Michael S. Atkinson's Blog, page 25

Infernal

“Burglary?��Circle Eight, ditch seven,” drawled the snake. “Next!

“”This ain’t��fair!” Neil protested. “I wanna appeal.”

“Yes, well, since the big guy retired, we’re run��by committee. Appeals must be filed and initialed in triplicate. Response time three centuries, minimum.��Next!”

Pants on Fire

William Rathley was in a foul mood. Cecily South had snubbed him most coldly at the masquerade the day before, and the whole of Rathley’s social circle buzzed with the talk of it. William had hoped to make some progress with her; he was only a minor aristocrat while she and her family stood high in the court. It seemed now, however, that Lady Cecily would not have him. Thus William’s foul mood.

In a desperate attempt at some sort of retaliation, he had abruptly approached Abigail Winslow and asked if she would accompany him to the play that evening. Abigail, to put it kindly, stood not highly in��anyone’s social circle. William hardly noticed how pleased Abigail was at his invitation. He only made sure that the word would get back to Lady Cecily.

They arrived at the theatre, and the play proceeded. Abigail lost herself in the action and the rapid dialogue; she had heard much about the skill of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, and now she believed every word. Then, just as a main character swept on stage, an actual cannon went off, shaking the theater with its loud boom. Abigail started in alarm, and looked to William to see if he had been as surprised. He appeared to have hardly noticed. Rathley was glaring off down the rows of wooden seats towards a far corner, where a brightly-dressed woman was exclaiming over the cannon fire with her companion. Abigail recognized Lady Cecily, and knew a bit of social gossip. She swiftly put two and two together, and came up with a most distressing four.

Just as she did, smoke began to sting her eyes. Shouts of “Fire!” rapidly displaced the gasps of astonishment over the cannon. The audience surged towards the main exit from the theater. William went with them, without even looking back to make sure Abigail was accompanying him. She pushed her way frantically along in his wake as the flames ran through the beams and rafters of the theater as swiftly as a rushing train. William shoved his way out into the night, coughing hard, but relieved to be alive. Then he felt a sharp stinging pain lower down. He yelped in terror. Flames were darting up his breeches. Before he could do anything else, a sudden splash of cold ale doused the fire most thoroughly. “Ah,” said William. “Lady Abigail. I am most grateful for-”

Abigail cut him off stormily. “Sir,” she said, “You are a rogue and a scoundrel, and Cecily is most welcome to you!” ��William was left with gaping mouth and soaking breeches, as the Globe Theater burned merrily behind him.

This is my first stab at real historical fiction, as opposed to��Titanic��fanfic involving space hamsters, or Catrina saving Franz Ferdinand and thus averting World War One. I had heard about the famous fire at the Globe Theater (mostly from the��Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego��computer game, but until now I hadn’t heard about the anonymous man with his breeches on fire. He deserves a backstory. If the real Fire Breeches��Guy was a nicer gentleman than I have portrayed him, I apologize to his descendants. Also, for those of you wanting to know the fate of Mr. Stamper, I will return to his adventures next week. For obvious reasons, I couldn’t do a Stamper story and real historical fiction in the same response.

I Wanna Drive the Zamboni

Sometimes Madeleine Prime hated her life. Especially now, when she wasn’t really sure it was her life. She was sort of dead, maybe non-existent, and she was in hell, trying to rescue her evil counterpart so that maybe she could undo whatever her evil self had done and get everything back to normal. Did other superheroes have to deal with this? Mr. Ecosystem sure didn’t. His last battle had been a mutant panda escaped from the zoo. “What I wouldn’t��give��to fight a mutant panda,” Madeleine exclaimed.

Evil Madeleine giggled. “I torched a panda once. When I burned down Asia.”

“You burned down a whole continent?”

“I was bored.”

Madeleine Prime, not for the last time, wished she could just leave her evil self in hell. She took a deep breath. She was going to have to blow-torch Evil Madeleine out of the frozen lake, a tricky job at best. And they weren’t alone. Across the lake she could see dark figures moving about ominously. She bent down, and began breathing hard on the ice. Slowly, painfully slowly, it began to melt.

