She decided she'd be doing this individual a favor relieving it of the burden of its stupidity when she swallowed it whole. She sniffed the air and moved toward the scent. Walpracta slithered into a clearing five minutes later. There on the opposite side she spied the back of a solitary figure. How was it possible to be so impervious to detail as not to notice her approach? It wasn't like she was sneaking up on the damn fool. Ah well, what started off as fun was likely to end in a snoozer of a kill. She rushed the figure. She reared back, lifting the front half of her body into the air to strike. Her fangs deployed upward and outward, venom beginning to ooze from the tips. She squealed and hurled her bulk at her unsuspecting victim. She smashed into the ground so hard her mandibular claws buried themselves a meter in the dirt. She rose up and shook the figure in the …
“You missing something there, sweetheart?” said the man.
Walpracta rested her front end gently to the forest floor. She stared at the man, the man not in her jaws but in one piece leaning against a tree. She rotated a few eye stalks to study her oral opening. Nope, no victim present.
“You can't very well shake the life out of me if you don't hold me merciless in your way way ridiculous jaws.”
Walpracta closed her oral opening and reflected. Though the man was technically correct, she couldn't avoid thinking he was mocking her. To be fair she was uncertain, having never once been mocked in her immortal life.
“Did you move to avoid my consumption of you, man?”
“Me move?” He giggled. “No, cupcake, you just missed by a country mile because you're a klutz.”
“I could not have missed by … by one of those. I never miss.”
“Maybe your hideous eye stalks need glasses. Come to mention it, snowflake, you are beyond any and all doubt the ugliest, the most revolting, and the most foul-smelling creature I've ever had the bad luck to witness. For the time being you'll have to trust me that's saying a lot.”
While she wasn't sure he'd mocked her, she was now certain he'd insulted her. Her reaction was to become more angry than she'd have thought possible. My but that felt good. “Silly man, you mock and insult me. Do you know who I am?”
“A big talking lobster that's longer than it has any right to be?”
She screeched loudly, then spoke. “I am Walpracta, god of consumption. I eat anything and everything and I'm never full and never have to stop.”
“Well that settles it. If you and I go on a first date it'll be to an all-you-can-eat buffet.”
She screeched even louder, ever more passionately.
“I'll take that to mean you'll get back to me on the date thing.” He grinned.
“I shall ingest you, shit you out, and eat you again a thousand times.”
“Does your kind possess the notion of TMI?”
Her response was to vault into the air, careening down toward the man with hell-bent fury and rage. The tree he leaned against splintered and debris flew in all directions. She turned side to side but could not see the man. She felt her oral opening. He was not there either. Walpracta turned in a full circle. He was gone. Then she felt a sharp impact on either side of her head. She craned her eye stalks back on herself. There atop her scaly head sat the man. His heels clicked her shell.
“Giddy up, horse. I'd best be getting home. Alicia will think I've got a girlfriend.”
She was paralyzed with disbelief. It was not possible for him to be riding her. No one could be that skilled and at the same time be so suicidal.
“Honey, you're failing to initiate the giddy-up portion of tonight's entertainment,” the man chided.
She hunched her back with all the force she could, and the man flew forward. He rolled to a stop and quickly turned to face her.
“Well that's a piss-poor attitude if you ask me,” he said, looking at himself as he dusted off.
“I shall …”
He raised a hand and without even looking up created a glowing ribbon of force around her multitudinous legs. She crumpled to the ground. Lying on her side panting, she looked at the man with a feeling she'd never experienced before. Disbelief. “What have you done to me?”
“I've bound your skinny-ass legs with unbreakable truth.”
Her eye stalks blinked repeatedly. “Truth is relative. It cannot be unbreakable.”
“Really,” he said, scratching the back of his head. “Well then why don't you snap your fetters and stand?”
Walpracta focused and tried with all her might and all her will to break her bonds. Eventually she was forced to rest back in failure. “What you have done is a high sacrilege. It will be punished beyond punishment. I will know your name, man.”
