got free, but you can probably guess at the general thrust. - Ed, glad he got practice at long-winded speaking last episode, or he'd be out of breath by now.] "Anyway, the others have gone into Topeka again," Jack explained. "If things go well, it'll all be over by the time you're ready to get out of bed." "And if dey go badly...same t'ing," Louie added. @>-`-,-`-,-`-,`-,-`-,-`-,-`- \\ // -'-.-'-.'-.-'-.-'-.-'-.-'-<@ .|,Coherent Comics Presents \\ // #20 - Alea Mortis --X------------------------- E }X{ ARCHS copyright 2003 by the '|` A Superguy/LNH Tale // \\ Dvandroid (Dave Van Domelen) @>-`-,-`-,-`-,`-,-`-,-`-,-`- // \\ -'-.-'-.'-.-'-.-'-.-'-.-'-<@ Things were going badly, Davan noted. Not as badly as they could be... he was still human, with the proper number of body parts and amount of blood. And something about this...place...kept him from dying from the terrible hunger and thirst that had become his constant companions. Hunger and thirst he was getting used to. But having no one to talk to was starting to drive him nuts, something he would never have thought would be a problem. After all, he usually preferred avoiding the company of his fellow humans. Oh, there were people in the prison with him. If you could still call them people. Like him, they were untouched in body, but something had shriveled their souls to...shriveled things. Like prunes. Or raisins that had gotten past their expiration date, which you wouldn't think was possible, but he'd found out first hand once while.... "Gaaaah," he exhaled. "Now I know why those poor schmucks are lucky to call up the brainpower needed to drool," he said, if only to break the silence. A few of the others wandering around the seemingly endless gray plains looked up, then returned to their inscrutable routines. If there was anyone else in this place who could still rub two brain cells together, Davan hadn't run into them since arriving. No day or night, just constant uncomfortable warmth and dryness. No food or water, so no cycle of feedings to keep time by. Maybe he wasn't in a place at all, just trapped in a nightmare by the master of the Dark Spire. At least he hadn't been turned into one of those THINGS that roamed the streets of Topeka. Perhaps this was just the holding tank, once his brain had gone the way of campaign promises, his body would be warped into a crawling horror. And all for the crime of trying to scavenge up food for a few people still hiding in the nooks and crannies of the city. He shuddered. What if he was already a crawling horror, and this was just the way he was forced to view the world now? How would he know, unless he could find someone, ANYONE, to talk to in here? He started walking, pushing back the hunger and fighting the weakness. Direction didn't matter. Maybe the place was infinite, maybe it wasn't. He wasn't going to die, he just had to find someone sane before he left those exalted ranks.... * * * * "Well, that wasn't so hard," Forgeheart grimaced as she wiped a bit of tentacle from her face. Ashes clung to her hair and her feet crunched on gravel as she turned to look around the chamber. "I mean, 'Megakraken' was fairly tough, but once we got it surrounded it was over pretty damn fast." Skysabre nodded. "It couldn't really concentrate on all five of us at once if we were widely separated. We took a few minor injuries," he winced as the burn on his face was irritated by a flake of falling soot, "but other than that, I'm..." Skysabre's next words would have been "...not sure what this was all trying to accomplish?" But even if the abruptly opening holes in the floor hadn't surprised him into momentary silence, the question would have been answered before he could have finished saying it. And so, each Exarch fell through their own hole in the floor, dropping out of sight. * * * * Skysabre landed with a meaty slap on some sort of rubbery gel-like substance, quickly wobbling to his feet and trying to jump back up into the shaft he'd entered through. No such luck, the gelatinous floor kept him from gaining much height on the first try, and by the time he could brace for a second the opening had sphinctered closed. "Well, at least I know why Megakraken was there. To sucker us into a trap." He looked around, lighting the chamber with crackles of lightning. He feet didn't penetrate the floor, but sank in as if into a giant pillow. Or amoeba. Carefully, he touched one wall. It was smooth and rubbery, but did not seem to carry any sort of acid. He prodded it experimentally with the tip of one sabre, and it sank in slowly but easily, the wall bleeding a clear fluid that smelled of machine oil. But when he withdrew the blade, the surface healed faster than the eye could see. Then the burbling sound started, and he instinctively knew that the air was being pumped out of the chamber.... * * * * Forgeheart landed hard on a cold sheet of ice. The warm light of