The Worlds of D.A. Madigan

Looking for the writing of D.A. Madigan?

2009-12-30T19:37:00.000-08:00

Here you go:

ENDGAME When Webster Madison awakens at the far end of the universe in the super powered fantasy body he'd always wished he had, he was thrilled... until he learned that the price for his power would be his participation in a deadly alien game that could cost him not only his new avatar-form, but also his sanity, or even his life.

Now Webster and thirty other transformed roleplaying gamers from Earth find themselves enmeshed as living chess pieces in a contest whose rules they cannot comprehend, and where every move can result in sudden, horrible, grisly death, while the alien overlords responsible for their transformations test their new champions, often to destruction.

Those transformed human champions who survive these trials will be sent on a mysterious mission even more hazardous than the game itself, with an enormous reward waiting at the end for those who finally win through. Or so they are all told... but Webster suspects that in a world where no one is what they appear to be, nothing they have been told is the truth, either... and if he cannot somehow determine actuality from illusion in this dangerous labyrinth of perilous power, neither Webster nor any of his fellow super powered pawns will make it through to the ENDGAME...

For an exciting excerpt from D.A. Madigan's ENDGAME, click here!

EARTHQUEST When Webster Madison, Hired Gun is dumped at the other end of the galaxy from Earth by treacherous aliens, he must fight his way back home across the hostile stars. Hijacking a ship full of slaves, he successfully leads the human cargo in rebellion against the crew and embarks on a career as an interstellar buccaneer and liberator of the oppressed.

Meanwhile, back on Earth, Sam Curtis is using his newly found superpowers to reshape the world in his own twisted image. Should Webster somehow manage to set foot once more on his native planet, he will find himself walking into a deadly trap elaborately planned and set by his deadliest foe...

For an exciting excerpt from EARTHQUEST by D.A. Madigan, click here!

THE FEAR MASTERS In the late 21st Century, the Global Union has mostly united mankind and brought lasting peace to the surface of the Earth... until the dead start rising from their graves to attack the living. Across the globe, panic and terror cause chaos to erupt, civilization to crumble, and humanity itself to totter on the very brink of extinction.

Only three members of the Global Union's top secret Science Sector have any inkling of what is actually going on. Now they must undertake a perilous journey into the airless depths of outer space and beyond the borders of death itself in a last ditch attempt to save humanity from the evil alien Fear Masters that seek our utter, final destruction.

Can two tough as nails secret agents and a beautiful, brilliant super-scientist 'git 'er done'?

For an exciting excerpt from THE FEAR MASTERS by D.A. Madigan, click here!

TIME WATCH When Jim, a thirty something bachelor geek with no life outside the pages of his favorite SF books, comes across a wrist watch that allows him to travel in time, he immediately sets out to fulfill his lifelong dream by traveling through time to assemble the greatest collection of mint condition Silver Age superhero comics in human history.

But in the future, the secret agency known as Time Watch isn't pleased that one of their devices has fallen into the hands of an outsider, and they are ready, willing, able, and eager to do whatever it takes, up to an including kill Jim, to get their watch back.

As Jim flees from his pursuers across time and space, he quickly realizes that he may well be the human race's only hope for avoiding extinction at the hands of the insidious alien intelligence that wants humanity, ALL of humanity, dead... and Jim is now the only living human being who knows the truth.

Armed only with his wits, his time watch, and the aid of a beautiful female personal computer from the 22nd Century, Jim must avoid his pursuers and somehow thwart the genocidal agenda of an ancient, immortal, unearthly collective mind that seeks to bring all human history to a most final termination.

For an exciting excerpt from TIME WATCH by D.A. Madigan, click here!

WARREN'S WORLD It's 1983 in New Sparta, NY, and Warren Dawson is beloved by everyone... his friends, his family, even random strangers on the street. Everybody loves Warren and wants to make him happy. The TVs only show his favorite programs, the radios only play his favorite songs, the movie theaters always have his favorite movies. And, naturally, all the women are beautiful, and all of them love Warren unreservedly and uninhibitedly...

When Warren's best friend Jimmy starts to notice just how strange the reality he and all his friends inhabit truly is, he becomes a threat to the odd, timelost Utopia that Warren has so carefully constructed around them all.

Which sets the stage for a final, epic battle between Warren Dawson and his closest friends. Utilizing powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men, Jimmy and his buddies must go to war with a man who would be God, to settle the final fate of the entire human race... and every living inhabitant of WARREN'S WORLD...

For an exciting excerpt from WARREN'S WORLD by D.A. Madigan, click here!

ZAP FORCE Welcome to Sparta City, circa 1995, where seven super-powered teenagers fight for their lives and their freedom against covert cabals of ancient, evil immortals who yearn to outfit them all with high tech alien mind control slave collars – or low tech earthly bodybags, whichever works.

Yes, here in Sparta City, it’s the neurotically networked 90s as they never really were, a time and a place when centuries old evildoers scheme, conspire, machinate and manipulate, while teenage superheroes leap, flip in midair, hurl lightning bolts, cast illusions, punch, kick, fly at supersonic speeds, kick ass, take names, and generally blow stuff up real good.

Seven stalwart students at Sparta University, inadvertently given unique and insane ultrapowers by an exotic on-campus psychology experiment gone horribly awry, and now avidly sought after as super-powered slaves by every other secret super society on the planet -- this is Zap Force. And this is their story.

For an exciting excerpt from ZAP FORCE: ROYAL BLOOD by D.A. Madigan, click here!

UNIVERSAL MAINTENANCE When Dean Nydecker is asked to become a Universal Agent and help save humanity across the Multiverse, he jumps at the chance and instantly finds himself over his head and out of his depth, inundated in more outrageous action, otherworldly adventure, and inter-dimensional intrigue than he could shake a Tech Level 30 plasma rifle at!

Genetically optimized and mentally inducted with dozens of useful skills, Dean should easily be equal to his first assignment-a seemingly simple mission to recover the ka-pod of a deceased fellow agent.

But nothing is what it seems, either on the seemingly backwards Earth Dean is dispatched to, or within the ranks of Universal Maintenance itself. It will take everything Dean has, all his new abilities combined with his own native wits and courage, to emerge alive from the baffling and lethal labyrinth that is Universal Maintenance style office politics.

For an exciting excerpt from UNIVERSAL MAINTENANCE by D.A. Madigan, click here!

...IN THE EARLY MORNING RAIN

Not a novel, not a dream, not an imaginary story, but instead, the sad sad tale of what happens when the Least Militarily Inclined Geek In The Universe goes briefly insane and signs up for Army Basic Training! See how I, and everyone else in my training company, had to suffer...

For an excerpt from IN THE EARLY MORNING RAIN by D.A. Madigan, click here!

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IN THE EARLY MORNING RAIN (excerpt)

2009-01-08T12:30:00.000-08:00

IN THE EARLY MORNING RAIN:

A Military Memoir By The Worst Infantry Trainee In The History of Mankind

INTRODUCTION:

I can't, right now, remember my arrival at Fort Benning, GA in March of 1985 for Infantry Basic Training. I had been recruited by the Army National Guard unit in Syracuse, NY, although my lack of aptitude for or proficiency at anything vaguely military was phenomenal. And I should have known better. But at that point in my life, I felt at a dead end, unappreciated, and was chafing for some vast, transformational experience that would kickstart my existence and help me move toward some more fulfilling destiny, and I guess I figured what the hell. The military had been a vital, life altering crucible for many before me, and I seemed to be otherwise trapped, so why not?

I'd find out why not.

Still, as I say, I can't remember actually arriving at Benning. I remember bits and pieces of the plane rides down there, of the Atlanta airport, and I remember quite well the first barracks I was put up in, with a bunch of other equally uneasy new recruits, still in our civilian clothes and civilian haircuts, thinking that the way the reception sergeant had chivvied and herded us around that afternoon and evening was kind of brusque and rude, and wondering how much worse it would get. Wondering if this would, indeed, be some major turning point for my life, or just turn out to be a prodigious, incomprehensible mistake.

I believe, the morning of that first full day there, they actually got us up at six a.m. I'm sure that whenever they got us up, other guys in my intake group grumbled about it being too early, and I wasn't thrilled about it, either, but even then, I was pretty sure that actually being allowed to sleep until six a.m. wasn't something we should get used to.

I clearly remember how quickly hierarchies seemed to be set up in the process... not just regarding the actual rank structure, but how fine and distinct the gradations between intake groups immediately became. Guys who were three days or so ahead of us, but who already had their uniforms and equipment and Army haircuts, seemed infinitely more experienced and knowledgeable in the lore of the system than I did. (This was to remain a constant throughout my training, as I would infrequently come into contact with training groups farther along in their cycles than I was, and to me, they always seemed like ancient, weary veterans, sophisticated and informed by a dreadfully won acumen of just how things worked, footsore and world weary travelers of a dreadful road that still lay before me, and that I myself would inevitably have to traverse myself, whether I wanted to or not.)

In fact, it's worth noting at this point that one's 'willingness' to be in the military is really only valid as a moral argument, once one arrives and military indoctrination begins. Sure, there is no draft and we were all volunteers. Yet we were all also, nearly to a man, completely unaware of the realities of what we were getting into when we signed that piece of paper and took that oath. We'd seen a few movies at that point and thought we understood, if only vaguely, the mysteries of drill and discipline. We felt we had a grasp on what would be expected of us, and obviously, we all felt we could handle it; we all knew other guys, whom we considered peers, who had gone through it and survived.

And none of us, not one, had even the slightest real idea what we would be going through, and none of us, not one, would have stayed past the first week of real Basic Training if we'd been allowed to quit.

(When I say 'none of us', I am exercising a deliberate poetry, because in point of fact, there was one fellow in my intake group who knew more or less exactly what he was in for, because he had deserted from the Marines, and for some idiotic reason, had joined the Army under a false name, perhaps thinking he wouldn't get caught and could have a chance to start over. He honestly seemed to like the military, or at least, he seemed to prefer it to whatever else he'd had. It took them a few weeks to process his fingerprints, but eventually, they figured out who he was and took him away. As with anything else in the military, though, it happened inefficiently, and he was under company arrest and assigned to work details and CQ duty for a few weeks before they finally came and got him. On one occasion, when I was doing my laundry, I overheard him talking to another guy, and I remember him saying plaintively "Yeah, I don't know what guys complain about. This isn't that bad." For me, it was plenty bad, and going to get worse, but still, it was a relief to hear someone say that.)

'Volunteering' for the military, for the vast majority, is an act of utter ignorance, encouraged by recruiters with quotas who are very aware that if they tell you what you're really in for (systematic anti-humanistic degradation and humiliation designed to break down most overt, learned behaviors, and virtually all sense of individual identity not connected with your military unit, in order to replace them with the sort of ingrained discipline necessary to turn the product of a civilized society into, not simply a killer, but a trained, focused killer who would, hopefully, kill only on command and in the 'appropriate' context), you won't sign up. The system is equally aware that the vast majority of young sheep herded into it by recruiters want no actual part of the actual military; therefore, they make it extraordinarily difficult to back out of what you will have, almost as a matter of course, foolishly and unwisely decided to embark on, and will quickly come to see as a colossal error in judgement.

And so it was that, played like a violin by a maestro of a recruiter, I found myself in a barracks in Georgia, still in my civilian clothes, bemused by the thought that military food wasn't really as bad as I'd been led to believe and awed by guys a few days further along in their own cycles, who already had the uniforms, the equipment, and the haircuts. Although they knew barely more than I did (the couple I'd seen around the induction barracks were, at that point, waiting a few days to be assigned to a training company) they seemed nearly lordly in their apparently far greater experience.

However, the military moves fast, except when it doesn't move at all, and before the end of that first full day, we'd all been crammed into a bus and taken off for mass inoculations. While being moved around, our induction sergeant tried to instill in us a little basic sense of marching and formation, but without any of the murderous, vicious haranguing, verbal abuse, and quick disciplining through push ups and other humiliating physical tortures that would be used to enforce obedience and punish errors once we arrived at our training platoon. I tried to listen, and when it seemed tolerated, to ask questions, as I was feeling desperately insecure and grasping after any kind of reassurance that additional knowledge might have brought me. However, everyone who might actually know something about what was in store for me was vague, which I found maddening at the time, but looking back now, can see simply came from the fact that I had no vocabulary in common with the people I was asking my questions of. They couldn't tell me what it would be like in any adequate way; you could only really describe it to someone who had been there... or at least, that would have been the problem of the average non-articulate Army soldier. Clearly, I hope to do better.

