Michael S. Atkinson's Blog, page 46

End

This story was written for Trifecta’s weekend prompt, which was to write thirty-three words with a color in them. For some reason, I went serious this time. Never can tell where the muse will go….

Sirens wailed. Words lanced across her screen. She hadn’t thought the order possible. She had hoped…but…they were coming. She pushed the button, then closed her eyes, as her world went white.

Charming

This story was written for Trifecta’s weekly prompt, and continues the saga of the Third Little Pig.

Prince Evinrude, of House Charming, just couldn’t let it go. Once he had told the Third Little Pig about the secret dungeon in his mother’s castle, he ought to have let the matter rest. But then it occurred to him that the dungeon might very well contain objects of magical power, and he didn’t want a vigilante pig getting its hands on them (so to speak).

He was not entirely surprised to find that the dungeon door had been blown open. “I wonder how he did it?” Evinrude mused absently as he stepped through. Then he was really surprised.

The Third Little Pig stood warily before the glowing figure of a woman who seemed very much upset. She seemed to be in the middle of a speech, but then she caught sight of him. “You!” she howled. “I know you! I’ve seen you in my dreams! You’re supposed to be True Love’s Kisser, but you never arrived! I’ve been waiting a hundred years!”

Evinrude rolled his eyes. “Oh, dear. You’re what’s her name, the girl from that enchanted castle who’s fallen asleep and needs someone to wake her up. First point, I’m trying to run a kingdom since my mother’s gone missing; I don’t have time to go waking up enchanted princesses everywhere. Second point, I’m already engaged. Princess Amaryllis, from the Marian Islands. She wouldn’t like it if I started kissing random women everywhere. Oh, now don’t look so offended; it’s not personal. And…you’re turning into a snake. Honestly. You do know that went out with Aladdin?”

“I don’t think she cares,” the Third Little Pig said, as Aurora’s misty form swirled into a very solid, very large serpent. “You don’t know how to charm this thing, do you?”

“Er, no, but I know someone who does. I’ll just go and fetch him, shall I?” With that, Evinrude practically took to his royal heels, leaving the Third Little Pig alone to face the gigantic Aurora-snake.

“Princes,” the pig grumbled. “Oy.”

E is for Ewokington, and Overly Enthusiastic Fairies

Last time in the Catrina Chronicles, our heroine had finally fulfilled her quest to retrieve Mlrning (the Shovel of Thor!), defeating her brother Edmund and his horde of C-monsters in the process, and saving Asgard and the rest of the 21st-century world. Meanwhile, back in her proper 12th century, her royal consort Perry was having difficulties of his own. Specifically, he’d become a very large, very upset bear…

Ewokington wasn’t on anybody’s map. Even the great map of the whole kingdom that was hung up specially in the royal library of Shmirmingard Castle only showed Ewokington as a little dot without a name, a microscopic smudge in a bend of the Sticky Bun River. Ewokington had never been invaded, never been considered as a strategic military point, never been discussed as a great center of commerce. It didn’t even have a castle; the closest thing to it was the estate of the It was just the way the Yellow Fairy liked it.

She had been living there for a century or two, ever since that disastrous incident involving Princess Ermingard. She’d averted the curse of the chamber pot placed on the princess by the evil enchantress as best she could, making sure Ermingard would only go off for a short nap instead of going all the way dead. She’d even thrown in the bit about how Ermingard would be awakened by True Love’s Kiss. How was she to know that Prince Roderick would go off and marry some random girl he’d met in the woods, abandoning his duty as True Love’s Kisser? It had nearly led to war between Roderick’s father and Ermingard’s father. In the end, the Yellow Fairy had been forced to resign her post, and she’d gone into hiding ever since. No one ever came to visit her. She moved from small village to smaller village, staying just long enough until the villagers started to wonder about her longevity, then she would fake her death and quietly move on. The Yellow Fairy was getting to be rather good at this. She’d so far pretended to be run over by a rabid cow, struck by a flour barrel falling out of nowhere, eaten by a roving pack of marmosets, and squished by a careless giant. She’d been in Ewokington for forty years now, and people were beginning to talk. It was nearly time to disappear again. “Hm,” the Yellow Fairy wondered aloud, as her tea kettle hissed at her. “I wonder what I should die of this time?”

