💾 Archived View for gemini.spam.works › mirrors › textfiles › magazines › TWILIGHTWORLD › twilight.w… captured on 2022-06-12 at 14:52:41.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
= TWILIGHT WORLD - Volume 3 Issue 4 (July 22nd 1995) ========================
(On the birthday of Jason Becker, guitar talent extraordinaire bereft of his
talents by a muscle-crippling disease)
You can do anything with this magazine as long as it remains intact. All
stories in it are fiction. No actual persons are designated by name or
character and similarity is coincidental.
This magazine is for free. Get it as cheaply as possible!
Please refer to the end of this file for further information.
= LIST OF CONTENTS ==========================================================
EDITORIAL
by Richard Karsmakers
CRONOS IN WONDERLAND
by Richard Karsmakers
= EDITORIAL =================================================================
by Richard Karsmakers
On the birthday of Jason Becker, to whom this issue is dedicated with all
the best hope in the world, is released "Twilight World" Volume 3 Issue 3,
the 13th issue in total so far.
The reason why I started "Twilight World" back in April 1993 was that I
wanted to release some of my own stories that I had written in 1992 and 1993,
stories that I was myself sortof pleased with. Because they had some
references to earlier Cronos Warchild material, I thought it proper to first
do all other Cronos Warchild stories (1988-1992). Well, the last of those was
released in the previous issue, so as of this issue the magazine should be a
bit better (at least *I* think it's a bit better now). So this issue has only
one entry: A rather large story called "Cronos' rather zarjaz Adventures in
Wonderland", the first (and longest) of a few long-ish ones I've written so
far.
As usual, I hope you'll like reading it. If you're a publisher's talent
scout, er, have I already told you you're wearing a rather splendid
tie/dress?
So spread the word, and the file, and have fun reading!
Richard Karsmakers
(Editor)
P.S. If you no longer want to receive "Twilight World", *please*
unsubscribe; don't let me wait for the messages to bounce instead,
totally flooding my email box! This especially goes for people on
AOL, about 1 out of every 5 direct subscribers.
= CRONOS' RATHER ZARJAZ ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND ============================
by Richard Karsmakers
The Lewis Carroll inspiration is a bit blatant, of course, but it's really a
tribute to this man and his awesome imagination. Acquaintance with both the
original "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and the earlier Cronos Warchild
stories might not be a prerequisitite, but is advised nonetheless.
The whole has had some Monty Python, Bill'n'Ted's, Noam Chomsky, Douglas
Adams, Urbanus and Terry Pratchett influences thrown in for good accord.
I - DOWN THE KANGAROO CAVITY
Cronos was beginning to get very tired of sitting by a bozo on the bank, and
of having nothing to do; once or twice he had glanced at the newspaper the
bum used to wrap a bottle of liquor in, but the pictures were faded and the
text was written in a language that didn't make any sense to him.
So he was considering in his own mind (as well as he could, for he was
getting slightly sleepy and his mind wasn't particularly famous for
considering things) whether the pleasure of killing the drunk with one of his
recently acquired killer gadgets was worth the trouble of taking the thing
out of his pocket in the first place when rather suddenly a White Kangaroo
with pink eyes ran close by him.
Cronos wasn't particularly surprised of the fact that it ran so close by
him, nor of hearing the Kangaroo say to itself, "Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be
too late!" It hopped by him at rather astounding speed, then stopped.
Panting, its chest heaving and dropping faster than it should, it fumbled in
its pouch and retrieved from it a pocket watch that had a piece of broken
chain attached to it. Now Cronos was getting surprised, gradually - he had
never seen a Kangaroo that could speak, nor one that seemed to be able to
check the time on a pocket watch he had never seen any Kangaroo walking
around with before. Actually, he had never seen a Kangaroo in all his life -
but that's trivial.
Before Warchild managed to get to his feet, the Kangaroo had continued
running in the approximate direction it had been moving before. Then, without
much ado, it disappeared in a hole beneath a tree.
Cronos followed the track, surprised at the fact that such a large animal
seemed to have disappeared in such a small hole. Even though he himself was
even bigger than the Kangaroo, his mind got the absurd idea to follow the
animal into the hole - which was evidently even much smaller to him. Our dear
mercenary annex hired gun, however, had never been one of high reknown
throughout the universe because of his intelligence - therefore he wasn't
even surprised when he found himself managing to get through the hole and
into a tunnel that dipped downward rather all of a sudden.
He fell for a long time - a time that seemed long enough even for Cronos to
be able to calculate the square root of 2456.23. He rotated and bumped, got
tossed around by branches that stuck out, got nauseated by the smell of earth
and the crawling creatures that probably lived in it. He closed his eyes to
the overkill of his senses and for a moment he thought he saw the Kangaroo
again. It changed into a pink ant. For a brief instant of time there was a
smell of honey. He continued to fall. He was beginning to wonder if he'd end
up on the other side of the world - Australia perhaps, or Norway or Cuba -
when thump! thump! down he came upon a giant heap of sticks and dry leaves
and the fall was over.
Already Cronos had quite forgotten what had happened. He looked around him,
dazed and confused, finding himself at the beginning, or end, of a long
passage at the other end of which, just where it started to fade away in the
distance, he saw the White Kangaroo hopping off. Engaging his highly trained
mercenary muscles, he dashed after the marsupial (only he didn't quite know
he was chasing a marsupial, of course). He was getting close enough to hear
it say, "Oh my ears and pouch, how late it's getting", when it suddenly
turned a corner that seemed as if it hadn't been there before. He could
already smell it, virtually touch its tail when it had turned around that
corner. However, when he turned the corner himself the Kangaroo was no longer
to be seen.
He cursed a long sequence of miscellaneous words he guessed held some rude
meaning, then started wondering about the place he was in. It was a hall of
considerable height. As a matter of fact he could not see the ceiling - only
the lamps that hung down from it.
When he looked around him, all he could see were walls with doors in them.
He checked the doors instinctively, probing them for the likelihood of hiding
trained assassins that might leap at him during a careless microsecond. All
of them were locked, however. Peeping through the lock holes, he saw nothing
but a rather intense sort of blackness that made him feel giddy for a while -
the kind of blackness that is so black it seems to carry with it endless
depth and infinite time.
How was he to get out of this wretched place? The doors all seemed fairly
solid - his razor-sharp killer finger nail was no match for them for certain.
He tried his American Express credit card but it didn't quite work out like
he had seen so often in films. It just got stuck, and when he pulled it out
it looked as if it had just been shredded by a destructive money machine. A
weird sense of claustrophobia struck him. He looked around in what he would
never admit was a desperate way (but which was nonetheless). He walked
around, at a loss of what to do.
He suddenly stumbled across a small three-legged table of solid glass which
seemed to have appeared out of nowhere. It puzzled him for a while - where
had it come from? His mind ceased puzzling within several nanoseconds,
however, in the same way it stopped puzzling soon after discovering, say, a
traffic cop after having driven through a red light with a corpse attached to
the exhaust pipe.
There was a tiny golden key located on the glass table.
It didn't take long for Cronos to put one and one (or, rather, a key and a
lot of locks) together. He snatched the key off the table rather
unceremoniously and went around the hall, trying to see whether it would fit
in any of the locks. The locks were too large or, he reckoned, the key was
too small. He felt in his pockets but there was nothing in them except for a
mostly empty bag of sticky liquorice and a killer gadget of the Telector-O-
Cute! variety. His lack of resources and the sheer magnitude of this problem
baffled him for a while, at the end of which he discovered a curtain. Behind
it he discovered a tiny door; he had to stoop to try and fit the little
golden key in its minute lock, but to his great satisfaction it fitted. The
wee door swooped open on its miniature hinges with as little sound as an ant
burping.
Behind it he saw a beautiful garden. Cronos had never really been fond of
gardens at all - he had never felt any warmth towards flowers, and he had
usually found trees useful only to stop your car against when the brakes
failed. A continuous flow of gardening programmes on English television had
once even convinced him to move to a country where you couldn't receive BBC.
But in this particular case the garden meant a place to go, freedom, the end
of this strange claustrophobic sensation that seemed to be gnawing at his
innards.
Of course there was the problem of size. He would never be able to get in.
He tried his foot, but no way. He went back to the glass table, hoping that
it might offer something to help him out of this slightly precarious
situation. He hated being able to smell something but not quite being capable
of laying his hands on it. There was still no way of getting out of this
eerie hall. He had to get out. Through that little door (which, by the way,
had closed and locked itself rather mysteriously and meticulously when he had
turned his back on it).
On the table he now discovered a pill. He looked at it conspicuously lest it
should be a poison of sorts. His mother, Adnarim the Beautiful who was at the
moment 22 million light years away from him, had always warned him against
strangers offering him ice cream and against the eating of substances of
which he did not know the origin. But, he guessed, any pill which had the
phrase "EAT ME" printed on it could not possibly be deadly - and this
particular pill, remarkably, had these precise words written on it. He put
the gold key down on the table, took the pill and tossed it in his mouth with
the aim of an inebriated retard in a public urinoir. Miraculously, however,
it landed on his tongue - as if proudly defying all laws of causality and
faculty.
If anything, the pill initially tasted slightly of ink. Within half a second
after his powerful molars ground the thing to smithereens, however, the taste
became one of tobacco icecream mixed with decayed gelding's gall - not
altogether disagreeable, Cronos concluded with some relief. After all, it
might have been raspberry.
The hall seemed to become gradually larger. The lamps which hung from the
ceiling removed themselves from him so it seemed. The doors around him became
bigger. It made him think of being locked up in the middle of a mountain in
an absurdly small room with all exits jammed by rockfalls and a ceiling full
of shiny stainless steel spikes coming down slowly - only the other way
around, in a bigger room and without any of the pointed hardware. Warchild
noticed the table growing bigger, too. As a matter of fact, the entire world
seemed to increase its size for some reason or another. He began sweating.
What if his enemies had grown, too? What if he could no longer carry with him
even his tiniest of killer gadgets because they had outgrown him?
Suddenly everything froze in mid-growth. By now Cronos reckoned, to his
considerable discomfort, that the world had at least multiplied its size by a
factor of ten. He glanced around across the almost endless stretch of
enormous tiles all around him. In one direction, however, he discovered a
door that seemed accurately built for his size - the door that had previously
been too small, the door that had had the garden behind it.
He looked up, through the transparent table top above him, way out of reach.
On it lay a golden key.
A commonly used pseudonym for the action of human multiplication passed his
lips.
There was no way to get up there. The legs of the table were smooth,
insurmountable. He had no rope and no glue. His American Express credit card
had been shredded. He might as well give up.
Even though the place where he was now stuck was about ten times as big as
it had been previously, even though he could barely see the far ends of it,
he still found an odd sensation biting relentlessly at his stomach. He
remembered, rather vividly, a girl whom he had seen but briefly and whom he
would rather never in his life see again. Painful memories struck. His ego
cowered, his arm felt a stab of agony that accompanied the memory. The
feeling in his abdomen had been the same. His desolate sense of loss and
despair likewise.
He glanced up again. The key lay there, its gold catching rays of light that
seemed to come from nowhere, hurling them at his eyes enticingly,
enchantingly, luring him. But there was no way he could reach it. He couldn't
climb the table. He could do nothing about it except for using a suppository
that lay at his feet, having appeared as if out of thin air. It had "SHOVE ME
UP YOUR ANAL MUSCLE" written on it in extremely small letters. Its sudden
apparation did not even leave him in the usual state of perplexity, not even
for the fragment of time known as a nanosecond.
As his mother had never warned him about the possibility of poisonous
suppositories he rather unceremoniously pulled down his pants and shoved the
small object where it apparently wanted to be shoved.
If his rectum would have had taste buds, damn it, it would have tasted
Brussels sprouts.
II - A SEA OF SWEAT
"Unusual and unusualer!" Cronos said to himself. He quite forgot how to
speak his mother tongue properly when he discovered his head removing itself
from his torso as if his neck was a telescope extending itself. It would be
fair to say that today was another record day in the field of bafflement
intensity, for it could certainly be claimed that he had never been this
flummoxed before. The mercenary annex hired gun had experienced things with
which his brain couldn't cope more often than any rational number in the
known universe, but never before had it had such unheralded intensity. Had it
not been for his entire brain being fully occupied with getting to grips with
whatever was happening to him, it would certainly have instructed him to drop
into a coma out of which not even Penelope Sunflower's ghost would have been
able to awake him.
Time passed. It even tipped its hat politely.
When Warchild got his wits together, which he didn't have that many so he
succeeded rather more quickly than might otherwise have been the case, he
snatched the tiny golden key off the three-legged glass table and dashed for
the minute door. The lamps were beginning to get in the way; by the time he
reached the tiny door he probably couldn't even stick his big toe in it.