He rubbed idly at his chin.
“Speak and tell me your name, cur.”
“Huh? Why? You said you will know it. I was just waiting until then. No pressure. I got plenty of time, sideways lobster.”
“Do not add to your high sacrilege by further insulting me. I told you my name. Tell me yours.”
“High sacrilege? Come on now, sweet cheeks, I'm only just now up to the level of petty sacrilege.”
“Your name. I will …”
Ribbons of blinding light bound her oral opening shut. She could make sounds but she could no longer speak.
“Ah, peace and quiet return to my world. You're kind of full of yourself, Betty Boop. You know that?” He cupped a hand to an ear and leaned toward her. “No comeback? Okay, if you're not going to play anymore, I'm outta here. Oh, FYI. The unbreakable truth lasts forever. So for the foreseeable future and infinity beyond, I'd suggest you start liking where you are and the angle you'll be viewing the world from.” He giggled, turned, and walked out of the clearing. But he stopped and looked over his shoulder. “Say, you ancient gods don't happen to pillage and rape using a buddy system, do you?”
She writhed and grunted by way of response.
“Darn. That's darn unfortunate for you. Why I'll bet you'll lie there looking ridiculous until this system's star goes nova in eight billion years, give or take. You really should have buddied up. It's just like scuba diving. Going solo is just too risky.”
She howled in her throat even louder.
“Okay, all right. Sheesh, what a prissy bitch you turned out to be. The name's Ryan, Jon Ryan, and I'm so looking forward to not missing you.”
Walpracta emitted one final muted scream, more passionate and longer than the last one.
“For goodness’ sake no. I'm not that Jon Ryan. I'm the original. That biter, he's the duplicate.”
Then the alternate timeline Jon Ryan slipped quietly into the woods.
NINE
I sat at the bar with Sapale for nearly a full day. Us androids didn't have to worry about swollen legs or blood clots, so why not? We were waiting for Toño to pull off yet another miracle and had nothing better to do. I mostly nursed a few drinks and thought. A transportation vortex made of neutral matter hated my guts because I threw a machine that creates horrific hallucinations into it. What? Was it ( I could only presume the damn thing was gender neutral as well as matter neutral) broken because I gave it bad dreams? What a crazy state of existence I lived in. Next thing I knew the Easter Bunny would hop up to me and egg my face.
My mind, as it was prone to do, wandered. Maybe it was a boy vortex. I mean, it sure had a testosterony attitude. So that meant there were girl vortices out there somewhere. And because of the first comes love, then come marriage deal, there had to be cute little baby vortices learning to make their first gyration out in JustPlainNutsLand. If there was more than one vortex, then there inevitably would be conflict. Sure. If one swirl saw that another disturbance had a bobble it didn't, there'd be war. Bureaucrats? Yeah, why the hell not. If there was more than one transportation vortex, negotiations would be required. Who better than a middle-management vortex to make a flowchart in the direction of resol …
“If I have to ask again I'm doing it with my fist.” That would be my demure wife howling at me.
“Wha
t?” I said with a start.
“What what? I've been attempting to attract your attention for a little while here, flyboy.”
“You want me to buy you a drink or something? Maybe I try and regale you with my wit so I get the chance to do the pushy-pushy with you later tonight? I think we're sort of past that stage, brood's-mate.” That's when I noticed Toño standing alongside her. Dude was shaking his head slowly, as usual. “You have my attention. What?”
“I think I've made some progress on the neutral matter concept.”
I blinked at him repeatedly.
“What, you large baby?” he snapped
“I don't need a concept. What I need is a bucket of the stuff to shove down that mean vortex's allegorical throat.”
“Where I come from, Major Unreasonable, theory generally proceeds fabrication. I tried the take-a-wild-guess-and-see approach once. Didn't work out so well, so I lean on intellect over gorilla force.”
“Wow, that is fascinating and I treasure that you shared with us,” I responded with treacle. I opened my arms. “Group hug.”
