CHAPTER 12

ALONE AND LIMPLY LOITERING

"Well for the love of Beelzebubba!" said Rick, frozen with astonishment at the sight, just as Bill was. "Will you take a look at that!"

As the dissolving dragon grew ever mistier dark forms began to coalesce in the area, approximately where the creature's stomach must have been. Streamers of ectoplasmic mist billowed up coating the mysterious shapes in feathery cocoons. Within this thick, localized fog fizzed and glinted majestic sparklers of energy, like Pseudo-Fourth of July on Mistworld in the Pleiades Sector.

"Wow," Rick observed. "This sure beats late night holovision." Then fear hit. "I'm not sure I like this. What's happening?"

"It could be anything, worry-wart. But that carnivorous dragon was dangerous and it's well vanished. Just keep your sword handy and we'll see what gives now."

Some sort of transformation, it would seem....

Bill leaned closer and watched. Within the glowing bulbs of fog, he thought he saw the reweaving of flesh, the rejoining of connective tissue. But before he could do much more thinking on the subject, one of the thrumming bulbs broke open with a gaseous sigh.

Stepping out, like a new-hatched chick from its eggshell, came a gangling adolescent, blinking through concave horn-rimmed glasses the size of radiation visors. The young man was afflicted with acne and had a cold sore on his lip. The top button of his flannel shirt was buttoned, and his belted pants were fastened almost up to the base of his rib cage. In his top shirt pocket, pens and pencils peeked out from a plastic pocket protector.

"Hi! I'm Peter Perkins!" he announced perspicaciously. "Looks like I got wasted, huh? Oh well, I was getting kind of bored with the Priest character anyway." He looked down at his palm, in which he held a number of multi-sided dice. "Maybe I'll wander on up the street and see what's cooking at the game at Weird Alfred's." He looked with distaste at the surroundings, then at Rick and Bill. "He's a better Game Master, anyway. What do you say, guys?"

The "guys" were the others rising up from their misty bulbs, steaming with their foggy afterbirth. They were uniform only in their adolescence and bad complexions, the dice cupped in their hands, and general nerdiness. One was a grossly fat boy, munching on a Lactic Way candy bar. Another was a short, ugly boy wearing a ratty Boy Scout outfit. The last was female, in a kind of generally bloated manner, with a man-hating sneer on her pasty, pudgy face.

Bill scratched his head. "What the bowb's going on here, guys?"

"Don't you see, Bill?" said Rick, a glow of understanding washing over his face like an incoming tide of comprehension. "Dr. Delazny and the Chinger structured this as a role-playing game! These are just gamers from some other dimension, world or such that they picked up."

"Yeah, and he's a really lousy Game Master too," whined the girl, presumably formerly Clitoria.

"You bet," said the formerly-Ottar fellow. "A homophagous dragon with lousy riddles. The Fountain of Hormones — an equally disastrous idea. The land of Absurd Fantasy?" He stared over at the two bemused soldiers of fortune and blinked at them. "Rick the Supernal Hero? Yeah, and this joker is really supposed to be Bill — as in Bill, the Galactic Hero! Right! And I'm Jason dinAlt of Deathworld!" The teenager snorted in contempt. "Let's blow this popsicle stand, guys, and get into a game with some hair on its chest."

"Yeah!" said the last, peering about him in a bored manner. "Where are the dwarves with the great big axes? And I bet these jokers haven't even read their Hickman and Weis!"

The others looked horrified at the very thought.

"Wait a minute," said Rick, scratching his head with apparent bafflement. "I thought this scenario was supposed to be the Over-Gland fantasy segment, based upon archetypes, myths, fairy tales and suchlike hundreds, even thousands of years old."

"Myths? Fairy tales? What are those? This is serious gaming, man!" announced the militant fantasy gamer female. "This is important stuff!"

"Yeah!" said the others in unison. "This place stinks!"

With that, they started shaking their hands, and their dice rattled and clicked. Motion lines jerked and swayed about them, courtesy of some unseen cartoonist perhaps, and with one final spectacular swirl of animated mist, they started to spin and spin and spin....

Into nothingness.

"Wow!" said Bill. "They disappeared. Just like that. Say, Rick. Think we can do that? I don't really like this place much either."

