Michael S. Atkinson's Blog, page 23

A Problem of Etiquette

Lady Eulalie was sitting on the beach when the dragon came. It was a blazing sunny day, perfect for beach-sitting. Isle Turtledove had a fair number of beaches; Eulalie, being who she was, had her own private one on the north coast. The pathway to it was guarded by castle soldiers, so she thought she was safe in going there alone. She had been gazing happily out at the blue-green waters rolling by for some time when a shadow passed over her head. At first, she thought it was a cloud. Then the cloud dived.

She didn’t have time to run or call for help. The dragon, scales gleaming, massive bat-like wings tearing at the air, thundered down and slammed to the beach in a spray of sand and smoke. Eulalie screamed, expecting to burn in seconds.

Then the dragon paused. “Oh, blast,” it rumbled. “This isn’t right. This isn’t right at all.”

“I beg your pardon?” Eulalie said shakily.

“You’re alone,” the dragon said. “I can’t flame you if you’re alone. It’s not fair.”

“It’s not… fair,” she repeated.

“No. You’re supposed to be protected by a knight. I flame him, and then I flame you. Gives you a sporting chance, you see.”

Eulalie considered herself an expert on matters of etiquette. This one was completely new to her. “I didn’t realize there were rules for this sort of thing.”

The dragon drew itself up, looking offended. “This isn’t the 10th century, you know. We don’t just fly about where we please, burn people, and steal their treasure. We’re organized. We have standards. We do honest work for honest treasure.”

“You mean you’re paid for this?” Eulalie said.

“Of course,” the dragon said, a little condescendingly. Eulalie had never before been condescended to by a dragon. “Those big mountain caves don’t pay for themselves, you know. There’s property taxes to consider, and enchantment fees, and scale repair costs.”

“Oh,” said Eulalie. “So… someone paid you to come and attack me.”

“Exactly,” the dragon said. “But there are expectations. The client was clearly informed. I can’t attack you if you’re undefended.” It glared at her, as if it was her fault for messing up what should have been a neat and tidy job.

“I’m so sorry,” Eulalie said. “If you like, I’ll go and fetch help. My castle is just down the road.”

“Well, that’s the thing of it…” the dragon rumbled. “I can’t just let you leave now. You’ll summon a whole army and have them drive me off with arrows, or magic, or something else nasty. No, I’m afraid I’ll have to make an exception and flame you now. The client will understand. Circumstances.”

“But….” Eulalie tried desperately. “I promise, I won’t call a whole army, just one or two knights. One, even. I’ve got the perfect one in mind, his name’s Smith, he’s got a wooden leg, you won’t have any trouble at all…”

“Sorry,” said the dragon, “but there’s no help for it. I do feel badly about all this.”

“Oh, stuff it,” Eulalie snapped. Then she saw the dragon opening its jaws. She gasped. She wasn’t ready. She wanted something more appropriate for her last words, at least. Then she realized that no one would ever know the difference anyway. She shrugged, and unleashed a torrent of the most dreadful language she knew, things sailors shouted in the docks. Everyone at court would have been scandalized. She was still screaming invective as the dragon flamed.

This story is a companion to Charming, and So This is Love. Also, I owe a bit of inspiration to a story from 1921 by Heywood Broun, entitled The Fifty-First Dragon. Dragon-slaying is more complicated than one might think. 

Mysteries of Life

Red brake lights shone remorselessly at him. Sam had been sitting��in his Volvo behind��a��semi-truck for the past hour. It hadn’t moved. Neither had he.

Sam used dreadful language.��Traffic jams were an enigma to him. He never understood why he always hit the interstate at the worst possible time. Did the universe hate him?

Yes, thought the universe.��That Sam. What a clod.��

Arresting Developments

The rebellion in hell had been crushed. The rebels were armed with World War Two vintage weapons, impressive enough in their own way, but completely outclassed by the proton-torpedo bazookas of the��Seventh Circle Defense Corps. Madeleine stood at the edge of Phlegethon, trying not to throw up as the foul smell of boiling blood rose to meet her. “Ew,” said Evil Madeleine, who had regained consciousness. “That stinks, yo.”

“Yeah,” Madeleine said. “Well, now that’s over, I guess we can go on.”

The centaur lieutenant, Jinx MacPhee, gave a little cough. “Er, sorry, missie, but I’m afraid there’s a bit of difficulty.”

Madeleine sighed. Of course there would be. “Okay, what’s the problem now?”

Before MacPhee could answer, a centaur junior officer galloped up and handed an envelope to MacPhee. He ripped it open and read the contents. Then he looked up again at the two Madeleines. The look in his faces had gone cold, all business. Madeleine’s stomach clenched. “Right.You’re both under arrest. Charge is insubordination.”

