by Shad N Freud
And Cthulhu laughed as he felt the tear consume him.
∞∞∞
A warning light began blinking in a plane devoid of organic life. A being looked up from his stupor, the red pinprick of light where his eye should be flashing in annoyance. He ripped himself free from the wires and tubes that bound him to his seat, his throne. He began shambling slowly over to the corroded control panel and read the screen. He rolled his “eyes” and pressed his hand against a scanning device, his body to reverting to a non-undead form and allowing him to give the system a retinal scan.
“And thanks for all the fish,” he said, giving the coded password and causing a panel on the other side of the room to open. He looked up as he saw the ceiling slowly get devoured by a quantum singularity and he fought the suction, the gravitational eddy that grabbed him and tried to pull him into the sphere. He then grabbed a spanner and flung it with all his might, hitting a switch on the far wall. “Chrona, you can yell at me for this later, because I just saved everyone’s ass. Again.,” the Technolich groused as he let go and was consumed by the singularity mere moments before a temporal agitation device caused everything to grind to a halt.
Using your own powers to circumvent the rules of another’s can be an annoyance. When that other is the Elder God of Time, it can have far reaching consequences. But you can’t really get that angry at a child for breaking a window when the house is burning to the ground, can you?
Chapter Twenty-One
Once More with Feeling…
Bahamut awoke and yawned as he stretched in a cat-like fashion, causing Camilla to giggle as the dragon opened his eyes, then rolled onto his back to catch the sun’s first warming rays. When she had her back to him, watching the Dragon God act like a house cat, Cenere reached into his pocket.
He withdrew a ring box he’d gotten from the mansion, an enchanted ring within with a four-carat ruby set as the main stone. Camilla’s birthstone, surrounded by a number of much smaller one-carat sapphires, his own birthstone. He then moved to a kneeling position, waiting for her to turn back to him. His eye tracked Jin as he came in for landing with a freshly caught dolphin from the coast. He offered Bahamut a piece, who rolled onto his side and licked his scaly lips.
Cenere was struck by an intense feeling of Déjà vu when he looked over to see Sachi going for a walk with The Gun. The brand on his hand burned and Cenere couldn’t explain how he knew, but he knew that if he didn’t stop her, Sachi was going to kill Bahamut and Jin!
He drew his sword as his locket activated and lunged for Sachi, who had just dropped to one knee and sighted her rifle. A loud shot rang out, and Camilla turned towards the sound of a blade meeting flesh, and a thump as a body hit the ground.
Cenere was clutching his chest in agony as blood oozed and spurted from Sachi’s neck, Cenere’s blade having taken her head cleanly off, the look on her face one of surprise. Smoke curled up from the barrel of the rifle and everyone rushed over to where Cenere lay on the dirt. Camilla ripped his shirt open and gasped. His locket had intercepted the bullet and stopped the lethal round dead. The locket glowed faintly before it faded, flickered, and finally went dark.
∞∞∞
Within the deepest level of the Abyss, Cthulhu raged, screaming in impotent fury as the thrashed in his dead sleep. He’d been cheated! He’d been stabbed in the back, again, by that prick Matter. He wallowed in his rage, his misery, and unleashed a scream that caused the very landscapes of the Abyss to quake. The Obsidian Palace shuddered, and Demogorgon howled in anger with both heads and he stomped his feet, trying to silence the rumblings from below.
As he did so, a large piece of obsidian fell from the ceiling, and skewered the Demon Prince. This had an unseen consequence, as the prisoner within watched his cage shatter when struck by the obsidian. That being then smiled a shark-like grin and began ripping and tearing at the insides of the monumentally large Demon Prince, undertaking the laborious process of climbing up the beast’s gullet, pausing to devour large pieces he’s cut away as he climbed.
∞∞∞
Within Hell, Lucifer leaned back into his chair in relief. Using a brand as a focus to cast a spell was difficult, but doing so with pinpoint accuracy? Doubly hard. Doing so after the universe was reset to just a bare thirty seconds before the calamity? Nearly impossible. Unless you were a god.
The pendant had been difficult to move, but it had been enough, just barely putting it in the bullet’s path in time and saving the multiverse, as the note had told him to do. He’d be glad when all this temporal flux nonsense was over and done with.
