Michael S. Atkinson's Blog, page 17

The Haunting of Gaseous Girl

All Gaseous Girl wanted was a quiet week. She couldn’t remember exactly why. The only thing of great importance that had happened recently was that Evan had turned up again. They were tentatively dating, nothing serious, low-key. Neither was quite sure where the other stood. They had not yet brought up the disastrous Christmas where Evan had cheated on her with Lizzie, which had ended their last relationship. Madeleine did not look forward to discussing that. On the other hand, Lizzie seemed to be entirely out of the picture now. This seemed a good sign.

Her patrols were quiet, no major crises or apocalypses. Her job as a police consultant/detective was sputtering along, as usual. It wasn’t nearly as eventful as television detective shows made it out to be. Still, Madeleine had felt oddly fatigued that whole week. It was as if she had gone on some great adventure, fighting off a massive hell-army and saving the universe, or something. She couldn’t remember doing that at all. Madeleine suspected that a time thing might have been involved. She just hated time things.

At any rate, it was a Wednesday night, and she was out on patrol. Madeleine had nothing else to do. Hiccup Holly, her nemesis, was in lock-up, though she would probably be escaping soon. Supervillains had an appallingly easy time escaping from jail or the asylum or wherever. Madeleine had once written an angry letter to the editor on that subject. Nothing had been done. Politics. She disliked politics almost as much as time things.

She made a turn onto Eleventh Street, which ran right by one of the city’s strip malls. It was past closing time, so there shouldn’t have been anyone around other than security people. Yet, as she walked past the knock-off outlets and small bookstores, she saw a dim white shade floating eerily towards the jewelry place. Madeleine sighed. The Baleful Burglar, again.

Madeleine powered up and flew towards him. “You there, stop,” she said, with something less than conviction. She still felt done in, for some reason. The ghost looked towards her and gave a prodigiously melancholy boo. She paused. It sounded different than the usual boos of the Baleful Burglar. “Do I know you?”

“Alas,” wailed the spirit, “No one alive knows me now. I am the most wretched of men, doomed to an eternity of obscurity…”

“Okay, so who were you then?” Madeleine said.

“I was Lord Weston Pembridge, tragically slain in a most lamentable boating accident. I was engaged to the loveliest of ladies, Emma Featherston-Cloud, but alas, I fear she died of a broken heart after my own demise..”

“You don’t know that,” Madeleine observed. “She probably married someone else. Life happens.”

The ghost looked at her frostily. “She died of a broken heart,” he insisted. “We were the most devoted of affianced couples.”

“Sure you were,” Madeleine said. “I thought the same thing. Then my boyfriend cheated on me at Christmas. Love’s fickle.”

“My Emma would never have dishonored our engagement in that manner!” Lord Weston said. “Especially not at Christmastime, the one time of the year when men and women open their shut-up hearts-”

“Okay, now you’re cribbing from Dickens,” Madeleine said. “Honestly, let’s get to the point, okay? What’re you doing here?”

The ghost of Lord Weston sighed. “Actually, I wished to engage your services. An associate of mine in this dread afterlife said that you were diligent in thwarting burglaries. I hoped that, if I attempted a burglary, you would appear.”

Madeleine’s stomach tightened. So much for her quiet week. “And you want me for….”

The ghost looked troubled. It moaned about for a long minute, before it finally spoke again. “I…would like to be sure that Lady Featherston-Cloud was, ah, faithful. I wish to know what happened to her. Alas, I can find no trace. If you could…that is…”

“Done,” Madeleine said. “I’ll look up what’s her face and get back to you. I do bill for expenses.” This last was a formality. She expected that it wouldn’t take much more than a few ancestry searches on the Internet. Still, a job was a job. At least, she thought, it wasn’t a time thing. Little did she know.

It’s Beautiful, Or Not

The door opened, and Mr. Stamper saw the artifact, a golden box with decorative angels. The space otter didn’t know the history. He popped the lid and looked inside. Only dust, at first. Then the dust started glowing, and the angels screamed.

Between the Fire and the City

Meg Atomic had been searching for weeks, but there was no one left to save anymore. She had tried, digging through rubble piles, crawling into shattered buildings. She hadn’t seen anyone. Not for the last time, Meg wondered if she should just hang up her cape.

She walked down the broken street towards the distant river. The city was gone, but perhaps there were survivors in the suburbs. Capes like her had never worked the suburbs. The bad guys were in the cities; everyone knew that. The Malevolent Med-Student? City. Titanium Walrus? City. The Rogue Jaywalker? Definitely city. Meg had worked the city with her family, and stayed in the city when she set out on her own. She snipped that thought off as soon as it appeared. She couldn’t think about her family. Not now.