A sense of defeat swept over him like a tidal wave. Fate seemed not to want
him out of this hall - which had in the mean time shrunk back to the
proportions it had when Cronos first entered it. Possibly even smaller. A
familiar feeling frayed his stomach. He started sweating profusely. It
dripped down in his eyes, it made his sideburns cling to his square head, it
wet his pants, it soaked his socks, it even started to make the tiles
slippery.
Out of nothing he suddenly heard large feet, or paws, slapping on the tiles
and coming towards him. It was the White Kangaroo he had seen before, the
White Kangaroo that was the fault of all this. He heard the animal's voice
coming closer, saying, "The Mayor, the Mayor, won't he be cross when I keep
him waiting!" It sounded quite as if it was in a hurry, almost on the verge
of panic in fact.
When the marsupial was sufficiently close, Cronos cleared his throat and
ventured to start a conversation involving blame, impending doom and a very
short life span.
"Say, er...Sir," he began sortof threateningly, but the Kangaroo did not
heed him. Instead it dropped a keyring with a tiny Koala attached to it, as
well as a magnifying glass - both for no apparent reason other than gravity.
It then disappeared without as much as a puff of smoke. Things were getting
to be very strange. They were getting sufficiently strange, indeed, to make
the mercenary annex hired gun lapse in a severe form of identity crisis.
"Zonk," the tiny Koala said.
"Who am I?" Warchild said out loud, actually starting to talk to himself,
"Surely not the man who has an immaculate grip on fate and chance, surely not
the Great Warrior who had yet to be bested?" He cringed as he suddenly
realised the beating he'd gotten when he last thought he was the Greatest of
Warriors. For a second he heard a girl's name repeated in his mind, the f-
word.
"Perhaps I'm Napoleon," he continued, his voice bouncing off the walls and
doors as if he was in an empty hospital corridor painted frating green, "Now
what would he do in a situation like this? He'd probably stick his hand in
his uniform - which I don't, so therefore I am not him."
Cronos smiled. He might not be himself, but at least he wasn't Napoleon.
"Maybe I'm Al 'Bumkisser' Darcy, with whom I went to Mercenary Academy," he
proceeded, his voice now echoing through the hall as if it was a candle-lit
tomb at midnight, "He'd probably hide under the nearest tile - which I don't
so therefore I couldn't be him, either."
He sighed with relief, thoroughly glad he wasn't Al. Everything was better
than Al, even being Korik St...
Cronos nearly choked on his breath.
"Maybe I'm Korik Starchaser," he muttered, his voice failing to amount to
any strength and therefore echoing even less than the sound of two feathers
colliding in the vacuum of space infinity, "There is no telling what he would
do, really."
Warchild thought deeply. It hurt.
"So if you can't tell what he might do," he concluded, his voice gathering
volume as he progressed, "then I surely can't be him, for I know what I am
doing now; I'm sweating and feeling thoroughly discomfited!"
Relief set in.
"Besides," he added, "I'm not that much of a wimp."
A grin appeared on his face, widening, triumphant.
"Zonk," sighed the Koala.
But why was everything so strange nonetheless? He was fairly certain of
being himself by now, if only because of the fact that you'd have to be
called Cronos Warchild to get in these sort of situations. He decided he'd
recite the song lyrics of Napalm Death's "Dead", but somehow the word didn't
come out like it should:
"Wednesday!"
Maybe he was Korik after all. Or worse - Al. He began to sweat fervently
again. Things were definitely strange and altogether not like he preferred
them to be. He felt disoriented and nauseated by the circumstances he found
himself in.
Also, there was something very odd happening to him - or to his
surroundings.
At a rapid speed, he found his head removing itself downward from between
the lamps hanging from the ceiling. The doors grew, the walls moved away. He
was surprised to see that, somewhere during his identity crisis, he had
picked up the White Kangaroo's magnifying glass. Somehow, it caused
everything all around him to grow - or himself to shrink, he added proudly to
himself. By now he was merely two feet tall and still shrinking. If it
continued like this, he feared, he might end up like an insignificant little
dot at the end of an insignificant line in an insignificant mail order
clothing company brochure.
"Zonk," the Koala intoned.
He threw the magnifying glass away, instinctively sensing that it might be
the cause of all this shrinking, or growing. Immediately, both shrinking and
growing stopped.
During the lucid moment following this event he ran to the little door, but
it turned out to be locked again (both mysteriously and rather meticulously).
Also, a glance over his shoulder confirmed his worst thought: The gold key
that fitted in the door's lock had found ways of getting on the table again,
as if it had much of a will of its own.
Things would have started to get pretty repetitive if he hadn't dropped into
an enormous pool of salt water at that time.
Cronos had had swimming lessons at Mercenary Academy, of course, but he had
hopelessly flunked (and sunk). All lower life forms, however, have a built-in
sense of survival. As the part of his brain that was actually used was
smaller than that of a psychopath horsefly, Warchild could be classified as a
lower life form - which allowed him to find himself instinctively doggy-
paddling to keep his head above the water.
Where had this sea come from? The taste of it was not just salt, it was
something as indescribable as the smell that arises from the armpits of Miss
Fragilia Franatica, the second Princess of the Zantogian Empire, just before
they get their annual washing. He guessed it must be the sweat he had
excreted when he was still tall, before he had somehow managed to pick up the
White Kangaroo's magnifying glass.
He was quite right.
Warchild looked around when he heard a sound of splashing and spluttering
homing in on him. At first he didn't get a good look at whatever it was that
was with him in the giant puddle. When it came closer, however, he saw it was
a Virgin. He had a way of recognizing them, you see, which was probably
caused by the many looting and raping sessions he had embarked on during one
of his practical terms at Mercenary Academy. On top of that, recognition was
made painfully obvious by the fact that she had long blonde hair, a look of
naive-ish innocence on her face, and no clothes on at all.
At first she didn't seem to notice him, or perhaps she was just ignoring
him. Maybe virgins also had built-in recognition systems where mercenaries or
other potential rapists were concerned. Cronos felt a strange sensation in
his lower abdomen, but this time it seemed quite enjoyable. Things were
looking better now; fate seemed to be smiling - or at least grinning through
its teeth.
"Er...hi," Cronos said.
The Virgin continued to ignore him. She was good at it.
Warchild held out his hand for her to take and shake it. He nearly drowned.
Now she noticed him, or at least failed at being good at ignoring him.
"Good day to you," she said, her haughty voice sounding like frozen icicles
dropping on stratospheric glaciers.
"I'm Warchild," he continued, "Cronos Warchild." He plastered a smug smile
on his face that totally failed to bewilder her. When he got no perceptible
reaction from the Virgin, he added, "I'm a mercenary, you know."
"Pray, don't!" the Virgin cried in a frightened voice that seemed to come
from a strangled throat, after which she practically leaped from the water
and dashed off, frenetically swimming away from the source of her distress.
"But I'm sortof of a nice mercenary," Cronos said, his voice almost
faltering, as if close to being on the verge of crying, "Don't you like
mercenaries?"
The Virgin ceased swimming and looked at him, somewhat doubtful. "Don't like
mercenaries!" she said with a voice like a diamond cutting through the perma-
frozen body of an ancient mammoth babe, "Would you like mercenaries if you
were me?"
Cronos thought it over. He had never looked at it that way. "No," he said
finally, "I guess I wouldn't. But nonetheless I wish I could introduce you to
some of my mates from Mercenary College. You know (he said more to himself
than to the Virgin), some of them got straight A's at all subjects involving
violence, assassination, raping of virg..."
He cut himself off mid-sentence, a truly remarkable feat for someone as
overwhelmingly dim-witted as himself. Nonetheless the Virgin had already
heard enough. The look of distress came in her beautifully blue eyes again,
her nails seemed to be poised, prepared to ward off any infringements of her
chastity.
"Beg your pardon there," Cronos said, blushing, almost ashamed of himself,
"We won't talk about mercenaries and...er...indecent assault anymore."
"We, indeed!" the Virgin retorted, her voice like an icy avalanche crashing
down on an igloo, "I've always hated them and...er...it. My mother, too."
"Do you like murderers, then?" Cronos inquired, "Or perhaps building
contractors? I could tell you some great stories about murderers (again he
went off more to himself then to anyone else). There was, for example, this
case of Fak the Ruthless. You know he's reported to have assassinated at
least five dozen people during his practical term, over half of which were
children or women. He was a guest lecturer at Mercenary College for a year.
He used to be great at looting and raping, too, and... Hey! Why are you
swimming off like that?"
All of the pool seemed to be in commotion now, what with the Virgin trying
to swim away from Cronos as quickly as possible.
"Please come back, Virgin," Cronos cried hoarsely, almost pleadingly, "I
swear I won't talk of mercenaries or murderers any more. Not even of rape of
virgins!"
When the Virgin heard the pleading sound of Warchild's voice, she couldn't
help but turn around, as if she sensed that the mercenary annex hired gun
didn't and couldn't possibly know any better. She panted as she came closer,
her complexion rather wan.
"Let's get out of this pool," she said, her voice having lost most of its
icy quality now, "and I will tell you why I hate mercenaries and murderers
and...er...indecent assaulters."
It was about time they left the pool for, rather extraordinarily, it seemed
to have filled up with other animals. There was a large Ant, a Kaka, a Falcon
and a rather large Koala. Cronos, his instincts momentarily taking over, led
the way and dog-paddled to the shore.
"Zonk," the Koala uttered, as matter-of-fact as it could.
III - A SILLY RACE, A VIRGIN AND A TAIL (AND A TALE AS WELL)
After Cronos and the various other creatures had reached the shore of the
giant puddle, he looked around at them. Feathers were clung to bodies, furs
looked rather disfunctional, water gleamed off a chitinous skeleton.
"Now how will we get dry?" the Virgin asked slightly irritated, her voice
like icy stalactites in a period of dew, "And how will I get my hair in order
again? I spent a fortune on it at the hairdresser's only yesterday, you
know!"
One of the animals, within the confines of its bill, muttered something
about not knowing and not wanting to know at all. The Virgin looked around,
her gaze as cold as frostbitten toes in an Antarctican mid-winter night, but
wisely decided not to react.
"Zonk," the Koala thought aloud.
There was a brief silence, fragile like capillary glass tubes and as
vigorous as a Pitbull grinding baby skulls.
"I know how to get dry before we all catch some rabid kind of pneumonia,"
the Falcon said, stepping forward, "I shall tell a story. The driest thing I
can come up with. Promise."
It had expected some visual support from the others, but none such happened.
It cleared his throat and stroked its pointed beak, as if thinking of how to
start.
"Once upon a time there was a Princess," it began, eyeing the Virgin to
gauge her reaction, "who was very beautiful indeed. Her father, a grumpy old
man, wanted her to marry an Evil Prince called Elvis who was also rather
frightfully fat and ultra ugly. Her mother felt sorry for her, of course, but
they just happened to live in a kingdom where women's lib and that sort of
thing hadn't happened yet."
"Zonk," the Koala interrupted.
The Falcon cast a menacing glance at the fluffy creature.
"Zonk," it apologized.
"On the night of her having to wed," the Falcon continued, "she was all
dressed up in the most gorgeous gown that made all of the castle maidens
jealous. She also wore little glass shoes that fitted her tiny feet exactly,
and slightly above her upper lip sat the Mother of all Moles. Her mother
wept, and her father drank another beer. She thought it was altogether rather
silly that she had to marry this prince whom she did not even love. She
shuddered at the thought of perhaps one day having to darn his socks or
something as mundane as that. Now the stable boy was something totally
different. He was a broad-shouldered hunk with a hugely bulging..."
"Atchooo!" the Koala interrupted rather brusquely, therewith instantly
causing the Wrath of the Falcon to be turned upon him.
"Our fluffy colleague here is right," the Kaka now interjected, "We're not
getting any drier at all. I propose we do something else. Maybe we had better
get physical."
"Zonk," the Koala sniffed in agreement.
The Falcon, though its pride was hurt somewhat, could do nothing else but
condescend, too. "I've been meaning to ask you, by the way. What's a 'Kaka'
and why do you look like the spitting image of a 'Dodo'?"
"Elementary, my dear Falcon," the Kaka replied, "I am a Kaka but one of my
kin has once been mistaken for a Dodo. Basically a Kaka is like a Dodo -
only, well, different."
The Falcon pondered it over for a while. It decided to ask no further. It
was having troubles with it, but in the end it succeeded.
"Let's run around in approximate circles like a bunch of mental retards and
see who wins," the Kaka decided when it was obvious no more questions were
going to be asked.
"Zonk," the Koala nodded, and everybody agreed.
They all ran around for about half an hour. Sometimes the Falcon seemed
fastest, but occasionally the large Ant overtook it in a flurry of legs and
the scent of honey. The Koala seemed to tag along, as did the Kaka. Cronos
ran to keep up with the Falcon or the Ant, whichever was fastest at the
moment. The Virgin tried hard to keep up with Cronos, whom she considered
mentally and physically inferior to herself. Women's lib in the making.