“I'm thinking that ditching him here's sounding better and better,” announced Sapale.
“Too much better. Tempting, I'd call it.”
“Okay, team,” I said seriously, “let's retire to my office and see what we got.” I pointed to the farthest table.
Once we were settled Toño began. “Neutral matter is an insane concept,” he said flatly.
“Okay, then we're done here, right?” I replied. “The vortex is not made of it. Who's hungry?”
It was so cute. First Toño, then Sapale crossed their arms and stared at me judgmentally. It was like they'd rehearsed it.
“Say, Doc, I hear neutral matter is a nutty notion. But I bet MacGyver-in-space could make some.”
“Yes he could, if he had a hadron collider on the scale of the universe itself and micro-containment fields on a Planck scale.”
“Nope, just gum, paper clips, one shoe string, and of course duct tape. Can't do no MacGyvering without the old DT. That's all Angus ‘Mac’ MacGyver ever had at his disposal.”
“Might we return to the here and now, not the feeble-minded and chafing?”
I did not dignify that crass remark with a response.
“Are you familiar with sea quarks, Sapale?” he asked.
“No clue.”
“They are highly unstable quark-antiquark pairs. Quantum mechanics holds that net-neutral virtual paired particles pop in and out of existence regularly. They form what is known as vacuum energy.”
“Rings a bell very softly,” she said, furrowing her brow.
“The details are unimportant. But there is only one way I could conceive of forming neutral matter. If I substituted one of these sea quarks for two of the three quark known to form positrons and neutrons and their antiparticles, the resultant matter might actually be neutral.”
“Doc,” I interjected, “you just said a lot of big words but they do not have meaning. You can't fill your pockets with instantaneously self-annihilating virtual particles for later use.”
“Oh I think I can. The issue is one of energy. The requirements would be truly fantastic.”
“You have access to fantastic amounts of energy?”
“Not at this time, no.”
“Then I return to the issue of who's hungry.”
“Jon, what was inside those intermixers?”
“Best I could tell, nothing.”
“And what effect did the intermixer have on the vortex?”
“It was displeased in the … Woah. You're not suggesting those boxes were full of neutral matter?”
“I most certainly am. Why make it when you can steal it?”
“So you think these bozos can fabricate something that requires a hadron collider on the scale of the universe and micro-containment fields on a Planck scale?”
“They don't call them gods for nothing, my love,” responded Sapale.
“But, if that's true, and what Wul told me was common knowledge, wouldn't it be the case that the monuments at Beal's Point are currently guarded more tightly than Mother Superior Mary Kathryn's loins?”
“Yes, and I wish you'd stop abusing the institution of speech with your vulgarity.”
“How many of those units, assuming they're all the same, would be needed to take out the vortex?” asked Sapale.
“I estimate twenty-five. Thirty to be on the safe side.”
“Well there's a lot more than thirty statues up there,” she responded.
“One hundred thirty-seven well-guarded ones, to be specific,” I added. “And once we open even one statue, all hell—and I mean that quite literally—will break loose on us.”
“Precisely,” replied Toño with a sneaky grin. “Which is why we're not going to steal the neutral matter one intermixer at a time.”
“What, we're going to order them on Amazon.weirdassuniverse?” I snarked.
“That's preposterous. No, we're going to blow the units up all at once and steal the replacement shipment.” Toño was positively radiant.
“We're going to rob the stagecoach?”
“We're going to rob the stagecoach,” he returned.
“What the hell's a stagecoach, and why would any respectable ancient god ship intermixers on one?” Yeah, that was the culturally deprived alien asking that one.
“They wouldn't, hon,” I replied, patting her shoulder. “I'd explain but we need that time to start building bombs, lots of bombs.”
She nodded quickly. “Bombs I get.” She looked up to me. “I'm good at bombs.”
TEN
“I don't feel we're any closer to understanding what the devil's wrong with the vortex or who sabotaged it.” Vorc rubbed vigorously at his chin as he spoke.
