A bit of help with my silly NaNoWriMo concept

[tbok1992]

Okay, I know it's a bit late to make this topic, but NaNoWriMo is coming closer, and I was wondering if you guys could help me with this idea for a novel I have. I have a lot of really great concepts and vignettes I want to include, but no idea how to make them fit together as a cohesive story.

Lemme describe the base of the story and the ideas I've got so far:
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Genre: The same genre as Dr. McNinja, IE, a action-comedy sci-fi/urban fantasy merger with no "masquerade" and heavy amounts of wierdness that nevertheless all keeps its own internal consistency and forms a cohesive mythos. Or, if you're not being charitable, an urban-fantasy equivalent to World of Synnibarr

Setting: A heavily fictionalized version of our modern world where super-science, magic, and stranger things run amok. D&d-style adventuring is not only an accepted and legitimate profession, but also legally regulated with its own somewhat-loosely-organized guild/union (though the legal framework would be kept vague as possible to avoid having holes poked into it).

More Specific Setting: A heavily fictionalized version of my hometown Tucson set in the aforementioned setting.

Starting Plot: Our heroes, a band of four adventurers, are low on cash and thus decide to head over to Tucson, the nearest moderate-sized city, to look for work .The book follows them as they take their various adventuring jobs, and the threads that connect them, amongst other things.

Main Characters:

Bill: A large, muscular African-American man with a pleasant, gentle disposition. He's considered the groups de-facto leader due to being the most sensible, with a knowledge of most practical adventure-y matters and a great deal of ingenuity and deductive skills.

He's soft-spoken and nice, which can end up getting him into trouble at times. Mainly dresses in a plaid shirt, blue jeans, a leather vest and a cowboy hat. Dual wields .44 Magnums as his main weapons (Explained by his muscularity and the setting running on action-movie physics)

Xill: A grey alien from one of the New Mexican alien-inhabited-towns established after the (far more extensive than in our world) Roswell crash. He's a magic user of great ability and repute, but this makes him shunned by his people who gave up magic hundreds of millenia ago in support of Science.

He met with Bill during an incident in New York where he was maintaining a bookstore and Bill was taking a job trying to foil a FreePlumber (Think sewer based conspiracy-theory masons) plot to rouse all the rats of New York into a single powerfully-psychic rat-king. One thing led to another, xill started adventuring with bill after that incident, and now they're almost inseparable best friends.

Xill is somewhat skittish and paranoid due to a lifetime of various unpleasant magical incedents, but he is ever-faithful to his friends and an almost encyclopedic (though long-winded) source on all things mythic. He has posesion of the mysterious Iron Wand of Indiana from another mission, able to control and shape metal with incredible ability in addition to its excellent properties as a magical focus, but Xill is still trying to get the hang of how to use the damned thing.

Valerie: A woman with a gymnast's physique, she is the daughter of a prominent Privateer (Essentially a pirate, but with legal support via the adventurer's guild). She's loud, crass, crude, bombastic, libidinous, perverted, slightly nutty and overall a very-over-the top person. This is both her greatest advantage and disadvantage, for while her risk taking and willingness to think out-of-the-box can be an asset, it can also be a big 'ol hindrance.

She usually dresses i na striped shirt which she rarely ever washes and a pair of lose pants, with a bandanna covering her short, blonde hair completely except for a little bob on the front of her face.

Her swords are named "Subtlety" and "Tact" as a swipe at a guy who said she had neither of these qualities. She can swing 'em hard enough to chop through a block of solid concrete and she fights with them usually via hit-n-run strikes. She's also a big fan of B-movies and comics.

Bishikama 9001: Created as the perfect assassin-droid by the Japanese Rent-A-Ninja Corporation, he made the mistake of falling in love with his (male) trainer. When said trainer was slaughtered, he ran away from the corporation to wander the world as a ronin, eventually ending up in the U.S. with bill's group. This backstory's pretty incidental to the story, but I thought it'd be nice to know.

He looks pretty much human, avoiding the uncanny valley via an excellent rubber-y skin covering. He looks like what he would call a bishonen and everybody else would call a god-damned-prettyboy. He's very good at his job of stealthing and slashing when he's not trying to be fancy or beautiful about it. Unfortunately,

Is kind of over-dramatic, and loves to say everything in the most purple-prose romance-novel type speech possible. Despite finding her uncouth and vulgar, he is secretly attracted to Valerie in spite of himself (yes he is bi, he was designed that way on purpose for versatility via infiltration).

Story Beats/Concepts I want to put in:
-The heroes' main base of operations being a hotel in the middle of the great wash called The Kactus Kabaret, specifically designed to rise like a boat when the Wash is flooded.

-A mysterious woman who shows up at the hotel looking for her father's killer (Whose identity I haven't decided on yet, perhaps the Duke from down below), who happens to behinding from almost everyone that she's a bizarrely deformed mutant with horrible claw hands, eyestalks, and secondary tentacle-arms amongst other things. She's Bill's love interest.

-An amnesiac alien whose flying saucer they accidentally cause to crash would spend a fair amount of time recovering in the Kactus Kabaret. She's from a race of millitant conquerors who use technology/bioweapons very similar to B-movie tech/monsters, and looks like a sexy female version of Ro-Man. Xill struggles ethically on whether or not to tell her the truth about this as she slowly recovers her memory, even as he struggles to reconcile his attraction to her with himself despite their races historically being ancient enemies. The phrase "I cannot, but I must" would be uttered more than once through this story arc.

-A recurring pair of David Icke-style Reptillians* as minor characters searching for something of theirs that escaped

-An encounter with a creepy Polybius machine.

-A Silent Hill style "Otherworld" in Old Tucson Studios, made comical due to the characters casual reactions to it, as that sort of thing is a common phenomena in-setting (Ones mentioned include The Hotel California, Lake Really Goddamn Eerie, The House Beyond the Rock and Gregory House).

-A group of fae and obake living at the Tanque Verde Swap Meet after being banished from the other great Fae enclave in Tucson, The Valley of the Moon.

-An evil cyborg named Chop-Shop who is trying to create a small army of robots using parts from the Airplane Graveyard where he's set up shop.

-A running gag of the god Coyote, in human form, sending forth truly bizarre "random encounters" from the shadows to baffle the heroes. these would have an effect on the plot and a big payoff near the end.

-A date scene between Bishikama and Valerie at a chinese restaurant that becomes more and more silly as the scene goes on, and goes really nuts when the forgotten Native American demigod beneath the building wakes up.

-A running gag also of Channel 4's Skynet camera system (I did not make this up, they really do call them Skynet here) growing to hate mankind.

-A minor evil mage named the Halloween Kid (With a gimmick of using enchanted Halloween props) who the characters deal with very early in the story, who comes back much nastier later in.

-Bill having to negotiate a peace between the many Resident Evil-style biomonsters escaped from Raytheon's bio-weapons department to eke out a living in the aforementioned Airplane Graveyard who just want to live in peace and Raytheon's tiny (as in, it consists of two people) Bioweapons department (because every Millitary corporation has to have one) who want what they consider their property back, and are sending out their parent company's experimental "Mr SWAT" drones to try and capture or "liquidate" them.

-Raytheon's missile department experimenting on a cursed object from the Lost Duchman Mine.

-The heroes having to protect a werewolf-based** strip club on the outskirts of town from a meglomanaiacal mutant from the Sorta-Forbidden Zone (formerly Known as New Jersey) who calls himself The Duke and has a grude against the club's owner.

-The main villains being two Qlipoth*** in human form who are, in one way or another, behind a large chunk of the bad things in the book and trying to use Tucson as a testing ground for a plan to turn the entirety of North America into a blighted wasteland.

*The Reptillians in this setting are just like the conspiracy-theory ones, except for the fact that they're laughably incompetent at their job of conspiracy-mongering, only really a threat when their creations go out of their control.

** There are a few different types of Werewolves in this setting, such as the ones who are granted their mysterious power by heredity or at the whim of the weird and ancient Wolf spirit and can turn into fully sentient but non-speaking humanoid hybrid forms (The ones that work at the strip club are this type), the Lon Chaney style ones; who transform every night during the time the Wolfsbane is blooming and whose murderous rampages are actually all collectively pupeteered by a very nasty individual of the former werewolf type, the ones who've made a deal with the devil to turn into giant flaming hell-wolves when they wear a special wolf pelt, and Wannabees; who are fursuit based ones similar to the former except they are powered only by their own insanity, far more comical looking, and much more powerful and dangerous.

***While demons in this setting are your typical fallen angels, Qlipoth are far nastier anti-angels created by Angra maynu, god's evil counterpart. Yes, this setting does mix mythologies a lot
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So yea, you've got an idea of the bits I want to include and how big my concept is, but I'm having trouble fitting them together as a cohesive whole due to its size and amount of stuff I want to include, especially tying in the villains pulling the strings to most of the bad stuff happening.

The story' structure would be relatively episodic, but with an overarching story arc and various running plotlines tying it together, like a lot of animated TV shows nowadays. So do you think my ideas are good and can you help me tie the crazy together?

:EDIT: I don't know if this is the right forum to post this on, so if somebody wants to move this to another forum better suited for this topic, by all means please do so.

[TheEmerged]

We went thataway (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=257541).

[Dr.Epic]

What the heck is NaNoWriMo?:smallconfused: I swear, the slang you kids use today on your facetubes and youbooks.

[tbok1992]

National Novel Writing Month. I thoought NaNoWriMo was a commonly used acronym. Apparently I was mistaken.

So, how do you think I can make all the bits and ideas for the concept I have fit together well? I must mention that most of the heroes backstories aren't all that relevant to the plot, and don't come up that often, I just thought it would be a good thing to mention how these oddballs came to be the way they are.

[Xondoure]

National Novel Writing Month. I thoought NaNoWriMo was a commonly used acronym. Apparently I was mistaken.

So, how do you think I can make all the bits and ideas for the concept I have fit together well? I must mention that most of the heroes backstories aren't all that relevant to the plot, and don't come up that often, I just thought it would be a good thing to mention how these oddballs came to be the way they are.

