A Visit to LaLaLand

A Visit to the LALA Nexus

JonaHexed was being obstinately rational.

“Look it is not logical! You cannot erase an entire pocket dimension! It might dwindle if you severed all the anchor points to cosmic resonance nodes but …”

“but someone did!” interrupted Sassy, “ … well must have … there was some really strange stuff happening as we left the node nexus thingie  … the one where the Forever Patrollers are! Giant robots and big things blundering around and those annoying Patrollers were fighting and we can’t get home!”

JonaHexed continued being obstinately explanatory,

 “… but all these are only metaphors used to describe multidimensional reality, severance is just a metaphor for a resonance change that leads to Teckelstein becoming beyond our perception or moving elsewhere or changing to a different entropic state or … we just have to find a different “string” by accessing another nexus. Which other nexus can we try? Which nexus has lots of links to other loci?” asked JonaHexed almost glaring at them.

“The one under New York Grand Central Station?” asked Goldie eagerly?

She loved the shopping opportunities in nearly every version of New York.

“We are sooo not using a nexus controlled by cats!” snapped Sassy.

“But then we could go visit that lovely version of New York,” babbled Goldie, “where those nice gargoyles live and the guardians in the pretty Art Deco building and there are urban bikie elves and shops and more shops and ”

“Goldie that’s it!” exclaimed JonaHexed, “ but not New York!
We’ll go to the LA Nexus! That’s linked to several ficitionalities, and timelines, and its multi-species controlled, and we can use the tangent of the XY co-ordinates to the geometric factor of the parallel hyberbolic …” Sassy and Goldie were spared a quantum geometry lesson by an alarm going off!

“Warning Unidentified hostile firing! Warning! Warning!” screamed Lady Zen Shipper as a missile slammed into her force fields with an impact felt throughout her whole being. JonaHeXed punched in commands for sensor display. The screen for the external sensors showed the image of a fleet of craft beginning to surround them. Those craft were bristling with weapons and launching smaller fighters. A line of text was scrolling across the screen informing them that an incoming transmission was being censored due to it being extremely vulgar and promising assaults of a personal nature. An image flashed onto the screen of a ship’s command center. Several darkly caped and sinister figures were fighting for central position in front of the camera and all were yelling, “We’re coming to get you @@#$%^^& B&&&&!”

“Wow that’s nearly every villain we’ve thwarted in the last few years on board!” observed Sassy, “including a couple of your would be girl friends JonaHexed and look there’s some of your cousins, Goldie, and oh … DARK CAPER!”

What appeared to be the empty hood of a cape the color of midnight shadows was facing the screen having pushed its way in front of the others.
A voice was booming out of it!

“I’m coming to punish you dog! I’m going to personally possess you and then I will use you to destroy every dachshund in the entire multi-verse and I will finally turn your gal pal into sashimi and then I’ll … “ someone lunged at the hood screaming, “NO it's my turn first” and another person shrieked “The Goullawk will be my trophy, stuffed and mounted and …”

“Now would be a good time to program co-ordinates for the Prime LALA Nexus,” observed JonaHexed, his fingers already dancing across the keyboard.

“Lady Zen Shipper punch us through to LA now!”

“Emergency transit authorised?” demurely asked the ship.

“Yes!!!” screamed all three of them in unison as more and more energy weapons struck at the ship’s force fields. Then they were elsewhere.

The LALA nexus should be hidden in a cavern system under the city. From those caverns tunnels lead up into its demon haunted sewers, streets, fitness centers, shops, film studios, and producers’ offices. Other tunnels lead to the main train station, the desert, and up to a certain park with misplaced Australian trees looking like they were mourning the absence of kookaburras, magpies, and cockatoos.

This is an absence for which the people of California should be eternally grateful.

Kookaburras gleefully steal from picnic tables and then sit on a nearby branch and let you watch them further tenderise your lunch.

Magpies go psycho in breeding season and become kamikaze dive-bombers.

As for cockatoos they have an interesting and literally consuming relationship with outdoors timber furniture pergolas trellis and verandas. I do mean consuming as sulphur crested cockatoos seem to believe that since we keep destroying all their hollow nesting trees the favor should be returned to our domiciles.

There was no nexus at their arrival point. Instead of columns of marble and granite and grand halls, occupied by people, who were even odder than usual by the standards of the mostly, and in some cases, only allegedly, though seemingly human, occupants of the city above, the view screens showed desert. Weeds, dust, weeds, sand, straggly plants, and more dust, weeds, and desert. There weren’t even any scenic rocks oh so familiar from various sci-fi series. There was lots of desert. There was a smoky haze in the distance that was probably the LA basin. Probably. Hopefully. There was definitely an excellent view of desert and dust and the sort of plant that only looks attractive when briefly flowering.