He looked over at Judas, whose punishment for the century was to keep writing what he did on the blackboard. In chalk. Day in, day out, just writing on the chalkboard until he was told to stop. Every time he finished writing, the line above the one he’d write would disappear, meaning that he had to keep rewriting the lines as they disappeared. After the third week of doing so, Judas had nearly gone mad. Now, he just mumbled, ranted, raved, on occasion cried, and otherwise tried to break up the monotony of his sentence.
Lucifer smirked as he popped a sweetmeat into his mouth, savoring the chocolatey taste as he watched the most recent film reels showing Hitler give his speeches. Lucifer had to hand it to him; as far as despotic speech writers went, Hitler was pretty much the tops. He disagreed with the majority of what the fascist leader had to say, but he could admire the dedication to the cause.
He looked at the note again and smiled. The bastard’s soul would soon be his, and while he didn’t fully understand the reference to the pineapples, he could see the poetic justice of it. After all, Hitler spewed shit from his mouth; all the better to feed him rectally. And, as the Fuhrer was a vegan, giving him pineapples was rather apropos.
He kicked back and set Helevision set to watch the war. Life was good.
∞∞∞
Life was pain. Cenere raised a shaky hand to his chest and engulfed his chest in Hellfire, feeling the ecstatic agony of his ribs and sternum being forced back into their regular alignment, then merging together again. He coughed afterward, his bruised lungs healed as well. He sat up and stared at his mother’s pendant which, though destroyed, had spared his life. He closed his eyes and thanked his mother for protecting him one last time before standing up on wobbly knees, aided by Camilla who hovered over him like a mother hen, kissing his face as tears ran down hers.
They looked over at Sachi’s corpse and saw something rise above it. Sachi’s soul looked at her headless body and cringed, stepping away from it. “Thank you, Cenere. I’d been trapped in my own body, made to do things against my will for some time now. One of Cthulhu’s minions snatched me when we were still in the temple and injected me with a demonic virus. It took over my body and forced me to shoot the gun. I have to go now; Purgatory awaits. I guess I won’t go to Hell, since I fought it the whole time. Maybe I’ll see you again someday, my friends.”
She smiled as tears flowed down her face, and a shaft of sunlight fell over her. When the light faded, Sachi was gone.
Camilla fell to her knees and began to weep for her friend. Cenere sat on the dirt next to her and held her as she wept, whispering quietly in her ear. Eventually, the door to the room Krang and Sachi had shared was thrown off its hinges, and Krang ran like a man possessed, slowing as he saw the couple sitting in the dirt. When he saw his love’s lifeless body, being covered with a sheet by Ziccorro, he collapsed to his knees.
Krang crawled to the body and ripped open his chest cavity, grabbing a fluid line, and spilling it on her corpse. “Come on, work damn you! Work!” Krang muttered feverishly as he spilled more of the nanite laden fluid on his lost love, trying to push the head back against the body.
“She’s gone, Krang. She’s passed on.” Bucky said, reaching out to the synthetic man.
“NO! I refuse to accept this!” he screamed as the nanites tried and failed to resuscitate Sachi. His eyes began to leak lubricant as he tried to restore her to life. He finally grabbed her body and held he
r close as his tears continued to fall. He held her and closed his eyes tightly, begging any higher being that might have been listening to bring her back. After several moments, he gently lay her back on the ground.
He then turned and lunged at Cenere, grabbing the grieving tiefling by the collar. “Who did this? Who killed her? I need to know!”
“I did,” Cenere confessed as he met the other man’s gaze. “She…she had The Gun, and she was going to shoot Jin and Bahamut. I…I stopped the bullet, and I took her head to keep her from shooting again. I had no choice, Krang. And, I’m so sorry.” Cenere wiped the tears from his eyes, sniffling as he tried to regain his composure. The knowledge that he’d needed to kill one of his closest friends twice was gnawing at his stomach, slowly eating him alive from the inside out.
Krang’s expression darkened with each word Cenere said. “Not sorry enough.”