“Didn’t know you could breath fire,” Evil Madeleine said.

Madeleine Prime winced. She’d just taught herself a new trick. “It’s not fire,” she said. “It’s technically superheated gas. We’re Gaseous Girl, you know, we can do that.”

“Sweet.”

“Shut up.” She went back to breathing, trying to do it more rapidly. She could hear something whirring towards them. It was getting closer.

The ice was turning to slush now. Madeleine Prime seized her counterpart’s arm and pulled. Evil Madeleine moved a few inches, then stuck fast. Before Madeleine Prime could try to melt more ice, the whirring something spun up behind them. Madeleine Prime spun to face it, ready for a fight. Then she paused.

A small goblin-like creature sat there, atop what looked suspiciously like a Zamboni ice resurfacer. It glared at the two of them. “‘Ere, what’s all this?”

“Ah…”

“Blimey. I work all day, work me tail off, keepin’ the icy lake all shiny-like, and you two ‘ave to go and melt it!”

“I apologize,” Madeleine Prime said. “And who are you then?”

“Screwbolt,” he said. “Cocytus Maintenance. I’m a ‘onest goblin, I work hard for me living. I try to keep the ice clean, but ‘ow can I with people constantly trampin’ through ‘ere?”

“Really?” Madeleine said. “You get paid for this?”

Screwbolt sniffed. “Course I don’t get paid. I’m in ‘ell, missie. We ain’t exactly got labor laws down ‘ere. No, I do it for the joy.”

Much as Madeleine Prime was curious about the employment practices of the infernal regions, she noticed other shadows in the distance, and decided not all of them would be as relatively harmless or malleable as Screwbolt. “Well, I apologize again for melting the ice. I tell you what: let me just pull my friend out of here, and then if you could give us a ride back to Circle Eight, we’ll go away and never come back again. Deal?”

“Deal. Lemme ‘elp.” Screwbolt hopped down, and grabbed Evil Madeleine’s other arm. With a heave, the two of them pulled her free at last. They scrambled aboard the Zamboni and tore off down the frozen lake, Screwbolt as eager to get the interlopers out of his domain as the two Madeleines were to go. Madeleine Prime didn’t dare to look back to see what might be chasing them.��She just wanted to get out of hell and away. Unfortunately, even though it looked like they’d get out of Circle Nine unscathed, they still had a long way to go.

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

Elena

The doctor’s experiments were legendary. Wally the Wildebeest, for instance, spliced with human DNA, now lectured in biology at the university.��The doctor’s proudest creation, however, was Elena, the Mutant Ant. Then, one night, Elena broke out of the lab.

Elena wrote him later from South America. She had married, and was very happy.��The doctor sighed. He had not expected to see an ant elope.

I wrote this for Grammar Ghoul Press and the Chimera 66 writing challenge. Couldn’t resist the pun, since puns seem to be a theme this week. :D

Surprise

“So, Beta Six, what’s the deal with you and Delta Nine?”

“I love him, sir.”

“And?”

“Isn’t that enough?”

“No. Not for clones. For you, there’s rules. Permits for irregular associations require exceptional circumstances. Military comradeship. Lengthy subspace expeditions. Pregnancy.”

“Actually…”

“Lovely.”

Shattering Kaboom

Stamper on the starship-

Staring, his wrath rising,

Running, whip-fast, went he.

Warp core smoothly whirring-

Stamper, fury, firing,

Phaser blasting blindly.

Warp core, breaching, blazing:

Blinding. Stamper smiles.

This is my attempt at a dr��ttkv��tt, a form of Norse poetry, which we were encouraged to write for the April poetry slam at yeah write. These things are tricky, let me tell you. I don’t know how the Vikings did it. On the bright side,��I bet you no one’s ever written a space otter��dr��ttkv��tt before.