her flames reflected coldly back at her from all angles, revealing that the walls and ceiling were also ice. She could barely make out the hole through which she had entered, and it was rapidly sealing shut as ice encroached on it. She turned up her flames against the cold, which seemed determined to eat into her bones. The floor started to melt, and Anna almost fell when she shifted her weight to look around better. "Damn. Better sit down," she muttered, carefully dropping to a crosslegged position on the ice. The she noticed that the ceiling was a lot easier to make out. As were the walls. The ice was closing in. "Time to get the hell out!" she decided aloud, swinging her hammer down to shatter the floor she sat upon. The ice calved in great chunks, and she fell into frigid meltwater that came up to her waist. Only the strength of her armor kept her from being crushed by the shifting blocks of ice that butted up against her faster than her flames could melt them. The ice was still closing in, and now the water was rising as well. Crushed, drowned or frozen. Lovely set of choices. * * * * Oakthorn tumbled to a stop in the darkness. The floor felt like...he wasn't sure what. Smooth like polished wood or stone, but no warmth OR cold greeted his questing fingertips. There was a faint give, as if it was made of plastic. Or bone. He summoned an arrow to cast some light on the situation. It was snuffed almost as soon as it appeared, leaving only a dancing image on his retinas. If the brief flare had fallen on anything of note, he'd been too momentarily dazzled to see it. Stan exhaled abruptly. "Man, I'm beat. Guess fighting that critter took more out of me than I thought...can't even keep an arrow lit." He tried again, carefully looking away from his hand so that he wouldn't be blinded. This flash guttered out even more quickly, casting even less light before being extinguished. Stan couldn't make out anything concrete, just a few fluttering shadows. "So damn tired," he muttered, sitting down. "This sucks. Fell into a trap, now I'm gonna end up dying alone in the dark." * * * * The smooth tunnel turned sharply sideways, and suddenly Seafixer was floating weightlessly in a vast space filled with sparkling gray blobs. He looked at his hands, and saw that his shining black armor was gone, replaced with the star-sprinkled blackness that had once covered his body as a second skin. "I'm...Constellation again?" he asked of the astral void. Slowly, he reached out and pointed a finger at a nearby blob of astral matter, willing the sparkling gray stuff to conform to the shape of a chess piece. Stars shot forth from his fingertip and formed the outline of a king, the blob oozing into that skeleton and fleshing it out. He blinked. Had the last few years just been a horrible nightmare? Or...had Crimson simply decided that the best way to deal with Floyd would be to lock him into a time loop, forever repeating the last several years of his life? An icy hand gripped his heart and wouldn't let go. He...well, Dot...had locked Lord Ebon into just that sort of loop once, ending his menace once and for all. The Gentle Gift of Crimson no doubt had learned all he could desire from the mind of his pawn during years of torture and degradation, and he would see the irony in such a punishment. The chess king reformed into a pawn.... * * * * It wasn't the first time Kat had been unceremoniously dumped down a shaft, whether intentionally on her part or not. In fact, it was the fifty third time overall, but most of those had happened back in her home reality (fifty one of the incidents, to be exact). As a result, she reacted far more quickly than the others had, and while she had been unable to slow her descent down the shaft, she was ready the instant she emerged over a bubbling pit filled with noisome green fluid. The Stone Catena lashed outward, embedding itself in the ceiling and mystically gripping the surrounding stone. A few chips knocked loose by this fell ahead of Katena into the pit. As she swung towards the wall and stabbed her fingers into it like pitons, she noticed the chips sizzling and boiling away once they hit the liquid. Kat carefully started carving herself a recess in the wall, coaxing the stone apart with her new powers. It would be a relatively simple matter to just keep going up until she reached the living part of the Dark Spire again, then follow the twisting corridors up to the throne room. But she wondered...had the others been so well-prepared for whatever traps they'd faced? Might she end up facing the Darklord all by herself? * * * * "Dot?" Floyd called out hesitantly. "Are you there?" "Yesyes," came a soft voice in his ears. In his EARS. The stars in his eyes burned cold and murderous. His hands clenched, astral matter stretching between them to form an iron staff shod with gold, which he started swinging around in all