Somehow, they actually seemed to get dry in the process. At the end of it,
Kaka rather unexpectedly signalled them all to stop.
"Who's won?" the Virgin asked, her panting sounding like snow stars on
frozen windows.
"Everybody has won," the Kaka said resolutely, "there's no question about
it."
There were some muted cheers.
"And," the Kaka added with emphasis, "of course, all of you shall get a
prize!"
"Zonk," the Koala now cheered with the others.
"Excuse me," Cronos interposed after this bout of happiness, "but who is to
give the prizes?"
"Well, you of course," the Kaka cried happily, "who else?"
All of a sudden all creatures' faces swirled to meet his, eyebrows raised in
eager expectation.
"Indeed, who else?" the Falcon interjected.
"Sure. Who else but he?" the enormous Ant now added, its multi-faceted eyes
rolling.
"There's no question about it, really," the Virgin agreed, her voice like
icecream in a hot summer day, "Or is there?"
"Zonk?" the Koala enthused.
"Prizes! Prizes!" they now all yelled rather too fervently.
Cronos fingered his pockets. Out came the most-empty bag of sticky
liquorice. He handed them to the Kaka, which he reckoned was the Master of
the Award Ceremony. The identical twin of a Dodo pried them loose and handed
them around. Just before Cronos was to supposed to get his prize, however,
the pieces of liquorice that were left disappeared with a deft movement of
the Kaka's feathered hand - filed away for reappearance, no doubt, at a later
and probably more private occasion.
"What else have you in your pocket?" the bird inquired.
Cronos hesitated, but eventually took out his Elector-O-Cute killer gadget.
Especially the Falcon and the Kaka looked at the gleaming piece of hi-tech
metalware with more than the usual interest.
"What's it?" the Ant asked, its multi-faceted eyes looking intensely
scrutinous at the mercenary annex gun and about a hundred other places within
the wide vicinity.
"It's a thing with which I can electrocute people over the phone," Cronos
explained, "It's pretty ingenious, you know, and it works regardless the
distance. Moreover, you can..."
"Zonk!" the Koala cried. It seemed to go frantic, its tail curling in an odd
way and its entire body shaking much in the way a doomed little friendly
Gremlin shakes just prior to colliding with huge quantities of water that it
sees inescapably running towards him.
"Sounds much too savage," the Kaka said, eyeing Warchild with suspicious
distrust, "for having someone like yourself walking around with it." It
inserted a meaningful, contemplative pause. "Nonetheless," it said as it
snatched it from Cronos' hands with a fell swoop, "I shall give it to you as
your prize."
Cronos was about to get very angry but his poor brain instructed him not to
bother. Which was probably just as well.
"Anyway," the Virgin said, her voice filled with the weight and purpose of
an ice floe that knows it has to fill the biggest river in the known
universe, "I shall now tell you all the tale, the sad tale, of why I hate
mercenaries."
She cast a meaningful glance at Warchild. It was lost to him, however, as he
was examining his Elector-O-Cute! killer gadget to see if the Kaka might have
damaged it. He put it in his pocket after assuring himself that no corruption
had been inflicted on the thing. He made a mental note not to forget testing
the device once he'd get home. You never knew, and it was the only way to be
sure.
Warchild found it odd to hear the Virgin speaking of a sad tail whereas A)
It was no sad tail, and B) She had no tail. He was fairly convinced of the
latter, for when viewing her naked splendidness earlier that day he was sure
he had not found evidence of a tail's presence, and he reckoned there surely
was no place to hide it.
Nevertheless the Virgin told her tale. Perhaps it should have been called a
poem, but that would have made this whole bit of the story too difficult to
write. Cronos was half wondering about the tail, half listening to her voice
like snowflakes dropping in the sea, so to him the tale ran like this:
"Once upon a time there
was a virgin and a
mercenary too.
The virgin, of
course, was I.
They went along
rather fabulously
but nonetheless
something seemed
to gnaw at the
mercenary's
insides. Of
course she
couldn't
know that
it was one
of his most
base instincts
speaking up that
spoke of rape,
sex and a lot
of slaughter.
She only
just
escaped
but
she
still
hears
his
voice
now
and
then
.
"
When the Virgin stopped her tale she caught Cronos deep in thought, almost
as if in a trance. To tell the truth, he had actually found it necessary to
go into a state not unlike hibernation - for otherwise his brain would surely
not even start to understand what this tail was all about. Besides, he seemed
to have lost count of the bends. Had there been one one one one one one? Or
perhaps one more?
"You see?" the Virgin said to the others while deliberately ignoring Cronos,
her voice like the sound of a blunt icepick attempting to cut through the
North Pole, "Virgins and mercenaries just don't rhyme."
Cronos pondered on, unperturbed, thinking about ones - too many of them.
"Hey, dude!" the Virgin said rather well audibly to get Cronos' attention,
sounding like the Titanic on the night of April 14th 1912. The mercenary
annex hired gun had apparently come to the end of his comatose pondering and
chose that moment to look up.
"Seven!" he cried, smiling rather triumphantly.
The Virgin said something like, "Ooof!", which sounded like a thousand tons
of liquid nitrogen being hurled in the mouth of an erupting volcano. She ran
off, all but stampeding.
"Come on, girl," Cronos said, like a mother addressing her spoiled
offspring, "What's all this running away for?"
The Virgin didn't answer. Her splendidly nude form ran off in the distance,
like a dog with its tail between its legs - only, of course, she didn't have
one. Cronos was still fairly certain about that.
"Hmpf," he snorted, "Fak the Ruthless wouldn't have had any problems getting
her back."
"Zonk!" the Koala sniggered. With a small >plop< it disappeared.
"Er...hum," the Kaka said, "I think I left the gas on at home." With those
words he disappeared through a door that locked itself behind him.
The Falcon flapped its wings and heaved itself in the sky. "I'd better be
going too, pal," he said, "good luck to you." Within seconds it was a dark
spot growing even smaller, far away.
Leaving behind a vague scent of honey, the Ant had disappeared, too.
So Cronos was alone again. Alone with himself in this truly vast hall filled
with doors he couldn't open - except for one, to which the key lay out of
reach, on a three-legged table that was too high for him to ascend.
"I wish I hadn't mentioned Fak," Cronos muttered sortof sadly to himself,
"Will I ever see Fak again, or any of my other Mercenary Academy mates? Will
I ever get out of here?"
The feeling in his lower abdominal area moved slightly up. It also
transformed from a rather nice to a somewhat nauseous one. Sweat started
breaking out from one or two pores, followed by more.
Then he suddenly heard the sound of feet flapping, coming closer. Was it the
Virgin that came back to throw herself in his unmistakably masculine arms, to
hurl her regretful tears at his recognizably macho shoulder?
IV - TED'S BOGUS JOURNEY
Of course, Cronos Warchild was quite wrong (rather totally and exceedingly
so, as a matter of fact). It wasn't the Virgin but the White Kangaroo - the
creature that had been the cause of his current predicament. When it came
within speaking range, he heard it cry, "Oh the Mayor! The Mayor! He'll make
a eunuch of me if he discovers I've lost them!"
At that moment the White Kangaroo saw Cronos standing.
"Mortimer," the White Kangaroo said in a reproachful tone while pointing to
a place behind the mercenary annex hired gun, "what are you doing here? Go
into the house and fetch me my magnifying glass and the keyring with the
Koala on it. This minute!"
Intimidated and somewhat abashed, Cronos walked off in the direction the
White Kangaroo had pointed to. Obviously the animal had mistaken him for
somebody else, but Warchild decided not to behead it for this mistake; if he
would have killed every creature that was doing something odd today he would
end up with a frighteningly huge pile of carrion at his feet. It would take
days to rid his hands of the stench of rotting flesh, though - he relished
the thought.
Was that a telepathic vulture, circling high above him?
After a brief stroll through green meadows with flowers blooming and
butterflies making love in the air, he came upon a small cottage with a rusty
copper plaque next to the door. "W. KANGAROO" was engraved on it in rococo
style, barely readable to cultural barbarians like himself.
He walked inside and hurried up the wooden stairs when he heard the slow,
deliberate footsteps of what he guessed was the real Mortimer. At the end of
the stairs he discovered a little room, of which he closed the door behind
him. The room was well kept - that is, if you just tried hard to think away
the piles of computer printouts, floppy disks and miscellaneous notes that
lay everywhere. On a table that was relatively void of the aforementioned
items lay a magnifying glass and the keyring with the Koala attached to it.
"Zonk," the Koala sighed.
He wanted to grab these items to give them back to the White Kangaroo -
although it eluded him why he would want to do the dratted creature a favour.
He didn't get around to actually taking the magnifying glass off the table,
nor the keyring with the Koala on it, for at that precise instant a
hypodermic syringe materialised next to them.
For a second or two there was a smell of ozone as if just after lightning.
A label was attached to the syringe. It had the typed words "CYANIDE" and
"MEDICATE AT YOUR OWN PERIL" crossed out, and "INJECT ME" hand-written below
them.
"Whattaheck," Cronos thought to himself, "it doesn't seem deadly to me."
He stuck the needle in his left arm and injected the fluid in a vein, or at
least not too far away from one.
His arm turned purple, then cyan. Then his whole body went bright red with
yellow dots, then, too, all cyan. The entire process, during which Warchild
saw all kinds of strange colours swirl towards him, lasted perhaps ten
seconds. At the end of it he felt like his old self again - only much bigger.
He found his head pressed against the ceiling, almost causing his neck to
break. Previously, the sensation of claustrophobia has been rather dreadful
but nonetheless subtle-ish; now, however, it struck him like a freight train
transporting lead storming towards him, down-hill, with malfunctioning
brakes.
And still he continued growing. There was no other solution but to stick his
head out of the window and his left foot up the chimney.
Sweat starting breaking out of him again, running down the various parts of
his body in small rivulets; what about the cheap motel room he rented at the
moment, cockroach-ridden though it may be? He'd never fit in it - if he could
get out of here at all in the first place. And where was he to leave the
large trunk carrying his collection of patented and superlatively lethal
killer gadgets?
He was torn from his thoughts when he heard feet flapping up the stairs, and
a voice yelling, "Mortimer! I need my magnifying glass right now, you hear?
Mortimer!"
Next thing he knew, the White Kangaroo opened the door to the little room -
or at least the animal tried to but didn't actually succeed as the door had
to open to the inside and Cronos' posterior was rather solidly pressed
against it.
"Then I'll try to get in through the window," Cronos heard the animal say to
itself.
Outside, the White Kangaroo got quite a fright when it saw the huge, square
head with the sideburns sticking out one side of its home.
"Mortimer!" it called angrily, "Mortimer!"
Slow, deliberate steps up the gravel of the garden path announced the
butler. It was a badger wearing a black uniform, that had a white towel
folded around his arm which it held in front of itself.
"Can I be of any service, Sir?" the butler inquired politely.
"What's that?" the Kangaroo spat with badly hidden vehemence, "Would you
mind telling me what that is?"
The badger looked up at Cronos' head.
"Shocking, Sir," it admitted, "It seems to be a rather frightfully large
head belonging to some sort of giant-ish chap, with your permission, Sir."
"Get rid of it!" the Kangaroo commanded urgently, as if it concerned merely
a couple of gnats in the bedroom.
Although Cronos resented the possibility of his huge, rather squarely built
shape to be manhandled out of the room by the tiny White Kangaroo and its
midget butler, he began to think it would be the only way out. The
claustrophobic freight train had hit him between the eyes - it hadn't even
lost any velocity, the driver hand't seen him, and the "no speed limit" sign
was coming up around the bend.
His left foot deemed the moment fit to send to his brain the signal of a
rather irritating itch he had no way of being able to scratch. He bit his
tongue.
Voices reached him, barely audible, parts of sentences, as if they were
conspiring against him. He also heard a third voice, that he saw belonged to
what appeared to be a Skunk of sorts that was called Ted.
"What?!" he heard the Skunk exclaim, high-pitched with fright, "Do I have to
go down the chimney?"
"Well, most certainly, Sir," the butler confirmed.
"But I don't want to, you see," the Skunk whimpered, "Why does it always
have to be me?"
Cronos saw the White Kangaroo snorting impatiently, flapping its feet on the
grass.
"I'm afraid, Sir," the butler tried to explain, "that I can't offer
satisfactory answers to either of your questions, Sir. However, if you allow
me, Sir, I would advise you to do whatever you have to do quickly so as not
to incur the wrath of your master, Mr. Kangaroo, Sir."
"But..." the Skunk whimpered on.
"I think, Sir," the butler cut off the Skunk's words, "that you're at this
particular moment in time and space acting like what is reportedly known by
commoners as a 'yeller', Sir. Now if you'd be so kind, Sir?" It emphasized
its words by gesturing for the Skunk to move its rear end up the roof and
into the chimney.
There were some sounds of ladders being climbed, and of Skunk's feet walking
across the thatched roof. Cronos pulled back his left leg as far as he could
manage, back into the chimney somewhat.