It was at that moment that she heard a sudden pounding and snuffling at the door. The Yellow Fairy peeked out her window, naturally wary of unknown visitors late at night, especially when they snuffled. To her surprise, standing there on her doorstep was a great brown bultitude of a bear, sucking on one paw. The Yellow Fairy was, needless to say, a bit startled. It wasn’t every day one had a bear on one’s doorstep.

She pulled out her wand, just in case, and tapped it to make sure it still worked. A few shiny sparkles came from one end. She’d never been quite satisfied with her wand, and wondered sometimes if it was defective; it would be just her luck to get a wand that wasn’t right. For the hundredth time, she made a mental note to take it back to the wand-makers’ shop and complain. Meanwhile, it was the best she had. Wand in hand, she unlocked her door and confronted the bear. “Right, you,” she said, “what in heaven’s name do you want?”

The bear snuffled again. It looked very confused and distressed, and the Yellow Fairy sensed that something wasn’t quite right about it. It didn’t seem like a normal bear. A normal bear wouldn’t have come right up to her cottage door, for one thing. “Oh dearie me,” she said, “you’re enchanted, aren’t you? You’ve got yourself under a spell or something that made you a bear. Oh dear, oh dear.”

It nodded earnestly. The Yellow Fairy wondered who it was. She hadn’t heard that anyone had gone missing. Usually people who’d got themselves turned into animals turned out to be long-lost princes, but there weren’t any princes around to get lost in the first place. The kingdom had a princess of course, Catrina, and she did have a consort, but so far as the Yellow Fairy knew, he was still back in Shmirmingard. She’d heard odd rumors away up north, near Shmirmingard, something about an army let by Utgarda-Loki that had come to attack the castle, but it seemed they’d all gone away again, wherever they had come from. She couldn’t make anything out of that. “You’re not,” she asked hesitantly, “the Princess’s consort, are you? The Lord, ah, what’s his name, Perry, I think?”

The bear nodded again, even more enthusiastically, and the Yellow Fairy gasped. She’d gotten lonely over the past hundred years, and would’ve liked a friendly visitor or two for tea, but she had never expected to receive the enchanted royal consort, particularly as a bear. At any rate, there was clearly one thing to do. “Right,” she said, tapping her wand, “I’ll have you turned back in a jiffy. Stand straight, please. Don’t look so worried; I’m a professional. Now then. Wibbity, wobbity, w00!”

There was a flash of yellow light. The bear didn’t change; it only stood disconsolately on the path outside her cottage. A flower next to the path, however, gave a sudden delighted squeak, leaped out of its flowerpot, and scuttled away, chirping, “I’m free! I’m free!”

“Oh dear,” said the Yellow Fairy. “I must have misfired. Let me try again.”  She raised the wand, and waved it about in a complicated pattern that looked like the unholy love child of a triangle and a parallelogram. “Shazam! Wibbity! Woo!”

This time the bush on the opposite side of the path burst into a spray of fireworks that shot into the sky and disappeared in bright blooms of color. The Yellow Fairy was beginning to get irritated. “Blasted wand, never does what you want it to,” she grumbled, rolling up her sleeves. “Ah, well, third time pays for all.”

The bear made a series of nervous gestures with its paws. It meant to convey that it really appreciated her effort, but didn’t want to trouble her any further, and it was actually quite happy being a bear for the present, and so it was just going to go away and come back another time. Unfortunately, the Yellow Fairy mistook its gestures for encouraging signs. “That’s the spirit, keep your chin up, and never say die!” she said. “Well, then, on the count of three: one, two, thr-”

But she never got the chance to try a third time.

To be continued…

 

….

This has been another episode of the Catrina Chronicles. For previous episodes, go here. For my Amazon author page where you can find two full-length stories with Catrina in them, go here. And, as always, thanks for reading!

Ah, L’amour

This was written for Trifecta’s weekend prompt, which was to use the words “water”, “ring”, and “stage”, plus thirty of our own. Roll film!

“Charlotte? I’ve got the ring.”

“Not now, Phil. I’m about to stage a Water Elf attack with my guild, and…wait. What?”

“Will you?”

“YES.”

*Smerp*.

…

…

“Your water elves are attacking.”

“Let ‘em.”

Beauty?

This story was written for this week’s Trifecta prompt, and follows on in my Third Little Pig story. Enjoy!

The Third Little Pig pelted hard down the corridor, the fluffy undead horde of zombie penguins streaming behind him. Then a sudden thought pushed into his mind. The Queen’s castle was in a temperate zone, nowhere near Antarctica. How on earth had penguins gotten here?