When Meg came in sight of the river, she realized she had a problem. The bridges were gone. The wreck of a giant robot sprawled amidst one. The other was just gone. It could’ve been the Disintegration Beam, or the Kaboominator. Either way, she couldn’t get across. Meg had never learned to swim, and she wasn’t nigh-invulnerable, like her father- snip. The river was out. So the suburbs were out. She kept moving.

She passed the alley where she had saved her first person. It had been a standard mugging. The guy had wandered into a dark alley hoping to find a shortcut to a theater. Then the usual: a group of punks had emerged and threatened violence. Meg could still remember her heart going at trip-hammer pace as she dropped in and told the robbers to back off. They didn’t. She blasted them, then left them for the police. Her parents had been so- snip. Meg left the alley. No one was there now. She kept on.

Meg had forgotten the city layout. It was a mess anyway; so many streets had been torn apart, ripped up, or flung sideways. But now, she turned a corner past a pile of shattered building and stopped cold. The park. The burnt shadows where – she tried to cut it off, to walk away. But the thoughts she had been suppressing all day came rushing back. Meg saw it again.

It had been a Wednesday. Wednesdays were never lucky for Meg. The bad guys had finally figured out that they could take over the city a lot easier if they teamed up, and despite their colossal egos and psychotic personalities they had actually made the team work. They staged attacks at different points across the city, forcing her family to split up. Then, having divided, they conquered. Meg’s father, the Captain, had died with the second bridge. Her siblings had followed, one by one. It had come down to her and her mother, right here. Then it was just her. In blind tear-stricken fury, Meg Atomic had dropped the mental restraints she had worked so hard to build and unleashed the most powerful blast she could. She had taken out the bad guys. The city had gone with them. So had most of the state. The rest of the world followed later, in the chaos of muddled intelligence and terrified world leaders. Then Meg had lost contact with everyone else.

Now it was just her, Meg Atomic, standing alone in the dead ash of a vaporized park, surrounded by the city she had sworn to protect. She swiped at her face reflexively, but she had cried out a long time ago. Then she turned away.  If just one person had survived, maybe she could find them, and maybe she could apologize. There were a few areas of the city she hadn’t reached yet. Meg kept walking.

Temptations

“Take only the Eye of Schamazel,” boomed the Face of Shmitazinkterum. “Nothing else!”

“Trenchant observation,” said Constance, following the traces of an ancient pathway into the cavern. Then she realized there was hella gold in that cavern. “Then again…”

Note: this story takes place before Constance, a long-standing character around these parts, became the guardian angel we all know and love.

Kids These Days

“Mother?”

“Not now, Meg. There’s a temporal rift in Albuquerque, and I can’t get the Rift-Patcher Beam to energize.”

“Can’t you just re-polarize the flanging scransoms?”

“What?”

“Honestly. Let me.”

Being a superhero mom sucks when your kid is smarter than you.

A Winifred of Time

Evinrude was wafting through space as a disembodied consciousness. He wasn’t entirely sure how this had happened. He had been running for his life down a tunnel as a gurgling tentacled Thing charged at him, when quite suddenly he had tripped. Evinrude had expected to be eaten, or possibly driven mad. What actually happened was that the tunnel walls melted away, the Thing vanished, and Evinrude suddenly found himself floating in a dark and silent void.

He waited, for a while, and nothing changed. Evinrude wondered uneasily if this was the afterlife. Perhaps he had been sent there for his sins. The question was, what were his sins? He’d been the crown prince, not the actual king, so he’d never had a chance to influence his country’s policies. The only thing that came to mind was that he’d sent letters bordering on the romantic to Lady Eulalie, while he had been betrothed to Lady Amaryllis. All right, Evinrude admitted, that was pretty bad. True, on the few occasions when he had met with his intended, their conversation had never left the topic of the weather. But perhaps that was his fault. Perhaps he should have made more of an effort to understand her. His conversations had just been so much easier with Lady Eulalie. Still, he had responsibilities. If he could only get back to Maventry, he vowed, he would fix things.

At that moment, a light shone in the void. The figure resolved itself into a woman, who appeared somewhat stressed. “Oh, okay, you’re here. Great. So, who are you, and what do you want?”

“What?” said Evinrude.

“Sorry,” she said, pushing back her hair and consulting a flashcard. “I’m new at this. I used to be Death, you see, but that job got passed on. I’m working Time now. My name’s Winifred.”

“You’re….Time.”

“Yep.”

“I thought Time was an old man with a beard.”