And She’s Gone

“What’ve we got?”

“Sir, two suspects, one female, one male, standard smash and grab. Took diamonds, nothing else.”

“Powers?”

“Cashier said the woman had funny eyes. Like the song-”

“Kaleidoscope, yeah. And?”

“Fired light-blasts.��Took out two cameras and a wall.”

“Sounds like Lucy Laser-eyes. It’s her style.��What��about the guy””

“No ID yet.”

“Right. So … it’s Lucy and this guy, with diamonds.”

“Yes, sir.”

This post was written for the Chimera 66 challenge by Grammar Ghoul Press. Superhero fic never gets old. :)

Ice, Ice, Maddie

Splat��went Madeleine on the ice. She said a few choice words, words that wouldn’t have been appropriate had she still been at the gates of heaven. She wasn’t there anymore, unfortunately. Gaseous Girl had arrived in hell.

She had hoped to arrive in more dramatic fashion, kicking open a giant iron door, maybe blasting her way through a line of demons, that sort of thing. But St. Nicholas had merely shoved her through a hole in a cloud, and next thing she knew she had landed smack on her face in a vast icy plain. Madeleine had read her Dante. She knew where she was: Circle Nine, the lowest point of hell, a frozen lake in which traitors were eternally buried. The question was, why would Evil Madeleine be down there?

A standard supervillain could commit a lot of acts of theft, like smash-and-grab bank robberies, or stealing priceless diamonds to power one’s freeze ray. But thieves landed up in Circle Eight bitten by snakes and lizards, not Nine in the frozen lake. Madeleine wondered if she should try climbing up to Eight and looking for her alternate. But suppose she wasn’t there? Had she landed in Seven, the river of blood in which murderers were forever plunged? Madeleine shuddered to think that she might have been responsible for a murder. Given her flammable powers, whoever her evil self had killed had probably not died happily.

Then she heard a hollow voice call her name. “Hey…” the voice gasped. “Madeleine….help…” ��She turned. There was her evil self, locked fast in the ice,��her head just barely sticking up like the world���s creepiest potted plant.

“Ah,” Madeleine said. “Figures. Who’d you sell out?” She looked round, trying to estimate where in the lake they were. “Your head’s out, so you’re not a traitor to a benefactor, or a guest…so either you betrayed family, or your country. Bet it’s America, isn’t it? I stopped a terrorist group just last year. Got a medal for it. You probably helped them. You��would. ”

“No…” Evil Madeleine whispered. “It���s not that. It���s probably Evan. That���s what the snake at the front said, anyway.���

The good Madeleine was confused. She hadn’t had a relationship with anyone named Evan. She hadn’t had a relationship with anyone, really.��The closest she’d gotten had been her high school boyfriend Ben, and he had cheated on her with Lizzie Dern-

Suddenly she knew. Ben had been one of those people who went by their middle name. His full name? Evan Benjamin Wizowsky.

“Oh my God,” she said, ignoring the irony of using that exclamation in hell. “You cheated on him. Not the other way ’round.”

“Yep,” Evil Madeleine said, giggling faintly. “With Lizzie’s boyfriend. Kyle. Oh, Lizzie was so mad. Like, raging mad. Then I broke a Botticelli painting over her head. That was fun.��Little pieces flying, fragmenting everywhere….the painting, not her head. Though her head wasn’t in too great a shape either.”

“So that’s it,” Good Madeleine said. “You betrayed your boyfriend, which is more or less like betraying family, boom, frozen lake.”

“Yep.” Evil Madeleine giggled again. “And then I cheated on Kyle with Will, and then on Will with Jordan, and then-”

The good Madeleine was half appalled, half envious. Evil Madeleine had a way more eventful love life than she did. On the other hand, who was in a frozen lake and who wasn’t? “Yeah, okay,” she cut in, “Let’s skip the recap and go to the finish. Thing is, I’m here to get you out.”

“You’re what?”