With swift logic, he reached a rapid conclusion. The Third Little Pig stopped in his tracks, spun about, and faced the zombie penguins head-on. They hurtled towards him, waddling ominously and clicking their beaks, and he steeled himself for the worst. And then….they weren’t there. He was alone in the corridor.

“I knew it,” he growled, and ran back to the dungeon. It was entirely empty, except for the cauldron he had seen before. “Right,” he called out. “I know you’re in here somewhere, Aurora. Show yourself.”

Nothing happened at first. Then, out of a crack in the old cauldron’s side, a thin plume of white smoke issued. It collected into the form of a young woman, blonde and violet-eyed, wearing a pink ball gown. “So you found me,” she said. “Huzzah.”

“Zombie penguins. What corner of your insane mind did you pull that from?”

“You have no idea,” Aurora said coldly, “what my mind is like. No one ever did. The fairies packed me off to sleep thinking it’d be better than dying. Yeah, sure. The first few days, maybe. But I’ve been sleeping, dreaming, for a hundred years. Not happy dreams. Not daydreams. Dreams. Do you have any idea what that’s like?” Her voice was rising into a scream.

“So you figured out how to push your dreams on other people, is that it?” the Third Little Pig said.

“Not immediately. It took me ages to learn to manifest my spirit outside me. Then I had to get in the mirror, and convince the Queen to kill off Snow. But now, with her death, I can do anything.” Aurora’s eyes blazed. “And now, I think, I shall deal with you, you meddling little swine!”

D is for Denoument

Last time in the Catrina Chronicles, our heroine was about to be eaten by a whole horde of vengeful C-monsters from Character Hell….

“Oh,” declaimed Catrina dramatically, “what a dolorous day, despite being destined in a dubious and desperate dare to descry the digging doohickey of the deity denoted as Thor, doubtless I am doomed to be devoured until dead by a deluge of dreadfully demented and discontented demons, dragged into depths of desuetude and darkest despair! Darn, what doleful denouement for a defenseless damsel in deepest distress! In short, this stinks, and you can call me C.”

There was no one nearby to ask if she was a crazy person other than the aforementioned demons of Character Hell, and they didn’t much care if she were crazy or not, only tasty. Catrina didn’t think she was at all good to eat, being fairly high in cholesterol and carbs, and she wouldn’t have wanted to cause any of the demons health problems. So she screwed up her courage, planted her boots on the hard rock of the lava river’s shore, gripped her Sporksaber in one hand and Mlrning in the other, and tried to work out how she could use them to smash all those demons before they could get to her.

The horde of chupacabras and chimeras and catoblepases (catoblepi?) and most especially the dread Cthulhu surged towards her in a wave of fangs and tentacles. Then, suddenly, her shoulder-attorney winked primly into existence on her shoulder. “Excuse me!” it called above the din. “Don’t you know you’re all supposed to attack one by one?”

The horde paused in some confusion. What? boomed Cthulhu in a voice dripping with primordial terror and unspeakable evil.

Catrina’s shoulder attorney quivered. It wasn’t every day one had to engage in an oral argument with Cthulhu. She hadn’t even done that in moot court. “Erm. It’s part of the Code of Story Characters. You’re legally obliged to attack my client one by one. If you all attack her at once, either you win and the story’s over prematurely, or you get tangled up in confusion, and she escapes. It’s…it’s more fair this way.”

You have a point, rumbled Cthulhu. Very well, insignificant worm. We will attack one by one.

“Oh good,” the shoulder attorney said.

I shall go first.

“Thanks a lot,” Catrina said to her terrified shoulder attorney.  

Cthulhu’s slimy tentacles slithered towards her. You will soon be driven mad by your feeble attempts to comprehend me. And then I will devour your soul. I look forward to it. You have done murder of an alien blob, and destroyed an entire world through an apocalypse. Your soul will be very tasty indeed.

But just then the dread alien entity was distracted as the pack of chupacabras made a furious protest. It turned out that they wanted to be the first to attack Catrina. As the C-monsters fell to arguing about it,  a sudden wild thought sprang into Catrina’s mind, sparked by Cthulhu’s mention of her prior sins. She rounded upon her shoulder attorney and whispered hasty instructions. The shoulder attorney hesitated. “Are you certain? This isn’t exactly professionally responsible-”

“Go!” Catrina said, as the C-monsters decided to settle the dispute by a method honored from time immemorial. Rock-Paper-Scissors. The other monsters fell back to a respectful distance, as the chupacabras selected a representative in the game. Cthulhu, of course, needed no representative.