Madeleine flamed up. So did Evil Madeleine. “Oh yeah?” the evil version of Gaseous Girl said. “You and what army?”

“Oh, you idiot,” Madeleine Prime said. MacPhee smiled, and gave a sharp whistle. Twenty centaurs galloped down upon them. The two Madeleines were surrounded by proton-torpedo bazookas.

“This one will do, I think, ” MacPhee said.

“So, where are you going to take us?” Madeleine Prime said in resignation.

MacPhee looked at the envelope again. “Circle Six.”

“But that’s for heretics,” Madeleine said. “We’re not that.”

“You’d rather go in the flaming river of blood with the Nazis, then?”

Madeleine Prime looked at Phlegethon. It still smelled horrible. “So. Flaming river, or locked up in a tomb with heretics. I guess I’ll go heretic.”

“Aye. You will.”

***

An hour later, Madeleine Prime was alone, inside a stone beehive of rock. The walls glowed dimly red. She couldn’t see outside, and she didn’t know where her evil counterpart was. She also didn’t know how she was going to escape this one. The universe was in peril, and here she was stuck in the sixth circle of hell. It was maddening.

Madeleine remembered the last time things had gone so badly. The Green Glass Bandit had been running amuck. He had an obsession with smashing stained-glass windows. Madeleine had underestimated him, putting him right around Major Mustard or the Rogue Jaywalker in threat-level terms. Then the guy had gotten hold of a padamantium-fueled phase distorter bomb and nearly punched a hole in the universe. Madeleine had just barely managed to stop him and hold reality together. It hadn’t been fun. Neither was this. Hell, she reflected, sucked.

For previous entries in Gaseous Girl’s trip through hell, go here. Thanks for reading!

Chase

Doctor Terrible was escaping. Meg Atomic couldn’t fly. “You there! I need to commandeer your vehicle!”

The civilian dutifully��tossed the keys.

“Right. ��Which��is��yours? Please say the Hummer.”

“Nope. That one. Cassette player don’t work. Seat belt’s broke too.”

“Oy.”

So This is Love

They first met at the Faun’s Summer Ball in July. Amaryllis had no idea why it was called that; she’d never seen any actual fauns there. She didn’t even want to go; she was pledged to Prince Evinrude, and he wasn’t going. She was frightfully bored, but then Prince Philip of House Shirley asked her to dance.

At first they kept to safe topics, like the weather. The weather, unfortunately was only good for so much. Finally, Amaryllis ventured into dangerous territory with a question about politics. She remembered that House Shirley hailed from the southern coast, and was very keen on trade. What did Philip think of the prime minister’s new tax on coastal shipping routes?

She expected to be dismissed. This wasn’t her first spin ’round the ballroom floor; she knew that noblemen like Philip and Evinrude didn’t care about the political opinions of a lady. To her surprise, Philip responded with a thoughtful critique of the new taxation policy, and suggested several alternatives. Amaryllis, startled, asked whether he thought the alternatives were realistic. Twelve minutes later, they had left economics and dived into foreign policy, as the musicians flailed away at their violins in the corner. It was the second happiest evening of Amaryllis’s life.

They next met at Christmas. Amaryllis was marching steadily through the endless round of holiday feasts and balls and carriage rides, and longing for it all to be over. Then came Christmas Eve. The royal family, and most of the aristocracy on hand in the capital, packed themselves into the cathedral for the traditional Christmas Eve service. Afterwards, as Amaryllis stepped out into the cold midnight air, she missed her coachman. (It turned out later that he had gone off drinking with a scullery maid.) Philip approached and offered her a lift back to her capital residence. She accepted gladly, and they spent another lovely hour talking about politics. As they said goodnight, Philip asked hesitantly whether she might visit him down in Shirleyhold, his family’s coastal palace.

“I’m sorry,” Amaryllis said, hating what she had to say. “I can’t. I’m pledged.”

“Who?”

“Evinrude.”

“Ah,” said Philip, and went away.

She didn’t see him again for six months. She saw Evinrude once. They talked about the weather.

July came round. Amaryllis had gone to her family’s country house in the north, tucked away in cool mountain pines. The Faun’s Summer Ball was coming up, but she wanted even less to go this year. She wondered if she could feign illness.

Then, the night before the ball, Philip arrived. “I, er, found a letter,” he explained hesitantly. “You should read it.”