"Hi," said the Skunk in a voice that didn't particularly flow over with
confidence when it peeped down the chimney.
A leg extended itself. A boot collided with a black-and-white, rather smelly
animal which as a result was sent hurling through the air. It connected
itself to the ground somewhere, some moments later.
There were some cries of anger outside. The unconscious Skunk was fetched
from its position on a patch of thistles, after which further parts of
conversations were carried by the breeze into Cronos' ears.
"Mouth to mouth resuscitation?" the Kangaroo exclaimed, its voice filled
with disgust, "Are you kidding? Mouth-to-mouth on a blimmin' Skunk?"
"I kid thee not, Sir," the butler replied timidly, "As a matter of fact,
Sir, this is the recommended sort of remedy in medical cases such as this
one, if you allow me, Sir."
Suddenly a couple of clouds broke.
"A little bit of Plantiac, perhaps?" a voice thundered from the heavens like
the Gods playing a double bass drum.
They all startled, Cronos inclusive; it even caused the Skunk to come to, be
it reluctantly. They looked around but couldn't see anything. They decided to
ignore the mystery voice, which was never heard in Wonderland henceforth.
"Terrible! Terrible!" the Skunk accounted, "It was simply terrible! There
were fiends and monsters and flames and...and giants! I stood no chance
against their superior numbers. I mean I tried, mind you, but even my
proverbial strength and the smell I can excrete left me at the shortest end.
And then there was this huge, black monstrosity that, in spite of my heroic
defence, catapulted me out of the room without as much as giving me a fair
chance."
"I see, Sir," the butler nodded, "I see, if you permit me, Sir."
"Shut your face," the White Kangaroo said, and lapsed into a fit of thought.
Time passed. It looked at the scene incomprehensibly, then continued its
eternal path.
Cronos, for his part, was quite glad he wasn't growing anymore. Things would
have looked severely disfortunate if he hadn't - possibly even worse than
they looked now.
In the mean time, the animals outside seemed to have some sort of idea. The
butler disappeared.
After a while the badger butler came back, pushing before it a large
wheelbarrow filled with a dark brown, semi-solid substance. A peg was located
on its nose.
"There you are, Sir," the butler said, slightly out of breath, "the ma'ure,
Sir."
The White Kangaroo looked up at Warchild's face, the beginning of a
triumphant grin dawning on its face.
"The smell's awful," the Skunk said, "Simply terrible."
Before Cronos knew what happened, he was being subjected to a volley of what
he guessed was human manure. Most of it missed him, but some of it clung to
his hair and some of it made its way inside the room, just smelling awfully.
"Stop that," he bellowed, nearly making the house burst at the seams, "or
I'll...I'll (he was searching for a foul enough punishment for these vile
creatures) do something I'll regret later."
Warchild did not get the time to put any of his threats into practise,
though, for at that moment the manure transformed itself in raspberries.
Raspberries, of all things!
Cronos might not have been very bright, but even an imbecile laboratory rat
would by now have learned that, whenever edible things occurred in the story,
its size would change from small or big or big to small (or its surrounding
would mutate with the same effect). So, in spite of the fact that raspberries
to Cronos were just about the worst things to eat - but one - he tossed some
of them in his mouth.
There was a quick feeling of giddiness, accompanied by a growing of chairs
and tables, and next thing he knew he was gazing at a printed-out computer
program listing on the floor of which the letters were almost one third of
his height.
He dashed out of the door, jumped down the stairs, and ran towards the
forest next to the White Kangaroo's abode with all speed he could muster. He
almost stumbled upon a scene involving the throwing of more manure and the
performing of apparently obscene things to a poor Skunk.
He guessed this was an appropriate moment to feel some sense of guilt, but
his extensive training at Mercenary Academy had made sure he didn't and
wouldn't ever.
The assorted animals that were gathered around the Skunk and the wheelbarrow
with manure thought for a moment that they noticed Warchild's tiny form just
in time to see a tiny booted foot disappearing in the dense undergrowth of
the forest. Just like humans, however, who for example don't see gnomes as
they don't believe in them, the animals thought they'd had a collective fata
morgana and proceeded throwing excrements at the window.
"First I've got to grow back to my usual size again," Cronos thought to
himself when he knew he was safe, hiding under a fairly large tuft of grass,
"Then I've got to find my way to that garden I saw when I just got here.
Maybe some killer weed'll grow there, or poisonous fungi that may come in
handy in future assignments. Perhaps..."
A sudden high twittering sound, repeated two or three times, made an abrupt
end to his train of thoughts. He looked up into two black eyes and a large
orange bill that belonged to a yellow, cutely fluffy chicken. Incidentally,
it was also terrifyingly huge.
"Easy does it," Cronos tried to coax it, almost on the verge of panicing,
"Issy nice chicken, yes?"
He had never seen this big a chicken - but, then again, he had never been as
small as this before. He tried to think of it as a huge mound of lean meat,
but the image didn't work - it kept on making sounds at him, opening its bill
menacingly, threatening to misinterpret him for a bit of delicious fresh
corn.
It was completely uncertain whether the chicken wanted to eat him or if it
wanted to play with him. Either way, it did make an awful racket and at
several occassions almost flattened the mercenary annex hired gun under its
clawed paws. Again, Cronos cursed himself for having opted to bring along the
Elector-O-Cute killer gadget, which had by now repeatedly proven to be
completely useless.
He was beginning to think he would either not get rid of the chicken or not
get out alive, when in the distance he heard a cock crowing. If the chicken
would have had ears, it would have pointed them; it seemed to listen intently
for a few moments, after which it hopped off to somewhere far away from
Warchild.
He sighed in relief.
"I'd surely like to have caught it and cooked it," he mused, "If only I had
been somewhat bigger."
Even Cronos knew that one wasn't supposed to go around chasing and killing
animals that are about four times as high as yourself when all you're
carrying is a device with which you can kill people by telephone. The problem
it came down to, again, was size. How was he to grow up to the right size
again? He couldn't see any cakes, suppositories, bottles, icecreams or pieces
of liquorice anywhere. Not even any raspberries! All he could see was a large
mushroom that didn't seem edible either.
On top of the mushroom, however, sat a small llama - arms and legs folder
like only preciously few llamas can do, sedately smoking a bong. It didn't
seem to notice Cronos at all, nor did it seem to notice the entire world
around it, including the very mushroom on which it sat.
V - ADVICE FROM A LLAMAOID
They looked at each other for a while, like opponents gauging their enemy's
strength. Cronos thought it looked really silly to have a llama sitting on a
mushroom with its legs and arms folded much in the way he had seen statues of
fat men with long earlobes do in Oriental travelling brochures. But, then
again, he had seen llamas in much sillier poses shooting camels with lasers
and such, now he came to think of it.
"Chill out man, nicely groovy and zany and altogether rather ozric," the
llama said suddenly, almost startling Warchild, "Zarjaz world we live in,
innit? Almost better than 'Star Raiders' on the Atari 8-bit."
The mercenary annex hired gun let it sink in for a while. He was about to
produce a reply along the lines of "Sure" or "Indeed" when suddenly the llama
spoke again.
"Who might you be, squire?"
Immediately, a D.E.A. (Damaged Ego Alert) sounded in Cronos' head. Had his
fame, or notoriousness, not reached this subterranean world? Had the stories
about his flawless killings, that had so far spread across all the inhabited
planets of the known universe like wildfire, missed out on this meaningless
little whatever-it-was?
Somewhat hurt he replied by mentioning his name in the usual Bond-James-
Bond-style.
"That sounds like a seriously unsound name to me, chum," the llama
practically laughed out loud, letting Warchild's name roll over its tongue as
if sampling cheap wine.
"It will not do, man," the llama concluded after some more rolling and
sampling. "I will therefore call you 'Jeff'. Now you have to agree that's
much better to start with. Seriously groovy, as a matter of fact."
Cronos stared at the llama, somewhat amazed at the animal's capacity to
insult both him and his parents in one go without as much as flinching an
eye, nor disconnecting its mouth from the bong. Somehow, the name 'Jeff' in
his mind connected itself with the image of a bearded chap with long hair
sitting on a stuffed yak, wearing an afghan, smoking a Camel cigarette and in
his hands holded an empty bottle of Inca Cola. He didn't quite know where the
image came from but, frankly, he couldn't be bothered.
"This world seems altogether rather strange to me," Cronos said out loud
after accumulating in his mind all the weird things that had happened so far
while being underground.
"You!" the llama retorted, visibly agitated, "Paugh! What makes you think
you've got something to say around here?"
Now that was a question that Cronos A) Couldn't reply to, B) Hadn't expected
and C) Wondered about what had caused it. All these factors together left
Cronos in a state that, should careful evaluation have been necessary, would
have had to surpass hibernation - a state that would have been almost
unmistakable from, if not identical to, death.
"May I add, by the way," the animal added as an almost trivial afterthought,
"that there's a drop of nasal fluid on your upper lip?"
This, almost literally, was the drop that made the bucket run full. Sniffing
violently and wiping his nose with his sleeve, Cronos walked off much in the
way the Virgin had walked off from him earlier.
"I say, old fruit," Warchild heard the llama yelling behind him, "come back,
man! No need for all that running off all of a sudden."
He turned around and traced his steps back to the animal. He didn't like the
smugness of its smile.
"Be excellent to each other," the llama said. Muttering to itself, it added,
"I've always wanted to say that. It does have a nice ring to it, even if I
say so myself."
"Is that all you have to say?" Cronos asked, "Is that why you wanted me to
come back?"
"Well, you know, dude...er...no," the Andes inhabitant said. It even took
the bong out of its mouth. If blew a puff of smoke in Cronos' face that made
him feel dizzy for a couple of moments, then said, "So you think things have
been rather strange to you?"
"Yes," Warchild nodded, "I mean I've changed sizes at least one one one one
one times today. Animals talk. You talk. And you're smoking, too. Only a
while back I tried to recite the lyrics to Napalm Death's "Dead" and the
word, one word mind you, came out all wrong. I don't know what's happened to
me. Am I one card short of a full deck? Am I not quite the shilling? Am I not
the usual top billing? Am I..."
He cut himself off, just short of saying that he thought he was a banana
tree.
"Am I slightly mad?" he asked to wrap it up, genuine concern filling his
voice.
The animal shifted its position on the mushroom, as if it had suddenly
discovered that its rear end was sleeping. It closed its eyes for a moment,
which looked as if it was reading the answer to Cronos' questions from the
insides of its eyelids.
"Well," the llama said after a while of breathless contemplation, opening
its eyes, "Perhaps you could recite the lyrics to Metallica's "Orion" for
me."
Cronos thought hard for a while. Then he thought hard for another while or
two. He then said:
"If birds could talk
The world would be quite different
This is the strange dream
That birds have at night
It is no longer possible
When they're awake
Cannot man teach them to do so
Or let them be?"
"See?" Cronos said, initially sporting some pride at being able to say
something as profoundly deep and extensive as this, then disappointed, "The
words came out all wrong."
The llama looked like a psychiatrist who was about the judge a ten-year-old
little girl mentally incapacitated for the rest of her life. Its face did not
so much frown, but more sortof contorted. One of its front paws seemed to
stroke its chin in a wholly un-llama-like way.
"First of all," the llama said, "that wasn't "Orion" for that's an
instrumental song. Trick question there. You did do "To Live Is To Die", but
again it seems the words didn't quite come out right. Incidentally, did you
know that the real lyrics to that song were probably partly ripped from
Stephen Donaldson's 'Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever'?"
Cronos failed both to recall ever having heard of the author's name before
and connecting all of it with the current situation. He tried to express
naive innocence, something which unfortunately only caused his mouth to drop
open and his eyes to stare at no particular point somewhere in the distance.
"Thought you didn't," the llama said, more to itself than to Warchild. The
silence that followed lasted the better part of five minutes.
The South-American animal broke the silence first.
"So what size would you like to be?"
"Dunno," Cronos said, not quite prepared to answer a question as
intrinsically complicated as that, "I guess I don't care that much, really.
I'd basically like to be able to stay the same size for a while, you know."
"I don't," the llama said, dryly.
"What?"
"I don't," it repeated.
"Don't what?"
"Know," replied the llama.
"Know?"
"Yes. I don't know."
The animal rolled its eyes at the human's obvious stupidity.
"You don't know what?" Cronos insisted.
"I don't know that you'd basically like to stay the same size for a while,"
the llama explained more elaborately.
"You don't?" Warchild asked incredulously.
"Well, now I do but when you started about it I didn't."
"Ah. I see," said Cronos, unsure.
"No, you probably don't," the llama disagreed.
"I don't what?"
"See."
"See what?"
"This conversation is getting nowhere", the llama broke off.
Cronos fell silent, already quite having lost trace of it way back.
"I'd like to be slightly bigger than I am now," he said finally, "four
inches is such a darned lousy height to be, or should I say lowth?"