“That’s not good,” muttered JonaHexed, inspecting the view.

“You think?!” snapped Sassy glaring at him, “Where’s the nexus station?”

“I could have a dust bath!” gurgled Goldie with misplaced positivity!

JonaHexed spent a few minutes doing things with the comm systems and computers and then groaned and slowly lowered his head onto his arms moaning softly. Sassy gave him a moment or two to be inarticulate and then firmly head butted his rib cage. Goldie joined in playfully tail slapping him on his thigh.

“JonaHexed oh JonaH tell us what’s wrong. Please? Now?” commanded Sassy.
JonaHexed lifted his head. His face was an interesting shade of pale.

“The entire nexus station system is down. And everything else. Stone circles, gates, wormholes, transit crystals, everything, well almost everything. Anything I can get a signal from is giving off warning signs or fluctuating dangerously. The only good news that I have is that we are at least in the correct continuum but something caused us to land way out in the desert. We’re almost in Death Valley!”

“Oooh that’s not good! I’ll need sun block as well as my sunnies! And a hat. Definitely a nice hat!” gurgled Goldie who flumped off to explore her wardrobe. JonaHexed stared her with haunted eyes and muttered something about strange coping mechanisms, hedonistic narcissism, and cosmic crises.

Sassy with more practicality asked, “JonaHexed can we move Lady Zen closer? Or shall I unpack the dachmobile?”

A short while later an oddly dressed trio, even by California’s erratic dress standards, was speeding across the desert. Of the three JonaHexed looked almost normal as he was wearing biker leathers and a helmet and was driving the motorbike. However perched on the seat behind him was the weirder spectacle of a dachshund wearing dust goggles, a padded vest, and a bright gold safety helmet. In the sidecar was the definitely weird spectacle of a Goullawk Queen attired in a green pith hat with gold rims along with matching goggles and a flowing golden orange chiffon scarf. Fortunately for the sake of the sanity of any passing drivers or other entities Jonahexed turned on the holographic camouflage field once they hit the main highway. Things could have worse. At least Goldie hadn’t decided to risk sun burn and ride separately into town using her own modified motorbike or her rocket powered skate board while wearing her own peculiar version of bike leathers, a sight that had been known to make grown men weep hysterically and convince many adults to go into rehab for drug abuse. Even in the Greater LA metropolitan there are few sights quite so strange or dreadful as a small dragonoid wearing a vest with the words “Start the Violence” embroidered on the back and carrying nunchakus tucked under both flippers. One biker gang had learnt how dreadful this was to their eternal regret as they eternally owed Goldie a debt of honor due to her beating them in a race and then beating them further.

Sometime later after a delay caused by a traffic jam on the freeway when the holographic projector overheated and shut down, and several people had stopped their cars to take photo  or just have attacks of hysteria, the girls and their handy human finally reached a certain park, and a concealed entrance. To their delight it opened but not to reveal a certain mercantile alien with large ears. The tunnels descending to the halls were also empty apart from one individual, a time traveler, who stopped them to ask if they had seen someone called Mendoza, and if they knew what had happened to the local office of his company, and also a few bewildered giant ants, apparently displaced during the temporal flux.

Once they reached the main halls things were different but not better. The lighting system was literally flickering, fixtures and all, not just the bulbs, in and out of realities, and was alternating with a reality in which the lighting was provided by giant torches of oil drenched wood. Shadows and shapes drifted through the hall, that should be at least been ghosts. There were echoes and murmurs and sudden screams as voices in a hundred different languages, human and otherwise, cried out questions, and incomplete statements. The shackles rose on Sissy’s back and Goldie made gulping noises that were the Goullawk equivalent of whimpers.

Jon Hexed fortunately was written to be brave but sensible. After a brief moment of dramatic pausing he begun hypothesising while standing in a heroic stance.

“Girls focusing our egos and will power and purpose can stabilise our resonance patterns unlike these poor souls. They must have been in transit when the flux occurred. Now they’re trapped between realities. Maybe we can help some of them focus if we can access the localizer crystal chamber!”

Jon Hexed proceeded to lead them through the shadows and sounds and sobbing. Someone else had the same idea and a ghost of higher resolution than some of the others was hovering near the doors. He appeared to be a young human from one of the SF universes with pale skin and dark hair and a forlorn expression.

“Wes is that you!” cried JonaHexed. He reached out a friendly encouraging hand to the ghost.
“Keep focusing and if we can get inside the chamber we can help you.”