There was also the fact that, even had anyone described clearly what I was in for, it would only have scared the shit out of me. Much later on, while my company was running through a particular obstacle course on a rather swampy, muddy training range, one of the drill sergeants (not one of my platoon's) who had generally shown himself to be comparatively friendly and accessible, and who apparently chose that moment to resent the fact that many of the recruits in his platoon seemed to perceive him that way, dropped everyone in his eyeshot, in ankle deep mud, for an apparently endless series of pushups. "You people seem to have mistaken me for someone who cares about you," he bellowed out over the chaotic, bobbing, panting array of shoulders, helmets, and asses in mucky camouflage. "I'm not your mama. I don't love you."

That attitude is a typical one, or at least, it was, when I went through Army Infantry Basic Training. It's obviously and honestly not true, of course. Most drill sergeants are relatively decent human beings and, just as in the movies, they do tend to form some sort of bond with their recruits. It's human, and you can't help it. (Some drill sergeants, on the other hand, are genuine sonsofbitches and a few are out and out psychotics, but in my experience, they're in the minority.) However, they're taught to act cold and uncaring, so that when they threaten you with imminent bodily harm, curse at you, tell you you're worthless, and act as if they're about to kill you with their bare hands, you'll believe it, and be motivated by their scorn, and their anger, and their contempt.

Beyond that, being a drill sergeant means being cruel, and for most human beings, cruelty is part of our nature. Compassion, empathy, kindness, consideration... the notion that other people have feelings too that are just as important as ours... these are things that seem to be, for the most part, learned social responses and behaviors. Babies don't feel them, and a child who isn't taught to feel love and gentleness and kindness fairly early often won't learn at all. On the other hand, no one seems to need to teach even the youngest kids to be cruel and mean; that seems to be something that simply comes naturally. I suppose this is all a product of the essential and inescapable solitude and loneliness of the individual human condition, but whatever the case may be, the vast majority of human beings have cruelty and mean spiritedness somewhere within them... and when one is a drill sergeant, one is not merely allowed, but actually encouraged, to be an utterly evil prick. In fact, one is told that in this particular context, being an utterly evil prick is more than simply one's job, but one's duty, and that in fact, by being an utterly evil prick, one is not only serving the abstract concept of one's country and one's military branch, but you're also actually helping the poor schmucks you're being a complete bastard to.

I mean, you can't beat that deal with a stick... you get to be a total asswipe, all day, every day, to a bunch of hapless twits who are utterly dependent on you... and you get to feel proud of yourself for it, too.

The best drill sergeants I knew... Sgt. Dennis, Sgt. Aguirre, Sgt. Lozano... seemed to be able to rise above it, and although they certainly simulated uncaring brutality well, there was an ephemeral line I felt they never crossed, and I never got the feeling that they truly relished and reveled in their power to humiliate and their authority to degrade. Deep down inside them, I felt, they still retained a certain respect for the innate humanity and dignity of their charges. They did what they had to do, and I'm sure they felt justified in doing it; I have no doubt they thought it was their duty, and would someday even save the lives of some of the men they trained.

I'm sure the worst drill sergeants I saw there... Sgt. Robbins, a truly vicious prick in Fourth Platoon named Sgt. Collins, and others whose names I can't remember right now... told themselves the same things. But those guys also undeniably enjoyed their authority and they liked making people crawl in a way that Dennis, Aguirre, Lozano, and most likely Sgt. Laffey, our company's Senior Drill Sergeant, and Captain Lambert, our Company Commander, simply didn't have in them.

Yet enjoy it or not, a drill sergeants job was to establish and keep authority through brutality, an utter lack of empathy, and a constantly maintained façade of ferocious contempt and vitriolic hostility. In some, the façade was thinner than in others, but they all had to do it, and would do it, and did do it... otherwise, they wouldn't have been there.

All of which means that, if any induction sergeant early on in the process had had the capacity to clearly articulate what lay ahead for the group of saps and chumps he was in charge of for a few days of outfitting and initial orientation, he still most likely wouldn't... for the good and simple reason that it's terrifying. Basic Training is at its most fundamental level a season in hell, and a primary element of that hellish experience lies in the fact that the authority figures you are given no choice but to rely upon expend an enormous amount of energy behaving as if they not only don't care about you, but on many occasions, actually despise you and would like nothing better than to see you suffering or dead. And some of them mean it, too.

Much later, Sgt. Aguirre, who was a drill sergeant for Third Platoon, after I'd been through weeks of training, would confide to me in an off guard moment, "There's a reason for everything we do". While I doubt that that's true... or if there is, the reasons are things most drill sergeants don't even know... I'm sure that there is indeed a reason why drill sergeants are trained to behave at all times as if the only emotions they feel for the confused young men suddenly thrust into their care are scorn and disgust. In fact, I'm sure there are many reasons, some of which I've already mentioned. Nonetheless, it's a terrifying thing, to suddenly find yourself in an utterly alien place, surrounded by people you don't know, and where the authority figure you are forced to trust and rely on tells you every day, through explicit words and implicit behavior, that he thinks you're worthless and wishes you were dead.

To me, memory is rarely a linear thing for very long, but generally functions as an associative mosaic. Therefore, since I don't have anything like a journal from this time period, and have mercifully forgotten many details of my Basic Training, this account of my season in hell, undergoing Army Infantry Basic Training as a member of Second Platoon, Company C, Sixth Battalion, First Infantry Training Brigade, at Fort Benning, GA, will be meandering and disjointed, as I move from one topic to another, writing everything interesting I can think of on each. That's how I remember my time there; as a patchwork quilt of vivid images and emotional snapshots, and as a seemingly endless, suffocating nightmare. Hopefully, I'll be able to convey at least the essence of the experience to any readers this account may one day have.

One last note: the Army experience does not so much embrace profanity and vulgarity as it is simply immersed completely in it; words like 'fuck' and 'shit' and 'goddam' and various sexually charged insults like 'cocksucker' and 'motherfucker' are as inescapable in nearly every spoken sentence in Basic Training as they are in any fifth grade public school boy's lavatory. Therefore, I've chosen to include such language in this account. There may be members of my potential audience who will be shocked and even offended by this. If so, don't read any further.

Universal Maintenance (excerpt)

2009-01-08T12:27:00.000-08:00

WORLD 214, SYRACUSE, NEW YORK

Dean glanced at his watch; like everything else about him, it was cheap, shabby, and in need of a good cleaning. Dean had bought it for $30 five years before; he'd had to have the battery changed twice and the crystal replaced once since then. The current crystal was almost too scratched to see through; it was probably getting along towards time for a new one- but Dean could still make out what time it was if he tried, and to Dean, function was far more important than style. Not to mention the fact that the five dollars he'd spend having a new crystal put on could be far better spent at a bookstore or in a movie theater.

It was ten minutes of three in the afternoon. Dean's appointment was at three; as always when he had an appointment, he had left his apartment a good 40 minutes early. Partof this was because Dean had a horror of being late; he was always convinced that, if he showed up even a minute after he had agreed to, people would leave without him, or, at the very least, refuse to see him. The other part was boredom; Dean had put off leaving for as long as he could, but finally, simply couldn't make himself sit around the apartment waiting any more.

Well, he supposed they'd have a waiting room upstairs. Besides, being early was usually something that impressed a prospective employer... or so Dean had read, anyway.

And then, there was Ms. Neumann. She had one of the world's sexiest phone voices; Dean was more than a little curious as to how well her appearance measured up to it. Of course, Dean told himself ruefully, nobody sounds fat over the phone... and he'd had several experiences with telephone dating services to prove it. Although, to be fair, some of the women involved could well have said the same thing about him.

At the thought of Ms. Neumann, Dean shifted uncomfortably. He'd been uncertain of just what kind of dress was expected for this interview, and had been too shy to ask on the phone... after all, weren't real professionals simply supposed to know these things? Dean often felt that he'd missed an essential class in high school in which several Important Things About Adult Life had been taught. Other people always seemed to know these things; Dean felt like an idiot for asking about them. Finally, he'd taken out a decent pair of slacks and an okay blue office shirt. He'd considered a tie, and decided against it; Dean's general rule was, when in doubt, ditch the tie. The same rule applied to dress shoes; Dean's one pair was from his Army dress uniform. They shone like black mirrors, but were godawful uncomfortable. Dean settled for a pair of black sneakers, reasoning that most of his temporary bosses over the past several years had never noticed them, so why should these people?

Dean had worried about the blue shirt; for interviews, he'd heard, one should generally dress as conservatively as possible, which meant, for men, a white shirt. But Dean knew that white shirts made him look even fatter than he was, and the tone of the recruitment letter had been pretty informal... Dean decided to go with the blue, which at least wouldn't accentuate his surplus poundage.

Dean opened the front door and went in.

Ten minutes later, Dean found himself sitting in a wonderfully comfortable chair in a brightly lit conference room with an opened can of Coke II on the gorgeous walnut table in front of him. The table had - five, six, seven - eight chairs around it, four on either side, all of them as sumptious and comfortable in appearance as Dean's. He'd been met as soon as he opened the door into Suite 600 by a startlingly attractive woman, faintly Oriental in appearance, who'd pleasantly introduced herself as Celeste Neumann, Regional Field Recruiter. She'd welcomed him by name, shaken his hand warmly, and then taken his arm lightly and guided him through the front office and into this room, where she'd told him to please be comfortable; Martin Zwingli would be with him immediately. Then she'd asked him if he'd like anything to drink, and brought him the can of Coke II within seconds of his asking for it. Dean's head was whirling with new images.

Although Celeste had moved him very quickly (albeit with no outward signs of haste) through the front office, Dean had still caught a glimpse of a desk that had been loaded down with state of the art computer equipment. He wasn't sure, but he thought he'd spotted a bulky cubical device in one corner that looked for all the world like a sophisticated photocopier with a fax attachment on the top. Celeste's perfume had been delightfully distracting. Dean couldn't help noticing, as she walked beside him, the way her shining reddish-black hair had been piled up on top of her head. Dean idly wondered just how long it would fall on her when let down, and wistfully wished he could find out.

A door across the room - not the one Dean had been ushered in by - opened, and a man whom Dean immediately assumed must be Martin Zwingli came through it. His hands were empty, which Dean found surprising, but then realized he'd probably have Celeste bring in anything he needed - although, on the other hand, Dean had somehow got the distinct impression that Celeste was a great deal more than a simple receptionist-secretary.

The man came around the table and extended his hand. "Martin Zwingli, Executive Field Recruiter for Universal Maintenance. I'm very pleased you could come, Mr. Nydecker."

Dean clumsily stood up, put the Coke can down, and shook hands. Zwingli's grip was very firm, and his hands were completely dry, as opposed to Dean's, which were coated with nervous sweat and condensation from the cold soda can. "Dean Nydecker," he stammered. "It wasn't - I mean, it was no problem to come. I mean..."

Martin let go of his hand and walked around to the other side of the table. "Yes, Mr. Nydecker," he said, pulling out a chair and sitting down, "we understand you are currently...ah... between employment opportunities, as it were. Although, in all honesty, I'd like to think that we'd still be having this meeting even if you currently had regular employment." Zwingli phrased himself in a way that made Dean expect a fruity British accent, but his speech was actually utterly uninflected.

"Well..." Dean wasn't sure what to say, so instead he busied himself sitting back down, pulling his chair up to the table, picking up the Coke can again, and then nervously replacing it on the table.

"Your letter was - interesting. I mean, sure, I'd have probably..." He trailed off uncertainly.

Zwingli looked at Dean with bright appraisal over the table. Dean, not having anything else to do, took another sip from the Coke can and looked back at him over it.

Zwingli is a short man; shorter than Dean, who at five foot ten inches is exactly average height for his time and culture. Zwingli is very dark, dark enough to be Hispanic, although his other features do not suggest this. His hair is a deep brown, worn straight with a part on the left in a very short, almost military cut. His features are sharp; a pointed nose and jutting cheekbones give him a very alert, almost hawklike air. His eyes are a light, metallic blue, and his ears are very flat to his head, so much so that even his short hair cuts off any view of them when his face is looked at directly from the front. His chin is outthrust and comes to a blunt point. For that meeting, he was wearing a business suit of some light blue shiny material. There was something odd about the cut of it, but Dean had never paid much attention to men's fashions. Something about the lapels, maybe...

For his part, Zwingli saw a male Caucasian with very bland, nondescript facial features. Dean at that time was wearing a full beard; he'd put on so much weight over the past two years that his face had gotten unpleasantly chubby, and the beard helped disguise that. Dean was then almost 60 pounds over his best weight, and had pretty much given up on trying to lose any of it... Dean hated exercise, and dieting would have meant living without virtually every food Dean found to be worth eating, especially pepperoni pizza. Dean had brown hair of an indeterminate shade; his beard was slightly darker, with flecks of red in it. Dean's normal posture, when he was alone, was a sprawled, comfortable bonelessness; at that meeting, however, he had assumed the stance more normal to him at that time when he knew he was being observed, a hunched, slopeshouldered, much more protective position.