The llama snorted, standing up on its hind legs, precisely four inches tall.
"No it isn't," it said, hurt.
Cronos had another attack of guilt again, but somewhere along the relatively
infinite line of nerves and synapses it got nipped in the bud. His face
remained utterly void of expression.
Another silence followed. It lay on the ground, writhing, pleading, as if
almost begging to be broken.
"One side will get you bigger, the other will get you smaller," the llama
finally said, "You sort it out, Jeff."
Cronos hated being called 'Jeff'. He also wondered of what one side would
cause growth and the other shrinking.
"The mushroom, you git," the animal said, reading his mind.
"That's all we need," Cronos thought to himself, annoyed, "A telepathic
llama."
"I heard that!" the Llama said, again sounding hurt. Amid a huge fractal
explosion it disappeared off the mushroom, leaving behind only the scent of
burned herbs.
Now Warchild faced a dilemma he had faced the last time during the first
grade at Mercenary Academy: Mathematics. His tutors had at the time insisted
he learn basic arithmetic - Cronos had found it inescapable to fail. Now he
had to face the consequences: Which side was which? After all, the mushroom
was as round as it could possible be, so there was no way to determine which
side would be one and which other.
A pain crashed through Warchild's consciousness - he had another lucid
moment. The total amount of these occasions during his life had been very,
very rare. The fact that he had had two lucid moments this day seemed to
indicate he was making progress.
This all just serves to prove that statistics can be wrong quite utterly.
During the time the lucid moment spent in Cronos brain, he picked two pieces
off the mushroom - one on either side. He hoped it would work.
Of course, the bit he first tried was the wrong one - Murphy's law works
rather effectively even for those who often seem immune to the laws of
causality and faculty.
The shrinking that resulted from eating the wrong bit of mushroom was rather
devastating. One moment Cronos was still about four inches tall, and after
the blink of an eye he was suddenly very small. The mushroom towered above
him like a vast monument of the first nuclear explosion - only much, much
bigger and at this particular moment vastly more impressive.
"Oops," the mercenary annex hired gun said.
A beetle, that had been about as large as his fist until about one second
ago, now looked at him even more threateningly than the frightfully cute and
flawlessly yellow giant chicken had done before. It moved its antennas, as if
probing the air for molecules that had had the audacity to pop off Warchild.
It seemed to like what it sensed, and came closer for a first bite.
Cronos swallowed most of the other piece of mushroom, wishing to become big
as soon as possible. There was a very short crunchy sound, not unlike that of
a black boot crushing a beetle, and after that there were only the strange
feeling of an elevator quickly gaining upward momentum, and clouds.
He tried to feel his head, but couldn't. His hands simply weren't long
enough to reach his head that now seemed to be balancing on a neck quite
resembling some sort of nutty snake. He was having problems breathing, which
Cronos reckoned had something to do with space being much closer now - and
wasn't space empty?
He looked down. Now and again the clouds around him would tear up for a
moment, allowing a brief glimpse at the scenery below. Most of it was green
with a spot of blue here and there - which he assumed were lakes of sorts. A
bit to his left he saw a small cottage with a thatched roof. In its garden he
saw a White Kangaroo, a badger dressed as a butler, and a Skunk that seemed
to be out cold. On a road, way off before him, he saw a toad driving a car
rather more rapidly than it should.
He was surely feeling spaced out - which is a fairly accurate description of
what a bite of the growing side of a mushroom can do to you if you've
previously inhaled the smokes of certain mind-expanding herbs. When he closed
his eyes, his head seemed to be rollercoasting. When he opened them, it still
seemed to.
The feeling wore off just in time for him to be aware of some creature of
the sky flying into a part of his neck. He looked down to his neck that
seemed to hang below him like a rope from a balloon. He couldn't quite see
his body.
A small flying thing circled around him, towards his head, up from the spot
where it had collided with his neck.
"Can't you watch where you're going?" a voice said, now close to his ear. It
was fairly obvious that the voice wanted to sound enraged, but it totally
failed in obtaining the objective. Instead the voice radiated infinite love
and passion.
The owner of the voice flew around him, so that in the end Cronos could see
it straight before him, fluttering and complaining. It was a small angel, no,
a flabby baby with Pampers on. It had a golden bow in its tiny hands, and a
very small arrow container was located on its back, attached to a strap.
"Oh no," the tiny winged form said when seeing Warchild, "you."
"I'm afraid you've got the advantage," Cronos said, having heard this sort
of dialogue in a film once, "I have never seen you before."
The baby angel tried to put on a scornful face, but only succeeded in
showing infinite dedication and friendship.
"You big lummox," it said, gayly flapping its wings now and flying to and
fro in front of Warchild's face, "Don't you remember Loucynda? Or Penelope?
And what about Klarine Appledoor?"
Cronos had fleeting visions of a most beautiful shaped breast upon which
hung a name plate, of coal-powered engines hidden in folds of flesh that
functioned to pump around gallons and gallons of blood, and of a rusty-locked
chastity belt.
"Sure I remember them," he said to the little angel, "But I still don't
remember you."
Warchild had not been really sure of many things in his life - but he had
been sure the Virgin had had no tail and he was sure he didn't know who the
hell this little angel was.
"I see," the angel said in a tone that was supposed to convey sadness and
hurt but that only spread warmth and devotion, "You really, honestly don't
know me."
Cronos shook his head. "No."
He didn't even feel sorry, nor did he feel slightly guilty.
Quickly, the flying marksbaby changed subject.
"I've seen you look better, Cronos Jehannum," it said as if visiting an old
friend, "Much better than this huge ugly thing with a neck like a spaced-out
snake and breath smelling of weird herbs, raspberries and tobacco icecream."
"I'm no ugly thing with a neck like a spaced-out snake and breath smelling
of weird herbs, raspberries and tobacco icecream," Cronos said, "I'm but a
small mercenary annex hired gun." It seemed that a tear welled up in his eye.
It was visible for an instant of a nanosecond, then Warchild blinked his eyes
and it had vanished.
"If you flew into me just to insult me," Cronos said in as menacing a tone
as he could manage with half of his speech apparatus a rough two hundred feet
below him, "I'll have to insist you leave."
Another quote from a film he'd forgotten to forget.
"OK," the minute angeloid muttered, "If that's how you want to play it.
Fine. Don't expect me around when you need me, though."
It flapped its wings somewhat more intensely, after which it flew off into a
cloud and vanished from sight.
Warchild remembered the pieces of mushroom he should still have in his
hands, a long way down. He bent his neck in a huge arc until it almost formed
an "O", with his head close to his chest - which was quite like a spaced-out
snake indeed. By biting off small pieces off each bit of mushroom he
eventually reached his right height - or at least he got the surroundings to
the sizes he seemed to recollect from before he'd made the jump into that
hole under the tree in the park near his motel. He stuffed the bits of the
mushroom he had left in his pocket.
It felt strange being in a world that had its usual size again. He checked
his neck. It was still there - or, rather, it was still as always hidden
between his broadly built shoulders and his square head with the long
sideburns.
He walked away from where he had seen the White Kangaroo's cottage - he had
no intention of ever having manure hurled at him again, certainly not if the
manure had the tendency to transform into raspberries, of all things!
Within a few minutes he found a small house. It was scarsely more than a
yard high, however, so he reckoned it would be best to eat some more of the
mushroom bit that could make the world grow again.
He did. The world grew.
VI - FROG AND GARLIC
As soon as he had gotten used to his diminished size, he took in his
surroundings - that's the kind of thing a mercenary is trained to do. He kept
an eye on the house for a while until he reckoned it safe to go in for some
more detailed exploration.
He had just come out of his hiding when he saw a small DHL car coming up the
driveway. He had seen many weird things while he was underground, but this
thing beat everything: The car had two eyes popping up from the bonnet much
in the way a frog's would. There was no front bumper on it either - instead
it had a huge, grinning mouth. It looked like one of those small child's
toys, only life-sized.
Cronos was even more amazed to see the car rise on its hind wheels and knock
the door with a front tyre, sounding like a soft, rubbery 'thud'. It whistled
a postman Pat tune in an almost absurdly casual way.
A mole opened the door. The animal was covered, like most of its kind, in a
thick black fur that was most fit for crawling underground. Unlike most of
its kind, however, it wore dark glasses and a sports jacked, put on back-to-
front, with a Kriss Kross logo patched on its back (which was in the front).
Behind both its ears it wore hearing aids that looked every bit as impressive
as the car audio systems that cheap people living in cheap neighbourhoods
have built in their second-hand Opel Mantas to impress their cheap
neighbours. It bobbed its head left and right like Stevie Wonder (or, for
that matter, like Ray Charles). The fact that the mole was handicapped at two
of its most important senses, by the way, suffices to prove that only this
way one can fully appreciate Kriss or Kross or, indeed, both of the silly
brats.
"I AM ADRIAN, THE BUTLER!" the mole yelled at the DHL vehicle, "CAN I BE OF
SERVICE TO YOU!"
The car heaved a sigh, which almost perfectly succeeded in conveying the
meaning of the sentence "Oh no, not that stupid mole again..."
The mole, of course, was blissfully unaware of this.
"I have a message for the Mayor," the car said, the sound of a barrel full
of pistons rolling down a mountain into a car mechanic's workshop, "An
invitation of the King of Spades to play golf.
"THANK YOU, SIR!" the butler said.
The car went inside. The butler closed the door, quite forgetting to walk
back in itself.
Cronos decided it was time to do something. Anything. He walked up to the
front door and knocked on it a couple of times.
"THAT'S USELESS, SIR!" the butler said.
Warchild looked at the insectivore for a couple of moments. Deciding against
starting anything resembling a conversation, he tried to mimic "Why?" with
his facial expression.
Remarkably, he succeeded.
Even more remarkably, the blind mole sensed it.
"WE ARE BOTH ON THE SAME SIDE OF THE DOOR!" the mole explained, "SO I CAN'T
LET YOU IN AS SUCH. AND INSIDE THEY CAN'T HEAR YOU ANYWAY!"
Warchild put aside the implications of what the butler said for, indeed,
quite a racket seemed to be going on inside, though he couldn't make out what
it was all about. He was just going to connect his ear to the door when it
flew open and a self-cleaning garlic squeezer missed him by a mere fraction
of inches. It flew off into the bushes.
It was followed by an insulted red DHL car which brushed some dust off its
wings and disappeared down the road, bonnet in the air, muttering angrily
about idiots and the things that bolts go in.
The mole walked in and melted into what it probably considered to be one of
the more comfortable shadows that seemed to leap and lurch in the house.
Cronos decided to walk in, too. He stumbled upon a wholly odd sight.
He had entered a kitchen that scented thoroughly of gas - or at least,
reckoned Cronos, of something that smelled like gas. He found the Mayor
sitting on a stool in the middle of it, trying to soothe to sleep a baby that
was lying in his lap. A cook wearing a flat black cap with a ridiculously
erect thingy on top of it and holding under his arm a lengthily shaped loaf
of bread cursed to himself as he appeared to have added too much red wine to
the soup he was brewing. He kept on adding garlic to it, too, which was
probably the main reason behind the intense smell that pervaded every cubic
inch of air and behind the baby refusing to be soothed.
"It's OK, Maggie," the Mayor said, eyes watering, "it's OK. It'll be alright
in a minute. Just let Francois here finish the soup. It won't be a minute."
For a moment the baby seemed to contemplate the truth of this statement. As
a new wave of garlic smell wafted by and as it seemed to realise it would not
be a minute indeed, however, it started refusing to be soothed with redoubled
vigour.
When he tore his eyes off the ugly infant, Cronos also noticed the Koala
which sat rather inconspicuously behind the Mayor. It smiled broadly - rather
too broadly for a Koala, Warchild thought. From ear to ear, as a matter of
fact.
"Excuse me," Cronos asked the Mayor, unusually timidly for someone of his
persuasion, "but why does your Koala smile like that?"
He wasn't at all interested at why the Koala smiled that way, but somehow he
felt it would be the appropriate thing to ask.
The Mayor looked up at the mercenary annex hired gun, seemed to gauge him
for half a second and then snorted.
"It's a Cheshire Koala," he said as if it was common knowledge. After a
while, during which Cronos had succeeded in not coming up with any noticable
reply, the Mayor added, "You don't know a lot, do you?"
Warchild didn't like the tone of that remark, but he'd be the last one to
lose his temper over something involving his intelligence. He'd read
somewhere that smart people didn't react to insults, so he'd be damned if he
did.
He snorted in reply - or at least he produced a sound not completely
dissimilar to it.
All of a sudden the cook turned around agitatedly. He started yelling in
some sort of foreign language that sounded as if all the accents were put on
the wrong syllables. When the Mayor ignored him and continued trying to put
the baby to rest, the cook started throwing things. First he threw cutlery,
then some pottery and eventually other things ranging from garlic pieces and
wine bottles to snail's houses and pictures of De Gaulle.