The chupacabra deputy and the dread cosmic entity stared at each other. The first throw. Cthulhu’s mighty tentacle whipped into Rock, while the chupacabra went for Scissors. Cthulhu rumbled in terrifying laughter; the chupacabra pack whispered nervously amongst themselves.

“C’mon,” Catrina whispered, looking anxiously at the black sky above them, “C’mon, c’mon….”

Second throw. Cthulhu went for Rock again; only this time the chupacabra had gone with Paper. The chupacabras cheered wildly, and Cthulhu looked very unhappy. He rumbled something about dreaming in his house in somewhere Catrina didn’t quite catch. She guessed he wasn’t making a reference to Sleeping Beauty.

Time for the final throw. She could practically see the chupacabra’s mind going. If Cthulhu threw Rock again, obviously the chupacabra should throw Paper, and win. But Cthulhu had thrown Rock twice already; suppose it went for Scissors this time. If it did, it would beat Paper, and win. Therefore, the chupacabra should throw Rock in order to beat Scissors. But suppose Cthulhu thought that the chupacabra would think that Chtulhu would throw Scissors, and decided to go Paper instead; that would mean the chupacabra would lose if it threw Rock, so instead it should throw Scissors. But if Cthulhu thought that the chupacabra was thinking that Cthulhu was thinking that the chupacabra was thinking that Cthulhu would throw Scissors, and decided to throw Rock for a third time…..the poor chupacabra went mad from the revelation and had to be replaced by a substitute deputy.

Catrina heard a very faint buzzing in the air. Lights flashed in the glowering sky. For the first time in a long while, she smiled. It started on one side of her face and spread across, like a dawning sun.

The two C-monsters didn’t notice. The replacement chupacabra betted on predictability and threw Paper. But Cthulhu, being pure chaotic evil, threw Scissors. It gurgled thunderously on realizing that it had won, and turned to face Catrina. Now I will devour your s-

A plasma beam as big around as a small tree slammed into Cthulhu, knocking it back in a spray of slime. Even as it began to reform, more laser blasts tore into it and the rest of the C-monster horde. A swarm of beetle-shaped battle cruisers blazed in from the atmosphere.  “I’d be delighted to let you devour me,” Catrina said, smiling fiercely, “but it seems the Zarminnan Community wants me first. I killed their alien blob deity, you know. They’re very upset about it!”

Indeed the alien bugs were, and they weren’t about to let a bunch of C-monsters devour the Earthling who’d killed their god; they wanted to drag her back to be properly executed by laser rifle. The C-monsters, Cthulhu howling at their head, rallied. Mighty tentacles smashed Beetle-cruisers from the sky, and many a Zarminnan went screaming insane that day. Meanwhile, while everybody fought about who was going to be the first to bump off Catrina, Catrina herself made straight for Edmund.

The Prince of Character Hell saw her coming, Mlrning held high, and backed rapidly away. “Now, now, dear sister, let’s let bygones by bygones, shall we? I mean, I admit our relationship has been a bit, ah, rocky, we may have had a few misunderstandings-.”

“Misunderstandings?” Catrina said, eyes blazing in fury. “You tried to throw me to Cthulhu. You tricked me into destroying the world. That’s a bit more than a misunderstanding, wouldn’t you say?”

Edmund suddenly found that he could back up no more. He stood right on the edge of a cliff overlooking the river of lava that flowed outside the gates of Character Hell. He swore to find out whoever had designed this place and execute them with dispatch, but suddenly the blade of Mlrning was against his throat. One slight push from Catrina, and he would fall right in, probably vaporized before he even touched the lava by the sheer heat emanating from it.

Catrina wanted to make that push. She really did. She knew that heroines and heroes weren’t supposed to want that; whenever they had their worst enemy trapped on the edge of a cliff, they were supposed to relent, not push them over, and instead let them go quietly. The Beast had done that (and got stabbed for it), Simba had done that (and then Scar had jumped him from behind)….come to think of it, that policy hadn’t entirely worked out. Catrina was about to run through a quick ethical debate about sparing Edmund when he would almost certainly turn on her or pushing him over and thus possibly turning her to the dark side ala Anakin Skywalker’s murder of Count Dooku, when a stray laser bolt from one of the Beetle-cruisers zinged in and solved the problem for her by sending Edmund flying off the cliffside, right into the lava.  “Oh,” Catrina said, as Edmund’s last scream echoed in her ears. “Well. How helpful.”