Finally, Dean replaced the soda can on the polished tabletop and smiled nervously. "So," he said, "I guess from your letter that you guys want me to smuggle drugs?"

Zwingli stared at Dean for a moment. His face was expressionless, but Dean had the feeling he was dumbfounded.

After a few seconds, Dean said, "That was a joke."

Martin looked visibly relieved. "Ah," he said. "Yes. Celeste told me you have quite a sense of humor." He shook his head slightly. "I'm afraid... well, I thought that perhaps I might have actually, in some way, implied, in my letter..."

"Oh, no," Dean said, feeling much better for having managed to somehow take the initiative in the conversation. "No, there wasn't anything like that. Although, I have to say, I'm utterly bewildered as to exactly what you want... I mean, what it is you people do here."

"Well!" Martin exclaimed, smiling broadly. Dean could tell he was relieved to be back on familiar ground. No sense of humor at all, Dean reflected sadly. "Well, yes, Mr. Nydecker."

"Please," Dean said, feeling somewhat more sure of himself, "call me Dean."

"Ah!" Martin looked delighted. "And you must call me Martin. Now, then. As to what Universal Maintenance does. Well. That will take some explaining."

Here comes the sales pitch, Dean thought ruefully to himself.

"It would be best," Martin said, "to show you, rather than tell you." He raised his voice slightly, and spoke a phrase Dean didn't understand. The lights in the room immediately dimmed; a second later, a softly glowing object appeared, floating above the center of the table.

Dean started back in his chair and looked around. He couldn't see any sort of projecting apparatus; nor, for that matter, were there any apertures in the walls for an image to be projected from. And, in any case, there was no screen - the image, object, whatever, was just hovering there, giving off a soft, silvery luminescence.

"It's a three dimensional image, Dean," Martin said, rather patronizingly. "We use them as a visual aid."

Dean looked at him. "I've never seen anything like it before," he replied. "What do you use, lasers?"

Martin smiled, again, very patronizingly. "It's a technology I'm sure you're not acquainted with. It... well, think of it as a sort of projected computer animation."

Dean wasn't at all sure he liked the tone in Zwingli's voice, but what the hell; this was getting interesting. He looked at the image. It appeared to be a cluster of silvery, glowing spheres, of varying sizes, although none were more than, say, four times larger than anyother. They looked for all the world like a huge bunch of grapes, although there seemed to be nothing connecting them... no, that wasn't quite true. When Dean looked closely, he could see that the spheres all touched each other slightly; their outer hemispheres intersected. There were an uncountable number of spheres in the cluster.

Martin solemnly intoned, "There are 12,843 Earths. And none of them are real."

Dean dragged his eyes away from the image and stared at Martin across the table. "What the hell are you talking about?"

Martin looked taken aback. "It's a standard opening to my orientation lecture. It - I mean, I had a very good copywriter... It's always been very effective. Most people find it dramatic and intriguing."

Dean snorted expressively. "It sounds silly. Twelve thousand, eight hundred and something Earths, and none of them are real? And then you tell me you're Napoleon, right?"

Martin half closed his eyes. "Napoleon..." he murmured. His eyes opened. "Oh, yes... a famous historical military figure, commonly associated with psychological disfunctions having to do with personal identity." He paused, then looked angry as the meaning of Dean's remark sank in. "No, of course not. I'm not even from this Earth. Why would I think I'm Napoleon?"

Dean's face went blank. Now, if he were a sensible person, this would be the point where he excused himself and left. Quickly. Shouting "Help! Loons! Dangerous babbling loons! Help!" as soon as he was outside.

But he'd never claimed to be all that sensible.

"So," he said, trying to sound casual, "which Earth are you from, Martin?"

This was definitely getting interesting...

Martin, with an obvious effort, regained his composure. He spoke another phrase Dean couldn't understand. One of the spheres in the image began to glow a soft metallic pink.

"I," Martin said stiffly, "am from that Earth." He spoke another nonsense phrase. Halfway across the floating cluster, another, rather smaller, sphere began to glow, this time a crisp powder blue. "That," he said, somewhat more calmly, "is the Earth we are on now - your native world. Which we designate as World 214."

Dean nodded, his mouth puckered into an understanding moue. "Mmmmm. Very nice." This guy was definitely out there in the Twilight Zone somewhere, but it was certainly an interesting psychosis. And the special effects were great. "What number is your world, Martin?"

"My native world's number is 8437," Martin replied, sitting back and making a visible effort to relax. "Not that it matters, for purposes of this discussion. Now..."

Dean interrupted. "Your world is bigger than mine," he pointed out, gesturing with a cocked index finger and thumb in a way reminiscent of a child playing gunslinger. "Is that why it has a higher number? And what does the size mean... is your Earth really, actually, larger than my Earth?"

Martin looked bewildered. "Well, the relative numbers are assigned sequentially, by the - mechanisms - that hold everything in... well... in sequence. As for the sizes - our Earths are the same size; in fact, they're geographically very similar, although in social and cultural detail, they are quite different. Nonetheless, your universe is considerably smaller than mine."

At that, Dean looked impressed. "No kidding? What, this universe has only sixty bazillion galaxies, and yours has, say, seventy bazillion?"

Martin looked rather annoyed. "Your universe," he said, somewhat snidely, "doesn't have ANY galaxies. Your universe stops about half a light year outside the orbit of theplanet you people call Pluto. My universe, as you say, contains many, many galaxies;" - Dean could almost see Martin shuddering as he consciously refrained from repeating the word 'bazillions' - "yours contains nothing but this small solar system. The remainder of the heavens that you people see are just artificially projected images."

It would have been a staggering concept, if Dean hadn't already come across it in Behind The Walls of Terra. Still, he thought about it for a long moment. "Okay. What did you mean when you said that none of these universes is real?"

Martin smiled again, obviously happy to have returned to his previous theme. "Very well. Um... yes. There was only one natural universe, one primal, quantum, timeline. Singular and grand, one unified focus of ordered, structured reality cut through the chaos of probability and uncertainty like -"

A searchlight slicing through the fog, Dean mentally finished.

" - a beam of coherent photons, slicing through a foggy night," Martin exclaimed. "Untold epochs ago... millions, perhaps billions of years ago - a race arose to sentience in this primal, quantum, singular timeline. They were the first. They were the finest. They were alone, and unafraid, and undaunted by the huge, empty continuum that swept off to infinity around them. They mastered the laws of their universe to a degree that you, and even I, would find incomprehensible. They -" Martin was rolling his eyes now, and gesturing grandly with his hands, and Dean was having a hard time controlling his laughter. But at that, he had to interrupt.

"'You, and even I?'"

Martin ignored him. "They learned the secret of instantaneous travel, and explored the entire length and breadth of their universe."

Dean sighed and said, "If their universe swept off to infinity all around them, how could they explore the entire length and breadth of it? I mean, it would just keep going..."

Dean wasn't sure, but he suspected Martin's face was getting a bit darker. "Never mind," Martin said in a dangerously low tone. "They just did. They explored the whole universe, and found no other sentient life forms."

Dean frowned melodramatically and held up one hand, forefinger extended, as if spearing one particular aspect of Martin's words. Martin sighed and gestured him to speak.

"So, were these Prime Timer guys -"

Martin gasped in apparent horror. "They are known," he intoned, rather stuffily, Dean thought, "as the Primal Ones."

"I'll just bet they are," Dean replied briskly. "So, these Prime Timers - were they, like, lizard guys, or floating ameoba people, or disembodied energy critters, or horrible slimy multitentacled abominations from the outer dark, or what?"

Martin closed his eyes and massaged his scalp ever so gently. "They were," he said,quietly, "humans. Like us."

Dean's eyes widened. "Okay, okay, I know what comes next."

Martin opened his eyes and looked at Dean, a vaguely scornful smile playing at thecorners of his lips. "Oh, really?"

"Yes, really," Dean said. "They had this enormous war. It was so huge, and they were so incredibly powerful, that they laid their entire universe to waste."

Martin looked dumbfounded. His hand was still in his hair, but he seemed to be unaware of it.

"Then," Dean went on, "they had to find somewhere else to live. Now, there were no other universes to escape to, but these Prime Timers were pretty much gods, and could do whatever they wanted, so they created new universes. Little ones. In bubbles." Dean gestured to the silvery cluster of spheres hanging above the table. "Probably some kind of quantum cloning deal. Then they all moved into these universes. Probably, each one of them made one for himself, and ruled it like a God."

Martin looked beyond dumbfounded, he looked devastated. His hand sank to the tabletop unnoticed. "How... how do you know all this?"

"And," Dean went on, a trifle smugly, "all of our legends and myths about gods doing battle and destroying the world and recreating it can be traced back to this time period."

Martin looked as if he were going to cry. Dean took pity on him. "Obviously," he said, in a consoling tone, "they don't have science fiction on your World."

"Science fiction?" Martin repeated.

"Sure," Dean said. "Hell, that's an old plot. Zelazney uses it a lot. Philip Jose Farmer does too."

ZAP FORCE (excerpt)

2009-01-08T12:21:00.000-08:00

Graffiti found spraypainted on the side of Sparta University’s Dawne Hall, March 11, 1994:

Tesla Girl Tesla Girl
I’m in love with Tesla Girl

Bartholomew 'Barley' Keppler sat stiffly in front of one of the comm-console's many videoscreens. He couldn't really sit any other way; paralyzed from the neck down, his torso was kept upright in his motorized wheelchair by a rigid body brace that looked more like a medieval torture cage than a piece of modern medical apparatus. His head was cocked off to one side and his uncombed, greasy hair fell in lank waves to his left shoulder. The thick, black rimmed glasses perched precariously on his nose distorted his bright blue eyes and nearly hid the glint of manic intelligence in them.

The videoscreen in front of him was alive with oddly angular Japanese animation. As he watched, one of the characters pointed stiffly and shouted to another, "Blast him, Ray! Blast him with power!!" Knowing it would annoy Albert, Barley loudly echoed the line -- not in his natural voice, which he rarely used, but telepathically.

"BLAST HIM, RAY!" he screeched mentally (taking care not to let either of the girls receive him; they were at that moment fighting Wargs, and he didn't want to distract them), "BLAST HIM WITH POWER!"

Albert looked over at him impassively. "Barley, are you keeping track of Robin and Claire?"

"Of course, O Fearless Leader," Barley projected in reply, nodding his head jerkily. "They're... let's see... ooooh, Claire's scared; the Wargs both dodged and one's right on top... nope, Robin got it... oh, now Claire's really mad... She's gonna cook it... yow, Albert, remind me never to get her that pissed off at me."

Albert rose to his feet, rested his hands on the table, then sank back down into his chair again. "Should I go out there? Some of the vehicles in the hangar might get me there in time -- "

A sudden loud crash from the videoscreen brought Barley's head snapping around again. The villain had dodged, letting Blaster-Master's eyebeam detonate an enormous gasoline tank. "Man oh man," Barley breathed. "How come we never fight bad guys in the middle of a field of oil tanks?"

"Something to do with our sanity, I think," Albert replied coolly. "Barley, are the girls --"

Barley bit down hard on the mouthpiece he used to control his wheelchair and it spun rapidly in a circle; one of his gestures of exasperation. "They're hunky-dory, Boss! All the Wargs are dead dead dead! Uh..." He stopped and concentrated a moment. His facial expression became slack, then he grimaced. In a much quieter mental tone, he continued, "Shit, boss. I can't pick up Jeremy at all any more."

Albert closed his eyes. "I thought you said you lost contact with him a few minutes ago due to this psionic interference."

"The interference made it impossible for me to maintain contact with more than one person in the area at a time," Barley agreed. "I gotta concentrate real hard just to do that much. But I could still get Jeremy if I tried. I switched to Claire a few minutes ago to keep track of them and now I can't find Jeremy anywhere."

Albert's voice became very soft. "So he's dead?"

Barley spun his wheelchair around frantically, three full revolutions. "No way! No way! No way! He's gotta be just 'ported outta my range! Shitfire, Albert, the Baron ain't gonna kill Jeremy -- he wants us all alive!"

Albert nodded; that much, at least, was true. Baron Samedi, like every other so called Monarch, very much wanted the eight of them intact and functional -- as newly created superhumans, they were considered desirable acquisitions by all the elder paranormal clans - Royal Houses, as they called themselves - in existence. The Samedis had actually had them all, once; Barley and Rusty, working together, had fried the high tech psionic interface that was sapping their wills and they'd made their escape, wreaking complete havoc on the Samedi's headquarters complex in the process. Now, apparently, the Samedis were making a move again, months sooner than Rusty's most pessimistic predictions. Albert sat there, and tried very hard to think clearly and coherently. After a few seconds, he said tiredly, "Call everyone in. We need to meet and besides, I want all of us in one place for the time being."