The Mayor nor the baby seemed to notice the things being hurled at them, not
even when they bounced off them. The baby simply continued crying, so the
Mayor eventually resorted to singing sortof a lullaby.
"Shake and beat your little Maggie,
And fold her when she cries;
She's only a helpless baby,
But kick her 'till she's nice."
CHORUS
(Where the cook and the baby joined)
"Hey Hey Hey!"
The lullaby was having little effect. Showing the total ineptness of men in
the handling of babies, he started bobbing the ugly creature up and down on
his lap in what was hardly a comforting fashion. The baby started hollering
so loudly that Cronos could barely hear the words of the second verse:
"I shake and beat my little Maggie,
And I fold her when she cries;
For even though she's a baby,
I'll kick her 'till she's nice."
CHORUS
"Hey Hey Hey!"
Still the baby kept on crying and generally being any parent's nightmare. It
was clear that the Mayor had no intent to cope with it any longer. He flung
the ugly thing into Cronos' arms and got up.
"I must get ready to play golf with the King," he said as he left the house
without as much as bidding the others goodbye.
The baby made a distinctly queer sound.
Warchild had never been one to handle babies - not unless they needed to be
manhandled, that is. Ever since he had seen "Three Men and a Baby" he was
afraid of ever having to hold a toddler, afraid of being urinated on, afraid
of having other people witness his shameful lack of talents in the changing
of nappies without getting excreta all over him.
Deep in thought on how he was to get himself out of this situation, he
wandered out of the Mayor's house into the forest. He looked at the baby and
was considerably relieved to see that it seemed to have fallen asleep. Its
mouth had gone wide as if smiling, and its eyes seemed to bulge out a bit
when they were closed.
He sat down on a tree stump. Somewhere, deep within him, paternal feelings
were struggling to get out. The baby, ugly though it had been before, did
have nicely bulging eyes and a a kind of friendly green complexion.
Its eyes opened and it said the first word Cronos had heard it utter - not
counting the hollering, crying and yelling.
"Oo-Wrribbit," it said with a voice that sounded like warts, sticky wet skin
and deep ponds filled with mud and tadpoles.
To his considerable flummoxedness, Warchild found himself holding a human-
baby-sized frog. It looked quite absurd, with its powerful hind legs
extending from Cronos' grasp and its absolutely amphibian grin.
He put it on the ground, first checking to see if no-one had witnessed him
walking around rather sillily with a large frog of sorts. The animal leapt
off comfortably, nonchalantly snatching an innocent fly from the air in mid-
leap.
"Oh shit no," the fly said as it stuck to the tongue, just prior to being
swallowed whole and consequently digested, "Not again."
Shortly afterwards, at the start of its following - short - life, it
appeared as a bowl of petunias at a totally different place and an altitude
of roughly 300 feet.
In the mean time the green jumping wet thing, totally unaware of the
petunia's pending death or most of the other things that were going on in the
multiverse enveloping its wart-ridden form, disappeared in the shrubbery.
Cronos, for his part, did not even notice the disappearance of the
amphibian. Instead, most of his attention was absorbed by a Koala that sortof
drifted in front of a tree branch above him. It was grinning inanely - the
kind of grin Warchild would otherwise rather have hit off the face if it
hadn't been for the fact that the Koala looked cutely cuddly and, indeed,
cuddlily cute.
He hoped the Koala knew the way around here. He had seen it before, so he
guessed it must be a native to this world underground.
"Where should I go?" he asked.
"Where do you want to go?" the Koala replied philosophycally.
Cronos thought for a while. Peculiarly, it didn't hurt.
"Not any place in particular," he concluded.
"Then," the Koala stated with a sense of importance not unlike that of a
judge sentencing someone to death, "you should walk into no direction in
particular."
"But..." Cronos said, but his train of thought had already derailed by the
third dot. He decided upon another approach.
"What kind of creatures live where?" he inquired.
"Now that is a proper question," the Koala said, smiling from ear to ear to
the point where Cronos thought the mouth might connect on the back and the
top half of the fluffy head might flop off, "To the east (it pointed to the
left) you will find the house of Mr. Cranium. To the west (it pointed to the
right) you will find Arthur and Martha's place."
Cronos nodded the way game show hosts nodd when listening to a candidate's
life history for the hundredth time.
"They're all quite insane, you know," the Koala added as an afterthought.
Warchild looked at it blankly.
"No," the Koala said, "no, you probably wouldn't."
The Koala considered it an opportune moment to start disappearing. At first
its fluffy tail faded away, followed by its paws and body. In the end there
was only the head, some seconds later only the asinine smile.
"That's funny," Cronos thought to himself, "Hmmm...I've seen a Koala without
a grin but never have I seen a grin without a Koala."
By the end of this thought the Koala had disappeared altogether, having been
replaced by the proverbial thin air in or behind which the animal seemed to
have vanished without as much as a >zonk<.
The mercenary annex hired gun decided to go to Cranium's house. It sounded
somehow like the most logical thing to do, even though even Cronos felt logic
had nothing to do with it. He walked to the east until he saw a house - at
least he instinctively knew it should be a house though it actually looked
only like an enormous top side of a terrifyingly vast skull. Two ear-shaped
forms were attached to its sides. Some large birds had opted to build nests
in them. Of the two huge half eye-sockets Mr. Cranium seemed to have made a
door and a window.
The house was out of match with Cronos' size. He therefore decided he should
eat some of the right side of the mushroom he found he still had in his
pockets.
His surroundings shrunk somewhat.
He wondered what kind of person would go and live in such an absurdly silly
place. You'd have to be as mad as a hatter!
VII - A TIMELESS PARTY
He probed the front door, which swung open invitingly into a room in which
he saw a long table on which sat three - or were it four? - people.
Most prominent of all sat a person whom he guessed was Mr. Cranium,
excentric and slightly mad. He had a large bald head with tufts of hair
behind and above the ears, an impressive attempt at a failed moustache, and
half-glasses resting on a pompous nose that looked as if it had just been
harvested from a beet plant and glued to his face ineptly.
To the left of the excentric gentleman sat a siamese twin. One of them wore
a T-shirt with the name "Arthur" written on it, the other wore one with
"Martha" on it.
Now Cronos also noticed something sitting between the siamese twin and Mr.
Cranium. It was a huddled form of a human, long-haired dude with John Lennon
glasses sitting partly behind an almost absurdly huge mug of beer.
"War? Knuckles Busted? Stuhl gebaut? No Rob!" the human form muttered in
what seemed like sleep. He belched, wagged his head, then farted. After that
he - or it - seemed to drop in a more intense sort of sleep from which no
further miscellaneous sounds arose.
Warchild cast a glance at the clock. It was noon.
The creatures present, with the exception of the nodding humanoid thing,
looked at Cronos in fright when he barged into the house and helped himself
to a chair. Obviously they considered it a very uncivilized act of him just
to walk in and sit down and the same table where they were enjoying a nice
beer. They succeeded in showing undisguised disgust and contempt at this
infringement of what must be one of their prime rules of life.
"Would you..." Arthur said, "...like a cup of tea?" Martha finished.
Warchild nodded. Surely there could be no harm in them offering him
something as innocent as a cup of hot water with herbal extracts?
Arthur nor Martha made a move, however. They seemed to be waiting for
Cronos' coin to fall. It took a while. Then, as if reluctant to obey Newton,
a coin fell with an inaudible 'clank'.
"But there is no tea," the mercenary annex hired gun finally said, "And you
must know it is highly impolite to offer me something that you don't have.
Not to mention that it might be lethal." He added the latter bit with a hint
of threat in his voice.
Now Mr. Cranium spoke for the first time.
"It was highly impolite of you," Richard retorted, "just to enter my place
and sit down at this table."
Wisely, Warchild decided not to react. Instead he glanced at the clock. It
was noon exactly.
Arthur and Martha seemed to have forgotten all about Cronos already. They
were lifting large mugs of ale to their lips and drinking. The humanoid with
the long black hair and the small round glasses continued having a nap
attack. It snored quite ghastly, as if sleeping the sleep of the Dead. Only
Mr. Cranium kept on looking at Warchild unperturbably - or perhaps at a spot
just behind Cronos' skull.
It unsettled Cronos somewhat. He was not used to feeling unsettled, and
generally took care of feeling very settled indeed by obliterating any thing
or person that might have the slightest of unsettling effects on him. Last
time this had happened was when quite an innocent motorist had folded his
Chevrolet sedan around Warchild's left leg when he had crossed the road
rather suddenly. Though putting Warchild's mind at ease, it had had a
profoundly unsettling effect on the motorist's next of kin, the stomachs of
the two dozen people that stood watching and the social worker of the sewage
maintenance man who just happened to be at work in the manhole down which
miscellaneous unidentifiable but definitely gory bits had dropped.
Just in time to prevent the rather notorious acts Warchild would have deemed
necessary to settle himself, Mr. Cranium said, "Do have a beer."
It did not so much sound like an invitation as a command.
Warchild reached out and got hold of a mug of formidable dimensions. In it
was a foamy liquid that smelled slightly of urine topped by the stuff that
comes off rancid milk when you skim it.
Cronos sighed a deep sigh of relief. Even though he wouldn't recognise a
good red wine if he would drown in it, there was no way he would not
recognize a mug of Dessip if he saw one. This was real men's stuff.
He put the mug to his lips and started drinking. When, after two minutes of
swallowing without bothering to breathe in between, he had downed the entire
mug he had just time enough to burp the Mother of all Burps before passing
out at noon exactly.
It is said that being sober is not the opposite of being drunk, much in the
way that silence is not the opposite of noise but just the absence of it. The
opposite of silence, of course, is anti-silence, the kind of silence that can
shred bones, grind minds and generally cause vastly more intense insanity
than the worst imaginable LSD trip, the kind of silence you get when you go
beyond silence and come out the other side where sound un-exists.
The opposite of sober, much in the same way, is anti-sober (which is
sometimes referred to as Dessip in popular speech, hence the beer's brand
name). It does not leave you flat-out drunk and tottering across the road, it
does not cause spasms or retching, nor any pains in any regions of the body.
People who suffer from anti-soberness suddenly see what the world is really
like - the Truth, the Whole Truth and Nothing but the Truth - and would by
now have changed the world to a far better place if it hadn't been for the
fact that anti-soberness usually lasts for a very short time, immediately
after which the stage of brainmurdering drunkenness sets in (including the
effects hinted at above, as well as some surpassingly more nauseating ones).
If a Cyrius Cybernetics BrainSlator would have been connected to Warchild's
skull, the following short and very intense conversation with himself could
have been recorded:
"So this is what the world is really like? Hm. Does not look like a fun
place at all. What are those weird things? Maybe if I'd change a few things
it would be a happy place for all sentient beings in the entire univ..."
HEAVY MENTAL 'THUD' (signalling the end of the Dessipid phase).
"Oh my. Where's the loo?"
After that, even the sophisticated microcircuitry in the BrainsLator would
have had difficulty noticing any brain activity other than that associated
with the sudden reverse movement of the entire digestive system, followed by
a deep sleep, some more reverse digestive activities, a lot more of deep
sleep and, finally, thoughts about a lamp that protruded from a high, domed
ceiling.
The lamp seemed to gaze at him intently. It seemed determined to continue
staring at him, as if it was playing a game of "Who looks away first." The
lamp seemed keen on winning. Insofar as lamps could have any expression, it
looked smug.
In the end the lamp won.
From his horizontal position on the ground, Cronos looked around carefully
and found himself back in the large hall with the many doors, the lamps
hanging from the ceiling and the glass table with the golden key on it.
He shook his head once he recognized the place he was in. He had no idea how
it had happened, but he surely wasn't going to try and find out - the mere
thought didn't even start to cross his mind.
He sat upright, an intense pain jabbing at his head for a few throbbing
heartbeats. When it had ebbed away he ventured standing up. Apart from a few
more painful jabs, which he was trained to suppress, everything seemed to
work out fine.
Now what had gone wrong last time? He had taken the key when the
surroundings were small and when they were big the key was back on the table.
Hm. He felt in his pockets, relieved to find some of the mushroom still left
in it - of the side that would make the surroundings grow. It was the last
bit. He hoped he wouldn't be needing any more of it.
He took the key, walked to the small door, opened it with the small key, ate
something of the mushroom, shrank to a height of about half a yard and walked
out onto the splendidness of King Spades' Green.
VIII - KING SPADES' GREEN
It was the kind of green that golf game designers would love to buy a
license of. Roughs were located at nasty spots in the hilly landscape that
looked almost artificial in its neatness. A couple of trees seemed to be
meticulously placed here and there. Beautiful rosebushes were placed at
places where they seemed to fit most perfectly. In the distance Cronos saw a
flag or two, beckoning in the soft breeze.
These were the kind of surroundings where he would gladly spend the rest of
his life killing people - even though there didn't seem to be any phones
around.