Dr. Epic is a master of sarcasm. Or he would be if he ever used it. Which he doesn't. :smallwink:

[One Tin Soldier]

Well I don't think I can provide much help (at least, not at this moment), I just wanted to say that your setting/premise is good and you should feel good.

[Dr.Epic]

National Novel Writing Month. I thoought NaNoWriMo was a commonly used acronym. Apparently I was mistaken.

Well I do live under a rock.

[kumada]

It might honestly just be worth trying to write this episodically. At a couple chapters an episode (maybe less) you'll be able to explore a lot more of those concepts without getting bogged down in one single cohesive narrative.

For folks who write mostly short fiction, episodic long-form is a little easier than trying to spin out an epic.

[tbok1992]

That's kinda what I was thinking in doing that Kumada, as my other attempts to write novel-lengthers have not done well.


Well I don't think I can provide much help (at least, not at this moment), I just wanted to say that your setting/premise is good and you should feel good.
Aww, thanks. Here's a few more bits about the setting that aren't going to come up in the book, but are neat to know:

-Teddy Roosevelt is immortal in this universe due to beating the crap out of Death when he came for him until they were able to make a deal. Of course, he can never run for public office, otherwise the deal is off and he dies, but he's still had a pretty sweet eternal life nonetheless.

-Dinosaurs still live in the Western parts of the united states, lead there and preserved after the meteor hit by a figure discovered in the fossil record and nicknamed by the public as "Raptor Jesus," despite the fact that he's really more like Raptor Moses.

- Washington D.C. contains several portals to hell due to the massive amounts of political and moral corruption within it. Most demons like to use the place as a vacation home.

-Rasputin is still alive, but he's a good guy and a devilishly handsome one to boot thanks to various improvements in his magic skills. He spends a lot of time trying to protect the modern world from his evil father, Koschei The Deathless

-World War II in this setting wasn't fought against the Nazis, but instead against the armies of the antichrist, though in the end things turned out the same enough so that their history resembles ours. And there is an island of other-dimentional nazis in the atlantic who act like North Korea with actual-working-superscience and an actually competent government.

- There is another dimention that is one giant cornfield where powerful psychics send the people they "Disappear" and giant corn monsters stalk through, another that's a creepy maze based on Take On Me, another that's a sick parody of a weeaboo fantasy designed by all the collective subconscious minds of Hikkiomori mixing the power of the hiding goddess Amaterasu, and many many more, all accessible through a giant pit with millions of doors on its sides in the Antarctic.

[tbok1992]

Crap. I'm stuck on a chapter. I've gotten down the character's introductions, their arrival to Tucson and the hotel, with a bit of foreshadowing, the introduction of a few minor characters, and another digression with an action scene, a bit more foreshadowing and a fight scene with a villain that will be very important later in the story.

I want to get the characters to a job/mission at the mechanical hybrids coming from the Graveyard the next day, leading them to the graveyard and the but I'm not sure what to put in-between to get them from the night at the hotel, to finding out the mission, to there, like what sorts of character interactions would work well, the transition between Xill finding the job and a bit of the foreshadowing I want to add in the search.

Feh, I'm describing this really poorly. I'll just post what I've got so far (Put under spoilers and in several posts for length, note that stuff in brackets is meant to be turned into footnotes later), ask a few questions, and see what you think of it in general:

Chapter 1-If you are not humming “Knights Of Cydonia” by the end of this chapter, I am doing something wrong.

In a world where what seems to us impossible is not a dream, not a hoax, not an imaginary story (or at least no more than any other story), but as real as you and me, the sun rose. Specifically, it rose in the area of Tucson, Arizona; a place not big enough to be what one would think of as a city, but neither small enough to be called a village.

It was an early September sunrise, the kind where the light isn't right for one to say “Yep, it's fall now,” but the sun hung low enough that you knew that the heat was merely going to be stifling rather than the “God has damned us all” category it had been in the previous months.

The javelinas, jackrabbits, velociraptors and various other critters rose from their slumber amongst the saguaros, the peccaries scrounging for prickly-pair fruit and other various foodstuffs, and the raptors quickly pursuing the jackrabbits, wind rustling in their dusty feathers.

And through this golden light, on the saguaro-strewn outskirts of Tucson, cut a pair of vehicles, containing the protagonists of this American epic. [No you may not return this book for full price if this is not as epic as you were expecting].

The first was a large motorcycle, with a taxidermied horse's head attached to the front. The horses head was animate of course, otherwise things would have been too damn weird, and it bobbed its head in the and blinked its glass eyes as the wind whipped around his face.

Riding motorcycle were two individuals. One was a very large black man by the name of Bill, a cowboy hat shading his eyes from the riding sun, deftly following the mountainous curves onward, with the other individual clinging to his back for dear life.

That other individual was what most of us would know of as a “grey” alien, though most people in this world called them “Those folks down in New Mexico” due to the various towns established after the whole “Roswell incident” was past. His name was Xill, and currently he was grasping onto his red and gold robe flapping and peaked cap, hands slightly trembling as the garments set out to keep flapping about as the bike wheeled onward.

He wasn't. If one is thinking that his garb sounds like a typical “robe and wizard hat,” then that is rather appropo, as he was indeed a wizard; which was a taboo profession amongst his species. Hence why he was here in this dry forest of deadly spiky things riding into a town few adventurers even cared about and not sleeping in at this ungodly hour at his hometown, a fact that now firmly wedged itself into his mind as the breeze whipped the moisture from his face. He never had any regrets about going into the business, oh no, but he did have plenty of “inklings” about such.

And speak of the devil-may-care, one of those reason whipped past him in a fiberglass pirate ship. The ship was modified by Bill from an old carnival ride they'd gotten as “payment” for one particular mission, and it was able to reach speeds in excess of 60 miles per hour. They knew that because it had been tested by their expert in excess, one woman of twenty-and-a-bit years named Valerie D. Cannonade, with steel-spring muscles and a heart of gold and quicksilver. She was currently “testing” its maneuverability amongst precarious roads at speeds far in excess of the limits of both legality and sanity.

Bill rode on unphased by all except for the little grey alien clinging to his side with the grip of a cat doused in hot sauce. He knew from experience that she could handle it, though he didn't know if Xill could.

“You know,” Bill said, as an attempt at reassurance “She's done a lot dumber things without killing us. You remember when she called Edison the Science-Lich a 'plagiarizing weenie' to his face, or when she chased that Mafioso down the Luxor wearing nothing but a frown and a chair leg to thwack ‘im with.”
“Yes, I remember,” Xill said, also remembering the sting of Edison's indeed-plagiarized “Peace Ray” to the face after that statement, and that Mafioso’s sudden revelation of his pyrokinetic powers right on his outfit. “But there's always a first time.”
“Yeah, I suppose. But it's too damn nice a day for that sort of thing to happen”
Xill looked out, for a moment forgetting about his fear of heights and admiring the first rays of sun piercing through the fields of saguaro. “Yeah, I suppose”
“Glad to hear it.” Bill smiled and turned his attention to the whooping and hollering coming from the ship. “Everythin' okay up there Val?”

“Okay as it'll ever be!” Val hollered back, turning around and waving, then swiftly turning back just in time to avoid a steep drop off the cliff. There was an audible “Hrmph” from the back of the ship, as the last party member was in agreement, but for entirely different reasons as well.

His name was Bishikama 9001, which Valerie had previously called “The Second Most Weeaboo name I'd ever Heard” {The first roughly translated from Japanese as “Duck fortune bring good ****,”}, but he scoffed at that assessment.

Hell, he scoffed at most things, like the waste of a perfect sunrise with her shenanigans, at how hard it was to polish his assortment of fine cutting weapons when the car was swerving left and right like a drunken hooligan, how low the quality of the oil he was currently drinking to lubricate his mechanical system was due to their lack of funds, how the oil stained his blue black outfi...

Oh right, I forgot about the fact that he was a robot ninja designed by the Rent-A-Ninja corporation to look as perfectly human as possible for assassination purposes. The tale of how he ended up with this motley crew is a tale of tragedy, violence, bisexual romance, and wandering the earth as a ronin for a good long time. Though, it was pointed out to him many times by Bill that technically ronin were Samurai, which he then proceeded to ignore, so you pedants out there cannot fault me on that.

It is a truly beautiful tale that I will not be writing up unless this book does well enough to warrant a sequel. So buy the damned thing, willya.

Anyway, all you need to know is that the man was with them, and he considered them all rather uncouth, though Valerie took that as a complement, but he respected them enough to stay with them. Well, for the most part. The polishing of the weapons took care of that though, the gold-anointed cloth, brushing off the filth of this work and leaving in its cleansing path pure, sharp steel. Like him, a beautiful creation, cleansing the world of filth with steel.

If those last two sentences sound at all pretentious, then you are in good company with the rest of the group, as every other sentence out of his mouth was as this one thought. Full of purple and poetry, but ultimately signifying “LOOKIT HOW PRETTY I AM!”

Though, to be fair, he was quite pretty, given that he was designed to look as bishonen as possible for the purposes of infiltration. And he was quite good at his job of stealthing and poisoning [Nonlethal stabbing and poisoning mind you, which he thankfully felt was more poetic] when he wasn't prattling about the deeper lovelorn meaning behind the horrible tentacle monster's actions. Besides, Valerie thought he was funny, much to his displeasure.

“There is nothing funny about true romance!” he would have said to her, had he not been concentrating on polishing those blades in the midst of her chaotic driving. He had said it once, twice, three dozen or so times since he had known her, but darn it, sometimes ya gotta say the cliché!

“Hey shuriken boy.” Valerie yelled back there “Ya doin' okay back there?”

“Okay,” he said, barely even looking back as he was polishing what was CLEARLY a kunai, not a shurkien “is a relative term. But I'd be far more 'okay' if you were to halt this 'living on the edge' and reduce your velocity to a reasonable amount.”
“But I like livin' on the edge,” she joshed back at him “You can see the view better there”
Bishi paused, looked up, and then went back to polishing his kunai. “I would prefer the view not clouded by danger and insufferable...” There was a hefty BUMP in the road, scattering Bishi's weaponry across the back of the car and leaving him scrambling to try and re-organize the delicate pieces of stabby metal, But not before he turned around and finished, “Turbulence.”