directions, lengthening it as it spun. KRAK! Floyd was standing in a simple chamber like so many others in the Dark Spire. Nearby, a twisted wretch that had once been a man lay with its grotesquely large head at an unnatural angle upon its broken neck. "The illusion was good," Seafixer hissed, shrinking his staff back down and stowing it inside one gold-trimmed black bracer. "But Dot only ever spoke to my soul, never to my ears, you bastard." His eyes stinging with tears and his teeth clenched in rage at the cruel revelation that reality still was what it had been for years, Seafixer stormed out of the room and headed up towards the throneroom. * * * * Stan hadn't felt so hopeless since the time he had been shipwrecked in the South Pacifanfic with that wrecked container ship full of cheese. He'd been a nearly worthless "son of a millionaire" type then, with some middle management skills and an unpursued talent for chemistry, and he'd been sure then that he would die on the beach. Just like he was going to die now. NO! Anger flared up inside him. He'd lived then, and he WAS worthless back then. Now he was ten times the man he'd been before the shipwreck, and he'd proved himself again and again. He was not going to lay down and die, no matter how damn tired he was feeling. Then it struck him. He was probably *literally* "damn tired". This was a trap, and it wasn't the walls that were keeping him in it, it was the constant drain on his life energies. "No wonder the arrows snuffed out!" he hissed. "They're pure life energy, and this place eats it! But if I can get a real, chemical fire going..." he started rummaging about his person, collecting bits of bark and dried leaves from the living armor he wore. The fact that it was dying back due to the room's vampiric nature only helped now, giving him more fuel for the fire. Then he screwed his eyes shut and summoned up the willpower to create one last arrow of verdant flame. It vanished. But not before the faintest of sparks had caught on the tinder pile. Carefully coaxing the fire, using skills he'd been forced to learn on that desert island, Stan brought it to a full flame. The light wasn't much, but it was enough to see by. The opening in the ceiling hadn't even closed, it was just out of reach. Painfully, wearily, Stan stood and jumped for the lip of the shaft. It felt like he was trying to haul a container ship ashore, but he finally got all the way up into the shaft and out of that damnable room. His strength returned quickly once he was free of the enshrouding darkness, and he started to climb back up the shaft. * * * * The water was up to her chin, the weight of her armor keeping her feet planted firmly on a slippery ice floor. But she didn't dare remove the armor, thanks to the ice chunks that occasionally broke off from the walls and threatened to crush her. Eventually one would hit her in the head, stun her long enough that she would slip under and drown. And even if it didn't, it wouldn't be long before the water would be over her head. Her stage magic career had included the usual escape tricks, so she could hold her breath longer than most people...but not forever. At least she wasn't too cold. Even trying to keep her flames banked, she was reflexively generating enough heat to keep the water immediately around her warm. This accelerated the flooding, of course, but even if she turned it to steam she would be safe from the heat. So she'd just drown in boiling water. She paused at a realization, and a falling chunk of ice nearly ended her options. Swatting it aside at the last instant, she took a deep breath and dove down into the pocket of warm water. As soon as she felt she was deep enough to be safe from the next few falling blocks, she focused her will into the hammer Forgeheart, commanding it to issue forth flame as intense as any she had been able to summon to date. The last lingering traces of cold vanished and the water bubbled as pockets of steam formed and raced for the surface. But within seconds, there no longer WAS a surface. Ice met water met steam, and all churned together like the contents of a witch's cauldron. Less ice. Less water. More steam! Blood hammered in Anna's ears as she reached what she knew her limit was, and then went past it. WAY past it. Finally, however, there was a thunderous crack that rang oddly through the bubbling water, followed by a surge of current as the superheated water swept her out into a hallway. Gasping great gulps of air, she propped herself up on her hammer and waited for the flood to subside. Vapor concealed everything, but she had a feeling that she needed to go up, away from the draining water.... * * * * The air was draining out of the room at a rapid pace now, and Skysabre couldn't even tell how it was getting out. He could feel it flowing towards several points in the floor, but there was no outlet at any of the drains. Not that