Albert Schmidt did not look even remotely Teutonic; if anything, he looked Mediterranean -- medium height, stocky build, straight black, shiny hair that looked as if someone had painted it on his round-domed cranium... he'd once written in his journal that if he flunked out of college, he could always go to Hollywood and find work playing Mussolini in World War II movies. He had a pronounced widow's peak, his nose was broad and peasantish, his eyes narrow and naturally dark-ringed. His face fell of its own accord into a worried expression, and although he deliberately stayed clean shaven to combat it, he knew he looked years older than his actual age of 20. He thought it was a rotten break; he would have had no problem buying beer, but since he didn't drink at all, that was no benefit to him.

His habitual stillness also made him seem much older than his true age; unlike most people, he had virtually no body language, and almost never made extraneous gestures. It was not an affected trait but a completely natural one, and he would have given it up if he could have, since he'd been made aware on several occasions that it bothered most people deeply. If he kept his eyes closed for any length of time while others were in the room, they usually had an overwhelming temptation to check him for a pulse.

Right now he and Barley were in the large chamber they all thought of as the main meeting room, mostly because it was right down the hall from the elevator (two doors down on the left, right past the kitchen), had a big shiny mahagony table in it (forty feet long and twelve feet wide; most of them tended to cluster at the far end, but there was room to spread out when tensions were high), was just across from the big gymnasium (weights, parallel bars, uneven bars, overhead horizontal ladder, gymnast's horse, swimming pool, rings, climbing ropes, punching bags, pegboards, and a lot of other things no one knew the names of), contained a large communications console (phones, viewphones -- although whenever they got a call on one of them it was bad news, since only Royals had that technology -- radio, TV -- with over 1000 channels supplied by a hidden satellite dish -- computer with fax-modem & scanner, separate fax machine, and many many more communications devices that none of them but Rusty even pretended to understand), and in the corner of the room nearest the connecting door into the kitchen (containing a huge walk in freezer stocked with enough food to feed an army for a century, and enough junk food to kill that same army three times over), there was a den-like grouping of low-slung, black-leather-and-chrome Bauhaus style furniture, arranged around an 14'x20' wall screen TV with built in tape deck, CD player, and VCR. Cementing the room's enduring popularity was walnut paneling (that slid aside in strategic areas to reveal more computer stations, from which any area of the complex, and many areas of the campus, could be circumspectly monitored), a luxuriously thick carpet (which, amazingly enough, seemed to conceal no secrets, other than the mysterious property that kept it perpetually clean), and 14 wonderfully decadent chrome and leather swivel chairs lining each side of the long central table. (The chairs were mounted on apparently frictionless casters and could be easily rolled over to the various hidden monitor stations when need arose.) The lighting came from muted ceiling panels, the ceiling itself was a spacious 12 feet in height, and although Albert secretly felt the room was a very sterile one that would be vastly improved by a few potted plants and a working fireplace, nonetheless, it seemed that the chamber's very lack of individual stylizing made it generally agreeable to all. Barley had declared that the room was exactly what every superhero team needed, and gone on to lament that the table didn't have a big, cartoon lightning bolt running down the center of it -- and despite those comments (most of the other members found Barley's constant comic book references annoying; Robin and Jason heaped open and virulent derision on them), the room had still become, by common unspoken consent, their 'main' gathering place.

When they gathered at all, which wasn’t very often… in fact, it was absolutely no more often than absolutely necessary. Which everyone thought had been happening far too often, lately…

Albert had rushed down here from his corner suite on the 7th floor of Dawne Hall ten minutes before, when Barley had first apprised him that Jeremy was being stalked out at Kirby Field House. He'd been issuing orders on the way to the elevator, after listening to Barley's quick reports on the locations of all the other Zs ("Sandy's in a bar on Lee Street; lemme see... no, Boss, we don't wanna interrupt her right this second... Claire's in the Doll House talking on the phone to her mother in Quebec... Robin's sittin' through one of Druger's boring Biology lectures in the HBC auditorium...") and of course, with Jason gone and Jeremy the one being ambushed, available resources had pretty much been limited to Robin and Claire. He could have had Robin swing over to Dawne Hall to pick him up, too, but it would have cost extra time -- Claire's sorority house (which all of them except Claire called the Doll House) was pretty much in a straight line between Robin's class and Kirby Field House, while Dawne Hall was in the opposite direction. Albert ached to be out there in the field, but the extra couple of minutes might make an enormous difference to Jeremy. So he'd made the tough decision, sent Robin to pick up Claire, and hurried down here, where he could monitor everything and maybe, in an emergency, jump in one of the dozen or so futuristic vehicles they'd found in the complex (he'd puzzled out the controls -- he devoutly hoped -- on four of them) and speed out there to help.

As it had turned out, his presence wouldn't have made much of a difference, as the girls had apparently handled the three Wargs by themselves. On the other hand, having Robin come get him, too, apparently wouldn't have hurt any, since Jeremy had almost certainly already been missing by the time they arrived. Overall, it seemed he'd made as good a call as possible; the Samedis had just out-maneuvered him.

God damn it, this time he was going to assign everyone a partner whether they liked it or not -- if Jeremy had had backup with him, he might not have been missing now.

Or the team might be down two members instead of one, he thought glumly to himself. Well, three instead of two, since you had to count Jason. But you couldn't think that way; the team was all they had between them and capture by any one of a dozen Royal Houses. It had been a serious mistake allowing people to move around individually, regardless of their virulently stated personal preferences. He couldn't afford to make any more mistakes like that, and the others couldn't afford to continue indulging their own stupid little whims, either.

On the communications console a red light began flashing on and off beneath one of the viewscreens. Barley was sitting right next to it, but the slackness of his features and the unfocused way his eyes were staring behind his thick, black rimmed glasses told Albert that he was busy monitoring one of the others (or, for all Albert knew, all of the others simultaneously). With no expression on his face, Albert pushed off from the table, letting his chair roll through the deep pile of the carpet and thud to a halt in front of the console. The lens cover was down on the videophone's camera pickup; since Albert wasn't in costume, he left it down. Baron Samedi probably knew what they all looked like without masks, but other Royals didn't, and anyway, it never hurt to be cautious.

"Zap Force, Gallant speaking," Albert said, and although he felt more than a little ridiculous using Barley's code names for the group and himself, he had to admit it sounded at least a little more professional than "Hi, this is Albert".

"My dear chap," came a deep, fulsome voice out of the console's speakers. Albert immediately recognized the reverbating baritone with the upper crust British accent just slightly spiced with the rhythms of Jamaica. The image on the screen was that of a shaven-headed, moon faced black man of very African features, with a broad, blindingly white smile that exaggerated the expression of malevolent good cheer written large on his handsome and expressive face. An ivory stud earring, artfully carved into the shape of a skull, gleamed in one earlobe.

"Baron Samedi," Albert said calmly. "I hope you're well?" Actually, Albert would not have been at all displeased to be told that the Baron had contracted rectal cancer, but he'd been raised to be polite, and he'd long since discovered that most Royalty valued courtesy highly -- the emptier, more hypocritical, and more elegantly worded it was, the better.

"Positively smashing, old tick," the Baron said, his eyes glittering coldly above his expansive smirk. "And I trust you and all the other dear little Zap Forcers are in the pink of health? Heh, heh."

"As far as I know," Albert said cautiously. "I do seem to be having some trouble keeping track of all of us lately... although you probably don't know anything about that."

The Baron laughed, a rolling crescendo of mirth that reminded Albert of waves rumbling into a particularly stony beach. "Ah, you tickle me as always, old horse." 'Horse' actually sounded like 'hawss' in the Baron's mouth; once again, Albert found himself wondering just how much of the Baron's absurd speech patterns were a deliberate sham -- did he actually talk that way in private? But he was going on... "Yas, I'm afraid I must admit to some culpability in your regrettable misplacement of that dapper young African-American... whatever do you call him? Bulwark? Buttress? Fortress? Figurehead? Heh, heh."

"Rampart," Albert replied levelly. "But I'm pretty sure you remember anyway... you've probably got it stenciled on his collar already."

The Baron rolled his eyes in mock horror. "My dear Gallant, what an appalling boor you must think me. I assure you, I would never dream of preparing your collars without consulting you first as to their appearance and general style." His face became suffused with sinister good humor once more. "After all, old stick, you will be wearing them for a considerable period. Heh heh."

Since the start of the call one of the other screens had been filled with constantly changing lines of textual gibberish; now, abruptly, it blanked. Just as abruptly, three sentences silently printed themselves across it: GOT THE PENDAJO, BOSS. HE'S JACKED INTO A FIBER OPTICS LINE THAT RUNS UNDER BEN FRANKLIN PLAZA IN PHILADELPHIA. HIS OWN CABLE IS ABOUT 300 YARDS LONG AND HIS SIGNAL IS ACTUALLY ORIGINATING FROM ABOUT 200 FEET DOWN AND 1750 YARDS NORTHWEST OF THERE.

Albert didn't allow his expression to vary, but below the range of the video pickup, he quickly typed a question. To the Baron, he said, "So, you have Jeremy. Do you want us to ransom him? We could probably come up with some good stuff to trade..."

The Baron's face became grave. "Don't speak to me like a fool, young man. I'm well aware that your obnoxious little disembodied ghost of an engineer -- Mainframe, yes? -- has already traced where this call is coming from. Do you think he'd ever have come close to being successful if it were not my explicit will? Heh, heh."

Albert nodded. "Gotcha. My apologies. So, you grab Jeremy, then call me up to gloat, knowing I'll trace the call, and fairly soon, we come charging in like the 8th Cavalry and bang, you've got everybody. That's the plan?"

The Baron broke once more into a broad smile. "Of course! The seven of you, charging gloriously to the rescue, banners flying, trumpets all a-tootle... what a splendid spectacle you'll make; I really just can't wait to see it. Shall we say, tomorrow afternoon, two-ish? I really do want to spruce the place up a bit... beat the rugs, hose down the slaves... or is it the other way 'round?... have the chefs put together a special banquet; you know, that sort of thing. And I'm sure you and your little friends have your own preparations to make, as well..."

Albert shook his head slightly. "We sincerely appreciate the invitation, Baron, but we really couldn't impose. However, if we do happen to be in the neighborhood in the near future, we'll be sure to drop by."

The Baron looked aggrieved. "Well, dear boy, if you insist on a surprise visit... still, of course, you're always welcome." His voice dropped to a stage whisper. "But if you don't mind, could you use the front door this time? I'll leave it open. Those gaping holes you children left in the walls after your last visit were the very devil to repair."

Albert reached for the disconnect switch. "Give my regards to the Baroness," he said.

"And hers to you," Baron Samedi replied smoothly. "Until later, then?"

Albert nodded and cut the connection.He glanced at the screen showing Rusty's prior communication regarding the origin of the Baron's call. Underneath it, his own question blinked -- IS THE BARON LYING ABOUT ANYTHING?

And beneath that, Rusty's reply: IF HE IS, HE'S GOOD ENOUGH TO FOOL THE VOICE STRESS MONITORS, BOSS.

So, the Samedis had Jeremy, which was bad. And since the Baron had referred to the seven of them coming to the rescue, and his inflection hadn't shown the slightest variance, they didn't have Jason... which wasn't really good, since it would have been nice to know exactly where Jason was right now, and if it had turned out that the Samedis had him, it would mean he was almost certainly still alive. Moreover, if Jason and Jeremy were being held in the same place, they could neatly combine two rescues in one trip.

Put that off to the side, now. Jeremy was the current problem; the Samedis had him, Zap Force had to get him back... and fairly quickly, before those two ancient schemers had a chance to use their deadly combination of psionics and alien technology to completely brainwash him.

Oh, yes, and in addition to all of that, it would be nice if they could all survive the attempt, too.

"Definitely a 'three pipe problem', Fearless Leader," Barley suddenly chimed in. "Too bad you don't smoke, huh?"

WARREN'S WORLD (excerpt)

2009-01-06T17:11:00.000-08:00

SEPTEMBER 23, 1983 - WARREN'S HOUSE, 11:35 P.M.

A humanoid creature, 12 feet tall, composed of some dense looking, bluish black, rubbery substance, stalked down the hall towards the group of superhuman intruders. Its jewel-like eyes flashed red in its otherwise featureless, clearly artificial visage. Huge three fingered fists clenched at the end of sculpted, massive, dark and gleaming arms. The polished linoleum of the hallway beneath the figure's dense, thudding feet seemed to tremble as it approached.

Dave's character, Captain Jack Thunder, stared in wonder at the awful approaching apparition.