“Ah, Turbulence is just nature's whiny traffic cop tellin' ya to 'Slow Down! Stop! Get back with my bribe money!'” She paused, and then turned around to Bill, fingers haphazardly pressed against the steering wheel and swerving vaguely with the road. “So, how long till we get there cowboy-man?”

“Not long!” Bill shouted as Xill covered his eyes. “About an hour as the crow flies.” he looked down for am moment, and saw the horsehead at the front of his bike panting. Poor thing didn't even have legs to speak of, and still he was tired. Of course, they all were, since they'd been traveling long, their money was low. And though Tucson was a low-adventurer town that was where they were bound to earn some dough. And as they rode (Or, in Valerie's case, dangerously weaved) into the sunrise, none of them had any idea of the adventure coming their way soon.


Chapter Two- The Kactus Kabaret or; Who thought it would be a good idea to build a hotel there?

Tucson was an odd town, but the quiet kind of odd where it simmered under a slow boil, rather than fizzed and popped like an alka-seltzer tablet shoved down a pigeon's gullet. Of course, it is low-key in a setting where even the smallest southern backwater has some sort of mad scientist working out of their basement or a sewer god that feeds on hippie sacrifices every Arbor Day, so the low keyness was only so relatively speaking, but still there.

Perhaps this was the reason why Tucson was not a popular location for adventurers of the guild, only getting the run off from nearby Phoenix. Many Tusconans said that about a lot of things, but in no areas more than here. It didn't help that Phoenix had that whole “Portal to the treasure-filled Hopi Underworld” thing going on, with a cluster**** of high hotels surrounding it with high prices and high amounts of residents, but low turnover and even lower morals.

Hence why Bill did not want to go there, and the rest of the group agreed more or less [You'dve thought Xill would be all for exploring a metaphysical landscape, but it turns out that “Getting to go to a place of great mystical power” and “Promptly getting annihilated six-ways-to-Samhain” cancelled each other out like matter and anti-matter on the advantages/disadvantages scale]. Better to go to lightly-trodden ground and make waves rather than go into that sludgy, sticky morass of... eughhh. He remembered the first time he went there, and when he left covered in dried KY, with several teeth and rib bones of unknown yet presumably horrible species stuck in his britches amongst other places, having not gotten nearer to the pit than about 5 miles, he told himself “never again”.

There was that large part of his brain, the practical; warm one he used most often and would probably call the better cranial real-estate he owned, that said to him on the matter of his Tucsonan stay “You're good for doing this. You're providing a service to a city in desperate need of it due to business being siphoned away by a neighboring city, you've got so much to do in your downtime, there are lots of secrets to explore, and this is really a wonderful use of his time.”

Then there was that other part of his brain, that cynical; mean little part he had worn down to a sliver through underuse that he nevertheless dare not eliminate, which was saying “MMMMMONEY!MONEY MONEY MONEY MONEY MONAY! THEY GOTTA LOTTA CASH THEY AINT USIN, WE'LL BREAK THE BANK WITH THESE SUCKERS! COME ON WHO WANTS TO GET ON THE RICH TRAIN! GEEEET ON THE RICH TRAIN, WOO WOO!” And, though he hated to admit it, he did have to say that money was secondary, yet vital necessity that this jouexcursion was covering. After all, you can't eat or live in good intentions [Though Bertolt Brecht claimed he could, though later this was proven to merely be an angel messing with him]

Bill meandered through the city streets on his cycle, hoping to get a better view of the city he and the others'd be working (And eventually saving, unbeknownst to any of them) in for the next few months. Valerie added her own meandering to the mix, swerving between the white lines and the road at breakneck speeds. Though she made sure to amend those speeds to moderately-strain-neck with a scowl on her face through the traffic cameras she'd been warned about. Shops whipped past them, from the Chivalry Inc. store with a shuttered front and a big 'ol pot leaf being plastered over it, to the grand old Loft Cinema, to the unforgiving dungeon of concrete that was Pima Community College West campus.

There was moderate jubilation and pointing at things from Valerie and a quiet sense of contentment from Bill. Bishi just sat in the back grumbling and polishing his weapons, though he did occasionally utter a haiku of fancy indifference. “A town so tiny/with so little to offer/is a fool's delight”

“What?! I can't hear you over the sound of how awesome this is!” Valerie yelled back at him. And on and on it went. But as the pair reparteed', deep in the recesses of Xill's mind, worry started to boil. Of course, he did have many idle worries, such as the diseases he would have gotten from Caecilian Island or the “green juice” stains from the march of the murder-plants. But here, it was something more serious.

No, make that several things more serious, as his wizard senses [Which could be considered similar to Spidey-sense in the same way that being licked on the back by a fat guy named Harold could be compared to a massage session] were being pulled just about every way at once. It felt like something holy and something mad slowly burning outward like a road flare, a powerful thing wending the world just a bit in its wake, but with something horrible slowly leaking inward like a rain of raw sewage, the two forces fighting for dominance over the land.

He briefly considered the graveyard they drove past as a possible source, with the unholy, animate skeletal claws grasping out of the earth. And then he thought to himself, no, these vibes are far greater than anything that could come out of there, just as the groundskeeper came by and started whacking the hands back into the dirt with his shovel.

And that hum grew louder and louder still as they moved onward. And as they were going by some restaurant called “Lindy's” that Valerie was giddily pointing at, Xill saw it. It was a great Moai head, set next to a cafe, eyes staring upon the street. And it was radiating holy power. And as Xill locked eyes with the relic, he heard it broadcast several words into his mind.

Beware the tower,
For Babel reaches deep
And the night it brings
Shall take the light and reap.

And as Bill put-putted away along the avenue they were on, Xill pondered to himself. “Beware the tower? For Babel reaches deep?” What's that supposed to mean?

Of course, one cannot look and learn if one cannot seethe whole picture. He could not see the skinny coyote with the prismatic eyes following the scooter through the many alleyways, nor his all too human grin of delight. And he definitely could not see the two brothers of wealth and taste driving into town with their black limousine, nor the pure unholiness emanating from their bodies or the dark deeds roiling in their ageless heads.

….

“Well, here we are!” Bill said. Xill looked around. Little but sand and concrete walls graced his eyes, with a ramp to the left and his team and vehicles scattered around the sand providing evidence that no, he had not died and gone to a very weird purgatory. He'd been pondering the “Look and Learn” thing so long he'd forgotten to check if they'd actually gotten there. He swore to god that he had heard that phrase before, but where...

“Ya seem distracted,” Bill said as Xill pushed himself off the bike. “Anything wrong?”

“No, nothing's wrong.” Xill said, feeling the tiredness of the road thrust back on him in one great thwump as he disembarked from his seat. “Noting relevant at the moment anyway”.

If one could see Bill's eyes slightly better, they'd see he had cocked an eyebrow at this statement. But, he felt it best not to pry and dropped the matter. “Well,” he turned around and gestured his hands, “Here we are!” and everybody saw his hands gesture towards one of the oddest hotels they'd ever seen. It looked like a retro hotel perched atop a giant steamrollered canoe, with all of the stylization but only a moderate amount of wear.

The boat looked like a flat, wide canoe with metal boards gussied-up in the style of wooden planks and the hotel looked like an old-timey saloon as interpreted by way of Hollywood, IE. Bigger and glitzier than sanely possible in those days [Well, there was the “Effigy saloon”, but that's another matter entirely]. There was even a neon sign saying “The Kactus Kabaret” dominating the front, with a rotating image of an anthropomorphic Saguaro cactus “stripping” down to her ribs.

“Well, it sure is a beau-” Bill's speaking was halted by the feeling of what felt like a holiday ham slamming him in the face, followed by a feeling similar to being slapped by a very sticky, very wet towel.

“No! Down boy! Bad Rock!” A balding, handlebar-mustached man in green came running in to the scene. It was then that Bill realized that the thing standing atop him was an enormous pit-bull approximately the size of your average great dane, furiously licking his face and wagging its great big tail. “I'm very sorry for that, he just really gets happy to see new people” the mustached man said, pulling the dog off Bill with a beefy, hairy arm.

Bill picked himself up and grinned, giving the dog named Rock a few skritches behind the ears “He named Rock because he's as strong as one?”

“That and he's about as dumb as one.” the mustachioed man said, Rock grinning obliviously in that dopey wide-eyed way friendly pit bulls tend to do. “Glad to see ya here!”

“You got our reservations, right?” Bill said, popping the trunk of his cycle and pulling out a duffel bag full of clothes and other assorted amenities.

“Yeah, I got 'em. Hell, I sent 'em to the Weekly just cuzza how stunned I was that somebody actually bothered to reserve somethin' here instead o' just stayin through the night after Phoenix and leavin' nothing but a mess and a lousy tip. Ya didn't need to bother though; there wasn't jack-squat else botherin' to stay here.”

“Well, I just thought it was polite, that's all.” Bill said, pulling out a huge crate filled with what seemed to be dozens of case of pork-n-beans and packets of ramen.

“It's polite o' ya to stay here in the first place. Nobody gives a **** about Tucson around these parts.” the mustachioed man said, firmly yanking on Rock's collar to keep him from lunging at the crate.

“Well the people sure did on the Adventurers Guild's official Help Me, Help Me website. Damned place was an echo chamber, with only a few real jerks replyin'. And, I figured since we were in the area and need the work, we might as well come here.” As Bill let off that exposition dump he struggled to pull out what looked like a stuffed apothecary alligator at least ten feet long, filled to the brim with various spell components in jars and boxes that Bill desperately was trying to keep from tipping out of the thing's mouth as it opened.

The mustachioed man ran over to Bill and grabbed the gator on the other side, hoping to help him hoist the damned thing out of the trunk. “How in the-:eugh:-hell did you manage to fit all that-:grunt:-stuff in there?” he said, slowly hoisting the thing upward with Bill.

“I'm actually the one behind that.” said a voice from behind the two. It was Xill sheepishly looking back at them “It's enchanted to be bigger on the inside you see, sort of like a bag of holding. Made it using several toy TARDISes, and a few physics textbooks. Works pretty well as long as you don't put anything too eldritch in there.”