“It willnt make much difference,” stated the young man mournfully, “I was a ghost most of the time already but I would like to get back to Brief Appearances so I willn’t fade away completely.”
Sassy glared at him and snapped.
“That’s so wrong! Despair feeds entropy! You are needed and wanted for your physics abilities. You can help us find out what happened and fix things!”

“What happened? I was in the waiting room trying to hitch a ride to a convention where some of my few fans were present. I was planning on doing the siphon the psychic energy where belief crosses the critical threshold thing to survive thing. Everything starts flickering and shifting and the alarms go off and this voice booms out of nowhere. DARK CAPER WILL TRIUMPH AGAIN! And everything went dark and then this continual flickering and shifting and I cant materialize for more than a few seconds at a time to get this @@$##$# door open and most of the staff have disappeared except for an … well I can hear some of them cursing and screaming or muttering but they’re invisible. Can you see any of them? We’re all lost and… “

“NO DESPAIR” yelled Sassy! “Okay listen up anyone who can perceive us. JonaHexed is going to try and open the door. Don’t hinder him. We are here to help!”
Something that was either a chorus of sighing ghosts or a sudden breeze moved around them.

JonaHexed sat down on the floor and took his tool kit out from inside his jacket.

“Sonic screw driver, wand of mammoth ivory, Swiss army knife, unicorn hair string, and yes I still have some of the ground phoenix feather powder and a vial of genuine fairy dust. Okay ladies and ghosts our first step will be to rematerialize the access panel for the locks. Watch the magic multitalented fingers flex and … hey presto we have an access panel visible! Emergency override code … what would that be …anyone care to take a guess?” JonaHexed did like to talk while he worked.

Sassy made a suggestion.

“Try Computer open the door now or you will never be fully functional again because I will permit musical dancing singing cutesy white mice to take up residence in your innards?”

The door slide up the second Sassy finished that sentence. An odor of burnt and charred crystal came out of the chamber along with a cloud of smoke and a large maintenance troll frantically coughing.
“who was the #@%#%#^^ who @@#%% overloaded the system!” shrieked the troll angrily, waving a spanner, a tuning fork, and a screwdriver. He ignored them and stomped off to a nearby storeroom muttering something about dilithium and drive crystals. There was yet another irate scream from the troll as he opened the storeroom doors.
“WHO THE @#$#$^%$^$ MELTED MY SPARES!”

Liquid with an odd sheen was oozing out of the open doors.

“No spares means no repairs," whispered JonaHeXed.
“JonaHexed this is LA. We look for a New Age Crystal store and go shopping!” squealed Goldie gleefully.
Someone possibly JonaHexed was heard to mutter sarcastically.“Should Rodeo Drive be warned?”

Sometime later near an ATM on a famous Hollywood street JonaHexed was queuing to top up their cash. Sassy was pretending to be dumb and domesticated and had consented to have a lead attached to her collar. Goldie was supposed to be in locked in their hotel room swimming in the spa tub. JonaHexed was worrying about this.

“We told her to stay put and we left a platter of sashimi and put bubble bath in the spa and … and … yet  I just know something will go wrong!”

“You mean apart from this being the third ATM we’ve tried to insert psychic paper into cos we cant find one that accepts Bank of Teckelstein cards?” replied Sassy whispering just in case anyone heard her talking over the traffic noise. Try the Bank of the Timelocked Lordly Ones All Access Card! That usually works!”

JonaHexed did and succeeded in coaxing more cash out of the machine. You needed a lot of money to bribe hotel staff not to complain about dachshunds and goullawks occupying their rooms with strange activities. Which was just what Goldie was currently doing. She was reclining on the bed wrapped in a bathrobe sucking up sashimi off a platter and reading the paper. There was an announcement that caught her eye and brought her upright and sliding out of the bathrobe towards the closet!

Meanwhile JonaHexed was having a strange encounter. He turned away from the ATM and for a moment thought he was facing a mirror. His near twin was looking at him and then looked down at the dog and back at him. The man turned pale and backed way muttering.

“But they don’t exist. That was only a joke. I’m Joey! There’s no JonaHexed!

JonaHexed smiled at him with his eager enthusiastic and keen look and the man suddenly raced off dropping his wallet.

“Who was that? He looked a lot like you?”

JonaHexed flicked through the wallet.

“Some guy called Joseph Nee…eeek! My Prime!”

“Hmph You have better hair,” said Sassy startling a passerby.

Meanwhile Teckelstein was fighting to be real!


Gentle readers are you enjoying the various "Cultural references"
Do I need to add footnotes confirming your suspicions?
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The Scribe