(Dave himself looked in mild shock across the table at Warren, who was D.M.ing tonight.)

"What the fuck is that?" Captain Thunder cried out.
Night Vision, the black clad man in the battle harness festooned with futuristic gimmicks and weapons, dropped the unconscious ACE (Augmented Cybernetic Elite) agent whose body he'd been searching and yanked his Mark VII pulser rifle off his back.

("Okay, Warren, I drop the creep I'm searching and draw my rifle again. If that thing comes within twenty feet of us, I'm gonna blast it," snarled Rick, Night Vision's long time player.)

("Roll a d20 and don't fumble," Warren said back. Rick obligingly rolled, and not getting a 1, advised Warren "No problem.")

"This isn't fair!" Blue Blazer said, sounding rather put upon, as her player Leslie fixed Warren with an affronted glare from the armchair she was sitting in over by his smaller bookshelf. "We just had a big fight! We won!"

(Leslie's fingers slipped and she dropped the old, battered paperback copy of THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE she'd been skimming on to the pinewood floorboards with a thump. "Shit, I'm sorry, Warren," she said, suddenly contrite, knowing how mad Warren could get when someone mistreated one of his books.)

Purple Haze gestured and a square of purple mist seemed to condense out of the air around the rapidly stalking Whatever It Was, congealing into a solid rectangle of purple substance.

("I encase him in a purple rectangle, Warren," Jimmy said, picking up percentile dice and rolling them. "Uh... 76?"

"Fine," Warren said idly, "the rectangle forms, no problem." Behind his notebook, he rolled a set of his own dice.)

Barely breaking step, the midnight blue construct flexed its arms and legs, sending shards of shattered purple material flying everywhere.

"Shit!" Purple Haze said. "I'm runnin'!"

("Warren, where's the nearest exit sign in the opposite direction from that fucking thing?" Jimmy demanded.

Warren rolled dice again behind his notebook. "Sorry, Jimmy," he said, after a second, "the only exit sign you see is at the end of the hall, behind the critter.")

Mindstar closed her electric blue eyes and furrowed her brow in concentration.

("Warren," Ellie said earnestly, "I try to read its mind and see if it has any thoughts I can influence."

Dave groaned. "Just use your telekinesis, Ellie. It's a robot. It's not going to have thoughts."

"Let her run her own character," Warren advised. "Ellie, roll percentile and add it to your Telepathy rating."

"Um," Ellie said, looking at her dice. "Um... percentiles are the which ones again..."

"D10s or D20s," Jimmy said. "You need two different colors, one for the tens, the other for the ones..."

Jimmy reached forward and nudged a red d10 and a white d20 out of Ellie's pile of mostly borrowed dice. "These two," he said. "Call red high."

"Oh, okay, I remember now," Ellie said. She picked up both dice and rolled them. "92! And my Telepathy rating is a 34, so..."

Warren rolled dice behind his notebook, then looked up. "Sorry, Ellie... you detect no thoughts at all in the approaching creature."

Dave sighed. "Told you."

Ellie looked disappointed. "Okay, but now I can still use my Telekinesis, right...?"

"Write down your Energy Point expenditure for the Telepathy you used," Warren reminded her dryly. "You have to keep track of your Energy Points."

"That's why I said to use your Telekinesis FIRST," Dave expostulated. "Now you don't have as much energy to... oh, never mind." He turned to Rick. "Just shoot the fucking thing, Rick.")

"Shoot it," Captain Thunder snapped out gravely to Night Vision.

Obligingly, the black clad cyber-knight brought his energy weapon up to his shoulder, sighted, and fired.

("I'm giving it 4 dice of Energy Blast, Warren, just to see how it likes that, aiming for the head," Rick said.

"Roll percentile and add it to your Weapon Attack rating," Warren said.

Rick rolled, did some mental math, and said "Unless its damn head has a target rating higher than a hundred, I hit it by a lot.")

A ruby red beam of seemingly solid light momentarily connected the barrel of Night Vision's futuristic rifle with the near-featureless 'face' of the artificial being. The beam simply seemed to be absorbed into the dark substance of the creature's head without effect.

("Roll your damage," Warren said crisply.

Rick rolled 4 d10s and added them up. "23 points," he said. "Remember, that's an enhanced particle beam. If it has any Special Energy Defenses, my beam ignores them."

Warren turned a couple of pages in his notebook. After a few seconds, he said, "Sorry, Rick... the beam seems to absorbed into its face without any noticeable effect. It's still coming."

"Well THAT sucks," Rick said.)

"Blue Blazer, Night Vision," Captain Thunder rapped out crisply, "pour every erg of energy you can into it. I've got an idea."

("Les, Rick, hit it with everything you've got, I want to try something, Warren," Dave said, eyes gleaming, "where's the closest fire extinguisher?"

Warren sighed. Another brilliant Dave idea. "Roll... um... a d30, you want less than your luck," Warren said.

"A d THIRTY?" Dave exclaimed, sounding put upon, knowing full well his character's Luck was only 14, and he'd have less than a 50% chance of succeeding in that roll. "Come on, a d30 is ridiculous! This is an office building! What, it's the only office building in New York not in compliance with State fire codes? Make it a d20, I mean, let's not be stupid about this."

Warren looked at Dave placidly from behind his notebook. "Your Luck is a 14," he said. He rolled a die behind his notebook. "Sorry. The closest fire extinguisher is back down the hall, behind the approaching creature."

Dave's face flushed. "I can roll my own damn dice," he started to expostulate.)

A crackling halo of blue tinged ethereal flames sprang into being around Blue Blazer, blasting outward from the area of her head in a shimmering cobalt bolt towards the rapidly nearing monster. Night Vision, having dialed up his pulser rifle's energy output, fired again, a searing red beam spearing outwards towards the creature as well.

("Uh, I'm firing on the damn thing again, Warren," Rick said. "Full charge, 10 dice, in the chest." He rolled percentile. "Uh... 86 total... that should hit."

"I blast it too, Warren," Leslie said, still sounding annoyed at the necessity. "Um..." She looked down at her character sheet, one purple painted nail tapping her Energy Point column. "12... no, hell, 15 dice of Energy Blast." She looked through her dice, then said "Rickie, can I roll your percentiles, I put mine away."

"Don't call me Rickie," Rick growled, pushing his percentile dice over to her.

"Oh, get over yourself," Leslie said, picking up the dice and rolling them. "Um... 57... plus... what... my Attack Value is 7, so..."

"64," Warren said. "Don't forget your skill levels at Energy Blast and the Accuracy modifier of the attack itself... that's +5 for the Skill Levels and another +5 for the Accuracy modifier, which is 74 total." Leslie just looked at him attentively. Warren sighed. "You should write this down, Leslie," he chided her. "I'm not going to keep reminding you of this stuff."

Leslie pouted... but picked up a pencil stub and obediently scribbled something on her character sheet.)

Both beams, the crackling blue and the tight pulsing red, struck the onrushing giant full on in the chest... and were swallowed up within it. A faint pinkish glow could be seen radiating around the edges of the dark giant's body now, and its rapid rush forward slowed as it leaned into the pulsating blasts of energy emanating from the two superhuman adventurers.

Captain Thunder's eyes narrowed. He had originally planned to employ a fire extinguisher, but the closest one was on the other side of the enemy artifact... as the powers that be would have it. But... he turned to Purple Haze. "Those things you create out of your purple energy," he said. "You control whether they're solid or liquid, right?"

("Jimmy, you can control the state of the purple stuff you make, so you should be able to control what temperature it comes into existence at, right?")

Purple Haze focused again, from his frantic search for a retreat. "Uh, sure," he said.

"Can you control their temperature, too? Could you encase that robot or whatever it is, right now, in a solid, supercold straightjacket?" Thunder's eyes sparkled. Obviously, the humanoid device was designed to absorb energy attacks, but the glow around it indicated it had already reached and exceeded the amount of energy it could store and was radiating the excess away. If he could suddenly crash cool it...!
Purple Haze looked... intrigued. "I... I don't know," he murmured.

("Uh..." Jimmy looked puzzled, then glanced narrowly at Warren. "I

never gave that any thought. Can I create my purple energy constructs at any temperature I want, Warren?"

Warren ran his tongue around under his lower lip, something he did while thinking. "Purple Haze is an auto and bicycle repairman and general tinker, right?" Jimmy had specified this when he set up the character, so Purple Haze would know how intricate mechanisms worked and could thus duplicate them with the strange mental energy field he controlled.

"Yeah," Jimmy sighed, already knowing where this was going.

Warren said, "I've let you create purple liquids before, although normally the stuff you make is solid. I've never given any thought to the actual temperature of the stuff, but if physical law applies, then the liquid form of a substance that is normally solid at room temperature should be very hot, like molten stone. And we haven't defined it that way, right?"

"Right," Jimmy agreed. "Actually, temperature has to do with the speed that the molecules of a substance are traveling... the faster they travel, the more distance there is between them, and therefore, the less dense the material is."

Warren nodded. "Which means that your purple stuff is basically just a mental construct that you create as a solid or a liquid, whichever you desire, and which does not seem to be subject to the normal laws of physics."

Dave said, "Which means that now that I've suggested it, he should be able to create energy constructs of any temperature he wants, just by thinking about it."

Warren shrugged. "Not necessarily. We've simply established that his 'purple stuff' is a mentally generated solid material amenable to his own psychokinetic manipulation. Like ectoplasm. It may not be possible for it to vary from the ambient temperature of the environment it is created in. We simply don't know." He paused and continued to run his tongue around under his lower lip, making it bulge in and out.

"Dice roll?" Dave suggested, doing a pretty good job of keeping the hope and interest out of his voice, but not his eyes, which were bright at the thought of the possibilities if Jimmy's powers could be expanded to include these new parameters.

Jimmy's own features were just as carefully schooled to blandness as he looked at Warren.

Warren smiled inwardly. The old Warren... the previous Warren, back in the good old days... would have doubtless already been bullied by Dave's charm and Jimmy's obstinacy into letting the character redefine his powers this way, and then had to suffer over the next few months of RPG sessions as Jimmy, egged on by Dave, continued to push the envelope, using his newly expanded powers to create not only boiling purple lava, supercooled purple ice, and superheated purple steam at will, but also starting to explore various other physical properties of the purple mental substance - like, say, the pressure the substance was under when it was created, which would allow him to fairly quickly cause massive explosions in any confined space pretty much at will, among other things.

The old Warren was so whipped that there wouldn't even have been a question of a dice roll to settle the matter; Dave and Jimmy would just have teamed up to spout some plausible sounding, over-Warren's-head bullshit about physical properties and molar numbers and atomic weights and god knows what all, and Purple Haze would have become an unbalanced godlike entity who could basically do anything he wanted to do and deal with any conceivable situation that might come up with little difficulty.

Players loved to play characters like that, or they thought they did. Actually, they got bored playing characters like that very quickly, as there is nothing more boring than constant instant gratification and a lack of periodic frustration. It's like playing a pinball game where the ball can never drop.

And, meanwhile, the presence of the character would have made it impossible for anyone else to have fun, too, because there was no longer any sort of credible challenge for any group the character was in, and no one else ever got to do anything, either.

It was gratifying to see how much things had changed, that he wasn't simply being trampled underneath the bulldozer wills of Dave and, to a lesser extent, Jimmy.

All that passed through Warren's mind in less than half a second, objectively. (As much as objectivity had any meaning in that context, anyway.)

"No," he said, finally. "Maybe if Purple Haze was a molecular physicist, I'd let him make a Willpower roll to try to do it. As it is, no."

Dave and Jeff immediately started protesting both at once. Warren sighed and held up one hand. "Okay," he said. "As usual, I run this game on the One Appeal System, and I'll hear you guys out since you obviously don't agree with my decision. But in this case, I'm going to explain my reasoning first, so you can see where I'm coming from."

Warren thought to himself, with some wry amusement, that all of this yammer yammer yammer was taking place in the maybe two or three seconds it would have taken the giant android to turn the corner at the end of the long hall the adventuring party was in and close with them. But he kept his amusement off his face and out of his voice. "First," he said, "yes. The purple stuff that Jimmy creates... excuse me, that Jimmy's character, Purple Haze, creates..." Warren always tried to speak very very specifically and accurately at times like this, "...should indeed be mainly controlled by his own volition. The fact that the purple stuff stays at room temperature, even when in different physical states like solid and liquid, is a fairly clear indication that in effect, the purple matter is mainly a mental projection, a sort of psychokinetic ectoplasm, whose shape and discrete form is controlled by Jimmy's... Purple Haze's... will. I can accept the argument that Purple Haze just never thought of altering its temperature before. I can accept that now that someone else has suggested it, he should be able to at least attempt to control other aspects of the energy manifestation beyond simply shape and physical state, like temperature. So you don't have to make those arguments; I'm already persuaded by them. In point of fact, since the 'purple stuff' already defies conventional physical law governing the creation and destruction of energy and mass, there's no reason it couldn't materialize with more inherent energy... like heat... or less, as a supercold mass, or fluid, or even gas."