The mustachioed man looked at Xill, barely having gotten the alligator out to the middle of its tail “And-:grunt:-you can't make this crap-:hnng:-fly to the hotel for us why wizard-boy?”

“I was never able to do it very well. Last time I tried, I left a hole in the ceiling and a substantial repair bill.” His eyes widened with remembrance a little. “But I can do this!”

He clapped his hands and shouted “Hep Hep!”, and as soon as he did so, the alligator sprang out of the trunk on its tail, made a perfect four foot landing on the turf, and started waddling towards the hotel far faster than any crocodilian filled with that much crap should. Xill looked sheepishly at the mustachioed man, who looked at him with an aside glance. “I enchanted the crocodile too. I always forget it can do that.”
Bill walked over to the side of the mustachioed man “Say, in all or this, I forgot to ask your name...”
“The name's Pete,” the mustachioed man.
“And, where exactly did that dog of yours go?” Bill asked.
“Why he's right...” Pete looked to the side “Oh god damn it Rock!”

There, in a ten foot radius from the alligator, was Rock, Head crouched down, tail between his legs, barking up a storm at the scaly magical automaton. Even while the gator paid him no notice, he still kept barking. Meanwhile, there was a different sort of barking going on at Valerie's ship.

“No!” shouted Bishi, clutching his collection of fine weaponry.

“What?” asked Valerie, a ratty duffel bag made more of duct-tape-than-cloth now slung over her shoulder, “All I did was offer to carry your stuff.”

“Exactly!” Bishi said, gesturing furiously “You offered to putrefy the sacred steel with your unclean and oafish grasp.”

“Yer exaggeratin'” Valerie said “It's not like I'm gonna set it on fire and drop it out the window!”

Bishi grew more furious “That's exactly what you did with those scrolls I bought back in California!”

“Okay now,” Valerie said “In fairness, A) I was very, very drunk at the time and B) they were cursed anyway, and when you're drunk you think the best method of dealing with a cursed scroll involves fire and heights.”

“That's not the point! The point is that I do not want you treating my stuff like... well... you!”

“Fine, fine, just keep your fancy froo-froo throwy-stabbers and pukey-mixes to yerself, I'll just go on in.” She said, waving her hand walking away. But, just as Bishi was struggling to hoist all one-hundred-and-ninety-five implements (Not counting his scrolls) in their own, delicately carved, collectively heavy wooden boxes, Valerie turned back. “You know, I was meanin' to make it up to you...”

Bishi grunted in a way that said “Leave now,” glaring daggers at her. She stepped back said “Okay, okay, I'm goin' .” hoisting her bag above her head and walking away, hips swaying in the warm breeze.

But then, Bishi stopped his struggling for a moment and thought. He looked back to speak to her. Unfortunately, in his thoughts he forgot about the multitudinous pounds of boxes in his hands, which promptly clattered down upon his face in a sad, sad stack, one of the boxes even popping his detachable arm out of its thankfully easy-to-fix socket. From underneath the stack the muffled sounds of swearing could be heard

----

Appropriately for the nearing high noon, the hotel smelled and looked like a Hollywood saloon as they walked in, with its meticulously clean impression of rusticality. It had a neon-lit bar with various drinks, both mundane and moderately magical, lit from behind with that musty neon glow of cheapness. There was a noticeable lack of dust or muss on the plastic-topped barstools or the rickety chairs and , but also a notable lack of people aside from the four of them and Pete. There was little surprise there because, as Pete had put it, nobody gives a **** about Tucson. But then there was also that man in the middle of the room currently dusting the bottles behind the bar.

The man appeared to be a bespectacled, pudgy sort of fellow around his late twenties, with wispy brownish hair and smile-lines from better times on his head lying right next to the aging marks of worse times. He looked up, ratty clothing beneath a fishing jacket waving, and smiled.

“Who's that guy?” Bill leaned over and asked Pete. “Oh, him?” Pete said. “That's just the janitor, John Karlowicz. Kid's had a hard-knock life, and he's a bit of a kook, but he's a good janitor, so he works here in exchange for room 'n board.” Bill looked at the kid. He definitely did look like an odd duck, but the compelling kind who could've been some mad scientist's Fritz in a past life, or perhaps a gravedigger in a cemetery where the dead rise at night, or perhaps even a chronically unemployed webmaster living in the hot, gross part of Florida.

Pete fished through his pockets and took out two metal keys. “Speakin' of which, your rooms are right down the hall, numbers 001 and 002.”

Bill looked to the side corridor. In the corridor there were several branching paths of rooms ranging from number 7 to 57, with a staircase to the side presumably leading to more. Of course, this didn't matter because rooms one and two were right at the front of the hall co-incidentally located around ten feet away from the nearest barstool.

“Sorry, but I don't have cable.” Pete said “I do however have wi-fi, thanks to the kid over there suggestin' it.” He pointed to Jon who waved wit a smile.

An audible “THANK GOD!” issued from the lips of Xill, who immediately grabbed the key right out of Pete's hand and rushed over to room 001, apothecary alligator waddling relatively swiftly behind him. He clicked the lock open and shoved his hand into the alligator's mouth, swiftly yanking out a blue laptop covered in runes which appeared to be made of glitter glue. He then proceeded to dash into the room, and from there the sound of a swift type-type-typing was heard.

From what he could see of the room at that angle, Bill thought the lodgings looked pretty good. There was no wallpaper or carpeting to speak of, but the rest, such as the TV, the bedside and central table. Even the bed looked soft and comfy, though speaking of which...

“Ya don't happen to have any bedbugs here, do ya? 'Cause we've had problems with 'em before and,”

“No, no Mr. Richards, I can assure you we have no bedbugs.” Pete said hands raised in assurance. “Again, that kid over there helped out a heap. It sounded like a pretty weird suggestion when he first said it, but it's amazing that all we had to do to get rid o' the bedbugs was introduce a couple of-”

A feminine shriek came from the room. “Xill!” Bill responded with a start.

“Oh nonononononononono!” came a voice that sounded like a mix between Karloff and a cartoon turtle. It was the kid, running straight past Bill and into the room “Don't you dare hurt my babies!” Bill rushed right behind him. What was the horror he was confronting. Was the kid breedin' some sorta unfathomably horrible space monsters? Was he keeping pet demons in a hell portal unleashed by heavy metal like in that one movie with the “really good stop-motion” Valerie kept sayin' he should watch [For the record, that movie is called The Pit, and after his adventure he did manage to find the time to watch it and reportedly thought it was “pretty good”]. Was it the deadly larvae of the invasive African Happy Worm? [ Don't laugh. In their native Africa they're responsible for more fatalities per year than hippos. Which are themselves responsible for more fatalities than lions.]

He rushed into the room, only to see...

Xill shrieking on top of the bed while a tarantula scuttled about on the floor, chasing a small beetle. It wasn't even that big of a tarantula, at the size of roughly the palm of one's hand. And currently John was tryin got scoop it up “Don't you dare kill her! She's only doing her job to keep the hotel clean and fulfilling a valuable role in the ecosystem!”

In the midst of his shrieking Xill managed to find the time shout “I AM WELL AWARE OF THE VALUABLE ECOLOGICAL ROLE TERRIFYING ARACHNIDS PLAY IN THE ECOSYSTEM, I JUST WISH IT WOULD GO DO SO SOMEWHERE ELSE!” He then took in a big gulp of oxygen and continued shrieking.

John gave him a dirty look, and whisked the arachnid into his hand just as it caught the junebug. “There there missy, we'll put you somewhere safe,” he said, patting the creature on the head like a kitten as he walked out of the room and through the hall. Xill's shrieking immediately halted.

Pete, Valerie and Bishi (Who was currently carrying his paraphernalia in, heavy box by heavy box) looked on as he walked in silence. “Like I said.” Said Pete, breaking the silence “Kid's an odd duck. But he's a good kid”

Bill paused for a moment. “How did he know it was a she?”

“No idea,” said Xill, stepping off the bed “and frankly I'll be glad if I never know.”

“I always knew you were afraid of giant spiders, but not these little bitty guys.”

“Well, I think that has a lot to do with that time at the Wizard Academy where some guy tried to cross spiders with army ants. Even seen a thousand black widows eat a man from the inside?”

“No, no I haven't.” Bill said. He'd heard many horror stories about the cut-rate wizard college that Xill went to after he was kicked out by his family for studying magic, which could be thought of as the root cause of at least 75% of his general fearfulness.

This included such things as a classroom being built onto an ancient Indian burial ground and how he would have to dodge projectile-vomit from possessed students while taking notes, how some of the teachers were really man eating abominations that got to stay due to “tenure”, the very literal “Hell Night”, the enormous formerly-human thing under the campus called The Huethe that was used as both a garbituator and a septic tank and an incident he only referred to as “The Octarine Orgy”. But he hadn't heard the one about the spider-ants.

“I wish I could say the same,” said Xill, shuddering “I wish I could say the same.” Xill said as he grabbed his laptop off the floor and flipped it open. He'd thrown it down on the floor in his fit of hysteria but it was relatively unharmed. Relatively because it was already held together by spit, hope and the magic runes Xill had emblazoned on it using glitter-glue and Gorilla Tape

In the background there was the sound of a lock opening, a few fast footsteps and the sound of creaking springs and the sounds of profound relaxation. It was Valerie, who'd jumped into the nearest bed in her room and was now in a position that could only be called “Floomphed”. “Thank god we're here. My back was killin' me” she said relaxed, reaching over for the remote.

Bishi was still bringing in those boxes about as carefully as one could bring up a hunk of metal and wood, and trying hard not to yell back at her “At least you don't have to spend an hour repairing yourself from the backstrain.” Much too inelegant language that. Instead he whispered it under his breath, trying and failing to form it into a series of well-worded haikus.

“So,” Bill thought to himself “This is where our adventure starts.” Well, the actual adventures could wait for tomorrow. For now, they'd get some R&R from the asphalt drear that had accompanied them so, look up some jobs they could do at the dawn of the next day to get them on their feet real quick, possibly look around town a bit more. After all, nothing could possibly be coming up at this hour on a fine Tuesday noon like this.