Cenere’s eyes widened as he barely slipped out of the android’s grip in time to avoid being impaled on the metal man’s hand. He danced away as Krang swung his fists, trying to knock Cenere’s head off. Cenere barely kept out of the android’s reach and flicked his wrists for a pair of throwing knives. Adamantine. He then waited for an opening, accepting a broken rib in trade as he jammed the knives through Krang’s throat and temporarily severed his control lines
He then staggered away to grab his sword from where he’d dropped it. He was knocked to the ground as several hundred pounds of synthetic man tackled him, pinning him to the ground. Krang sat, straddling Cenere, tears running down his face and the hole where he’d been stabbed healing over. “Sachi knocked me out when I had my guard down that way. I gave master level control to Greggory in case it happened again.”
He raised his fists to slam them down on Cenere’s face but paused when he heard a click and felt the muzzle of a 25mm grenade launcher press against the back of his neck. He also heard Jin shift to draconic form and the tell-tale sound of Ziccorro’s arms converting into plasma casters. He looked over his shoulder and saw Camilla’s enraged face as the tears continued to fall. The others looked at him coldly, as if daring him to continue.
He stood and moved away from Cenere, who gasped for breath. Several hundred pounds resting on healthy ribs would make it hard to breathe (read: nearly impossible), and the exchange between the two had cracked several of his recently healed ribs, while Krang squatting on him broke them. Cenere pressed his hands against his ribs and screamed in agony as his bones knit, and his ruptured lungs were restored to working order once again.
“We know how yer feelin', ye stupid bastard,” Camilla said as she helped Cenere to his feet. “My man killed her. But, she left him na choice. She may have been yer girl, bit she was my sister in all but blood. Sae, excuse th' bugger oot o' me fur saying this, bit juist fur ye'v bin pumpin' her lately doesn’t gie ye th' richt tae murdurr mah jimmy fur daein' his duty. Huv a go that jobby again, 'n' I’ll hae yer skull fur an ashtray. Am ah clear ?”
Krang glared at her as everyone lowered their weapons. “Crystal.”
Cenere coughed, some residual green smoke curling out of his mouth. “Glad to hear it.”
∞∞∞
Several days later, Krang and the others, joined by Bahamut in his Caretaker affectation, though wearing a formal black suit for the occasion, quietly made their way to a spot on the mountain with an amazing view of the sea to the south east. Krang held a crystal urn made by Jin that contained Sachi’s ashes. There was some confusion as to what kind of ceremony to hold, as she was a Japanese Christian, but they decided to have her cremated and scatter her ashes at a scenic viewpoint.
The sun shone brightly, the air crisp in the early morning hour. Krang stared at the urn as Cenere read the Lord’s prayer from a copy of the Bible they’d found in the library, and solemnly conducted her funeral. Finally, Krang stood and opened the top of the urn, carefully releasing her ashes into the wind to be swept away towards the ocean.
Krang then turned to Cenere and placed his hand on his shoulder. “I’m sorry about…well, you know. It wasn’t your fault. I just…the moment was too much for me. I’ve…I’ve never loved anyone before, not like her. And I don’t think I ever will again.” Krang then turned and glanced back toward the bay one last time before making his way back to the temple grounds.
Cenere hung back as the others made their way back up the mountain. Camilla noticed, and started to come back for her beau when she saw him pull out his pack of cigarettes and kneel where her best friend’s ashes had been scattered.
“I am so sorry, Sachi,” Cenere said, lighting his cigarette. “I didn’t want to. You know what I had planned that morning? It’s silly, really, now that I think about it. I took Camilla out for a picnic I cooked myself and waited until the sunrise. I…I almost lost my nerve, but then Jin comes flying in with a damn dolphin and starts eating it with Bahamut.”
He wiped his tears as he ashed his cigarette. He then laughed bitterly, then looked up to the sky.
“I was going to pop the question. I know, I know, it was pretty silly to do it in the here and now. But, after Carl died…I just decided that, you know, it was time to do something important. I love the bitch, you know?” he said with a sad smile as he took a long drag. “And we both know I mean it in the best possible way. Her idea of foreplay is to go to the training room, get good and high on cocaine, and have a knife fight, loser on the bottom. Then fuck the night away. And you know what? With the mansion’s training room, it’s not half bad. First time, she got to ride me. Every time after? Doggy style. And my god is she magnificent in the bedroom. Gorgeous, tough, knows her way around a kitchen, and…helps chase my nightmares away.”