His arrival at King Spades' Green seemed not to have gone by unnoticed. From
behind a rosebush he though he saw someone signal urgently. He walked to the
bush, noticing that all its roses were red except for a white one. He
considered it odd, but heeded it no further.
"Psst!" the voice hissed, as urgently as its owner had previously beckoned,
"Go away! If the King sees you on his Green he'll chop off your gonads!"
Cronos now saw the thing that was talking to him - for it was a thing indeed
- was a miniature model of the Chinese Wall with arms and legs. This was very
odd, but not half as odd as the fact that it spoke in what Cronos failed to
recognize as a Yorkshire accent.
"Go away!" it repeated, still quite urgent, "I am very serious. Take a hike!
Go and steal bicycles! Beat it! Go away unless you want to end up like so
many others! Piss o..."
The miniature Chinese Wall swallowed its words as it was interrupted by the
sound of footsteps coming closer behind it. Before either the Chinese Wall or
Cronos knew it, they were surrounded by four totally different dogs, four
totally different cars and three miniature Wonders of the World (indeed, and
all boasting legs and arms). In front of them stood a playing card - the King
of Spades, flanked by a Weasel dressed in a mink coat. The King was muttering
something quite angrily about a bowl of petunias, rubbing a bump on one of
its edges. The Weasel seemed just to be agreeing.
"Ha!" the King suddenly exclaimed, his voice triumphant, "Finally I have the
Chinese Wall! As I already have the Pyramids of Gizeh, the Colossos of Rhodos
and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, that means I'll surely beat the others at
Quartette!"
"Gruesomely so, Your Highness," the Weasel agreed.
The King surveyed the dogs, the cars and the Wonders of the World with a
satisfied grin.
Nobody really knew what to say to that, or dared to. Even though he would
probably have dared, Cronos didn't quite know what to say either.
"What is that doing on my green?" the King suddenly inquired when he noticed
Warchild standing around, stabbing a finger at the mercenary annex hired gun,
"Surely that is not one of the objects to be collected?"
Unanimously, the other collectables shook their heads. Nope - there was
definitely no category to fit in a dim-witted human.
"Well then," the King cried, "What are you waiting for? Chop off his
gonads!"
"Diabolically so, Your Supremeness!" the Weasel chimed in enthusiastically,
its tiny teeth flashing for a moment.
Warchild felt an all-too-familiar sensation creep down his stomach and into
his loins. Visions of upset females flashed before his eyes for a second.
A broad-shouldered Gorilla, Warchild's more primitive alter ego so it
seemed, appeared from behind a bush as if it had been hidden there all along.
It licked its lower lip as if it was craving for a banana, and in its hands
it held a knife that looked very sharp indeed.
The King turned around, probably having other pressing matters on his mind.
"Come on, Cat," he commanded.
"Disgustingly so, Your Ampleness," the Weasel assented, following the King.
The dogs, cars and miniature Wonders of the World followed, too. The Chinese
Wall managed to cast a fleeting glance of symphathy at Warchild.
The Gorilla grinned. The knife flashed. A killer gadget was fumbled with,
useless without a phone at hand. An upper lip was licked.
At around that instant, it became no longer apparent what happened. A
cartoonesque cloud of sand evolved around the human and the primate, grass
flinging off in several directions. The occasional sounds along the lines of
"BASH", "WHACK" and, indeed, "THUD", were hurled at who cared to stand by and
watch.
The sounds were enough to have the King decide that the pressing matters,
whatever they were, might have to wait.
"I put five on the human," the Hanging Gardens of Babylon cried.
"Ten on the gorilla," the DHL car yelled.
"Which one?" a Great Dane asked.
"No bets!" the King shouted.
"Horribly so, Your Elatedness!" Cat the Weasel concorded.
"I disagree!" a Pitbull grunted.
"One more remark like that," the King whispered between his teeth, "and I'll
have your gonads chopped off as well!"
"Detestingly so, Your Splendidness!" Cat joined in.
Few moments later the dust settled upon the unconscious form of the Gorilla.
Its fur was wrinkled, it had a black eye and its nose seemed broken with a
tiny stream of blood pouring out of one nostril.
It was dead, too.
Cronos brushed off some grass and sand, then snorted derisively.
"It seems," the King said, a hint of reverence in his royal voice, "That
perhaps your privates don't need to be chopped off after all."
"Resentfully so, Your Supremeness," the Weasel added, slightly hesitantly.
"Perhaps I should invite you to a game of golf," the King concluded after a
second or two of thought. He shushed away the Quartette collectables. Some
Pink Flamingoes appeared from behind bushes where they seemed to have been
all along, as well as a couple of Hedgehogs that had probably been hogging
behind a hedge all that time.
The Weasel didn't say anything. It just looked at Warchild, then at the
gorilla. A shiver ran down its weasly spine.
"You know what it's like with our kind," the King added jocularly, patting
Cronos on the back as if they had been pub pals for years, "We call a spade a
spade. Takes some getting used to, but most manage. Eventually."
One of the Pink Flamingoes was inserted in Warchild's hands, head down. One
of the Hedgehogs slowly coiled itself at Cronos' feet.
"Am I supposed to hit the Hedgehog with the Flamingo?" Cronos asked nobody
in particular.
"Yes," his Flamingo muttered in an irritated tone, "you're supposed to.
Don't worry. I'm used to it. I suppose the Hedgehogs are, too."
Warchild swung the Flamingo's head in a totally incompetent way.
Miraculously he succeeded in letting the Hedgehog fly off in the distance,
where it eventually landed on the ground, dizzy, after having collided with a
tree which it would have preferred somewhat less sturdy.
Cronos walked to the place where the Hedgehog lay, an unnaturally pale
complexion on it. Suddenly the White Kangaroo was walking next to him,
carrying on its shoulder another Flamingo.
"Where's the Mayor?" Warchild asked.
"Be silent," the marsupial whispered, "He's sentenced to have his you-know-
whats chopped off."
"Hm," Cronos hm-ed.
"Don't you think," the Kangaroo said, desperate to change the subject, "that
playing golf is difficult?"
To be honest, it has to be told that Cronos even found it difficult to play
croquet - let alone play golf with a live Flamingo that constantly tried to
bend its neck so as to avoid actually hitting the live Hedgehogs, which also
found it necessary to walk off constantly.
He nodded to the Kangaroo, that had in the mean time already walked off to
another hole altogether.
At that instant the Cheshire Koala appeared again, bobbing gently above
Cronos, who looked at it with rather bewildered incomprehension.
As soon as it had enough of a mouth to speak with, it inquired as to how
things were going.
"Well, actually things are sortof strange down here," Cronos said, "but I'm
starting to get used to it. Or at least I think I am, so I might not
actually."
The King saw the mercenary annex hired gun talking to the floating Koala. He
came closer, intent to find out everything about any odd things that were
happening on his green. The Weasel tailed behind, muttering an agreement.
"What are you talking to?" the King asked.
"I think it's a something Koala," Cronos replied, quickly adding "but it
isn't mine," in fear of having some vitals chopped off by a hypothetic animal
more formidable than the Gorilla.
"I don't like the wretched creature," the King said, turning up his nose and
extending his hand, "but it may kiss my hand."
The Cheshire Koala made a strange sound, then said, "I'd rather not, if you
don't mind."
The King's healthy black'n'white complexion turned red slowly, then passed
beyond that and eventually became an angry sort of deep purple.
"I want its gonads chopped off this instant! The impertinent sod!" the King
cried, more agitated then Cronos had ever seen him so far.
"It's a Koala, Your Solubleness," whispered Cat.
Warchild decided it might be wise to go off and attempt to hit some more
Hedgehogs.
The Flamingo, which had intently followed the proceedings that were going on
around the King and the Koala, was entirely unaware of what hit it (or,
rather, what it hit) until it was abused into moving an innocent Hedgehog
some three hundred yards away.
"Good," thought Cronos to himself, rather satisfied, smiling smugly at
himself. He trundled off towards the part of the green where the spikey
creature seemed to have hit the ground. The Flamingo, all but unconscious,
hung across Warchild's broad shoulders.
The Hedgehog lay in a state of stupor. Obviously it could no longer rely on
either the ability of the Flamingo to bend its neck away in time nor its own
ability to trudge off when noone was looking. Cronos' utter ineptitude at
playing golf had obviously been too much for either of the creatures to take
into consideration.
Warchild had folded the Pink Flamingo (which moaned a muffled moan in some
sort of protest) into shape and was just about to swing it with his usual
lack of talent when the sounds of consternation reached the inner part of his
highly trained mercenary hearing aid.
He lowered the Flamingo (which sighed the deepest sigh of relief it had ever
found necessary to sigh) and walked back to where some things seemed to be
going on that involved the Cheshire Koala.
All of the major parties involved in the conflict started speaking to
Warchild at once. His brain overflowed, his eyes crossed, his lower jaw fell
open rather sillily and a slab of wet meat fell out. Eventually they all shut
up, allowing Cronos to get his system going again.
The executioner, a Chimpanzee who was obviously intended as (but quite
failed to be) a spare Gorilla, said you could not chop off any gonads if
there was no body to chop them off from.
The King just said that if something wouldn't be done about this pronto,
everybody's gonads would have to go. Suddenly everybody started looking very
grave.
Having not been trained to be a judge or jury, indeed, only having been
trained in disciplines fairly closely connected with his profession of
mercenary annex hired gun, it was remarkable with which advise Cronos
succeeded in coming up.
"Well," he said, gravely so as to fit the mood, "it's the Mayor's Koala so
you could consult with him."
After it saw the King cast a short but intensely meaningful glance at its
scrotch the executioner ran off immediately, making the kind of assorted
noises that monkeys make when their trees are being burned down.
When after a while it came back with Mayor, the Cheshire Koala had vanished
entirely.
Some of the creatures present start to look for it nervously. The others got
back to the game.
IX - WHO BROUGHT THE SKUNK?
The Mayor was happy to see Cronos. Nobody had ever felt happy to see Cronos
again, except possibly for his dear Mother and the great loves of his life
(of which there had been preciously few), so it made him feel all funny
inside.
They chatted idlily for a very short while. The conversation was cut short
mainly by the fact that Cronos found himself constantly capable only of
talking about killing people and the gadgets required for that, which tended
to put off the Mayor. The man would probably never be happy to see Cronos
again.
The Mayor was oddly relieved to find something else to direct his attention
to when two biped Crocodiles suddenly popped out of proverbial nothingness
and clasped hold of him.
"Resistance is useless!" one of them bellowed in a most Vogonesque fashion,
prodding the Mayor with a stick in a rather unfriendly manner. The second
guard looked at Cronos mutely, if possible even more menacing than the other
had spoken. It was a look that suggested the beholder to either piss off or
get his butt kicked - which Warchild of course totally failed to recognize as
such.
Assuming it was some sort of mysterious Wonderland ceremony of greeting,
Cronos attempted to return the nasty grin as evilly as he could manage. He
found it difficult as he lacked the required dental outfit. Nonetheless, the
guard started to sweat and suddenly found it necessary to direct its
attention to the manner in which its esteemed colleague continued prodding
the Mayor.
"Might I inquire as to the reasons for my apprehension?" the Mayor asked,
trying to sound somewhat dignified but failing.
"You may," said the second guard in a matter-of-fact way, followed by one of
his ominous glares and silence. The Mayor started to sweat.
"Resistance is useless!" the other guard bellowed, as if trying to make a
point. It prodded again. It was rather obvious it liked doing it. It had
probably been hit a lot by pop and mom Croc.
They lead the Mayor off to a large amphi-theatre court that had previously
been hidden from sight by some purple trees. Cronos, for lack of anything
better to do, decided to follow and see what would happen.
The court was quite large. On top of what seemed to be not unlike a stage
there were a desk behind which sat the King of Spades and Cat the Weasel, a
chair and table on which (for a reason unaccountable) lay a Limburg Pie, and
two benches on which sat a variety of jury-creatures scribbling zealously.
Before the desk stood Ted the Skunk, flanked at a safe distance by two other
Crocodile guards wearing pegs on their noses.
Cronos saw that the jury consisted mostly of creatures he had met during his
stay Underground. He saw the Koala, the Ant, the Kaka, the Falcon, Mortimer
the Badger, Adrian the Mole, Mr. Richard Cranium and Arthur and Martha - the
last two sitting closely together, talking avidly about something or other.
"Please lead in the defendant," the King said, trying to make his voice
sound weighty and succeeding rather well.
"Most obnoxiously so, Your Flatulence," Cat agreed.
The two Crocodile guards that had fetched the Mayor now lead the poor man to
the chair behind the table on which lay the Limburg Pie. It was a cherry one.
It puzzled him. The guards posted themselves at each side of the Mayor,
disabling him from escaping should he have intended to.
Cronos saw there was only one place left for him to sit, which was amidst
the jury-creatures. He folded himself between the Kaka and the Koala.