She thought about staying to bravely challenge her enemies, but considering how many of them there were, and that one of them was Cthulhu, she prudently decided that discretion was the better part of valor. She was about to fly away when she suddenly noticed a smear of mud on the ground. The mud had apparently been on Edmund’s boot all this time,  and then fallen off when he’d been hit by the laser blast. Catrina rolled her eyes; he’d always been untidy. Never even bothered to clean his boots…..and then suddenly it hit her. Mud was merely wet dirt. That dirt was Earth dirt. And with that dirt, and with Mlrning….quickly she bent down and gathered the mud into her hand. Then she raised Mlrning high. “Take me back to the ocean!” she cried, and in a flash she was gone, leaving the Lovecraftian monsters and the space-age alien bugs furiously squabbling behind her.

Back up top, the derphins had swum unhappily away, leaving Catrina’s raft to bob about on its own, untended. Catrina dropped in, landing smack on it. She wasn’t entirely sure what to do next, but then she decided to let Mlrning work it out. She threw the mud into the air and struck at it with the Shovel of Thor. There was a blinding green flash and a crack of thunder. Catrina’s raft shattered underneath her feet and she tumbled towards the water and-

And landed on soft grass instead. She looked up quickly. Shining golden walls surrounded her. Stars twinkled in the distance. Asgard was back. Everything was back!

A golden light flared on her shoulder, and materialized into a tiny angel beaming with joy. “Hooray!” it squeaked. “You saved the Earth! And Asgard, and everything!”

Catrina breathed a long sigh of relief. “Right. I think I’m resigning from the job of reversing apocalypses now. I just want to go home. Mlrning?”

The Shovel of Thor moved in her hand, and whisked her away into the sunlit sky. And so, her shoulder angel and everyone else restored, and her evil brother defeated, she lived happily ever after. Except for her consort being a were-bear. That she didn’t find out about until she got back. What happened then, and how he got turned back into an ordinary person instead of a were-bear, is a matter for another story.

This has been the concluding episode of the Quest for Mlrning story arc, but don’t worry; as mentioned above, I’ve got another story arc planned. Actually, I’ve got at least three. So, stay tuned! For previous episodes, go here. For my Amazon author page where you can find two stories starring Catrina, plus a story that doesn’t have her in it but does have a volcano spirit, go here. And, as always, thanks for reading!

NaNoWriMo 2013

Yes, I know NaNoWriMo occurs in November every year, not July (except for the Camp NaNoWriMo thing they have going, which sounds like a good deal of fun but unfortunately my July is packed right now with various law-school-career-things). And November is a good ways off. But I did a post last year when I realized what my Nano-novel would be, and although I varied a bit (I never did use that opening line about the exploding soccer balls, but I will someday, I promise), I still stuck with the same idea. So, now that I do know what my NaNo-novel of 2013 will be, I figured I should go ahead and post it, to immortalize it for posterity.

So, basically, it was inspired by this CNN article about the top ten most misheard songs.  I have some personal experience with this concept. I watched The Princess Diaries once (I thought the political implications were interesting, and Hector Elizondo is a cool actor who voiced Bane once. Don’t judge me), and for the life of me, I swore at the beach party scene that Mandy Moore was singing a song about “Scooby cubie, you’re a roomie guy…”  Turns out it was “Stupid Cupid, you’re a real mean guy.” Go figure.

Anyway. One of the songs often misheard, according to CNN, was TLC’s “Waterfalls”.  The actual lyric is “Don’t go chasing waterfalls”. Apparently a lot of people misheard that as, “Don’t go, Jason Waterfalls.”

It occurred to me that Jason Waterfalls sounds like the name of a Bond-type secret agent. And suddenly, the following scene just wrote itself in my head.

“But…but Jason, I thought…I thought we had something.”
“Sorry, my dear Blue Berimuffin, but I’ve got to run. Dr. What is firing up the trans-matrix laser in thirty minutes. He’ll destroy the world. Bad form, that.”
“No! Don’t go, Jason Waterfalls!”

This has the added advantage of introducing some sort of love triangle. Because apparently love triangles are what sells these days. (See: The Hunger Games. See also: Twilight).  And as James Bond said to Elliot Carver in “Tomorrow Never Dies”, “Give the people what they want!”