He pocketed the butt from his smoke as he pulled out a fresh one and a flask of booze. “Now…it feels too soon to ask. I know you’d smack her upside the head if she said no, but…I don’t want to be ghoulish. You were her best friend for Lucy’s sake. And I’m…” He paused to ash his cigarette before he held his head in his hands. “I’m the stupid bastard that killed you.”
Cenere looked back up to the sky, then cracked open the flask, and poured it out. Camilla caught the smell of coconut rum; Sachi’s favorite. She covered her mouth to stifle a gasp and hid behind a rock when Cenere spun around to see who was spying on him. He wiped the tears from his eyes and drew his sword.
“Alright Krang, you said you forgave me, but to stab me in the back? I thought you were better than that. Come on out, let’s have it!” Cenere yelled, the tears still running down his face.
Camilla meekly stepped out from behind the rock. She ran over to a somewhat surprised Cenere, wrapping him in a tight hug as she cried into his shoulder. Not sure what to do, he drove his sword into the ground and sat with Camilla as she bawled into his shoulder.
“How much of that did you hear?”
“A' o' it, ye eejit,” Camilla answered with a tearful smile. She kissed him deeply, then pressed her forehead against his. “'N' th' answer is aye, ye damn gowk. Ah keeked th' ring kist that mornin' whin ye wur getting hings duin .” She looked into his eyes and saw the anguish there. “She wis aff tae be mah Maid o' Dishonor, ye ken ?”
Cenere smiled sadly. “I know. I wanted Carl to be my Worst Man. I guess we’d better tell the others the good news.”
∞∞∞
When the couple finally made it back up to the temple grounds, Zeke tossed Cenere the ring box. Cenere rolled his eyes and got down on one knee, to make things official. “Cammy, will you ruin my life by making an honest man of me?”
“Clam up, yeh daft buggerer, an put the ring on me.” she snarked as she held her hand out imperiously. He chuckled, then slid the ring onto her finger. Jin cursed and tossed Zeke a small gold bar. Krang watched with on odd look in his eye before turning away from the couple and going to hide in his room.
Camilla sighed as she watched Krang sequester himself again. He was still in mourning, and the group had decided to give him his space. The rest of the group, as well as a number of Golds that li
ved on the temple grounds, however, decided to celebrate the couple’s engagement.
This caused the newly-engaged to wake up the next morning with a slight hangover, and very little memory of the night before, other than the bedroom hijinks they had indulged in. Cenere’s eyes grew to the size of dinner plates as he realized what they’d done. “Oh, shit. Oh, shit! Oh, shit oh shit oh shit…”
“What are you on about?” Camilla asked in a thick brogue. “Yeh dinnae haf to run aboot like a chicky with it’s head cut off. What’s the matter?”
“We had sex last night!” Cenere yelled, then grabbed his head and lowered the volume to a loud whisper. “And with the wish in play…”
This time it was Camilla’s turn to groan in frustration. “Bugger. We celebrate th' engagement, 'n' now I’m knocked up, awright?” She glared at Cenere as she slugged him in the shoulder. “This is a’ yer fault!”
“My fault? How the…you’re the one that ripped my clothes off!”
“Yeh? 'N' you’re th' yin that bent me o’er 'n' played ‘will it fit’ whin ye bloody weel ken it wull, ye gobshite!”
The two glared at each other for another moment, then started laughing as they held each other closely. Cenere drank a tall glass of water, then began running the diagnostic spell, and low and behold, Camilla was in fact pregnant.
“Well, shite. On the other hand…” Camilla drawled with a lascivious look in her eye, “Sin I’m awready up th' duff, ah suppose it won’t hurt tae huv a go 'n' see if'n it’ll fit after all.”
Cenere’s tail stood on end at that pronouncement. “I mean, we are out of practice.” He smirked as he grabbed her and the pair laughed as they slid back under the covers.
Chapter Twenty-Two
“Alright gang, we’ve got a few minutes until the plane flies over head.” Cenere said, staring at his watch. They needed to time this perfectly, or it was all for naught. He stared out the mansion door, listening for the plane. As soon as he heard it in the distance, he slammed the door to the mansion shut, and counted the seconds.