Dave sat back, looking pleased. Jimmy, eternally more paranoid, narrowed his eyes and looked wary.

Warren went on. "However, this is one of the rare cases when I'm going to say that I don't care. I generally try to be an impartial referee, and simply make whatever decisions and arbitrations have to be made as fairly as possible, based on my own knowledge as to how things actually work, and when I don't know, I do tend to put things on a fair and open dice roll. But I'm not going to do that this time, because, frankly, if Purple Haze gains the ability to alter, at will, the various physical and chemical properties of the mental energy he constructs imaginary but solid artifacts out of..."

"It will make him too powerful?" Dave openly sneered.

Warren sighed exasperatedly. "You say that like it's immaterial, or like according to the Constitution, it's inadmissible in this court of law."

Dave folded his arms over his thin chest and looked disapproving. "Well," he said rather loftily, "I don't think that's something a gamemaster should think about when making decisions, no. I don't think it's fair. Players shouldn't be penalized based on how powerful their characters might turn out to be."

Warren wanted to roll his eyes, as he remembered long ago conversations, in a previous time, when Dave had not only refused to let Warren run a character he'd created named Warstar because the character was too powerful and would unbalance the adventuring party, but had managed to persuade all the other game referees in their group to blackball Warstar on the same grounds, also. But all that was past, and as far as the group here was concerned, had never happened anyway. Still, it was amusing.

"Dave," Warren said patiently, "I have to take it into consideration. What does every player in a fantasy roleplaying game want? They want to be invincible and invulnerable, to have the perfect power or ability to deal effectively with any obstacle or difficulty that arises, to be able to triumph over all adversity and to always be the leader, the hero, the Big Star. That's what everyone wants out of a roleplaying game..." Warren paused. "Hell," he went on, after a second, "it's what everyone wants out of life." He gave a strange little smile that was gone in an instant. " But," he said, gesturing around the table, "first, if everyone got that, they'd be bored. Suppose I told you guys that I'd decided never to kill another one of your characters; that somehow, no matter what happened, my RPG would from now on be just like comic books, and something would always save you at the last second. Think about it. Would you all enjoy the RPG as much? Or would it get boring?"

Everyone looked thoughtful at that. "Second," Warren continued, "even if, say, one person might not be bored running a nearly all powerful character with vast abilities that would be useful in virtually any situation, I guarantee you that everyone else in the group would get tired of it real fast. Attacked by a giant android? Purple Haze washes it out of the building with a flood of boiling purple lava. Toxic gas filling the room? Purple Haze pushes it back with a purple mist he creates that has a higher internal pressure than the surrounding atmosphere. Attacked by 50 ACE agents? Purple Haze inundates them in high pressure, superheated purple steam. What are the rest of you going to do? Carry his golf clubs? I can't challenge him with any reasonable opponents or obstacles, and anything I come up with that would give him a hard time, will kill all of you."

Warren shook his head. "It's not just bad game mastering to allow it, it's bad writing. It's the kind of thing a really lousy comics writer would script into an issue to solve some plot problem, and then be stuck with forever. Sorry, I'm not allowing it. I probably shouldn't have allowed Purple Haze to create both liquid and solid versions of the purple substance in the past, but I have, so I'll let that go. But I'm not letting him start trying to control the temperature or other physical properties of his purple stuff."

Dave looked disgusted. "Well, if you're just not going to allow it, there isn't any argument I can make," he said. "But I think you're being unfair. I don't..."

Dave stopped and put his hands to his forehead, massaging as if he had a headache, eyes closed. "Jesus," he murmured. "Oh Jesus Christ."

His eyes opened again, brown and crackling with anger... and yet, at the same time, almost agonizingly weary. "You fucking nobody," he said, glaring at Warren in obvious hatred. "You've got some fucking nerve lecturing ME on bad writing. I've got three goddam Eisner Awards..."

They'd all seen Dave's strange fits of incoherent irrationality before, but still, they were always upsetting. Fortunately, this one didn't last long... maybe five or six minutes, during which Dave started in (as usual) by cursing out Warren and calling him all sorts of awful, incomprehensible things, and then progressed to looking around at everyone else in the room and rambling insanely at them, too.

None of them could ever really remember clearly what Dave said during these episodes. Strange, senseless, hallucinatory stuff, about the calendar, and his career, and his awards, and something to do with some utterly delusional wife and child... hell, Dave didn't even have a girlfriend at the moment. Nobody could ever follow what he said. But whenever he had one of his fits, if Warren was in the room, Dave always screamed abuse at him.

Sometimes, at the end, he'd cry. Those were always the worst.

This time, fortunately, he didn't; he just ran down, finally letting his head slump into his hands in despair. "You never listen to me, you never listen, damn it, Ellie... all of you..."

He closed his eyes.

A few seconds later, he opened them again, and looked around. Rick had his arms comfortingly around Ellie, who was looking at Dave with her lower lip trembling and tears in her eyes (Ellie was, of all of them, the most easily upset). Leslie, who back in high school had dated Dave for several years, had gotten up and taken Warren's hand and was holding it tightly. Normally, her boyfriend and informal fiance Brian would have comforted her, but Brian had ROTC drill early in the morning, so he'd left at 10 p.m. that evening. Jimmy was just staring at Dave, drumming his fingers nervously on the table.

"Oh shit," Dave said, weakly, his voice hoarse and raspy from all the shouting he'd done. "Did I... did I freak out again?" He looked upset.

"Yeah, dude," Jimmy said, commiseratingly. "You got your pills?"

Dave fumbled in his shirt pocket, shaking fingers bringing out a narrow yellow plastic pill bottle with a round white plastic childproof cap. "Yeah, yeah," he said. "But I'd'a swore I took one this morning... I'm sure I did..."

"Obviously," Warren said quietly, "they don't have your medication balanced right yet, Dave. I saw you take a pill this morning at breakfast... we were working on that plot for the SCARLET CYCLONE mini series, remember?"

Dave had fumbled the cap off and now, trying to shake a single small white pill onto his palm, had managed to spill most of the bottle. Pills clattered onto the table and the floor. "Fuck!" Dave swore, miserably. His eyes were bright with unshed tears.

Jimmy immediately knelt down and started sweeping the pills into his palm with the fingers of his other hand. "No problemo, Dave-meister," he said. "No sweat. Don't worry about it. It's copacetic. Chill."

Leslie let go of Warren's hand and walked over to Dave, slipping her arms around his shoulders. "It's okay, Davie," she said, her voice low and comforting. "It's not your fault. It's all right."

"Shit," Dave said again, blinking. He hated to cry period, but especially in front of other people.

"She's right, Dave, it's not your fault, man," Rick said. Everyone else immediately chimed in agreement.

"We understand, Dave," Warren said solemnly. "I mean, honestly, it's not like it affects our feelings for you." He paused. "I mean, we all know you're a gigantic asshole, fits or no fits."

Everybody laughed at that, maybe a little too heartily, but Dave joined in too. "Fuck you, Dawson," he said, after the chuckles had died out.

"Not on the best day of your life," Warren responded, pertly.

"No," Dave agreed, his voice regaining at least a ghost of its former cockiness, to everyone's relief, "probably that would be the worst."

They all laughed again, in relief as much as good humor.

"Yeah, look," Warren said. "I'm going to call it a night. It's getting late anyway." This was a considerate fiction; it was barely midnight and they often played until sun up... but clearly, Dave needed some rest, and it wouldn't be much fun to play without him.

So the game broke up. People chattered idly while gathering their stuff up, Leslie sticking close to Dave and touching him frequently, just to comfort him. Warren wandered out to the top of the stairs with them (he lived for the most part alone in an ostensibly four bedroom apartment at the top of the two story converted house and rented out the lower floor, another four bedroom apartment, to various college students) to say good night.

As Dave and Leslie started down the stairs, Warren leaned down to squeeze Dave's shoulder briefly. "Be cool," he said.

Dave looked up and grinned. "Cooler than you, and don't get gay with me," he said.

Ellie was hugging Rick, then leaning up to kiss him good night affectionately. The kiss went on for a few seconds while Warren watched, smiling with benign patience. "See you tomorrow," she said, then glanced over at Warren. "Right?"

Warren had just then turned to go back in, leaving the upper door open; now he stopped and thought a sec. "Yeah, probably," he said, after a minute. "Laurie might come over tomorrow afternoon."

"Cool," Rick said, kissing his girlfriend lingeringly one more time and squeezing her ass through her jeans, making her giggle. "Have a good night, baby." He turned and started downstairs. "Hey, you guys, wait up!"

Ellie waved until Rick was through the door and had closed it behind him. "You want me to go down and lock it, Warren?" she asked, her voice serious and eager to please.

Warren came up behind her, slipped his arms around her waist, kissed her hair at the back of her head, then leaned in to kiss and nibble her neck. Ellie reached down to her waist with a happy little purr and covered Warren's hands with hers and squeezed them, letting her eyes flutter closed. She sighed, leaning her head back against Warren's shoulder as his mouth worked gently where the column of her neck swept down to her deltoid muscles. "Nah," he said, in between nibbles, "I heard the lock click when Rick closed it." His hands slipped out from under hers, moved up to her shoulders, and turned her to face him. "But," he murmured, nibbling the tip of her nose, "if you really want to go down..." His hands pushed down suggestively on her shoulders.

Ellie giggled and sank to her knees in front of him. "You really love it when I do this, don't you, Warren?" she asked him, fingers deftly unsnapping and unzipping his jeans.

Warren smiled down at her and ran his fingers through her hair on either side of her head, lightly stroking her ears. "Don't you like doing it, baby?"

Ellie had fished him out into the open air know with the dexterous movements of long practice and was leaning forward, her mouth busy. After a few wet seconds, she pulled her head back and looked up at Warren earnestly. "Well, I love making you happy, of course, Warren," she said with utmost sincerity. "But I hardly ever do this for Rick."

Warren cupped her chin gently and stroked her now moist lips with his thumb. Ellie moaned in her throat and closed her eyes. "But you love me more than you love Rick, sweetie," he said, quietly.

Ellie's tongue came out and licked Warren's thumb. "Yes, of course I do," she agreed breathily, her eyes meeting his for a moment. Then she leaned back in and resumed her previous ministrations.

Several rhythmic, well moistened minutes later, Warren gasped and his hands tightened on Ellie's steadily bobbing head. Ellie moaned happily and, as Warren had first coached her (she couldn't remember how long ago now) kept moving her head steadily, and concentrated on the simple act of swallowing.

Finally, Warren gently pushed her head back, bent his knees, and suddenly swept Ellie up in his arms without apparent effort. She giggled and slid her arms around his neck and put her head back docilely to be kissed. Their mouths met and fused for a long time, their tongues exploring deeply, Warren's arms holding her like a small child, as strong and steady as a statue's.

After the kiss, Warren said, quietly, "Thank you."

Ellie giggled and wriggled in his arms happily, like a puppy. "My pleasure. Blowjobs at the top of the stairs are a specialty of the house, sir."

Warren kissed her again, this time on the tip of the nose, and then carried Ellie back into the living room, through the dining room where the game session had been, through the kitchen, and into the small back bedroom where he slept. Ellie was alternating kissing his neck and upper chest where it was bare in the V from his shirt collar with happy little mmmm sounds. His big brass bed seemed even bigger in the tiny room, but Warren liked it best out of all the rooms used as bedrooms in the flat; it got the best morning sunlight through its one window and was handy to the back stairs which led up to the big attic he used as an exercise room and work area.

Now he lay Ellie down on the neatly made bedspread, kneeling next to her and kissing her again. Ellie kissed him back eagerly and openly, and Warren reflected, as she sucked and nibbled happily on his tongue, that he slept with women who were more sexually proficient than Ellie... Leslie was technically a better and more versatile kisser, for example... but what Ellie lacked in technique, she made up for in willingness and open, unmanipulative affection. She was such a sweetie. Rick was a lucky guy... well... he would be, if they were ever going to actually get married.

Warren put that thought away firmly as the kiss deepened, his hands moving over Ellie's wriggling body, unbuttoning her plaid cotton shirt, slipping it down her arms as the two of them playfully tried to undress each other without letting their tongues out of each other's mouths. Ellie was happy, Rick was happy... all Warren's friends were happy. The world was perfect. That was all that mattered.