Just then, like a bolt of contrived irony from the blue, the door was kicked in. Everybody looked out of their rooms and stared. Well, except for Bishi, who just held a particularly large box of poison outside of the hotel, swearing profusely about this woman-mountain blocking his way (Though under his breath for very obvious reasons). The woman who stepped inside was statuesque, in that she was beautiful and eye-catching, but step into her the wrong way and you'd probably wind up with a concussion.

Her tall and hardy frame was begarbed with a thick bulletproof vest over a long-sleeved leather jacket, and black leather boots and blue-denim jeans garbed her powerful legs, which were right now striding across the floor in the exact sort of motion that said to everyone in the room “Don't **** with me.” Her eyes...

Well her eyes were covered by a blue bandanna, but if they weren't one could assume they would be glaring and scanning across the room with a burning stare, (figuratively) napalming it with her eyes. Of course, this was completely different from the way Bill's eyes were gazing upon her, raptly with awe like a compass clings to magnetic North.

“M' nome de plume's Unseen Cassidy. I'm lookin' for the man who killed my pa, and I've come here to find 'im.” At the mention of the name Unseen Cassidy Valerie's eyes grew open wide. Cassidy reached into her pocket and pulled out a small band of hundreds. “ 'll this do for the next couple o' months ?”

Pete's eyes widened, both in fear, and in a little bit of “Holy crap, how much money?!”. “Yes, yes, oh god yes!” He quickly fumbled in his pocket for a key, any key

“Holy crap it's her!” Valerie said to Bill after the initial shock wore off, tugging at his sleeve “The Unseen Cassidy!”

“That'd mean a lot more if I knew who that was” Bill said.

“Only one of the best goddamn up-close-n' personal adventurers in the country, at least according to the forums on the Adventurer's Guild website.”
“I don't read the forums as often as you do.”
“Dangit you don't read a lot of things like I do. They have the most hilarious flamewars ever, better than 4chan even!”
“You see, that's exactly why I don't read them on a regular basis. There's this especially nuts poster called “KapnKandywine” who keeps badmouthing people on the site.”
There was a pause and the raise of an eyebrow from Valerie. “My handle on that forum is KapnKandywine. And I've met most of those people I've been badmouthing before I met you, and they are ****ing jerks.”
There was another pause as they watched Cassidy order a drink from the bar, “Well, that's unsurprising.” Bill said. Valerie'd mentioned a few adventuring horror stories before in passing, and when he'd asked for her to elaborate on one, he never wanted to ask her about 'em again. “So, whose
“Hold yer horses goo-goo eyes, I'm getting' to that.” Bill looked to the side a little as she said that. “She's known for doin' some of the toughest jobs around.” Valerie said enthusiastically “Remember that mummy train a few months back everybody was yackin' about?”
“Remember it? Why I was actually plannin' on havin' us take that job. Even drew up plans for it before that business in Mexico sidetracked us and it just dropped off the radar.”

“Well, she's the one who beat that train outta commission, even got some of the fuel back for study.”
“Don't those things regenerate?” Bill said.
“Yeah, but it ain't gonna be for a damned long while. Guys on the forums said it looked like a blender'd got it the last time they've seen it. And that ain't all, she took out a cell o' the Supermafia in Chicago (I think it was one o' the ones with rayguns), she caught that Grootslang in the New York sewers , and she stopped a Chuck E Cheese robot uprising before it even started”
Well, it just seems like the sort of stuff we do all the time” Bill said, eyes still locked on Cassidy. And that's another thing, where exactly is her adventurin' group”
That's the thing” Valerie aid “She doesn't have one! She does every job by herself” At this, Bill's eyes grew wide. “And nobody but the guys she catches 've seen her at work. They'd been debatin' it over at the forums, and I think that aside from the skubbers who whine about everything the mosta 'em said ' that it 've been impossible for her to fake 'em. Do you know what this means?”

“It, erm, means...” Said Bill, stumbling across his words as he realised that he'd still been staring across the room at Cassidy as Valerie talked up her credentials, probably more intently than before. Cassidy was, for the most part too preoccupied with her bitter, brown drink of an unspecified name, but highly alcoholic nature to notice Bill's stare.

“Yeah I know it means you have the hots for her,” Valerie replied, cutting Bill off “But it also means she's got a damn good secret for me to steal. Or, that I have the opportunity to learn some stuff from a master at the craft, girl-talk style or Manos-y-Torgo-type style!” She was at this point moderately fangirling, though not to the point of making “squee” noises yet. But the speech promptly stopped as they saw Cassidy, plunking down a few fives on the table and walking towards the hall.

“But I think it's your turn to have a little chat with her.” Valerie said, Nudging Bill in the ribs “Go get 'er tiger” she said, as the nudge turned into a shove, hard enough to send even a man-mountain like Bill right near to the woman-mountain walking towards the hall. Cassidy clasped her black leather gloves together as Valerie retreated into her room to watch and Bill nervously tried to piece together those mouth-move-thingies his nerves weren't letting him remember the name of.

“Um, hi…. M’ name’s Bill” Bill said, awkwardly shuffling his legs and fiddling with his keys on his belt, all the while avoiding Cassidy’s gaze. Well her assumed gaze, with him hazarding a guess that had he had the superpower of inexplicably cloth-exclusive x-ray vision [No, he wouldn’t use them for the obvious purpose. Man’s a gentleman], he would’ve probably seen her eyebrow raised and her eyes rolling in that “What now? Sort of way.
“H’llo” Cassidy said, trying to stride forward.
Bill stepped out of her striding way, though the corridor was barely big enough to fit both of them “I was… erm… How are… urm… What’s you’re.. I’d like to… go to…. Place.”
“Well…” Cassidy said, looking back slightly befuddled “That’s… nice…” The sound of facepalming could be heard in Valerie’s room as Cassidy turned back around and walked away.

“If yer goin’ to… wherever, I don’t recommend you go by Broadway and Campbell. Just did a job there and ‘Cleanup’ is gonna take a while.” Bill walked off bashfully as she strode down the hallway, barely budging an inch as Rock bounded down the stairs and bashed his dopey face on her thighs. She turned a little, patted him on his thick skull, and then walked up the stairs as the oblivious dog eagerly followed her. By then Bill was long gone, and Valerie was just shaking her head in disappointment. The whumph of yet another item of Bishi’s sounded yet again, and an irritated sigh not long after.

[tbok1992]

Chapter 3- Investigation and Invstiture

Words. Yes, those mouth-move-thingies were words. Words he had totally screwed up upon, Bill thought to himself as he rode down Broadway on his cycle. Of course, all the internal tongue-lashings were for naught, as what had been done, had been done.

That was also a phrase that applied to his going down Broadway despite, or rather because of, the warming Cassidy had given him. She’s a fellow adventurer, and there’s no point in getting’ goo-goo eyed over her if she can’t hold her own. He valued expertise in a woman, and right now he was gonna check out the results of her expertise, see if she’s the real deal.

Of course, Valerie had talked her up some, but Valerie talked up a lot of things, some of them rather questionable. For example, he sincerely wished he could have gotten the two hours of his life back that he wasted watching Neon Maniacs at Valerie’s insistence.

But his thoughts on why that film was a waste of both a perfectly good premise and perfectly good celluloid were abruptly brought to a halt by a lungless whinny from the horse’s head on his scooter. He locked his focus to the front, where he saw a teeming mass of cars at a dead stop in the middle of the road. “Bingo,” He thought to himself as he maneuvered his cycle into the parking lot of one of the stores.

He thought it would be best if he approached the scene on foot, as there was so much traffic clogging the road that it essentially remained a wall in the street. The swarm of cars was a buzz with swearing and honking, the thwacking sounds of a couple of fistfights breaking up the human static, including one with a frankinsteinean abomination getting his face beaten in by his own unstitched arm.

Amongst the cars there was also an ice cream truck, being attacked by a flapping, cooing swarm of pigeons with a mean and hungry look in their eyes, led by a particularly pestilential wolverine-sized specimen who was currently trying to pry the back doors of the van open as the van driver shook his fist in futile fear.

The big bird was a dire pigeon, a sort of creature with a great proficiency at controlling its lesser kin like a horde of hateful air-piranhas, but with absolutely zero proficiency at controlling its ravenous appetite. It was a truly omnivorous creature, with a diet including such things as rotten meat, dirty diapers, old tire leather, broken beer bottles, other dire pigeons, little dogs who were all inevitably named GiGi, and, as of now, ice cream and ice cream truck drivers.

Bill looked over, sighed, and pulled out a .44 Magnum from his belt, aiming and shooting at the big bird in one swift one-handed motion. Normally in real life shooting a .44 Magnum with one hand is only a smart idea if you have a secret wrist-injury fetish.

But, given that this is a setting that runs on the physics of your average shonen anime, which tend to tell Newtonian physics to eat a **** in several different l you will be unsurprised to learn that it worked just dandy for Bill, blowing off the filth-dripping dire pigeon’s head in one shot.

The driver looked about as the hideous swarm flew away hissing in rage. He saw Bill, who gave him a friendly wave of acknowledgment, “Thank you.” The ice-cream man said, wiping the sweat of his brow.

“No problem,” Bill said warmly as he walked on past. Dire Pigeons were not one of Evolution’s finer products, he thought to himself while walking. The damned things were less like a cancer to urban ecosystems and more like the urban equivalent of one of those diseases where your immune system eats your brain. But no matter, he was almost near the street’s intersection, where orange lights flashed and a few officers shooed bystanders away from the scene.

But that was incidental compared to the big whammy of a detail at the center of it all, a heaping, hairy vaguely humanoid plant-thing oozing bileous blood. Or, at least, something like blood, except it was the approximate color of a rainbow with leprosy, it was twitching in ways that blood should not twitch, and it was causing a faint sizzle as it swatchled across the pavement. In fact, it wasn’t at all much like blood except for the fact that it was coming out of something that had once been alive.

