Thursday 23 May 2013

The Wizards of London


LONDON CHURNING
 and burning too!
and the resident wizards are not happy!

Sassy Goldie and Jonahexed had intended to park Lady Zen Shipper at the park at the end of Respite Street.
The street however was a smouldering ruin with fires still burning in some houses, others destroyed completely, and the surface of the street cracked and split with holes and impact craters.

"where are all the people?" cried Sassy, "oh no, Reg, Her, Dr. A!"

"One of those piles of rubble is moving?" Fluvia stated.

A metallic arm could be seen punching upwards moving rubble aside. Very soon a cyborg housewife wearing a charred frilly apron could been seen smashing rubble and heard screaming too.

"My garden! My garden!"

Reg was the next to emerge from the cellar moving over to the part of the rubble apparently covering his taxi and was using his levitators to bob up and down in a manner both erratic and irate.

"My taxi! My beautiful cab! OY! I just had her waxed polished last week! #$!@##@$#%$$@!"

JonaHexed pointed towards the centre of the city.

The ground was churning. Roads leading towards the city were rippling and cracking. Something was moving under the ground. The buildings of the city were moving too shaking and swaying. Tentacles were rising from the ground. Burning tentacles belonging to some being with a biochemistry allowing it to have a body temperature so high its touch burnt and melted everything around it.

The Subchthonic races were rising to the surface.

Squads of angry archaeozooic reptilians awakened from hibernation were also rampaging the streets along with survivors from buried alien shipwrecks and mole like people and pale skinned subterranean adapted hominids plus a light scattering of fast and slow swarms of zombies.

Directly below them other survivors were climbing up out of the ruins.

Dr A was amongst them and he was very unhappy with a look that could quall civil servants of several ranks. He was so angry he was actually visibly using magic. Fires were going out around him and frost forming on the ground immediately about him.

"Should we be worried that Dr. A might be going dark?" asked Fluvia.

"There's one than one Wizard in London," stated JonaHexed.

"So?" asked Fluvia.

"Yes there they are walking up the street towards us!" replied JonaHexed pointing at a group walking towards them. The group included a beraggled middle aged mage with what could only be called dirty blonde hair in a rather grotty trench coat who was smoking, the owner of a shop that was really more a storage unit for arcane items, and some clearly upper class individual with an air of authority in a very expensive but well kept older coat and suit. He had an apprentice with him a young man part West African in appearance but all Londoner.

The smoker stopped walking opened his mouth to speak and begun to his horror to cough and wheeze.

The others glared at him and one of them muttered cynically
" ... well that proves the Laws of Magic have changed his anti-lung damage spell has stopped working."

"I don't suppose ..." asked the authoritative looking man "Young Timothy or any of the Potters have shown up amongst this chaos or that fellow from Chicago or that New York based mage or any of the Merlins?"

"I am here!" snapped Dr. A giving them a look that could have turned Epping Forest into a barren polar waste.

"We're here too!" remarked Sassy with distracting cheeriness sensing a possible fight.

There was an equally distracting hissing noise in the distance as larges wave suddenly surged up out of the Thames and its tributaries putting out many of the fires in the city.

"ah the Ladies of the River have taken action!" remarked the man in the old but stylish overcoat.

"some one is going to pay for the damage to my triffid collection!" snarled Dr. A who was glaring at the ruins of his house and garden.

"AH" cooed fluvia using her most seductively dangerous tone of voice,"speaking about that perhaps you gentlemen would like to assist us ...?"

to be continued sooner or later










Wednesday 8 May 2013

Next and next and next


Next next and next

Fluvia was in deep planning mode with the extended Adjunct clan.

A world in which all alternate universes and fictionalities along with other realms continuing to converge was dangerous to everyone. Death could become final and not dependent on rewrites or retro continuity or how popular your character was.  Also there were now fairies at the bottom of the garden and not necessarily the nice flowery ones. The distant yelping and shrieking  of tormented animals could be heard and that was just under the tea table as Goldie and the dodos fought over scraps and tidbits.

"So..." stated Fluvia, "its agreed we use Lady Zen to get to the Node and fight to make sure one of us is at the front of the queque  or brawl or civil war to make the first wish and ..." dark clouds suddenly appeared overhead tinting the daylight with ominous overtones, "Oh that's ... not good." The dark clouds begun to swirling and glow as if they were ash around a fire.

"There's no smiting scheduled!" cried one character.

"Weaponry!" cried another running towards the house, "we need guns!"

A bolt of something like plasma struck downwards vaporizing most of the house and setting fire to the rest and then a minute later a second carved a message into a hillside facing the house.