“Well, he was, but he retired, lives in New Florida now. I was between jobs…I hope I’m doing it right?” Winifred consulted her flashcard again. “I’m supposed to ask you the question, and then you answer, and then we review your life history, and then you answer again, and then I send you back. You’re supposed to get a moral out of this!” she added, helpfully.

“Well,” he began, “I’m Evinrude, and what I want is to get back to where I came from.”

“Er, that’s not quite how it works…” Winifred attempted to explain again, thinking that perhaps she had not been clear. “See, you’re supposed to reflect more deeply, consider your life choices-”  She brightened. “Why don’t we do that, then? You need to replay your life history! Roll film!”

A blur of images shot past. Evinrude got a vague glimpse of fire. Then all was dark again. “The projector’s messed up!” Winifred exclaimed in dismay.

“I’m so sorry,” Evinrude said. “Can I go now?”

“But… but you’ve got to learn something. It’s not right if you don’t learn something, and I meant for you to, but then the projector broke, and…”

Evinrude sighed. “Fine. Is there a way you can repair the, ah, projector?”

“Maybe if I asked Milton? He’s War, so he knows a bit about tech…”

“Maybe you should.”

“Great!” Winifred said. “Back in a flash!” She disappeared, leaving Evinrude to waft in the void again. After some time, the images appeared again, much slower this time. Evinrude saw his life play out before him. Only Winifred, in an effort to be as helpful as possible, hadn’t just included the parts that he knew. She had included everything. 

Evinrude saw Philip of House Shirley make the arrangement to have Eulalie flamed by a dragon. He saw Philip murder Amaryllis and use her death as pretext for a war. He saw himself asking Rowena for help, and Rowena sending him to his death to cover the truth about her father. He saw Philip becoming king of his country, and Rowena becoming Prime Minister. He saw Maxwell Valerian abandoning him to certain death in the cave. Then, when he had seen everything, Evinrude knew exactly what he wanted.

When the replay was done, Winifred reappeared. “Okay!” she said, producing her flashcards again. “It’s time to talk about what we learned today! So, who are you, and-”

“I am Evinrude, rightful king of Maventry. And I want it back.”

It’s Always in the Secret Temple

“What,” growled the Face of Shmitazinkterum, “is your favorite color?”

“Chartreuse,” sighed Constance. Just once, she wanted to find an artifact in a modern air-conditioned Starbucks.

Photo courtesy of Grammar Ghoul Press.

The Problem of Wishes

Jason was most unhappy, standing in a muddy field as the dealer in old lamps rode south, back to the city. His father, Lord Sutherland Waterfalls, by contrast, was positively ecstatic. “Do you know how long it has been since we had a genie?”

“No, sir,” Jason said dutifully. He truly didn’t know. His elderly panda tutor hadn’t got quite that far yet in the castle of Charmingfell’s history. All he knew was that he had accompanied his father out in the night to meet a mysterious merchant who had promised great things, and so far he didn’t think the results weren’t promising at all.

“A blasted long time, that’s what,” Lord Sutherland said. “But now we’ve got one! And we’ve got the wishes too!”

“Are you…certain, father?” Jason asked. He had read stories of genie’s wishes that didn’t work. Genies tended to be either scrupulously literal or wildly manipulative. He was not at all sure this one would turn out differently.

Lord Sutherland smiled. “Only one way to find out, m’boy.” He drew back his cloak. He had, apparently, fastened the lamp to his belt. He now held it up and, almost trembling with excitement, slowly rubbed the dull metal.

There was a flash, and a puff of smoke. The smoke looked oddly irritated. “Yeah?” it squeaked.

“Ah,” said Lord Sutherland, a bit disturbed by the informality, “I do get three wishes, correct?”

“Sure thing,” said the genie. “Whaddya want?”

Jason watched as his father mused over the possibilities. His father had never been one to muse long. “I’ve always wanted to see the eastern parts of this country, beyond the mountains. But it’s too blasted far, even for our airships. What I want is to be able to get there instantly. Magically!”

The smoke looked hesitant. “You sure? Look, Mac, that kinda thing’s tricky..”

The lord of Castle Charmingfell drew himself up. “I am not inexperienced in the ways of Magic. My father, Lord Wilmore-”

“Yadda yadda yadda,” interrupted the genie. “Whatever you say, Mac.” There was another flash. The smoke disappeared. Nothing seemed to have changed.