Bill’d had experience before with plant folk, what with the Heap-Spawn [Yes, as in the spawn of the public domain man-plant superhero. They started appearing around the early 70s, presumably after the thing’s infamous appearance at Woodstock, and they’ve be alternately described as “Cuddly and Totoroesque, in a smelly sort of way” and “Nightmare demons from hell’s *******,” the description usually depending on the amount of criminal convictions the speaker has on his record] he’d met in the various appropriately gloomy environs.

But this plant-thing itself looked nothing like he’d ever seen before, made up out of the unmistakable dry brown stalks and bushy seeds of buffelgrass, the invasive, highly flammable scourge of the Southwest. It stuck out from the entire surface of the formerly-shambling mound like a tumor made up of porcupine quills, with roots somewhat visible below the surface of its many wounds. Bill put two and two together and had had a hunch that the horrible prismatic oil was animating the damned thing.

Of course, he didn’t interfere, since adventurers weren’t supposed to butt in on police investigations of another adventurer’s work, and even at this distance, the police were giving him the stink eye. But, even at that distance he could see the cause of the thing’s death.

Huge lacerations cut into its sides, some like the clawprints of a radioactive cougar on PCP and some like a bullwhip made of iron had given the thing a once-over cutting deep and cutting frequently. The cuts were clustered in various locations, one area oozing far more of the blood splattering the ground than any of the others. Bill guessed that this was evidence of her attempting to search for weak points, a fact evidenced by the fact that the coat on the thing’s body got less and less dense as it got closer to that spot.

“Impressive work, I’ll say.” Bill thought to himself. “But, how can I possibly be sure it was her?”

Just then, a wind blew up in his face. A wind which most certainly had nothing to do with that mysterious grinning coyote in the distance, who most certainly will not become important later. The wind carried a sock from the scene, smacking him straight in the face with a moist splat.

Huh. She schlucked it away from his face and saw that it was, and currently dripping with a reasonable amount of that horrible pseudoblood. “Must be hers.” Bill thought to himself “But why’d she take her socks off to fight that thi… Never mind.” He put it away. “Might as well give it to Xill to take a look at the stuff.” He said, taking out a Nemean Bag [A brand of heavy duty sandwich bags, which refuse to re-market themselves as forensic sample bags even though that’s where 90% of their sales come from. “We won’t rebrand ourselves just because some namby-pambies refuse to eat anything with a PH above 12,” the company’s CEO Shaxus The Beyond Man said while eating his daily Roofing-tar-and-battery-acid burrito.] , putting it in there, and stuffing it in his shirt pocket. He knew he couldn’t give it back to Cassidy, not just because he’d look like a creeper. He could swear the goo was hissing at him from inside the bag.

He sighed and thought for some moments as he walked back to his motorcycle. Again, they’d used up most of their main store of cash to procure the hotel, but they needed some work to make sure they didn’t waste their money, and they needed it fast. But dammit, he couldn’t expect the call to adventure to just, waltz right out of that there furniture store right then and there.

Suddenly, an alarm broke out at the furniture store right then and there, and waltzing (or rather waltz-running) out came a man in what appeared to be a patchwork of Halloween costumes sown together, with a sack of cash on his left side and followed by a series of bizarrely and lethally equipped Halloween decorations.

As he cackled and threw a blood capsule which entangled the pursuing storeworkers in a mess of sticky slime, he said with glee “Try as you might, but nobody can stop the Halloween Kid!”. Bill smiled the smile of a man who had just hit paydirt and his arm reached for his gun.


Chapter 4- Sometimes Opportunity Knocks… Down the ****ing Door With a Battering Ram.

Bill grabbed some rubber bullets to load into his gun as “The Halloween Kid” struggled to start the sad excuse for a scooter up. He never really carried ‘normal” ammo, with his bullet cache filled with only nonlethal and ludicrously deadly bullets. The things he usually fought were either A) immune to conventional ammunition or B) not immune to it; but also not the kind most adventurers were legally allowed to use possibly-lethal force on.

But, Bill thought as he aimed the gun at the “Halloween Kid’s” leg, rubber bullets still hurt like a mother****er. And indeed, as it hit the poor sod’s leg, he let out a squeal of pain before turning around and glaring daggers at Bill with a comically enraged face.

“YOU!” the Kid yelled, pointing at Bill as he picked up his now heavily bruised leg, hopping towards the curb “You Dare attack the great Halloween Kid?!” Bill said nothing, but looked at him quizzically as he spoke.

The Kid’s voice didn’t sound remotely threatening, like somebody trying to be a big, bad supervillain instead of one who actually was one. But, in that nasally bellow, he screeched, “Sic ‘im!” and the already antsy creatures following him, rushed over to Bill.

A zombie baby of rubber and foam dove at Bill. He swatted it out of the way like a rubber ball against an aluminum bat, just as a spider of glitter and foam moved towards his foot. But his eyes weren’t on the things coming towards him, but rather on the place the the Halloween Kid was running away from him to. More specifically, a flaking silver Kia that’d seen better days parked in the street blatantly illegally.

He aimed for the thing’s tires, kicking aside the spider with a swift, sightless kick of his foot. But it was surprisingly solid and heavy for a repurposed Halloween decoration, and it barely budged as it grabbed on to Bill’s boot with needle sharp jaws and started spraying out a gush of distressingly adhesive fake blood.

Bill knew enough about magical constructs to know that this was far more complex than a man who should have to be committing a crime this small. But he didn’t let him distract it from his aim, nor did he let the spider biting and gluing his foot, or the small bendy flower-clown-skull now trying to wrap itself around his arm.

He knew he couldn’t shoot The Kid, as he was about to get in the car and peel out as Bill drew a bead, but he knew that he could delay him for long enough. And as his eye and gun barrel lined up for the perfect shot, as The Kid leapt into the car and started to keep trying to work the keys, he pulled the trigger.

The loud bang startled even the small constructs, which allowed Bill to follow with a second, hasty shot. And after both bangs, there followed a loud hiss of air coming out of the Kia’s Picard-bald tires. Followed by the pladap-pladap of flat tires barely moving and the reving of a smoke belching engine gone to seed. “Better move quick,” Bill thought to himself, “It’s now or never before he flees” He ripped his foot from the not-quite-tacky fake blood now on the pavement and charged at the window.

It’s funny the things you notice when you’re slamming through a criminal’s back window to reach at him from the inside of the rotting from the inside-out car that he’s currently trying to make a getaway in.

Like the fact that even though you used the weight of what is essentially animate, cheap plastic to make sure crash through without any injury they barely sustained any damage at all. Or that the Halloween Kid had no backup weapons for when he was caught like this, like a gun or a knife, as Bill tackled him to the car floor. OR that the kid was surprisingly scrawny for a petty robber, as Bill tied up the incoherently flailing Kid with the seatbelt. Like I said, the little things.

----
When the police came, a few things were unveiled about the Kid. Apparently he was a homeless man, living in his car behind the various husks of those storefronts that turned into Halloween shops every August to November. He’d also been arrested for various minor misdemeanors, of the sort that Bill suspected half came from desperation half came from a lack of social graces.

The search had also found several pages of notes on his body, in addition to the cash, though al lbut three of his creations had slipped away in the ensuing chaos. The first few were detailed schematics of runes, unguents and incantations to apply to the various Halloween props he’d used.

But the second was of things of a greater nature, props that would have cost far more than the small tatty bits he had now to turn into grand machines of larcenous Samhain wonderment. Lord knows why he didn’t steal them. Bill thought that even in the depths of poverty there are some personal taboos few are willing to break.

But right now, his only plan was to yell, “**** you! **** you all to hell!” The kid screeched, rambling incoherently as the cops shoved him in. “I’m gonna be a somebody someday! And that’s when you mother****ers are all gonna pay!”

“Buddy,” Bill said, trying to stare at him as sincerely as if he hadn’t heard that from every 2-bit mad scientist, minor magician, and psychotic psychic to turn to petty crime “I don’t think that bridge yer sellin’s ever gonna be build. You seem like a bright guy too. Couldn’tcha do somethin better with yer life?”

There was a pause. Tears started welling up in The Halloween Kid’s eyes, as if to say “I did. Once.” That’s the sort of story Bill’d also heard a million times from every mad scientist, minor magician and psycho psychic who wasn’t mean enough or savvy enough to turn petty crime into a full-time job, a life of rejection and failure, and he could see the words of that story dripping down the Kid’s cheeks. But the Halloween Kid said nothing as the door of the cop car slammed in his face.

“So, Officer…” Bill asked one of the policemen as he inspected the scene

“Officer Keystone.” He said abruptly. She was a woman with a lean face, a strong arm and a look in her eyes and in her very poise that said “I’m getting too old for this ****.” Despite the fact that she only looked to be in her mid-thirties

“Officer Keystone?”

She rolled her eyes “Yeah, I know. Grandpa was in the LAPD, dad was a hippie who wanted to spite him…”

“I won’t pry.” Bill said with a shrug “Anyway officer, why haven’t you caught this guy before? He looks pretty small-time, well within your jurisdiction”

“That’s what I’ve been sayin’ for the last two months.” Said Keystone, throwing her hands up into the air. “They got us busy guarding some building called the R.J. Fleischer or somthin they’re buildin’ where the old Magic Carpet Golf used to be. Apparently it’s being built for some big-shot corporation, and they want us to make it look good, so we got most o our men guardin’ the streets. Hell I barely…”

She looked down at the jelly doughnuts and then, without warning, shoved them all in her mouth, barely chewing on them before forcibly gulping them down.

“Hell, I barely got any time to make so I can eat.” Said Keystone, giving no indication of the previous spectacle but a wipe of her fingers across her hand to get the excess jelly off. “So we can barely deal with normal ****, no less this super-****, ‘specially with our one werewolf cop on 23/6 duty at the building.” The frown on her face turned into a small smile “So thank ****ing Dino Jesus you came here when you did.” The Cop looked around “Tell me there’s more o’ ya adventurer-types around, please for the love o’ god tell me there’s more.”

“There is, m’ party in fact” Bill said with a cheerful grin ‘We just got here today, when I stumbled across the guy. Speakin’ o which, was there any sort of “job” on this guy?”