It wasn’t addressed to her. It was addressed to Lady Eulalie from Isle Turtledove. Amaryllis hesitated, not wishing to read someone else’s post. Then she recognized the handwriting, and the royal stamp. It was Evinrude’s letter, and he was saying some��very��friendly things to Eulalie. Much too friendly.

“How did you get this?” Amaryllis demanded.

“That’s not important,” Philip said. “The point is, he’s pledged to you. But he writes more like he’s pledged to��her.”��

Amaryllis crumpled the letter in her hand. “I shall have to do something about this.”

“The thing is… I already did. ”

“What?”

Philip smiled. “We’re just just keen on trade, you know. House Shirley has an…acquaintance with certain powerful wizards. We don’t talk about it much. People might think it’s cheating.”

“And so you…”

“I sent a dragon after her. Isle Turtledove is probably cinders by now. Which means Evinrude will be off on a futile quest to hunt it down. He’s not likely to come back. And since you were pledged to him, and he has no heir and no family…”

Amaryllis swiftly grasped the implications. ��She smiled brilliantly. “You darling.”

What followed made for really the happiest evening of her life.

The fiction focus for this month at yeah write involves romance. It isn’t quite my genre, but I thought I might take a stab at it. So to speak.��

Final

At last, K’pid��had finally trapped the planet-eating crystalline alien. Her engineers, after much deliberation, had stunned it with a reversed-polarity tachyon stabilizer. So they told her anyway. Whatever worked…

“Weps,” she said, “ready the supernova proton missile.”

“Captain,” K’pid’s science officer squeaked, “Shouldn’t we try to study the-”

“Nah.”

She got a good deal of catharsis out of big kabooms. This one was most satisfactory.

Send in the Cavalry

The forest was on fire. Both Madeleines could see the flames racing through the howling trees, as they crouched behind a low bank of shrubs. Madeleine Prime didn’t know if the shrubs were tortured souls trapped in hell, or only ordinary shrubs. She didn’t want to find out, either. At least they weren’t on fire, though how long that might last was an open question. Something rushed over her head with a freight-train roar, and a second later she heard a loud��whump��nearby. The shock wave slammed her against the shrubbery. Branches scraped her face, and she had a nasty cut on one knee, but so far she hadn’t been hurt. Neither had her other self. Madeleine had no idea what would happen if they got seriously injured or even killed in hell. She didn’t have time to ponder it.

The best she could tell, the shellfire and gun noises came from further up Circle Seven. Madeleine knew it had to be Phlegethon, the boiling river of blood where the violent against people and property were eternally plunged. Apparently it hadn’t been a good idea to keep all those violent people in one place, brooding together like a cancer in hell. Now��they had broken out, and got hold of modern weaponry. Madeleine heard distant shouts in what sounded ominously like German. Her stomach clenched. “Right,” she said. “Violent against people, modern weapons, military experience, speaking German. Nazis. I just hate Nazis.”

Then she saw the excited look on her evil counterpart’s face. “You are��not��going to join them.”

“Why not?” Evil Madeleine whined.

Madeleine Prime face-palmed. “Because they’re freakin’��Nazis. And they’re leading a revolt in hell. You��really��want to join a Nazi hell rebellion? Does��anything��about those words suggest that maybe that’s not a good thing to do?”

“I killed off the entire population of my planet,” the other Madeleine observed coolly. “I’m ��evil, remember? So, naturally…”

“Oh, cripes. Look, we’re getting out of hell right now. We, and by we I mean you, are not stopping to join a Nazi hell rebellion. Got that?”

“Make me,” Evil Madeleine challenged.

Before Madeleine Prime could take her up on it, another shell roared in. This one was a lot closer. The explosion knocked Evil Madeleine flat unconscious. Madeleine Prime, protected by her own counterpart, sighed. “Okay then. That settles that. We’re getting out. I just need to figure how.” She was still Gaseous Girl, so she could probably flame a few of them before they shot her. Still, she really didn’t want to get shot.

Then she heard a rumble of hooves. To her great surprise, a full squadron of twenty centaurs charged up around her, centaurs in neat khaki uniform tunics and neater pencil mustaches. “Right, love, we’ll take over ‘ere,” said one of them, waving a saber gallantly towards the gunfire in the distance.

“Who in the hell are you?” Madeleine asked, somewhat literally.

“Captain��Arthur Jenkins-Dunchurch, miss,” said a second, more serious centaur. “My lieutenant, Jinx MacPhee. Seventh Circle Defense Corps, Squad B, at y’r service. ”

“Ah,” said Madeleine. She remembered centaurs from Dante. She hadn’t remembered them being quite so formal. “Shouldn’t you have bows and arrows?”