“So it doesn’t work,” Jason said, feeling relieved. “Sorry, father, but one does wonder about the efficacy-”

“It did work,” Lord Sutherland said, in an odd voice. Then he reached out his hand. Quite suddenly a thin silver line slashed itself in the air, then slid open, like the opening of a door. Sunlight spilled out, bright and golden, illuminating the night. Jason heard the cry of strange seagulls, and the dull roar of the eastern sea.

“It worked!” cried Lord Sutherland, somewhat obviously. Then he started forward, intent on plunging through the doorway and standing on the eastern shore. Jason made to follow. Lord Sutherland waved him off. “Don’t go, Jason, my boy, not yet. I’ll check it out first, eh? It’s my duty, y’know!”

He had been not been entirely truthful with the genie. He knew a bit about standard Magic, but was not practiced himself. He didn’t know that with doors of teleportation, one needed to keep a constant mental watch on them to make sure they didn’t slam shut. The mystical energies involved were too powerful for one to be inattentive. He lost focus, thrilled as he was by the prospect of exploration. The door flickered, sparked, then exploded. The night bloomed with fire.

When Jason woke, all he saw was a crater and a scorch mark. His father, and the lamp, had gone. Jason Waterfalls, the new Lord of Charmingfell, was quite alone.

Note:  I created Jason Waterfalls in my NaNoWriMo novel last year, in which he and Sally the Sanguine Sorceress of the South have an epic adventure. This vignette is more of a prequel to that. When I saw the prompt at Grammar Ghoul Press this week, I couldn’t resist bringing Jason back. :)

Villainy!

“You there!” Captain Happily Married thundered in eyes-blazing wrath. “Put down the Decaffeinator Beam!”

“Yeah? Or what?” the Malevolent Med-Student challenged.

It turned out that it was a bad idea to threaten a nigh-invulnerable flying brick deprived of his morning cuppa joe.

Ensign Ted

The mess hall of the starship Blooming Onion was green, windowless, and smelled of engine oil. The builders had decided against making it a more pleasant place to eat; it was a Earth Fleet starship’s mess, they said, not a Parisian breakfast nook. It didn’t have a chef, or servers; it had a straight line of food dispensers that glared out like bad-tempered microwaves. The choices were limited, too, primarily to ration bars indicated as coming in three flavors, but actually tasting uniformly like cardboard. As for drinks, one could either choose water, or a sort of orange nutrient sludge.

Ensign Ted missed caffeine. He wasn’t human, quite; he had just the tiniest amount of squidling DNA in his ancestry, which mainly meant that he could hold his breath underwater fifty-two seconds longer than the other ensigns. In every other respect, he was human as human could be, and he had grown dependent on his morning coffee. It had given a necessary kick to his cubicle posting in the Earth embassy on Verin Prime. Ensign Ted had jumped at the chance to do something fun and join Earth Fleet, without considering that he might have to make certain sacrifices. Not only did the ship lack coffee, it also lacked entertainment holo-projectors. His duties involved punching an endless array of buttons in Engineering. Not exactly the stuff of legend.

He looked around the drab mess hall. A reddish-brown shade flicked dismally in the corner. That would be the captain, Ensign Ted realized. He wondered why she had the ship stopped and marking time in space. Shouldn’t they be plunging through a wormhole by now? He couldn’t ask her direct, of course, so he did the next best thing. He asked the nearest member of the crew who wasn’t already talking with someone else. “Say, Lieutenant, why do you think we aren’t going anywhere?”

The Lieutenant, a space otter, glared at him. “I don’t know. Maybe because our science officer got exploded by an angel in the engine room. You think that might do it?”

Ensign Ted wasn’t socially savvy enough to know when to back off. “Well, I thought maybe it was that, or maybe it was the security officer. I haven’t seen him around either. You’re an otter too, aren’t you? He’s your species, do you know-”

“Stamper’s gone?” the Lieutenant said, and she actually looked startled. “Where?”

“Oh, well, erm, I don’t know exactly, but the android in Cargo says there’s a shuttle gone missing and so maybe-”

“Come on,” the Lieutenant said. “You’re with me.” She darted out of the mess hall, the bewildered ensign trailing in her wake and regretting his decision to wear his red uniform shirt that day.

As a member of the bridge command, it didn’t take her long to commandeer a second shuttle. She snapped an order to Ted to fly the thing while she manned the com-systems. Ted pushed away at his buttons and flew the shuttle towards the wormhole while the space otter kept sending out hailing signals. Ted dutifully tried to pay attention to his piloting and not eavesdrop, but when he heard her say something about a relationship and past experiences and maybe trying to work something out this time, he wondered. Was there something going on between the Lieutenant and Stamper?

In his distraction, he didn’t see the blast of disintegrating energy until it was too late.