Keystone gave a puzzled look and said “I thought you were on a job when you decided to…” She quickly took out a well worn smartphone from her pocket and flicked through it.

As she searched Bill said “Nah. I mean there’ some adventurers who’d ignore a robbery off-job, but I don’t consider myself that sorta mercenarial type. Besides, it was easy business an-“

“Found it!” she said, looking down at the screen. “Yeah, the job’s there and, furthermore, it ain’t taken by anyone. Ya could sign up and collect the reward pretty handy for it.”

Bill shook her hand “Thanks maam. We’ll be stayin’ here for a while, so don’t be surprised if our paths cross again.”

“God I hope so.” Keystone said as Bill walked off.

Keystone’s partner popped his head out of the side of the car, with The Halloween Kid’s cursing still audible from the back seat and the twitching rattle of the three partly-cracked constructs in a lockbox in the front faint in the background. “Didja tell him about the other st-“

“Nah.” Kyestone responded, turning back to the car “He’s an adventurer, he’ll find out sooner or later. And besides, adventurers are made of tougher stuff. The words “I hope” ran silently in her mind after she said that. “Now c’mon, we gotta get back to that tower.


Chapter 5: Meanwhile…
The sun shone in that eerie, beshadowed way that spoke of fall along the sand stained concrete barriers of the wash, the ocean of sand broken up in intervals by patches of green shrubbery and jackrabbits being pursued by the many hungry velociraptors that crawled within the ecosystem, their tan feathers rustling with the autmn breeze.

It all would’ve been very poetic had it not been broken up constantly by the sound of Rock barking ceaselessly from the second story at the aforementioned velocirators, a fact which annoyed both Bishi and Xill as they worked on their own little projects .Val, with all her gumption, didn’t much mind as she sipped down a beer on this lazy-so-far day. It helped that usually with most bars, she was the one raising the ruckus, so she felt free to occupy herself while Rock was doing it for her.

Of course, Rock’s Barkign wasn’t the only noise breaking up the silence. There was the tap-tap-tapping of grey fingers against the keys of the laptop as Xill searched for a link to the statue’s statement. He’d had very little luck so far, as all he’d found was the obvious biblical references, several books worth of the sorts of terrible poetry most of us wrote when we were fifteen, and the website of “the first Golem porn star,” which was so poorly designed it would’ve been laughed off Geocities.

Of course, it didn’t help that the computer was a heap of


And that's all I got. Sorry for all the likely profanity censorbits that're inevitably going to happen, but I didn't have time to edit it, as I gotta go to bed soon. Now, here are my questions:

-Cassidy's supposed to be the mutant love-interest for Bill, but I'm not sure how to do the foreshadowing well for her so far. I tried to do so with the wounds on the Buffelgrass-thing, and I do want to edit a bit more into her description to hint she's hiding something under those thick clothes, but how in my previous bits of writing, the interim and later events should I do that?
-What sorts of character building should I do in the interim between the rest of the day and the heroes seeking out the mission that day? are there any characters who feel particularly underutilized or who need more development relationship-wise?
-What sorts of tics or what particular bits of bad writing in the story do I need to expunge?
- I feel that the story drags when Bill leaves the hotel. Are my suspicions unfounded, or is there a problem there?
_Do you see any problems, structural or prose wise that I haven't brought up?

So yeah. Just tell me what you think, maybe give a few thoughts/answers on the questions, and I hope what I've written so far isn't too garbage or tl/dr.

[Inglenook]

-Teddy Roosevelt is immortal in this universe due to beating the crap out of Death when he came for him until they were able to make a deal. Of course, he can never run for public office, otherwise the deal is off and he dies, but he's still had a pretty sweet eternal life nonetheless.

-Dinosaurs still live in the Western parts of the united states, lead there and preserved after the meteor hit by a figure discovered in the fossil record and nicknamed by the public as "Raptor Jesus," despite the fact that he's really more like Raptor Moses.

- Washington D.C. contains several portals to hell due to the massive amounts of political and moral corruption within it. Most demons like to use the place as a vacation home.

-Rasputin is still alive, but he's a good guy and a devilishly handsome one to boot thanks to various improvements in his magic skills. He spends a lot of time trying to protect the modern world from his evil father, Koschei The Deathless

-World War II in this setting wasn't fought against the Nazis, but instead against the armies of the antichrist, though in the end things turned out the same enough so that their history resembles ours. And there is an island of other-dimentional nazis in the atlantic who act like North Korea with actual-working-superscience and an actually competent government.

- There is another dimention that is one giant cornfield where powerful psychics send the people they "Disappear" and giant corn monsters stalk through, another that's a creepy maze based on Take On Me, another that's a sick parody of a weeaboo fantasy designed by all the collective subconscious minds of Hikkiomori mixing the power of the hiding goddess Amaterasu, and many many more, all accessible through a giant pit with millions of doors on its sides in the Antarctic.
This is beautiful.

[tbok1992]

Aw, thanks! So, in addition to the stuff I asked about where I currently am in the book, I'd also like to ask about some stuff for later:

-I'm plannign to do a parody of Silent Hill in one bit, set at Old Tucson Studios. The otherworld would be constantly on fire, since Old Tucson did suffer through a massive fire that destroyed a huge chunk of the place, and one of the main antagonists of that part would be this creepy shadow-ghost based on real sightings.

The humor would mostly come from most of the characters underreactions to it, as they've experienced other phenomena similar to this, and the horror would come from one character (Bishikama to be precise) not having experienced it and facing a series of monstrosities based on a horrible event from his past.

The question here is, to those who are more familiar with the series than I, what sorts of elements do you think should be in this to make it a legitimately good/affectionate Silent Hill parody. I mean, I've got jokes involving the suggestive monsters and the symbolism involved, but is there anything else I should tackle?

-Do you know of any practical reason for a weapons company to make Umbrella Corp-type bioweapon-monsters, or at least a reason that sounds practical on paper even if it. Because, I'd like a good reason for it to be a popular trend for weapons companies to develop these things, to give a reason for why Raytheon would have an extremely tiny Biotech division dedicated to making them.

This is to justify a plot point involving a colony of said bioweapons escaping into Tucson's Airplane Graveyard and merely wanting to live in peace. As an ancilliary note, their leader is a giant skeletonlike monstrosity covered in thick plates of armor leaking glowing, melty skin (Think a combo between the Godwarrior from Nausicaa and the Evas from Evangelion) with the personality of a mellow hippie-type.

-Should I just use the Koch brothers real names for the villains, or should I merely heavily imply that it's this setting's version of them? Because, while I know I'm likely protected under parody law to use their names, I plan to publish this someday, and I'm worried if they see it they might try and screw any other works of mine over, like Hearst did with Citizen Kane.

I'd really love to see what you folks on The Giant have to say about those and my earlier questions.

[willpell]

I still haven't found time to actually read this, but it's fricking hilarious from the snippet I just glanced at. Definitely deserves a spot somewhere on my unfortunately centuries-long todo list.

[tbok1992]

Thanks! I'm just posting in this again, because I completed another snipped, a bit of a further ways into the book. It's during a bit of the storyline where the heroes are seeking the source of these nasty animal-plane hybrids animated by a nasty chemical sludge. When I showed this to my writing class, the main criticisms of it could be paraphrased as "Too weird and too geeky". So just keep that in mind:

The blue clarity of noon shone through the day, tinted with the gold of a near autumn sun, and the tramping feet of a fair. A street fair to be exact, the fair of the hippiest street in the hippiest city (For the most part) of the Southwest (California was its own thing), being held uncharacteristically early thanks to the prophecy written in blood on the Moai head on the street.

It wasn’t so much the prophecies written in blood that caused them to do that, as any old idiot can buy a bucket of pig’s blood and write a phony prophecy as most of the public had learned from the New York “Hobopocalypse” scare of ‘72.

Rather, it was the disturbingly accurate predictions of the weather for the next six months beneath it that convinced them it was no fake prophecy. After all, who’d waste perfectly good weather predition on a phony prophecy of coming doom?

Thus, in accordance with the prophecy, they held the event in September. Of course, this didn’t matter to Bill at the moment, though the reasons behind it would far later. What mattered was that there was a madman fusing animals with airplane parts, he was going to attack here, and they needed to stop him. For they were commissioned by the Adventure’s Guild and there was money riding on this.

Of course, this was a lesser bounty, not the big brass ring he was going for, which was to capture the man behind the monsters himself. But, a minor bounty was good too, and it’d be a good way to trail them back to the core of whole shebang.

But now he just had to exhibit vigilance. Constant, deep vigilance. Well, not quite too deep. After all, they weren’t quite trailing some wizard, or a protean shape shifting monster from outer space. The semi-protean things would make their presence known when the time came, so he and the others might as well enjoy the fair while it lasted. But as he walked through the crowded aisles, he always made sure to keep one hand close to his gun at all times. After all, it wouldn’t pay to be kept off guard.

Holy rounds, acid rounds, sticky rounds, flash rounds, he carried the big guns, or rather the serious mother****ing bullets, with him as he followed the crowd. Something told him he’d need them when the beasts came. The fair had the sense of festival about it, but more that of the meandering, relaxed pace of a harvest rather than the bacchanal of a state fair or Mardi Gras. Of course, Bill’s teammate Valerie seemed determined to act like it was a bacchianal, as she flitted about examining about the tables and stores about that lane.

And my weren’t there a lot of them. There were artists upon artists there, selling all sorts of things produced by hand or lathe or welding iron or chainsaw or machine gun or radioactive-sound laser or astral magicks or you get the drill. There was love in every item made and you could feel the craftsmanship and detail that had gone into these products just as surely as the man selling weapons made of amber and petrified wood could feel Bishikama wrapping his arm around his chest and his hand hear his throat.

As swiftly and as easily as a demon through Congress he slipped a bundle of bills into his hand, to pay for the finely crafted pair of sais he currently held in his left foot, and just as swiftly retreated back. Valerie caught a glimpse of Bishi with her wandering eyes as he dove into the shadows once more to search for both the hideous animal/machine hybrids and for great savings on tasteful yet elegant art objects.