So there you have it. Last year’s NaNo was superheroes. This year: Waterfalls. Jason Waterfalls. *cue dramatic music*.

Process

This weekend’s Trifecta prompt was to describe our writing process in three words. This is rather hard to do. I had one idea, but then I decided that zombie-penguinification isn’t really a proper word (though obviously it should be). So here’s a more realistic portrayal of what my wirting process is like.

“Muse! SPEAK!”

…

“No.”

 

Fly, You Fool

This story was written for Trifecta’s weekly prompt, and follows on in the tale of the Third Little Pig. Roll film!

The dungeon door looked like every other dungeon door the Third Little Pig had seen (he’d seen a surprising amount for a pig of his years).  The difference was, this one didn’t have a keyhole visible anywhere. It seemed Prince Evinrude had been right; this door was one of those blasted magical doors that only opened if you said the right word.

The Third Little Pig looked closer, raising his lantern to shed its full light on the door. At a certain angle, he could just make out spidery letters in silver. They spelled out one single word. Fly.

He pulled a dictionary from his pack and consulted it swiftly. The word could be literal, of course; perhaps one just had to say “Fly” aloud and the door would open. But then, no one would be so daft as to write the secret password plain on the door for all to see.

So. One definition of fly was to move in or pass through the air with wings. But he was well underground, and pigs couldn’t fly anyway. A second definition was to fade and disappear. He couldn’t see how turning invisible could help. Then there was the third meaning. He could fly into a fury, perhaps. But how would a show of extreme emotion open the door?

Finally, he decided to skip the magic and the dictionary altogether and try something more practical. In his travels he had spent some time in China. Secret words had nothing on a judicious application of gunpowder.

The door blew open. He stepped through. Inside, next to an empty black cauldron, lay a crowd of fluffy bodies. Penguin bodies. Then, horribly, they began to move.  They lurched, squawking, straight at him. Then he knew what “fly” really meant. It hadn’t been a password or instruction. It had been a warning.  Fly, as in, to flee or escape from.

As the zombie penguins closed in, the Third Little Pig wished he’d read further on in his dictionary.

C is for C-Monsters

Last time, in the Catrina Chronicles, our heroine had finally managed to unlock the power of Mlrning, the Shovel of Thor, thanks to the heroic sacrifice of her shoulder angel. Now she’s flying off to Character Heaven in order to retrieve her fallen manifestation of her conscience….

Wind whipped in Catrina’s face as the Shovel of Thor rocketed into the sky. She clung fiercely to its rune-emblazoned handle, wishing that it had one of those t-shaped holders at the end that shovels often did. If she lost her grip, well, it was a very, very long way down. She risked a glance to see just how far down it was, and was startled to see the entire planet itself receding into space below her, like a shiny blue marble on a black rug. “Oh dear,” Catrina said. Of course, she shouldn’t have been able to say anything, as she was now well into the void of outer space, but if Superman can breathe in space, so can Catrina.

Stars shone cold and bright in the distance. All of a sudden they all winked out, and the Earth went with it, and Catrina found herself racing through a long dark tunnel, with a tiny gleam of light at the end. She was very curious to know how one got to Character Heaven; she’d only been there once, after her first death (but not her last, sadly) in the Zombie Penguin Apocalypse, and she didn’t remember too much about the way. So far it all seemed fairly standard. Long dark tunnel, tiny gleam of light at the end…she assumed that once she emerged, she’d meet St. Peter at the Pearly Gates, and then she could explain her mission and everything would be fine.  But suddenly the tiny gleam of light changed, from heavenly golden to a blaze of red and green, and Catrina, to her utter astonishment, began to hear a jingling of bells.

She came to a bumpy halt on a puff of white cloud. Before her, in shining red and white, towered gates that very much looked like they were made out of candy cane. Pine trees, glittering in ornaments, rose from the clouds around her. A wide, gurgling brown river flowed before her. A delicious smell rose to meet her in a wave,  and Catrina realized in blank amazement that the river was made of chocolate. She could even see little marshmallows bobbing along in the current.

There wasn’t a bridge anywhere, but Catrina made a move with the Shovel, and she found herself skimming across the surface of the chocolate river. Then she was across. Before her, at a wide desk covered in papers and the occasional child’s toy, sat a man in a bright red suit fringed with gold, with a white beard that flowed down across his ample waistline. Catrina recognized him at once. “You…you’re Santa Claus!”