"No, Bill." Rick sighed. "I'm afraid we've been real patsies. We've been had by that Doctor and that Chinger. We're in this for the duration. The only way we're going to get out of this is to find that Fountain of Hormones for them."

"That bowbing Eager Chinger Bgr," gurgled Bill, his urgent need for Irma lessening somewhat, replaced by a sudden need for pure and simple revenge. "I'll get even with him for doing this to me."

"And don't forget Delazny!" grumbled Rick.

"No. I won't forget Doctor Delazny. I've got something very special planned for him!" Bill's eyes glimmered with hatred and calculation. "Keelhauling Doctor Latex Delazny in deep space is too good for him!"

Rick agreed, and they continued on their journey southwards, away from the land of Absurd Fantasy and toward the doubtlessly much more worthwhile and interesting Land of Feelthy Magazines.

Unfortunately, they had no compass.

Which meant that with very little effort on their part they managed to get themselves terribly lost. Bill, who had been looking forward with tumescent expectation to squadrons of frolicking nudes, badly written yet graphic lascivious prose, as well as not funny cartoons with incredibly endowed lovelies in compromising situations, was disappointed to find himself in a new and depressing territory filled with almost unrelieved gloom.

"Arrrr!" observed Rick, looking about him at the wilted vegetation, the monochrome colors. There was an entire lack of any kind of smell to the air, be it foul or fair. The limbs of what few trees there were about drooped listlessly. The grass and the weeds lay pasted down upon the ground damply, as though they'd just been pelted by a fierce, not to say slimy, storm. Indeed, the entire glandscape had the appearance of nothing less than limpness as though all hint of life or vitality had been bled from every object.

"Zoroaster!" growled Bill. "Looks like this place has a terminal vitamin deficiency!"

"Grim, eh? Arrrr! I think we've traveled a bit off course, matey, and even now find ourselves upon the Fabled Isthmus of Impotence."

Bill cringed, filled with instant fear. The very term was anathema to an alcohol-blooded Trooper of the Empire, striking terror deep within the much-cherished macho self-image that was the eternal legacy of male-dominated society. Or something like that. And he wasn't worried about "Fabled" or "Isthmus." It was that terrible "I" word that got him.

"But this is supposed to be the all-powerful Over-Gland, fueled by the powerful chemical reactions of the collective overactive Ids of billions of human beings!" Bill suggested.

Rick shrugged. "Maybe it had a tough day at the office."

"No. It must be something more than that. I've got the feeling, in fact, that it's something very important." He scanned the stale, flat, underwhelming territory. "We have got to figure this out. Do you have any idea of what is happening?"

"In a word — no."

"But you know, Bill," Bill said in a strange and hollow voice. "I didn't say that," he said, clapping his hands over his mouth.

"I heard you say it," Rick cannily observed.

"This is your friend, the good Dr. Delazny," Bill said again in the same strange voice. "Speaking to you through the benefit of post-hypnotic impression. If you are hearing this now it is because you find yourself in a situation that your teeny-tiny brains cannot understand or explain. Therefore I, or at least my voice, is here to help. That you have activated this particular pseudo-memory means that you are now discovering something new about human beings. Common knowledge to the medical profession, but shocking news to you dummies that even within the young overexcited stud, there is still some part that the surging hormones do not affect. This must be the symbolic part that I have mentioned to you before, though you probably weren't listening — the neo-cortex. The source of logic and reason in mankind."

"Naw," said Rick. "This place is much too big for that."

Bill spoke again in his new voice, muffled a bit since he had both hands over his mouth. "You jokers will have to figure this out for yourselves since I am really not there. Perhaps you have reached the Fountain of Hormones that you were supposed to find. Get to work. Over and out."

Rick scratched his chin. He surveyed the territory again. "What about that castle over there, Bill?"

"What castle?" he said in his usual gravelly voice. Then yipped with pleasure. "It's gone! It's me talking again!"

"Wonderful. I liked the other voice better. It had something to say. Now we're on our own again. Over there, see it? On the hill. The clouds are just lifting even as I speak."

Sure enough, as Bill looked to the spot that Rick had indicated, he saw the cottony sheath of gray clouds lifting like a curtain on the next section of a play, revealing the battlements of a particularly flat-looking castle with stubby towers and a droopy flag dangling from a droopy mast.