"New Product! The Schnittatron. Don't wait for Divine wrath! Take your revenge NOW!! Darkoverlord Today! Brought to you by giantmegacolossalcorp! Ha!ha!ha!"

"oh really!" yelped Sassy, "who carves evil laughter? Your series villians are really tasteless!"

JonaHexed pointed up at the sky. The clouds were swirling and glowing again!

"Run they havnt finished! To the ship now!"

The humans raced over the lawn but the most of the dodos panickd and run around in circles shrieking.

"PLOCK! plock PLOCK! plock!"

"Pickie here girl marshmallows!"

"PICKIE!"

Another bolt of pseudodivine wrath struck.

"oh Pickie!" wept several people.

Happily a small flock of slightly smouldering dodos wandered out of the smoke surrounding the impact crater from the bolt in a manner even more dazed and confused than usual for small reconstructed from extinction avians.

"Everyone aboard now!" ordered Fluvia.

Even the dodos complied with a little help from Sassy bravely ignoring the risk of incineration and racing out to round up and herd the dodos to the ship.

Lady Zen Shipper raced from the outskirt sof Swindon towards London followed by dark clouds.





Wednesday 1 May 2013

DRM and Dodos.


DRM and dodos to the rescue!

Maybe we just crossed a cloud of Dark Matter?"
observed Fluvia staring out at the gloom beyond the windows at the rolling and roiling darkness.

An abstract object that looked like a sculpture of a syllable with a plus sign at one side followed by a whole word that moved like a thread dangling down from something.

"Holy Muses a discarded morph and a dangling participle!" screamed one character.

"A what?" asked Goldie. Despite being multilingual a grasp of actual formal grammar was not one of her gifts.

"Couldn't this just mean we're near the textual ocean in you know which world?" asked Sassy as a phrasal verb drifted past followed by a uniliteral glyph, a string of Unicode, and a line of HTML 3.

"Or this could Dark Read Materia?" replied Fluvia still staring out the window,

"oh there's a dodo out there! Who'd discard one of those? They're valuable?"

"it's not a Wonderland dodo ... but that style looks ...it's Pickwickie!" squealed Goldie in gleeful recognition.

If we can catch her and tie a line to her we can use her as a resonance point and get back to Swindon. Well a version of Swindon and that will get us closer to London!" exclaimed JonaHexed manfully.

Some time later JonaHexed stood in an open airlock holding a lasso while Fluvia lured toward Lady Zen with offerings of marshmallows.

"Here Pickwickie Marshmallows!"

"Plock? Plockplockplock?!"

"Come on Pickie time to go home! Just follow the trail of marshmallows!"

JonaHexed flung out the lasso and lured the dodo a bird of very little brain given the size of her head in proportion to her body.

"That's a good small blue reconstructed avian! Eat those mallows! Want some more?

"Plock PLOCK plock?"

"Home Pickie! Remember Thursday! and the day after that?"

"Plock! Plock! Plock!"  cried the Dodo excitedly.

"and you remember the day after Monday?"

"PLOCK!Plock!plock!" The dodo ran around in circles panicking.

"Well now you've gone and frightened her!" snapped Sassy.

"Pickwickie oh pickie time to go home come on girl head for home!

Something almost like a thought flickered briefly in the dodo's eyes.

"Remember Thursday Pickwickie? Home! Please!"

The dodo raised her head and sniffed for something.

"Yes Pickwickie Thursday Swindon Home home girl home!

The clouds parted and the dodo ran towards a patch of green.

With a terrible thump Lady Zen was dragged along behind her and landed on the lawn of a small mansion.

The dodo was racing towards a terrace at one side where people were having afternoon tea.

Sassy Goldie and Fluvia hurried towards them and paused at the edge of the terrace.

There seemed to be two or three versions of every person there including the dodos. One type was eating birdseed but another group wearing glasses were standing on a table reading newspapers.

"Hello?"asked Fluvia," would anyone here happen to be named after a day of the week, particularly the day after Wednesday?"

"I am!" "No I am! "But I am too!"

Fluvia snatched a news paper from the dodos who squawked indignantly.

The headline read WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE!

One of the people named after a day of the week held up some kind of digital tablet.

"Wow Apple are negotiating a merger with Starktech!"

"Uh some place called Ryleh is sending ambassadors to the UN?"

And some madwoman dressed in steam punk clothes attacked the producers of Doctor Who screaming "Stop damaging my paintwork"

( Yes readers I warned you some events were narrated to me out of sequence. Apparently the You know Who's travel device stopped off at Cardiff to get her revenge for the number of times she's been damaged the last few seasons but that was AFTER she got the messages ... now the girls tell me!)

"Right," commanded Fluvia "Next next and next we need you!    and here's why .."

to be continued sooner or later at the usual erratic pace.