“Sure, and haven’t we gone and upgraded them?” Lieutenant MacPhee said. “They’ve got Earth-side weaponry datin’ from twentieth century; we”ve had to adapt.”

“So…what do you have then?”

MacPhee smiled. “Somethin’ that’ll fall on the enemy like a bloomin’ piano.”

The captain, all business, bawled out orders in a stentorian voice. The squad fell out, deploying in a neat line. Other centaurs, moving up behind them, handed out an assortment of long green metal tubes. “Bazookas?” Madeleine Prime asked.

“Almost,” said MacPhee, still smiling.

“Squad, aim!” Captain Jenkins-Dunchurch roared. Twenty almost-bazookas pointed at the horizon. A pregnant pause ensued. Even the distant Nazis seemed to sense that something was amiss. Then, the pause gave birth. “Squad, fire!”

The weapons didn’t go bang. They went wirp.��Twenty balls of crackling light arced through the air and were gone. Then, after another pause, the sky in the direction of the river lit up. The ground bucked beneath Madeleine’s feet. “What the-”

“Proton torpedo-bazookas, miss, to be exact,” MacPhee said. “The Popsicle, Mark One.”

“Blimey,” said Madeleine Prime.

This story was written for the Mutant 750 challenge at Grammar Ghoul Press, and is part of the ongoing��Gaseous Girl adventures.

Oops

���Okay. I am Lunar Man. I protect the innocent. I-���

���chirp chirp*

“Yeah. Hey, Phase. Yeah, I���m on patrol. ���Date night was tonight? Ah, Phase, I���m sorry. Completely forgot. I��� hang on a sec.���

*Whap! Sock! Pow!*

���You still there? Phase?���

���Crap.���

Charming

It was quiet in the countryside, but then, Evinrude lived in a quiet age. There weren’t the distant wails of police sirens or ambulances racing to hospitals, there weren’t car horns or train horns or bicycle bells, there wasn’t even the constant sea-like roar of cars on the interstate racing away to parts unknown. All Evinrude could hear as he stared out into the night was the occasional distant hooting of a lonely owl. That was it. Just long stretches of painful silence, broken only by a faint��hoo.��

He should’ve been back at the castle, he knew. But Evinrude needed to think. His life had gotten suddenly complicated, and he had to take a minute and sort it out. So he had ridden off alone into the country, living behind his outraged attendants and courtiers. Princes usually didn’t go away on night-time trips into the country by themselves. It wasn’t responsible. But Evinrude, in the end, ignored them and took off. He was the Prince of House Charming, the sole surviving member (not counting his sister Genevieve, who’d been turned into a tree after bad-mouthing a Dryad). Princes could do things like go off by themselves to think. What could go wrong?

Evinrude had problems. For one, his prime minister had just died. The prince wasn’t terribly broken up; the man was dull as ditchwater, and had never said a personal word to Evinrude in his life. He had been a capable administrator, though, and now Evinrude was stuck with finding a replacement. Worse, he might have to rule the country himself. His parents had long since died, but Evinrude had successfully held off his own coronation as king on the grounds that the prime minister ��was handling things well enough. Now that the poor old boy was gone, Evinrude had no excuses. Princes could get away with a lot;��kings,��on the other hand, couldn’t. They had responsibilities. That was a word that sent shudders up Evinrude’s spine.

His second problem involved love. Love, and politics, which was a ghastly combination. He had been engaged for some while to Princess Amaryllis of House Marian, a match set up for him by his parents before their deaths. House Marian had a significant treasury and a large number of knights sworn to their banner. The hope was that combining Marian’s strength with House Charming would secure Charming’s position forever, and ward off any possible challenges to Evinrude’s crown. Evinrude and Amaryllis would have to do their part in producing heirs, but even so, that shouldn’t have been a problem. Unfortunately, Evinrude had begun corresponding with Lady Eulalie, whose family ruled Isle Turtledove. He had saved her life from a giant snake, she had been grateful, and so they had been writing. She had even attended the Christmas Ball the previous year. Evinrude liked her. He liked her a lot more than Amaryllis, who never wrote or spoke to him, and whom he hardly even knew. On the other hand, he knew disastrous things could happen when a prince abandoned a commitment to marry someone in order to marry someone else. House Turtledove didn’t have many sworn banners, and its finances were reportedly gloomy. It was a vexing dilemma.

Then, he heard the flutter of wings. It didn’t sound like the distant owl. It sounded like a messenger bird. That meant trouble.

The message was three sentences. A dragon had attacked Isle Turtledove. Eulalie was missing.��Send help.