"Surely we can knock on that castle's doors and ask for directions!" Rick suggested, his spirits plainly rising.

After a quick, if soggy trek, they found themselves standing before the portcullis of the castle.

"Yoo-hoo!" called Rick. "Is anyone home? We are but weary, hungry and thirsty travelers searching for a warm fire, a cold drink of — water, maybe a hot meal and simple directions!"

A door opened behind the guardian bars of the portcullis. A nose peeked out. "Who's there!" whined a nasal voice, reminiscent of a chipmunk with a bad head cold.

"Rick and Bill!" said the Supernal Hero in the friendliest, most diplomatic voice he could manage.

"Rick and Bill aren't here!"

The door slammed shut. Bill pounded on the metal-studded wood slats of the portcullis. "Hey, bowbhead. We're Rick and Bill! We need some help!"

"Please, Bill," hissed Rick. "We need to be a little friendlier if we want to get anywhere. We're not exactly in a Trooper barracks, you know."

Thank Zoroaster for that, thought Bill, who had taken to wearing body armor to bed after that spate of D.I. murders by recruits in the Beta Dacroni Sector. Officials claimed it was the effect of Zeta-wave radiation from the primary that had driven the killers out of their teeny-tinys — but Bill knew the truth. After all, he'd been a recruit once, under the heel of the much-loathed, always-feared, Deathwish Drang. One of his dearest dreams during those months of grueling torture, a dream undoubtedly shared by everyone else in the barracks, had been to preside over the torture and eventual execution of Drang.

The door creaked open and the nose peered out again. "Oh! You're Rick and Bill. And ye say you want directions? Well, heh-heh, you go to hell — and I'll tell you how to find that!"

"Actually," cried Rick, desperately, "we're salesmen! Right! And we're selling Grandma Goldfarb's Old Fashioned Monkey-Liver Hair Restorer, along with a special offer, today only, on Grandpa Goldfarb's Guardia Gorilla-Gland Potency Serum! Think about that — have you ever seen an undersexed gorilla? The answer, of course, is no. And it — it —" said Rick, running out of inspiration.

The door squeaked back open tentatively, and the nose stuck out again. "Don't need hair restorer much," it wheezed (and Bill could see from the tangled growths of hair coming from the nostrils that this statement was quite true). "But there has been a slight problem around here lately that the latter potion might resolve." A moment of silence; Bill could almost hear the rusty gears grinding. "Very well, strangers. Put down your weapons, and I'll take you in for an audience with the master."

Gladly, Bill and Rick removed their swords and daggers and threw them on the ground. The door of the castle swung open all the way, and a narrow man in a shapeless hat from which a tangle of limp hair hung down to his shoulders leaned out. Seeing that they were disarmed he hit a lever, and with a cranking wheeze and a rattle of chains the portcullis slowly clanked up. "Walk this way," he said through a protuberant nose, his small badger eyes gesturing them to follow. The tall thin man spun round and stumbled rapidly away, clicking his heels against the stone floor with every step.

Bill and Rick attempted the strange loping shuffle and click, but to little effect. By the time they'd reached the courtyard of the castle, they'd given up entirely.

"Did you read that sign?" asked Rick.

"Sign?" said Bill. "What sign? I'm was too busy trying to walk this ridiculous walk."

"Maybe it's significant. I better just run back and take a look."

Bill continued on after the strange-looking man, stepping out into the gray daylight of the courtyard. The first thing that he was aware of was that the man who'd let them in had disappeared. The second was the dozens of unsheathed swords and arrowheads pointed toward his most vulnerable body. Connected to said weapons was a collection of the ugliest creatures Bill had ever seen in his life, and Bill had seen some very ugly things, especially after a good drink and looking into the mirror. Orcs and trolls crouched and slobbered, brandishing pointed weapons. Gnomes and dwarves raised axes and knives.

"Here we go, Bill!" said Rick from back in the passageway. "It's a bit dim back here, but I think I can read it. Says, 'Abandon ... Hope ... All ... Ye ... Who ... Enter ... Here.' Now what do you suppose they mean by that, Bill?"

Bill didn't answer. He was too busy spinning about in a circle, looking for a way out.

Unhappily, with very little success.