by RyFT Brand
PeeDee3, Intergalactic, Insectiod Assassin in:
Fafafalala and Dosido my Eggplant
Part Two
season one, episode five
RiFT
This is a work of fiction. Any similarities to
persons living or dead are purely coincidental.
Copyright 2011
ISBN- 978-1-4524-0542-1
Fafafalala and Dosido my Eggplant
Part Two
RiFT
Floating in the nothingness of non-corporeal existence is starting to get on my nerves, except I guess I don’t really have any nerves to be gotten on. Hell, if I did where would I keep them? I don’t even have a body anymore.
The weirdest thing about existing outside of all time and space is that you have no idea where you are or how long you’ve been there. I’d give my lower left arm for a map and a claw-watch. The best I can hope for is a distraction, and here comes one now.
It starts, as usual, as a shimmer in the dark, then expands into a giant-sized window looking out into the past, my past. But instead of rushing forward and slipping back inside my handsome, crusty frame, I just hang there like a pupa during the molt. At last a booming, echoing voice speaks, “In the last episode of the life of PeeDee3—”
Oh hell no.
“Oh hell no! You hear me, I hate recap sequences. I remember what happened, and anyone who didn’t can buy a copy of part one, now get on with it.”
I hear a befuddled clearing of a subway tunnel-sized throat, a shuffling of papers, and the next thing I know I’m back in my body, on the planet Fafafalala, and I’m itching for a fight. Bug oh bug, I was out of my element.
I’d been hired to hit a Fredifice who’d pocketed a large chunk of his former employer’s sizable fortune and made a run for it. Said employer was a forerunner, a galactic bookie with a sizable temper and the cash to really do something about it, namely hire me. But the mark got wind that I was after him from a fortune telling forebabble and did the smart thing, he ran. Normally I enjoyed the chase, it gave me a chance to spread myself around a bit, but this dope was no dope. He ran to the one place where he might actually evade me, the chronologically unstable planet, Fafafalala.
Fafafalala is ruled by these snobbish time-masters, an ancient race of big-brains who, supposedly, first invented time travel. Being first they went ahead and declared themselves rulers of the entire time continuum, like their frass didn’t stink. But they couldn’t stop meddling with the thing, and the more they did, the more messed up the time line became, and the more messed up the time line became, the more they tried to travel back and fix whatever they’d screwed up. Every one of these pompous jerks thought they were the smartest, so they wouldn’t talk to each other. One would change something one way, and then another one would change that same thing around another way. It all got so messed up that, in order to protect all the other planets, Fafafalala was surrounded by a timeshield that kept the erratic time effects contained. But anyone inside that timeshield, in this particular case yours truly, would experience a constantly changing past, present, and future.
Yep, things were about to get really interesting.
I feel like I’ve said all that before. What’s it called, de’ja’vu? Never mind.
I had to find this Mark as quickly as possible, the longer I was here the greater the chance of him escaping and me becoming a permanent part of the fractured time line. I didn’t have much more to go on other than a name and a picture. Man, this guy wasn’t half-bad looking—I’d never seen a Fredifice before. He looked like a pile of rocks with a face. I might have thought him a tough character, except he was wearing a pair of glasses with white tape on the bridge and had a pocket protector in his button shirt pocket—obviously a total Dweeb. The Dweebs didn’t let civilians wear their colors, and those that dared ended up in pieces.
I’m still not sure how he’d gotten the shirt over his rock-like body, I guess it’s just one of life’s little mysteries, like how do they get the smoke into electronic gadgets, and what is the secret formula of Kell ‘n Ogg’s Frosted Dandruff Flakes?
Even if I could think, I didn’t have time for it. I had to be on my claw tips if I wanted to make it off of that rock with my guts intact.
So I started flashing the photo around and asking if anyone had seen a Fredifice named Mark. But the damned time snobs in their Romanesque robes strolled right by me with their pointy noses stuck in the air. Time to prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that their frass most definitely stinks, especially when it’s inside their togas.
I pulled my second most attention grabbing weapon from my trench coat pocket, my Roebuck’s precision feint & jab grenade. I wound up the spring with the included key then lobed it at the nearest Time Master. It flew straight and true, its spring unwinding, and divided in half and into attack mode. One section, moving slightly faster, extended its attention grabbing articulated digit, landed perfectly on the target’s right shoulder, and applied three well placed taps.
“Oh for heaven’s sake, what is it now?” he bellowed in his pompous, English accent—which sounded fake to me. As he spoke he looked over his shoulder.
Sucker.
“What? Who? Why, no one appears to be there.”
Sure enough, as he turned back around, the second grenade section expanded into weapon mode, a banana cream pie, and was abjectly applied to his face—or so it should have been. But it missed…how? I never miss, I’m PeeDee3, intergalactic hit bug for hire, I’m the best.
Well, the best was standing there with pie all over his crusty face. Man, I hate human food—unless it’s a human.
The hoity time freak spun around, covered his smirking mouth with three delicately applied fingers and let out a tiny chuckle. “Please bug, did you really think your primitive nerve complexes could out wit a Time Master’s oversized brain? When I checked my future this morning I saw what you were going to do, so I changed my future so I’d be seventeen millimeters to the left when your supposed weapon went off.”
I used the back of a coat sleeve to wipe artificially flavored non-diary whipped topping from my big, beautiful complex eyes and gave a chuckle of my own. “Yeah, well, that was pretty tricky of you. My oh my, your fancy brain is so big, I could never catch you unaware.”
Then, quicker than any humanoid could ever hope to follow, I drew my absolute best weapon, my Orik three-thousand Whispersonic Bowling-Ball Cannon. “Dodge this time-jerk.” I squeezed the trigger and my heart gave a little flutter—this is about the closest thing to love that a Kacekan can experience—and braced myself for the kickback. But nothing happened except that a large soap-bubble slowly extended from the barrel, detached, then floated into the air. It drifted, shimmering with rainbow colored light, to the robe-clad curmudgeon, where he casually applied a pin and it popped with a little spray of soap membrane.
Frass.
He laughed again, even more effeminately.
I was really starting to hate this planet.
“Oh please, did you think I wouldn’t have seen your pathetic little toy’s appearance in my time line? It was child’s play for me to slip back in time and exchange your bowling ball for soapy water and reverse the polarity of your vacuum generator.” The creep actually snickered at me. “Oh dear, a bowling ball cannon, I’m so scared.” Then the sarcastic sneer was wiped from his face by a cruel looking scowl. “No weapon ever made is a match for brains, you insolent, gnat-brained inse
ct.” Then a small device strapped to his wrist beeped and the dope looked down at it.
Big mistake.
I sprang forward and grabbed his arms with my lower two claws, while the uppers throttled his scrawny neck. He was gasping; his face wrinkled with terror…or is that disgust. I always had trouble reading humanoid faces, they’re so squishy. He was gasping, and trying to say something. It was hard to understand him with his windpipe crushed like that, but I think he was saying, “Pain.”
Well of course there’s pain. He was in the clutches of the nastiest Kacekan to ever leave the hive. That time schmuck had seven-hundred pounds of exoskeletonized insect on top of him and I was pissed.
He struggled desperately, pointlessly, and particularly foolishly for someone with his ‘big brains.’ I could have crushed his brain casing with three arms and my mandibles tied behind my back. But I needed information