Evinrude reached automatically for his sword. A random lady in a pond had thrown it at him a while back. It was supposed to be good at slaying dragons. He hadn’t had a chance to use it before. Now he did. As he raced back to the castle, messenger bird squawking indignantly in his wake, Evinrude had entirely forgotten about Amaryllis.

In the Land of Sand

“Now,��this��is what I expected hell to be like,” Madeleine said as she flew over miles of endless burning sand. The wyvern Geryon had dropped them off at the edge of the immense desert and then soared away again into Circle Eight without so much as a by-your-leave. Geryon hadn’t been much of a conversationalist, so it wasn’t like Madeleine expected a farewell speech. Still, there they were, in Circle Seven, faced with crossing a massive desert. She might’ve hoped he could have dropped them further into it.

Evil Madeleine had finally come to, and she was not happy. “Couldn’t let me find my own way out, could you? Nooooo. You just had to send the stupid monster after me. Jerk.” She followed it up with a few more insults, many of them unprintable. Madeleine Prime was ashamed of herself that she knew those words, even if it was an alternate version of her.

“Yeah, yeah, whatever. Let’s just get out of here.” Madeleine Prime didn’t see a track, or a signpost, so reluctantly she launched into the air and started straight across. Evil Madeleine, still swearing, followed.

They flew on and on and on. The heat rose up at them from the sands and blistered their faces. Madeleine saw people wandering about down there, and wondered what their sins were. She remembered from Dante that Circle Seven included the violent, and this particular area was meant for the violent against God and nature, specifically. She thought she saw another politician, one she hadn’t voted for, who’d been involved in a messy scandal that had kept the tabloids going for weeks. Madeleine Prime kept on. There were still six more circles to go after this.

Then, Evil Madeleine tugged at her sleeve. “Look, over there!” she said, her eyes lit up in excitement. “A waterfall!”

Madeleine had tried not to think how thirsty she was getting, and how refreshing a nice cold bit of water might be. Even the frozen lake back in Circle Nine sounded better than this. Still, though, she didn’t remember waterfalls mentioned in Dante. She looked where her evil self was pointing. “I don’t see it,” she said.

“Seriously? It’s��right there!”��Evil Madeleine exclaimed, gesticulating frantically. “It’s like Niagara Falls over there! C’mon!” She kicked off towards it.

“You idiot, don’t go chasing waterfalls now!” Madeleine Prime shouted.

“I know that song,” Evil Madeleine said. “But I don’t care, it’s totally real! Can’t you hear it?”

Madeleine Prime sighed. “It’s a mirage. You really expect there’s a nice cold waterfall in��hell?”��

Before her counterpart could say anything, a sudden��boom��resounded across the desert. Both Madeleines spun towards the sound. A long dark blur ran across the edge of the horizon, and from that blur smoke was rising. “Something’s going on,” Madeleine Prime said. “Question is, do we check it out or stay away?”

“You go after it,” Evil Madeleine said stubbornly. “I’m going after the waterfall.”

“Oh, no, I am not going to hunt down an unexplained noise in hell all by myself,” Madeleine Prime said. “Besides, that blur looks like the forest in the middle ring of Circle Seven, which means we’re nearly out of this thing. And, I’m telling you, there’s no waterfall. I wish there were, honestly, but there’s not.”

Evil Madeleine glanced agonizingly towards the sand, where she was presumably seeing a waterfall. “Fine,” she said. “Whatever.” Slowly she followed Madeleine Prime towards the distant blur,.

As it grew closer, the blur resolved into a dark tangle of crooked trees and thorny bushes, extending for miles. In the depths of the forest, more columns of smoke rose, coiling and ominous. Madeleine Prime heard more loud booms, punctuated by distant shouts and wails, and, once, a ripping metallic clatter that sounded almost like a machine gun tearing through a clip of bullets. They landed at the edge of the forest. “What on Earth is going on?” Madeleine Prime said aloud.

“Revolution,” came a slow, melancholy voice from the nearest tree.

Evil Madeleine yelped in fright and backpedaled rapidly. Madeleine Prime remembered Dante had said something about talking trees in the middle ring of Circle Seven. She was more alarmed by what it was saying. “What do you mean, revolution?”

“It seems,” said the tree mournfully, “that someone broke someone else out of the frozen lake in the lowest part of hell. Word spread. People further up decided they wanted to break out.”

Madeleine’s stomach knotted. She had only meant to rescue her evil self and undo the damage she had caused. She hadn’t meant to spark a revolt in hell.

This story is part of the Gaseous Girl Mysteries, and was written for the Mutant 750 challenge by Grammar Ghoul Press. Thanks for reading!