“I was under the impression the prime suspect is this Ryanmax fellow,” responded Dalfury. Though he possessed no throat, he produced the sound of one clearing. “In fact, Bethniak called strongly into question that he was even a Cleinoid god.”
“Start giving weight to her impoverished intellect and you'll soon be mumbling incomprehensibly in the corner. She may be powerful, but her strength stops at the top of her neck.”
“Oh I'd advise caution even thinking that. If she learned of that insult, I'm afraid there'd not be enough of you left for a proper burial.”
Vorc bristled. “I can hold my own with any god.” He tapped a finger to his temple. “Brains count for a lot, and I'm in a different league than the child-bitch.”
“Shall we return to the subjects at hand, sire, lest the walls develop ears and I'm forced to find a real job?”
“You are correct as always, my friend.” He paused briefly. “I'm thinking of consulting Gáwar.”
If Dalfury had eyes they'd have rocketed wider. “Are you se … serious, sire?”
“Why would I not be? This is a critical juncture in our existence. We must learn who is responsible if for no other reason than to prevent that individual from striking again.”
“Striking again is a possibility to be certain. But I am not certain what the criminal amongst us was attempting to do in the first place.”
“He was trying to destroy the vortex,” Vorc replied hotly. “Whoever it was knew the intermixers are powered by neutral matter. One plus one always equals two.”
“I shall take your word on the mathematics. However, what occurred might have been an attempt to assassinate you.”
Vorc's fists balled up and he trembled with rage. “Wouldn't it be nice to prevent that if it were the case?”
“Lord, calm yourself. Of course it would be. To summon Gáwar to know who tried to destroy the vortex might be justifiable.”
Before Dalfury could go on, Vorc finished his thought. “But to save my measly pelt, not so much, right?”
“You know how I hate to appear insensitive …”
“But we're talking Gáwar here. Yes, I get it.” His foot tapped the floor at a rapid speed. “Very well. For now we will continue
to interview eyewitnesses and pray for a break. But eventually I will favor summoning the irresistible force.”
Dalfury cringed at the casual attitude his master displayed concerning the unleashing of the most negative force in all the universes over all of time. The last time Gáwar was awakened, darkness reigned for a hundred thousand years.
ELEVEN
Our first step was to gain some intel on the status of Beal's Point. But we had to be discrete. No one went there on vacation. If we looked too interested or lingered too long it would be suspicious. I elected to pull a repeat performance of my original trip there. We positioned ourselves along the road pilgrims would need to take. Then we waited for a reasonable-looking group to pass by. Reasonable specifically meant no mind-numbingly slow islands. Even if time wasn't so critical, my piece of mind was.
It took a couple days. A collection of four individuals was coming in our direction at a respectable clip. Three total humanoids and one only slightly bizarre one. The closer that one came the more I thought walking cucumber, but at least it walked fast. Rolled, I should say. Sure, cucumbers couldn't have legs-legs. No, they had tubular cucumber wheels. Come on, when in Rome and all.
As they approached I hailed them directly. “You wouldn't be heading to Beal's Point, would you?”
“Why wouldn't we?” snapped the cucumber. It's always the cucumbers that have attitude. Always.
“I meant to say we're heading there. We stopped for a rest, but would enjoy some company.” I made a show of wiping sweat from my brow. “The way the place makes you feel, the more company the better it is.”
“Certainly,” said the nearest non-vegetable, extending a hand. “I couldn't agree more. I'm Flaming.”
No, I did not laugh and I did not snort. No guffaws either, I'm proud to report. “Ryanmax,” I returned as I shook his hand.
Everyone else introduced themselves. The humanoids were Catalexa and Klioaw. The cucumber was Mosanosa. I didn't press them as to their godhoods. We'd find out in time and it didn't really matter. Well, except for Mosanosa. I suspected he was god of the pickles you take off your burger and never eat because they have no place on an honest-to-goodness hamburger or the plate it's riding on. I was dying to ask/torment him about it. Oh yes, my time would come.
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