he could see, anyway. Perhaps the "skin" of this room was one-way permeable? Involuntarily, he gasped. Half the air was already gone, and while he knew a man could survive on even less...Lake Censoredcensored in the Alt.des Mountains was inhabited, and had similarly low atmospheric pressure...the rapid change was a big strain. The room wobbled as he suffered from the inevitable lightheadedness that came with oxygen deprivation. It was a lot like the time he'd visited POKE's PEEK with his family on a rare non-working vacation. He'd run around after getting off the cog train and nearly passed out from lack of oxygen, since his body hadn't adapted to the low pressure. Fortunately, his father had a breathing.thingy on hand for just such an emergency. He realized that one of those would certainly be useful now. He had cut and hacked at the walls and floor, but nothing had worked. The flesh of this room healed itself as soon as the blade came clear, and it seemed to be thicker than the length of his sabres. While the blades could pass into the fleshy walls, he couldn't force even a fingertip in next to the razor edge, much less an arm. He had tried to hold the air back, make it stay in the room, but the strain was incredible and the result minimal. Now there was so little air that a hibernating bear would be slowly dying from lack of oxygen. If there had been balloons in the room, they would have all popped. Skysabre was faintly impressed by the fact he was even still conscious, although he wasn't exactly what he'd have called "lucid". In fact, he was non-lucid enough that a desperation plan he'd abandoned earlier now seemed like a swell idea. Or, at least, he had little left to lose if it went horribly wrong. Holding both sabres out to the sides at arm's length, the tips as far from each other as he could manage, Skysabre poured lightning from one to the other. What little air remained crackled and ionized, and the tang of ozone competed with the smell of the blood now oozing out through his sinuses. When he could increase the intensity no more, he lunged at the wall, plunging both blades into its spongy barrier up to the hilt. He was thrown back by the explosion as lightning converted the intervening wall material to superhot plasma. Like the trunk of a tree shattered into toothpicks by a storm's bolt, the wall splattered into pieces that rained down on him. Now he saw that it was only about a meter thick, but the empty space beyond had let him think it was thicker. The edges of the ragged gap were scorched and cauterized, but even as he watched, fresh flesh crept around the burns and tried to seal the hole. "Unh!" he grunted as he leapt through the gap and landed hard on the bone-tiled floor beyond. He caught his breath quickly and cut down the door out of the room, then started running. Something inside him said to go up. Well, that was where the throne room was, so in theory that's where he wanted to go. If the others had survived being separated, they would meet him there. If not...well, he could die just as well in the throne room as the basement. * * * * Tybalt smiled as he felt the movements within the Dark Spire, then took his hand from the smoky red crystal that helped control the edifice. They had each survived the games of death he had set up for them to play, games which had entertained the master quite excellently. Despair, desperation, anger and even hope...hope that would be crushed soon enough, of course. But the Gentle Gift of Crimson supped on all these emotions and more, and Tybalt was a master chef when it came to such fare. He wrapped his cloak around himself and vanished. Time to prepare the next course...with a personal touch. WHAT SORT OF TRAP DOES TYBALT HAVE IN MIND FOR THE EXARCHS NOW? WOULD HE COUNT AS "IRON CHEF SOULREAVING"? AND WHAT SORT OF PERSONAL TOUCH, ANYWAY? I WONDER IF HE KNOWS HOW TO MAKE TEA.... Answers, questions, and the main course, on the next...SUPERGUY! ============================================================================= Author's Notes: Yeah, this is double-sized, but not for any special occasion or anything. I just realized that if I was going to split everyone up and throw them in traps, it would take a bit longer...but I didn't want to split this into two episodes either. Maybe I should have put one of the earlier scenes from this episode in #19, but these things are always clearer in retrospect. A couple of geography notes. Places in the LNH Looniverse tend to get altered names that reflect net.jargon or other related stuff. So instead of Pacific Ocean, you get Pacifanfic. Alt.lantic instead of Atlantic, etc. I don't recall any previous Loonization of Lake Titicaca, but I figured Lake Censoredcensored would fit well. }-> And my old Commodore-64 roots are showing in Pike's Peak as POKE's PEEK. Finally...yes, that's an Evangelion reference in the very first line of the episode.