On the sidewalk, a block up towards the apartment Jimmy shared with Brian and Leslie, the four friends walked quietly together. After another block, Dave and Rick would peel off, Dave to head for his own apartment on Dale Street, Rick to walk over to the house he and Ellie rented together. They were quiet, but it was a mostly cheerful quiet. No one wanted to talk about Dave's fit, least of all Dave.

"Sleeping alone tonight, huh?" Dave said to Rick, finally. He sounded almost guilty, most likely because he knew Warren was usually more considerate than that. Since Brian had already gone to bed early, most likely Leslie would have stayed with Warren tonight... but then Dave had had his fit. Of course, Leslie wasn't going to sleep with Dave tonight, that was long over, and she wouldn't cheat on Brian that way, but... well, it had probably changed Warren's plans, seeing that Dave needed company. "Sorry about that, guy."

Rick waved his hand. "Oh, please," he said. "Ellie would probably have been asleep as soon as we got home anyway... besides, it's not like... I mean, you know. It's Warren."

All four of them nodded. Rick was no more jealous or concerned than Brian would have been if Leslie had spent the night with Warren... which she did, once or twice a week, generally. Hell. It was Warren. You couldn't be upset about it. Dave knew that. He himself wasn't seeing anyone right now, but his girlfriends in the past had all slept with Warren on occasion. In fact, one of his exes still visited Warren every once in a while; she always said hi to Dave while she was in town. Didn't bother him a bit.

You just couldn't be jealous of Warren, he was too good a friend to everyone.

"You guys want to come over? Watch a video or play Magic or something?" Rick yawned. "I mean, I could go to bed, but..." He shrugged. "I've got a new set of BUFFY tapes."

There was a moment's hesitation. For just a second, everyone there felt vaguely disquieted for some reason. The impulse came and went too quickly for any of them to grasp; all they knew was, the suggestion felt slightly... improper... like it always did, when someone suggested the group get together in part or in whole, without all of them there.

But they all knew Warren was with Ellie, and doubtless they were both having a good time... so that was fine.

"Sure," Leslie said, holding hands with Dave, rubbing her head against his shoulder. "You guys want to play strip poker?"

"Oh, please," Rick and Dave groaned in unison. It wasn't that they didn't want to; it was just that Leslie never actually would.

"Damn, I was only kidding, guys," Leslie said.

"Teasing is the word," Rick said. "For that, I'm gonna play my Blue deck on you."

"Oh, shit, not that Control Magic/Counterspell/Unsummon thing," Leslie complained. "Please don't. I'll be nice."

"Let's just watch a video," Dave said. "Magic takes too much thought. My brain hurts."

"I'm going to head on back," Jimmy said suddenly. "I'm pretty beat."

They tried to talk him out of it... everyone loved having Jimmy around, him and his weird sense of humor... but he was adamant.

So, at the next corner, three of them turned right, one turned left. Everyone called out good night, and the two groups parted.

TIME WATCH (excerpt)

2009-01-06T17:10:00.000-08:00

PRE NARRATIVE DEVICE

I was sitting out by the pool relaxing, chatting with the big titted blonde girl from England in an aimless fashion, when I heard the distinct little click of the upper right stem on my watch suddenly jutting out from the casing.

The air took on the razor sharp, crystalline sheen of overtime.

Liz froze into utter immobility, her pleasant rather than pretty facial features, errant strands of breeze blown blonde hair, half lifted hand with fluttering, unmanicured fingers, and frankly enormous boobs lifting and falling distractingly under a wet one piece swimsuit, all distilling into one sharp, utterly unmoving image, her mouth half opened, voice cut off partway through an adorably accented 'well, HONestly'.

The gently lapping surface of the pool, being pushed around by the steady western breeze coming around the clubhouse ten yards or so away, went utterly still.

The breeze itself cut off as if someone had thrown a switch.

The air, and the world, lay completely motionless around me.

All sound vanished...

...except for the shoe-soles-crunching-on-gravel sound of more than one person running up the path from the parking lot towards me.

Someone else moving in overtime?

It was contrary to all my experience to date, and frankly, I was shocked. My conscious mind was stunned, paralyzed, unable to even begin to decide what I should do.

My body, on the other hand, seemed to be way ahead of my brain.

I tried to jump up out of my chaise lounge and as soon as I sat up and shifted my weight, slid right off it. In overtime, nearly every discrete object except the surface of the Earth itself seems all but frictionless and almost entirely immobile; I think it has to do with the timestream protecting itself from interference, but I don't know. Anyway, I slid to the ground, and instead of trying to get up, I just reached out, hooked my fingers around the leg of the Liz's chaise lounge - having been reminded everything was smooth as glass, I cupped it, instead of just counting on the friction of a grip that wouldn't be there… and yanked myself hard with that arm. Even the friction of the ground seems largely a matter of conscious will in overtime... something that bothers me sometimes, but I haven't figured out a lot of this stuff yet... and since I wanted to slide, baby, I SLID. Like a Russian bobsled down an icy mountain chute, I whipped forward on my belly across the normally rough concrete next to the pool and shot across the time-frozen, wind rippled surface of the water, whooshing with no perceptible decrease in velocity towards the mansard-roofed clubhouse on the other side, all while staring frantically over my left shoulder towards the parking lot I'd heard the running footsteps coming from.

Two guys rounded Building A, carrying something in their hands that pretty much had to be guns, although I couldn't get a good look as I slid like an eel on a greased tin roof towards the clubhouse. What I did see clearly, though, because my underbrain already knew what it was looking for while the rest of me was still baffled, was the glint of silver at their wrists.

The fuckers were wearing watches like mine.

This is very VERY bad, I thought quite coherently to myself.

And then, in a more jumbled fashion: Why did my watch go into overtime right before they showed up, AND HOW THE HELL ARE THEY MOVING?

They were pointing their... yep, definitely guns, and flashes were popping at the ends of the barrels, and things were buzzing through the air that seemed pretty much like bullets flying by me on the infiltration course at Basic Training back in my youth. My conscious mind dissolved in a chaos of confusion as I tried to figure out how the hell high velocity projectile weapons could possibly function in a realm where the flow of entropy itself was in momentary stasis. My subconscious slapped my hand into the ground and since I didn't want to slide, I pivoted around my palm and zipped, just as easily as you'd ever want, right around the corner of the clubhouse. There was a patch of gravel there, and even in overtime, even when you want it to, gravel does not do frictionless well. So I rolled and came to my feet with nothing like the spryness or agility of the actual action hero who SHOULD have been in a situation like this, and turned to head through the gate into the parking lot -

And nearly shit my pants.

The gate was closed.

Well, duh, of course the gate was closed, it was ALWAYS closed, we couldn't have kids wandering into the pool area unattended, they might fall in and drown, that's what the gates were FOR, but...

You do not open doors. Or windows. Or gates. In overtime.

In overtime, everything is in stasis except you. Well, not you, ME, as the only guy I knew who had this amazing time-displacement watch gizmo. Until very recently, that is. Now, everything but me and the two idiots who also had watches who were somehow shooting at me and who I could hear running towards the clubhouse right now.

Now, if everything is in stasis but you (or two other idiots with guns which should not by any feasible contortion of the laws of physics actually WORK goddamit) then, well, it should be obvious that anything that is closed, is not going to open. Or break. Had there been a big piece of paper stretched across an open gateway between me and the parking lot, I would have had to find a way over, under, or around that big piece of paper, because it was not gonna break while in stasis.

"Shit!" I said, and heard my words fall flatly into the echoless air of overtime.

Crunch crunch crunch crunch came the running footsteps across the concrete.

A Robert A Heinlein hero would have immediately realized some brilliant application of quantum physics and in some way manipulated it to eradicate his opponents. A Keith Laumer hero would have persuaded his opponents he was really a harmless little old lady and the guy they were chasing had just gotten on a bus to Orlando. A Roger Zelazney hero would have slipped in between dimensions, or would have foreseen this eventuality and arranged to lure his opponents cleverly into quicksand, and then would have preached them a sermon on Buddhism. An Alistair MacLean hero, or, for that matter, a Jack Higgins hero, would have hauled an enormous handgun out of his cut offs and blown gaping holes in both of them as they came around the corner.

Chubby little me, nobody's hero and friend to darned few, stared at the gate and said "Shit shit shit SHIT!"

...and then turned around, slowly, to get my head blown off.

They came around the corner running full out, and skidded to a halt on seeing me. They handled themselves easily in overtime, which I found both annoying and scary. They looked perfectly normal. One was taller than the other one, and a little stockier, but both were in good shape. They had 1980s haircuts; shaggy, with the little sideburns, and their clothes were those weird colored suit jackets and trousers over casual pullover shirts in pastel colors from around that time period, too. They had loafers on. No socks. Both looked vaguely Hispanic. One had a jowly face and a big nose. His slightly shorter, thinner partner was much more nondescript, with watery grey eyes and a sharp little chin and nose.

I noticed all this because all my life I've wanted to be a professional artist, and my eye just works like that, but what riveted my attention was the B.F.G.s in their hands. Big Fucking Guns. But perfectly normal looking B.F.G.s; one looked like a .45 automatic, one of the big ass ones Nick Nolte is always hauling around in Walter Hill movies. The other one was some kind of huge revolver with a long barrel that I imagine was most likely a .357 Magnum, but honestly, I haven't seen a Dirty Harry movie in over a decade, so I couldn't be sure.

I am still amazed I did not shit my pants as they stood there, panting, glaring murderously at me, and slowly pointed those cannons at my irreplaceable torso.

"YOU," Big Jowly Face said, gasping for breath, "said the offline nocard would bluescreen when he scanned us. You glitching guaranteed it."

"Gigo," his partner hissed back. "He's got more ram than I thought for bouncing bese-o. No debug, we got him."

"Affirm," Jowly said back in mournful tones, "but if that gateway hadn't been passworded, he be infinity and beyonded, blueboy."

I should have been utterly paralyzed in fear. Okay, I WAS utterly paralyzed in fear. Except for my mouth, which has never been paralyzed in its life. Having no idea what I was doing, I opened it and out came "Holy shit, guys! I have total authorization to operate in this time era! From Central Command! There's been some massive screw up here!"

Hey, I'd just reread DINOSAUR BEACH a couple of days before this. You can see why.

Jowly squinted one eye and stared at me like I was a gigantic talking pile of shit... and, you know, he'd never seen a gigantic talking pile of shit before. "Freeze program," he said, in the same tone you or I might have said 'whoa'. "He's a derange."

Needlenose shrugged. "Enn ae," he said, and it took me a half second to realize he meant 'N/A', as in, 'not applicable'. "Derange or gold card, we still reformat him." He put both hands on his goddam enormous pistol and steadied the barrel on my chest. "Scan you in hell, test tube..."

Two watch alarms started beeping.

"Faggit!" Jowly swore. "That wasn't one point five!"

"Ahhhh VIRUS," Needlenose said with great aggravation simultaneously.

Both reached for their watches instantly, even as they said that, pressed them... and vanished.

My own watch gave a cheerful little tremor on my wrist, the overtime stem clicked back home again... and the world came rushing back in a clamor of wind and voice babble and rippling water sounds.

From around the clubhouse, I could hear Liz's voice... "Jim? JimMEEE? Where the 'ell did you go?"

I sighed, put my thumb to my watch, and pushed out the overtime stem again with the nail. Once more, the world went still and sharp and silent.

I reached into my shirt pocket and pulled out a little notebook I'd bought less than two weeks ago at the Walgreen's a couple of blocks away. It had had a picture of a nameless smiling girl in a bikini on the cover and a palm tree imbued logo saying WELCOME TO FLORIDA on it. Now the colors were somewhat faded and both covers were creased from long usage. I flipped it open, paged through it... tapped one particular page... flipped it closed and put it carefully back in that pocket. (I always wear button up shirts with at least one pocket these days, even to the goddam pool, and I always carry the notebook and the watch. I'd left my wallet in my apartment, and I'd just left the paperback copy of RAH's THE MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS I'd brought out with me on the little table between my chaise lounge and Liz's, but the watch and the notebook I always had with me.)

Anyone looking through the notebook would be bored; it's just page after page of dates and times:

1/1/54 11:00 - 11:25 AM

1/1/54 3:20 - 4:05 PM

1/2/54 9:15 - 9: 40 AM

etc, etc.

I could probably get along without it... I mostly used it to make sure I'd never double back and run into myself on a time trip. I didn't know if it was possible, and if it was possible, I didn't know if it would then be possible to interact with me in my own past or future with the kind of truly horrifying consequences depicted in books like Gerrold's THE MAN WHO FOLDED HIMSELF, or even Heinlein's "By His Bootstraps"... but I'd avoided finding out, and planned to continue doing so. No divergent timelines is my motto.

Okay. I'd found a free date. Now:

One at a time, I pulled out each of the other stems on my watch. Then I reset the month from July to June...