A murmur ran through the jurors and most of the attending audience that sat
opposite the judge's table on the other side of the amphi-theatric structure.
"Resistance is useless!" something shouted at the top of its voice, after
which the audience's droning quickly died away.
"Zonk..." whispered the Koala, a bit sad.
There were some instantes of hushed silence, hanging in the air like a death
verdict. Then the King rose from his seat, and with him everybody in the
court.
"Herald!" the King shouted, "read the accusation!"
The same White Kangaroo that had ran into Warchild at several occasions
during his stay in Wonderland now appeared on the stage. It looked
ridiculous, what with half of a trumpet sticking out of its pouch and it
wearing a powdered wig of sorts. It unfolded a piece of paper, waited until
everybody sat again and started to read.
"The accused, Mayor Mr. Johann Gambolputty de von Ausfern-schplenden-
schlitter- crasscrenbon-fried-digger- dingle- dangle-dongle-dungle-burstein-
von-knacker-thrasher-applebanger-horowitz-ticolensic-bur-ander-knotty-
spelltinkle-grandlich... (here it had to breathe deeply, after which it
continued as if nothing had happened) ...grumblemeyer-spelterwasser-
kurstlich-himble-eisen-bahnwagen-gutenabend-bitte-ein-nurnburger-bratwustle-
gernspurten-mitz-weimache-luber-hundsfut-gumberaber-shonedanker-kalbsfleisch-
mittler-aucher von Hautkopft of Ulm, henceforth to be referred to as 'the
Mayor' for economic reasons, is accused of...bringing Ted the Skunk!"
Some "ooohs" and "aaahs" went through the audience, after which they hushed
again as the White Kangaroo continued, "The Court calls the first witness,
Miss...er...Virgin."
It took out the trumpet and blew a cheap Louis Armstrong impression.
A door at stage left was thrown open and a bailiff showed in the ostensibly
nude form of the Virgin. Some whistles arose from the male spectators, some
eyeglasses were connected to the females. Although the audience consisted
solely of various animals and birds, none of them seemed to remain totally
unaffected by the way in which the Virgin's beautiful long hair covered vital
bits of her anatomy and simultaneously revealed enough of them to shake (not
stir) anyone's imagination.
To add extra effect to the Virgin's arrival, Cronos' system considered that
precise moment opportune to start growing a bit. The Kaka cleared its throat
and inserted a feathery elbow in Warchild's side.
"Would you mind not growing, Sir?" it said irritatedly. It sounded like a
parrot immitating human speech in an awkward way - which was probably
precisely what it did.
"You're growing, too, mind you," Cronos retorted.
"Would you mind," the creature said, insulted, "keeping those filthy remarks
to yourself?"
It turned around demonstratively to study the Virgin, avidly scribbling
things on its piece of paper.
Forward stepped a Hyena, wearing a powdered white wig just like the White
Kangaroo which looked even much more ridiculous on this African carnivore. It
also wore a black cape of some kind. It walked as if thoroughly aware that
everyone was looking at it, and enjoying it.
"Erm...er...," the Hyena started, having difficulty retaining his composure
with such a mass of soft, naked, human flesh in front of it,
"Miss...er...Virgin, what have you to say about Johann Gam... er...the
Mayor?"
The Virgin looked around at the assembled crowd as if waiting for a most
opportune moment to start her testimony. Suddenly she did.
"The Mayor is innocent," she said simply.
"Ah!" the Hyena cried.
"That is a most important thing to know," the King said.
"Most hideously so, Your Stupefyingness!" the Weasel chimed in.
"Oooh," said some of the spectators.
"Aaah," said some others.
The jurors were busy scribbling things on their notepads. Cronos considered
it odd that they all spelled guilty like "guilty".
In came a Snake now. A hush went through the crowd, for it was none other
than Tansa, a lawyer enjoying global fame in Wonderland. It was reknown for
its capability of bending justice to its own needs, something it was better
at even than most other lawyers. It, too, wore some sort of powdered wig.
"Might I interrogate the witnesssss now?" it said, its voice filled with
devious cunningness, if indeed the sound of a punctured car tyre losing air
could have any such qualities.
The King nodded gravely. The Weasel nodded too, but emphatically.
"Misssss Virgin," Tansa began, "what make you capable of claiming that
Joh...er... the Mayor isssss innosssssent?"
"Well," the Virgin started, "..."
"Isssss it no ssssso," the Snake interrupted, "that you can only know
thisssss if you've DONE IT YOURSSSSSELF?"
The reptile rose to its full height in front of the witness, trying to
intimidate her.
There was a satisfied murmuring from the crowd. The jurors scribbled
enthusiastically. The King sat back in his chair, smiling broadly. He had
always kinda liked the Mayor and he hadn't felt comfortable when he heard the
Mayor had allegedly committed such a hideous offence. The Virgin, on the
other hand, put him ill at ease just by being here. He didn't feel bad at all
about her being guilty. Justice had been served once more, and he could
finally get down to munching that Limburg Pie that just sat on that table for
not much of a particular reason.
The Virgin was not intimidated by the Snake, however, no matter how much it
looked like lawyers generally do. Even when the pathetic animal rose to full
height it was hardly larger than...er... Anyway, she had seen bigger things
in her life.
"You must be out of your mind," the Virgin spoke haughtily, "I will not have
you accuse me of anything of the sort!"
The crowd went through their "ooohs" and "aaahs" again, the King moved to
the edge of his chair, the imagined taste of cherry vanishing from his royal
tongue.
"Ssssso you deny!" Tansa cried. If the animal would have had a fist, this
would have been to moment for it to be connected to the table, with force.
Cronos was feeling ill at ease, just like the King. Only with Warchild it
was caused by his overall continuous growing. He was already getting too big
to fit on the jury-creatures' bench any more.
The King rose from his chair.
"If...er...um...you allegedly...um...er...didn't do...er...um... it," he
said, addressing the Virgin, "that is to say, er...um... bringing Ted, then
who...er...um...has?"
"Most...er...loathsomely so, Your...um...Divinity!" the Weasel concorded
quietly so as not to disturb amazement and wonder, which both hung in the
sky, chatting leisuredly while waiting for the outcome.
Without thinking twice the Virgin looked Cronos Warchild straight in the
eyes. He suddenly felt some part of his body was perhaps growing slightly
quicker than the rest of it.
"Him!" she cried, affecting emotion and tears, "that big lummox over there!"
She sniggered and snorted derisively, slowly pointing her virginal hand
towards Cronos Warchild. When she was positive all the court now gazed in awe
at the mercenary annex hired gun, she stepped down and left the court.
Amazement and wonder decided to stay for a while longer.
X - CRONOS' INNOCENCE
Warchild arose, startled, tossing over most of the jurors' benches as he had
already grown larger, almost up to his natural size. The creatures fell over.
Deja vu struck Cronos mercilessly, upon which he frenetically tried to put
all the animals and birds back on their benches for fear of treading on them.
His first kill had been his foster mother's cat, which he had reduced to a
flat mass of blood and gore by inadvertently lowering his rear end on it. He
didn't like to think back of it, nor did he like to have things repeat
themselves. As far as repition was concerned, everything that had happened
underground had already been, somehow, uncannily familiar.
"What do you know about thisssss busssssinesssss?" Tansa asked, attempting a
hypnotic stare on Cronos that bounced back off and made it feel sleepy for an
instant.
"Nothing whatever," Warchild said firmly. He might have been dimwitted, but
he had a great sense of justice. In his views the guilty had to die horrible
deaths, preferably by his hands, and the innocent needed to go free and
generally live long and happy everafter. As he could not imagine killing
himself he logically concluded he had to be innocent of whatever ridiculous
charge was made against him. Besides, he knew nothing of any Skunks
whatsoever, except maybe for once having kicked one.
If Tansa would have had a brow, it would have frowned it. If it would have
had hands and hair, it would have put its first in its latter.
Rather unannounced, the King suddenly sprang up from his chair.
"Silence!", he yelled at the top of his royal voice, the Weasel's frantic
agreement lost in the noise. The King took a leather-bound tome from the
table, opened it and read, "Rule forty-two: All persons more than a mile high
have to leave the court."
All eyes (some of which were on stalks) immediately turned at Cronos, who
suddenly felt stage fright homing in on his subconsciousness at positively
awesome speed.
"Peremptorily so, Your Multiformness," Cat added after a while, which it had
spent stunned at the King's suddenness.
"No way," Cronos said.
"Way," the King replied.
"Yesssss way," the Snake lawyer added superfluously.
"Two miles," the Hyena spoke.
"I don't care a pair of fetid dingo kidneys," Warchild said, folding his
arms demonstratively. One of the members of the audience uttered an insulted
bark.
The White Kangaroo was the first to send silence to the hospital. "There's
more evidence to come yet, Your Majesty," it said, "A letter written by the
mercenary annex hired gun and addressed to Ted the Skunk, as a matter of
fact."
Of course Cronos was as little able to read and write as politicians are
able to talk honest sense - so it was quite out of the question that he
should have written that letter, or whatever it was.
"What'sssss in it?" Tansa asked with the inquisition so familiar to lawyers.
"Dunno," the Kangaroo said, fumbling its trumpet's mouthpiece lamely, "there
is nothing written on the outside."
"It has to be written to someone," the Hyena remarked smartly, "it rarely
occurs that letters are written to no-one, you know."
"Open it," the King commanded.
"Mandatorily so, Your Slovenliness," the Weasel enthused.
The White Kangaroo solemnly opened the envelope and took out a piece of
paper. Even most jurors started to doubt whether it had been written by
Warchild when it was proclaimed to contain only poetry.
"It doesssss not look like the mersssssenary'sssss handwriting," the Snake
said, unable to bar disappointment from entering its voice. The jury-
creatures looked at each other, not quite knowing what to make of this.
"He must have faked another person's handwriting!" the Hyena remarked, smart
as ever. The jurors smiled happily, scribbling down something.
"Cod's Wallop!" Cronos cried, rising to his feet whereby he tossed most
jurors off their benches again, "and I am sick and tired of all this. Ever
since I came here nobody liked me! Ever since I arrived here everybody has
been very nasty to me, and now you're trying to sentence me, or something!"
He breathed in deeply.
"Mummy!!" he cried, sobbing, shoulders shaking.
The sheer power of his voice moved the tables, let the Limburg Pie dash off
with its proverbial tail between its metaphorical legs and caused most of the
creatures present to land on the ground spreadeagled, prostrate, or both.
Even the King found himself on the ground, his royal arse in the air.
Some Old Wonders of the World came running into the courtroom. Numbers
floated through the air. Colourless green ideas started sleeping furiously.
"Order!" the King yelled.
"Mummy!!" Cronos howled.
Warchild found himself screaming into an empty street. He was wet; it
appeared to have rained. Dusk had fallen. The moon and stars looked at the
mercenary annex hired gun mutely, seemingly intent on remaining that way.
As Cronos was not trained to think but to fight instead, the difference
between dream and reality was altogether rather vague to him. He wondered how
he came back on that bank, and he also wondered what had become of the bozo
that seemed to have done a pretty good job at going off somewhere.
Warchild felt his pockets. A curse rolled off his lips.
His American Express Travellers' Cheques had been nicked again.
THE END
Original written July to September 1992. And I'm very sorry about the (lack
of an) equivalent of the "Lobster Quadrille". I figured if I didn't even know
what a quadrille was, I should leave it be.
= SOON COMING ===============================================================
The next issue of "Twilight World", Volume 3 Issue 5, is to be released mid
September 1995. Please refer to the 'subscription' section, below, for
details on getting it automatically, in case you're interested.
Please refer to the section on 'submissions', below, for more details on
submitting your own material.
The next issue will probably contain the following items...
WILD HORSES
by Mark Knapp
FATAL FAM
by Martijn Wiedijk
AND MORE
= SOME GENERAL REMARKS ======================================================
DESCRIPTION
"Twilight World" is an on-line magazine aimed at everybody who is interested
in any sort of fiction - although it usually tends to concentrate on fantasy-
and science-fiction, often with a bit of humour thrown in.
Its main source is an Atari ST/TT/Falcon disk magazine by the name of "ST
NEWS" which publishes computer-related articles as well as fiction. "Twilight
World" mostly consists of fiction featured in "ST NEWS" so far, with added
stories submitted by "Twilight World" readers.
SUBMISSIONS
If you've written some good fiction and you wouldn't mind it being published
world-wide, you can mail it to me either electronically or by standard mail.
At all times do I reserve the right not to publish submissions. Do note that
submissions on disk will have to use the MS-DOS or Atari ST/TT/Falcon disk
format on 3.5" Double-or High-Density floppy disk. Provided sufficient IRCs
are supplied (see below), you will get your disk back with the issue of
"Twilight World" on it that features your fiction. Electronic submittees will
get an electronic subscription if so requested.
At all times, please submit straight ASCII texts without any special control
codes whatsoever, nor right justify or ASCII characters above 128. Please use