Valerie rolled her eyes. The man was a drama king. Though, to be fair, being a robotic, likely bisexual ninja with the body of an anime prettyboy and tragic past tends to lend itself very heavily to that sort of thing. Just as her background of piracy (She called herself a land-pirate nowadays, a term becoming more and more common as of late) lent itself well to a hearty appetite.

She was currently at the stand in-between the stand selling pop art and the stand selling tables made of car wreckage, buying a few of the home-made deep-fat-fried squash-chips they were selling. “Boy, those animal-plane-thingies are taking their sweet-ass time to get here.” She thought to herself, as she zipped about the crowd. She didn’t like it, it made her antsy. And when she was antsy, she ended up doing things that were irresponsible, ridiculous, or sometimes both at once.

Of course, antsiness was in her ally Xill’s heart as well. It always was, but this time the antsiness was deeper and direr, as he sat at a table with a bunch of the pamphlets he’d gotten from the various political organizations shilling their stuff. If he was going to be paranoid darnit, then he’d at least be paranoid with a few leads.

They seemed like the usual claptrap though, with one pamphlet warning of the danger of the Reptillians infiltrating human society. Even he, the paranoid grey alien, found that ludicrous, as he knew how incompetent the Reptilians were. He even had open proof with a blatantly obvious, poorly-Photoshopped ad for what were very obviously mind-control helmets handed out to him by a “man” garbed in clothes that could’ve come off a Party City clearance rack.

His grey hands and beetle-black eyes sifted through them as he chewed a comically large of dark chocolate he’d gotten from The Chocolate Iguana, which he was currently adjacent to. His mood was as dark as the bar he was holding, as there was the deep feeling that something absolutely awful was going to happen.

He’d heard the prophecy of doom, one far greater than the threat of mechanimals they were ferreting out now or those creepy blue people he kept running into at the fair, from the Moai on this street as he came into town. But he had heard nary another peep from it as he walked through the fair, robe and wizard cap being constantly tugged upon by various footfalls. Was it the wrong time of day, were there too many people around, was he doing something wrong, dear God what?!

He watched across the street in nervousness. In addition to the usual local bands whose sounds filled the air with rhythm, the planning committee for the fair had hired a troupe of performers to play card games on motorcycles for the audience. They had to announce their moves via a microphone in their helmets, because few people can hear you talk about summoning Marit Lage or believing in the heart of the cards over the sound of a 700cc engine.

Of course, it’s very hard to watch such a spectacle when a young man walks in front of you and starts chatting for no apparent reason. Which is what was happening to Xill at that very moment.

“Pleased to meet you, I do say pleased to meet you, my good sir, how are you on this fine autumn mor-noon?” The stranger said in the most slick and casual voice imaginable. The words flowed from him like a gusher from Jed Clampett’s well, his face always moving and his body sidling closer to Xill.

“Not good.” Xill said, sidling away from the strange man in his shabby coat-n-hat pair. There was something off about his face, but Xill couldn’t figure it out, the man kept moving as he spoke.

“Well stranger, I’d say you seem pretty glum, yessir, pret-ty glum. What’s gotcha down? Cat died? House burned down? Heard a prophecy of unimaginable doom from a Moai as you were driving past?”

The mercurial man responded at lightning speed, shaggy hair framing his slightly batty, cockeyed expression. Xill could swear he could hear a guitar tune coming from where there was none before around the man, but the man’s jabbering drowned it out.

“How did you…” Xill asked, before being cut off yet again.

“I just know these things, my good sir my good sir, but now I must tell you that the Moai is a very particular creature, yes a very particular creature, she doesn’t just give out her prophecies at any old time. I’d suggest you come back, ohhhhhhh say about after you defeat the Sunny Shane, but before your pirate friend goes out with the ninja.”

“Okay, who in the name of Aliester Crowley are you; why are you creeping on me and what in the dicebag of Gary Gygax is any of this supposed to mean?” Xill, responded, trying and failing to paint bravado over his fear. He reached for his wand.

“I have lots of names” the man said, taking off his hat in a mock salute and revealing his strange golden eyes to Xill “Most of them pseudonyms, a few containing expletives, and none of which I will tell to you, that’s for a later date. I am creeping on you because I find the nervousness from you little fussy people amusing, and because I too want to avoid this doom. And as for that last thing, you’ll understand it when the time comes.”

The man walked away ,strutting that haters-gonna-hate-strut, as a very distinct, mocking guitar tune followed in his path. But then he turned around.

“Oh, and” he said, revealing a mocking grin of sharp, canine teeth. “I’d suggest you move over to the Lindys a ways up the street. It’ll be better for you when the **** starts to go down.” And with that, he pirouetted around and returned to his strut.

Xill blinked. As random encounters go, this was probably about up there with meeting an Otyugh and an ocre jelly in the port-a-john on the scale of weird. He looked down, and saw that his wand was now in his right pocket rather than his left, which was the one it had most definitely been in beforehand. Xill shuddered.

Bill also shuddered, for different reasons. Namely, for the creepy blue people that kept growing more and more frequent as he waded through the crowd. He bit down on his Lindy’s burger as he looked upon the listless, blue-tinged folk shambling about the crowd.

“What is this?” He thought as he glanced about, trying to analyze the nature of the situation. “It might be magic, and they’ve got telltale signs of spiritual bleeding, but it’s got nothin’ to do with the things we’re looking for.”

A group drifted towards him, in the almost eerie shape of a five-pointed star. Their blackened eyes stared in his direction. “Is this the doom Xill was worried about?” He put a hand on his gun.

But then a light appeared across the aisle, and in an act of almost comedic timing streaked over to the azure hordette and hit them. Pink tones came back to their flesh, their eyes turned normal, and they walked back outward in the crowd, faces baffled but unphased. “Apparently no, no it’s not” thought Bill, answering his own question.

Of course, Valerie was asking herself a different question, specifically “Why the hey haven’t I heard of this before?!”

The “this” in question was a flyer, printed with a schedule for the next month of “Mondo Mondays”, being held out to her by a strange man from a stand. A logo for “The Loft Cinema” was printed on the tarp hanging down from the bottom of said stand in bold blaring letters recalling the mom-and-pop cinemas of yore, as it also was on the plentiful “Coming Attractions” pamphlets stacked across the table.

“Oh, you like B-movies?” the man asked. His pale, lanky body looked like nothing more than a Tim Burton drawing come to life, at least the kind back from when Burton was an great director rather than just a brand name.

“Hells yeah!” Valerie said back, recalling the days of her childhood when she’d marathon the schlocky VHS tapes she’d bought (or stole) at port in a night when the rest of the folks on the ship were asleep.

“It only costs three dollars to get in, and we sell cups of candy for a buck,” The man smiled in that same subtle, downplayed way he spoke. Small swarms of confused and sleepy bats fluttered about his head, and the wind swirled atmospherically as he spoke.

“Say no more pal! You couldn’t convince me more by saying there’s free strippers there to! I’ll be there or be square1” She was about to walk off, but there was that, what’s the word, prescence about him that intrigued her, like a hipster Angus Scrimm.

“Say,” she asked good-naturedly, “are you one of those Horror-Hosts I keep hearing about?”

The man just smiled and said “Well, I am the emcee for most of our Grindhousier fair, and I do host our All-Nite Scream-O-Rama on Friday the thirteenth. And I do get nifty supernatural powers from immersing myself in all this morbidry,” he gestured good naturedly at the bats swooping about his head like drunken Ioun stones, “So yeah, I think I can say that I am a Horror Host in both senses of the word, in that I am the emcee of horror films and I am the host for forces of horror.”

Valerie smiled and said “Neat! That’s all I needed to know!” and walked off merrily into the crowd.

Bill was getting some questions of his own answered as he saw a familiar face walking through the crowd. It was Cassidy, a fellow adventurer but not one with his group, walking through the crowd, her powerful, muscled physique covered in layer upon layer of hefty concealing clothing. She was holding what looked like a man with a hideously scarred, almost skeletal face in one arm, tied up and gagged in duct tape, and a uncannily well-made rubber mask in the other.

Bill stepped up to talk. “I’m surprised to see you here,” he said, trying to muster up all the confidence he could fake. He was better at it than Xill, but not quite good enough to be foolproof at it. “What brings you here on this fine day?”

“Business.” Cassidy replied curtly “This guy over here was stealing pieces of people’s souls to make some sort of meat-puppet army. I took care of him.” She looked down at the struggling figure in her arm, or at least she appeared to, since she always had that blindfold covering her eyes.

“So that’s what was with the blue people” Bill thought to himself. He did want to get to know Cassidy better as a person, as a friend, perhaps more, but he wasn’t quite sure how to broach things. Her heart, like her eyes, was veiled from him.

“You did a good job. Saved us the trouble of taking care of it at least,” Bill said, awkwardly trying to crack a joke. Cassidy did not look amused. “You bound him up real well, and you took care of it before it became a problem,” he quickly added, trying to save face “So I- em- must commend a job well done.”

But just as he was speaking, the figure she held started struggling to escape, like a fish on a dock, and she immediately put her other hand around the fiend. But as she did so, bill could swear that he saw something twitch under her jacket, almost as if by instinct.

And he definitely knew what he saw on her face .For, beneath her shaggy black hair, her bandanna had slipped, and he could see one of her eyes. Her blue eyes. Her glowing, Cherenkov-radiation-blue eyes.

After the villain had given up on struggling as she held him like a vice for those few, sudden seconds, there was an awkward pause. Both of them were wondering what Bill had seen for very different reasons. Then, just like that, she ran away. No good byes, just ran. But before Bill could give chase, he heard the most hideous squeal from behind him.

The crowd ran as a hideous amalgam of sludge and steel walked forth, a former javelina from the looks of it. The javelina stepped with an unnatural confidence, driven more by the sickly purple-brown sludge infesting it than by its own suppressed will, and the plane parts shuddered and chuffed with foul energies as the thing plodded forth. And Bill could see more coming from behind it with the same implacable trod.

Valerie was just about to bet she could beat the card gamers on motorcycles at a game while riding blindfolded, when she heard the shots ring. “Welp Not-Yugi, I gotta go!” she said as she broke into a swift dash towards the surrounding creatures…