Madeleine sighed. She hated the explaining part. “Somehow you broke reality, made all the alternate versions of us come together, probably collapsed the universe. I’ve got to fix it, only I can’t do that if you’re stuck in hell.” ��She wondered if she could just burn her evil self out of the ice. Then she glimpsed movement across the lake. All of a sudden Madeleine reflected that the current management of the place might not want to let Evil Madeleine go. “”Oh, joy,” she sighed. “This is going to be fun.”

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

An Otter You Can’t Refuse

Sal “Skipper” Carmine was an immensely practical otter. When an associate��on��Verin Prime told him of a way to enchant certain valuable objects so that they could always be found again, he didn’t stop to question it. He didn’t care whether it was really magic or tachyon particle displacement theory, so long as it worked.

He was careful, of course. Use a trick too often and people start figuring out how to beat it So he only used it on objects that were especially worth protecting, like for instance, the Orb of the Whangdoodle.

The trick worked, all right. If anyone anywhere so much as breathed the Orb’s name, two seconds later Sal Carmine would be there with a fully armed battle cruiser. This usually discouraged people talking about it.

He was unpleasantly surprised when he learned that someone had broken onto the casino starship��Charlotte’s Moon��intending to make off with the Orb. There was only one response. Blasting the starship itself into atoms, while unfortunate, would also deal with the upstarts who thought they could steal his stuff.

The starship reeled across the bridge’s viewscreen. Sal coldly watched it go. ��All at once his first officer, a water vole of considerable criminal enterprise, approached him��with��a distressing report. It seemed someone had gotten aboard the��ship. Sal nearly shot the water vole out of irritation, but thought better of it. Reliable associates were hard to come by, lately. Instead he turned to the viewscreen and punched in a command. To his astonishment, he saw a figure he recognized. Sal almost smiled.

***

Mr. Stamper had a very simple plan: blow up the ship. A grenade in the engine room, a big kaboom, a warp core breach, and that would be that.

Unfortunately the battle cruiser came equipped with top of the line internal teleporters. Energies flared around him. Quite suddenly he was on the bridge, whether he wanted to be there or not.

Sal Carmine rose from the captain’s chair. “Mr. Stamper,” he said. “Let’s be reasonable about this affair. We’re otters of sense, you and I.”

“Reasonable,” Mr. Stamper said. “You killed Natasha. Blew up her moon. That sound reasonable to you?”

“Which moon was that? In the course of business…you understand…��nothing personal���”

Mr. Stamper glared. “Luca Three.”

Sal Carmine blinked. Several pieces came together. He turned to his water vole, and spoke a rapid sentence. The vole slid a data chip into a computer, and a picture flashed across the viewscreen.

It looked like her. So much so that Mr. Stamper almost believed it was. But… he knew that spaceport. She had never been there. Not with him. And she didn’t like Swirling Supernovas, she’d said so. “Who…”

“Mr. Stamper, perhaps you know my daughter, Bianca.”

“Your daughter.”

He didn’t know what to do. It was her. He knew her. More than any other otter in the universe, he knew her. Apparently, however, he hadn���t known her at all.

This story is part of the Angel and the Space Otter serial. Thanks for reading!

MagnaPig, MagnaPig, Does Whatever a MagnaPig Does

Doyle, the��consummate burglar, had thoroughly scoped the place. No alarms, no dogs. Just a mom and dad, a kid, her insect collection, her guinea pig. Easy.

He got as far as the yard. Then, something tiny and squeaky blurred in his peripheral vision. ��

The police never did find out how all those wind chimes had been crammed��into such a painful place.

But Quicksilver knew.

This story was written for the Grammar Ghoul Press Chimera 66 prompt. Credit for Quicksilver the Amazing Magnetic Guinea Pig goes to EagleAye and his own entry for the Chimera 66 prompt, “Never Leave Him Behind.” EagleAye suggested that Quicksilver might be a good pet for Gaseous Girl. I quite agree, and appreciate his permission to use the character. I expect we’ll be seeing more of Quicksilver. :D