“Close, but not entire,” said the man, giving a tremendously jolly laugh. “I’m St. Nicholas, the very first Santa. Since me there have been many people who’ve held the office of Santa Claus. I believe the person holding it now is a time-traveling were-bear from the 12th century!”

Catrina was about to object that her sidekick (and lawfully wedded consort) wasn’t a were-bear at all (a fact about which she was slightly mistaken, but St. Nicholas had moved swiftly on. “It is my task to guard the gates of Character Heaven, only admitting those who were heroes in their stories. The villains, of course, go Down Below.”

She shuddered, knowing well the terrible place he referred to. “Well now,” St. Nicholas said, “What is your name, my dear?” He peered expectantly at her through his spectacles.

Under the circumstances, Catrina momentarily considered lying, but then she decided that, whatever else she had done, she couldn’t lie to the first Santa Claus. “I’m Catrina,” she said, “Daughter of Montgomery, Princess of Shmirmingard,” She had one or two other titles, but St. Nicholas’ beaming smile had turned into a frown. He rummaged about on his desk, and held up a paper that bore the heading, “Naughty List”. Catrina’s name was right at the top.

“Oh, dear,” he said sadly, “Letting loose a dragon, starting Ragnarok, and destroying the world. That’s very bad. Very bad indeed.”

“I don’t suppose you could check it twice?”

“I’m sorry,” St. Nicholas said, making a mark on the list, “but I’m afraid you can’t enter into Character Heaven.”

With that, the clouds opened underneath Catrina’s boots, and she dropped suddenly into the dark.

She landed in an entirely different place than she had been. Instead of fluffy white clouds, the ground underneath was scarred black volcanic rock. Instead of a chocolate river, an angry red stream of lava boiled its way past her. Instead of candy-cane gates, the wall that towered before her was hard iron. Catrina shivered. She was about to try leaving when the gates swung open. Edmund stood there, smiling like a predatory piranha. “Hello, darling sister,” he said. “I’ve been waiting for this a good long while.”

“I’ll bet,” Catrina snapped. “You never got over being forgotten after the first episode, did you? Spoiled twit!”

“Spoiled?” Edmund said. “Me? Need I remind you that you’re the one who’s had your name on these stupid Chronicles from day one? You’re the one whose author keeps bringing her back for no good reason? You think you’re beyond death now, don’t you? You’ll just keep getting resurrected, just like the Zombie Penguin Apocalypse, and the magenta ghost episode, and Murphy the Terrible. Well. Not anymore.”

Catrina raised the Shovel, intending to fly away again as she had before, but suddenly there was a tremendous boom from behind her. A massive three-headed dog stamped its gigantic paw on the ground and growled menacingly. “Ah, you’ve met Cerberus!” Edmund said, snark filling his voice. “And you’ll notice that very large creature over there, the one with the body of a buffalo and the head of a wild boar, that would be the Catoblepas. It’s good for you the beast’s looking down; if you get caught in its gaze you either turn to stone or die. And over there, that’s a whole pack of chupacabras, and they’re fresh out of goat. And then there’s my personal favorite, that thing that looks like an octopus gone terrible wrong, that would be the dread C’thulhu. You see, I’ve got a whole horde of C-monsters just waiting to get a bit of you, like a pack of toddlers after a plate of cookies; my only dilemma is which one to throw you to first!”

Catrina didn’t much appreciate being compared to a cookie by her Joffreyan snot of a brother; on the other hand, she had a few more problems to deal with just now. Mlrning was a fairly powerful weapon, she knew, but could even the mighty Shovel of Thor get her out of this? Fighting Cerberus alone would be a big do, and then there were the chupacabras and the catoblepas, and she was pretty sure she’d seen a chimera that Edmund had forgotten to mention, and then after all that, there was the primeval terror of C’thulhu. The princess wasn’t given to unprincess-like language, but this certainly seemed the place for it. “Oh….crap,” Catrina said, bracing herself, as the horde of C-monsters lurched towards her.

This has been another episode of the Catrina Chronicles. Be sure and tune in next week to see if our heroine survives. For previous episodes, go here. For my author page on Amazon, where you can get Catrina in Space, plus my new Volcano Rain story (which you can actually get free starting tomorrow through the end of Thursday, go here. And as always, thanks for reading!