...click, as I pushed that stem back in...

...the day from the 17th to the 2nd, and click again as I pushed that stem in as well...

...the year from 2001 to 1996... eighteen months or so before I'd moved into the apartment complex.

Without touching the overtime stem, I clicked that one back in, too... and jumped back in time a little less than five years. The little calendar windows on the watch now said July 28 2001... my jump off point from my native timeframe, the place I'd return to if I pulled any calendar stem out now, or even if I didn't, in 90 minutes at the most, which was, apparently, the absolute limit the watch would let me stay in a non native timeframe.

I checked around carefully. In a 'non native' time period, overtime only works for 90 subjective seconds. I assumed that's what had happened to the two shooters... they'd popped into a non native timeframe (mine) and then wasted too much duration and had to jump before they fell into normal time. Had they not jumped out, they would have been at my mercy, since I, operating in my 'native' time period, had no overtime limit.

Apparently, just them popping into my immediate locale in overtime had activated my own watch's overtime capacity... a safety feature I'd had no idea existed, but was awfully happy about now that I knew.

I didn't see anyone staring right at the location I was suddenly about to 'appear' in, nor was there anyone close by to be startled. So I clicked the stem back into place.

The world started up again around me in a blare of noise and movement as I abruptly appeared nearly five years into my own past.

I wiped sweat off my forehead, turned, and opened the gate that would have been completely immovable were I still in overtime. Then I walked across the parking lot, up the driveway, and down the street to a SunTrust bank a block away where I had opened a safe deposit box about three weeks ago... in, let me think... 1986, right after that particular branch opened.

Once I had cash, I could walk into any pawnshop in Tampa and buy a gun... something that had been in the back of my mind for a few weeks now, but I'd seen no real need to rush right out and do.

Whatever I did, though, I wasn't going back to my native timeframe for any longer than it would take to reset the watch and hop out again... at least, not anywhere near that apartment complex. Eventually, I'd have to sleep, and I'd need to do that in my own time period, assuming I wanted to do it for more than 90 minutes at a time... which I did... so I had a lot of stuff I had to do.

It was looking more and more like I shouldn't put off my trip to 2072 for too much longer.

The Fear Masters (excerpt)

2009-01-06T17:04:00.000-08:00

The first half rotted corpse came lurching down the stairs from the old 7th and Lex platform at 16:17, twenty two minutes after our train had ground to an abrupt and unexpected halt no more than twenty yards up the track.

At that point, I knew the day had officially gone straight in the dumper. Inconvenient power outage, subway train stalled two hundred feet under the world’s most sprawling radioactive ruin, something fresh out of a shallow grave coming towards me with obvious murderous intent – things had definitely gone from ‘all is well, all is well’ to ‘run in circles, scream and shout’ at terminal velocity.

Staring at what was left of the walking dead man’s face, my brain tried to gibber the 'z' word at me, but I told it firmly to shut up, mama was busy.

The dead man was shambling along at a fast walk, lurching like a drunken sailor but still covering ground steadily. Every couple of steps he’d let go with one of those growly 'rrrrrr rrrrr' sounds that all the zombies in the viewsees seem to come standard with. It was goddam creepy, if anyone asked me. Though no one ever did.

My ocular implants were already set to infra-red, so I knew that whatever this thing was, it had no body heat. It was a shock to see somebody who ought to be decently dead laboring up the tunnel towards me with pretty obvious murderous intent, but I don't freeze up when I'm scared. Not even with every dyed-blonde hair on my nappy black head bristlin’ like a shoe shine brush. My 'fight or flight' reflex was permanently hard-wired to ‘shoot, punch, claw and spit’ well before I hit puberty, and 13 weeks of boot training in Sumac Bay, followed by three years in a Middle Eastern hot zone and four more doing 'dirty' ops for Global Security’s top secret Science Sector had ground my instinctively violent responses down to a monofilament edge.

I had my window cranked down, my gun yanked up and an explosive round on the way before anyone else in our subway car had even realized there was anything untoward out there, much less lurching towards us with flesh devouring intent.

If I’d had any doubt regarding the nature of our attacker, it vanished as soon as I took my first breath of the outside air. The creep not only looked like a rotting corpse, but he smelled like one, too. The stench was enough to, as they say, knock a buzzard off a turd wagon, and it would probably have pole axed me, too, if I hadn’t been hardened to even worse sensory input by jungle training.

Eddie, who had been scanning behind us in the UV range, turned around just in time to see my first target’s head explode. "Myrna Loy, Myrna Loy," he murmured out of the corner of his mouth, "she don't know if she's a girl or a boy. I hope we find a WEE-pun on that corpse when it comes time to file reports, little darlin."

"Stop flapping your jaw, Eddie," I said, trying to keep the exasperation out of my voice. "Switch your ocs to IR and your clip to explosive rounds. And take a big whiff while you’re at it; it will put you in the picture faster.”

Eddie's typical whitebread from Alabama, all muscles and reaction time -- a good sort to have backing your play when the gumbo starts to splatter, but lord above, that boy can get on my last nerve when he's a mind to.

I mean, I can't help that my pop was a big fan of classic movies, nor do I really have any choice about which gender I prefer to share a hammock with on bivouac. I know Eddie thinks his heckling is harmless, but after a while, you get tired of repeating "Don't ask, don't tell". You yearn to present a more visceral argument. In my case, it wasn't my knuckles that ached to get into the debate so much as it was the edges of my palms and the soles of my feet... especially the spots where twenty years of kendo-karate training had built up all the calluses.

Eddie has three inches and about eighty pounds on me, and his arms are longer than mine, too. And, yeah, he’s probably stronger. But if he kept pushing my buttons, I had no doubt I could kick his meaty white ass all up and down that tunnel or any other one on the planet. I have a lot of quick, and a whole lot more mean, when I reach down deep to get a handful.

Eddie rolled his eyes at me, but dutifully clicked his contacts through to IR... just in time to catch sight of a well below room temperature mob spilling off the platform and shambling hungrily in our direction, 'rrrrrrrr'ing to beat the band.

He snarled something imaginative in Arabic that managed to be blasphemous, profane, obscene, and anatomically impossible all at the same time, while simultaneously hitting the RELOAD button on the side of his modified Ruger .38, dropping a clip of heatseeker and slapping in one of explosive rounds. By that time I'd dropped two more deaders with direct hits to their rotting faces and three others behind them, presumably from high velocity skull shrapnel. That only left maybe thirty or forty more walking dead lurching and growling towards us.

"Zombies, goddam it, ZOMBIES," I finally blew out past my clenched lips, "we're about to be inundated by a genuine horde of mother kinkin' ZOMBIES."

"What's the hazard bonus for that kinda action?" Eddie asked, actually flicking a tight smile at me as he started shooting. I was keeping my cool through an effort of will, but Eddie is one of those nutjobs – not uncommon in the military -- who is honestly baffled by the concept of fear. The way he's wired, 'bloodlust' is the closest he can get to it.

"Not fragging enough," I snorted back, keeping a tight grip on the little panicky butterflies that were trying to flutter in my lower intestine.

I kept firing until I'd emptied another clip. It took about four seconds; by that time, the only slightly diminished mob had covered about half the distance between the platform and our stalled subway car, and I'd come to the conclusion that we needed another plan.

"There are too spammin’ many of them," Eddie said, apparently reaching the same conclusion as I had. He didn't sound unhappy about it, just a little irritated at the realization. “And to think this started out as a pretty good day...”

Earthquest (excerpt)

2009-01-06T17:02:00.000-08:00

PART I - SOMEONE ELSE IN DEEP SHIT A LONG LONG WAY AWAY

Chapter 1. The Word For World Is 'Mudhole'

K'Thallians are one of the most widespread of the Galactic Human sub-races. Found on most worlds accessible by starship, the K'Thallians originated on a roughly Earthlike world with more than double Earth's gravity and atmospheric pressure. Adaptable, durable, enormously strong, and as a general rule, not hugely intelligent, the K'Thallians have been exported as contract labor (and, in some more lawless and therefore semantically honest regions, slaves) throughout the outward spiral arm of the Milky Way on more than 1200 of the well exploited 7000 World Lines. K'Thallian metabolisms require two to three times as much fuel as the Galactic Human baseline, making them easily exploitable, but also making them extremely short tempered when they've missed a few meals.

-- Touring The Milky Way For Fun And Profit, Webster Madison

Since you should always open a story with something exciting, and because I was actually jumped by a K'Thallian scavenger gang within five minutes of my arrival on Betel VI, let me tell you how it went:

They came at me from five directions when I was near the middle of the six way intersection. I'd had no chance to get off the street, even though I'd spotted them encircling me nearly a block back... the buildings lining the narrow, crowded thoroughfare were tall, ancient, stone monoliths of vaguely (to Earth perceptions) disquieting proportions, with sealed and guarded second floor entrances at the top of steep metal ladderlike stairways.

K'Thallians average around five and half feet tall, nearly that broad, and seem to be built out of stone, leather, and rubber. Two of the five closing on me had lengths of flanged metal in their hands that looked as if they'd been stolen from a construction site somewhere (the jagged ends looked as if they'd been chewed down to size); the other three were bare fisted. Since their bare fists were the size of Daisy hams and would most likely hit like bowling balls, this wasn't much comfort.

The classic move in these situations is to jump up and over the oncoming onslaught, and although it's generally really stupid to let your feet leave the ground in a real life fight, I almost succumbed to temptation, given how short they were, and how hard and fast they were stampeding towards me. However, instead I rolled to my right as the crowd opened up, hitting the palms of my hands and rolling neatly in between two of my opponents, coming to my feet behind them as they barreled by. From there I could have done many things, including my favorite tactic when fighting unknown opponents... or, actually, anyone I think can hurt me... namely, run the fuck away.

So I did, after first pulling some flash powder bombs from the limbo in my magic Gloves of Holding and scattering them behind me. The ffsssts!, WHOOF!s, flares of actinic light, and bright white, acrid billows of smoke did a wonderful job of not only making the K'Thallians lose sight of me for a crucial few seconds, but of riveting the attention of every human and nonhuman being on the street while I bent nearly double and scuttled crablike (or eeled, if you prefer) back into the stinking, reeking, motley mob.

By the time I let myself mostly straighten up again, my Hired Gun uniform of careworn denim jacket, blue jeans, and cowboy boots had morphed into a shapeless grey robe with a big hood. My magical belt that doubled my already impressive strength was wrapped around my bare waist under the robe, my cowboy hat had gone back to limbo, and my yellow leather gloves were tucked into either sleeve. With hood up, I won't say I looked just like anyone else in the crowd, but I certainly looked a whole lot less like the only Earth human on the planet... and hopefully, a great deal less like a target for wandering thugs.

Oh, I'm sorry. You wanted a big fight scene with flying kicks and savage punches and maybe a couple of explosions? Wait for the movie to come out. While there is no bigger BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER fan than your humble correspondent, I'm here to tell you that in real life, those spiffy looking high kicks will get your leg ripped off at the hip. Furthermore, violence is not fun, reality is not a Mortal Kombat game, and anyone with any brains knows that the best way to defeat an opponent is to outlive them, and the best way to outlive them is to avoid being dead for longer than they do. Basic wisdom, but entirely inconsistent with getting into an actual fist fight with five extremely strong and tough opponents when you can just leave instead.

Drifting onward:

I'd already noticed that there was a lovely looking city of gleaming silvery towers hanging in the sky over the... er... less lovely looking... slum (I assumed) I happened to be walking through... and, more importantly, that spacecraft appeared to land at and take off regularly from that city in the sky, as well. Therefore, I had to get up there.

I was wondering whether it would be easier to build a hot air balloon or hijack something when I realized I was being surrounded by the K'Thallians, and, well, I dealt with that, and now, a few blocks further on, I was back to my initial train of speculation.

I didn't need to worry about food; I had magical steam trays stowed in my gloves from my very first interdimensional adventure for the Tarlians. A safe place to sleep, however, was an entirely different matter... but not one I needed to worry about in the immediate future, anyway, since I can stay up without sleep for around 120 hours if I really need to. (I don't like it, and you don't want to say anything mean about Sarah Michelle Gellar or old SPEED RACER cartoons in my earshot from about the 100th hour onward, but still, I can do it.)

Which brought us right back to the problem of needing to be Up There, when I was Down Here.

Keeping a careful eye on the sky city as I shuffled along with the apparently constant and perpetual crowds through the apparently eternally narrow, smelly, squalid, teeming streets, I noted (with my three times best possible Earth human vision) several small black dots rising up from below and dropping back down from above... so, apparently, there was traffic between here and there. I just needed to figure out where 'here' was, and then hitch a ride.

Of course, brain surgery is easy, too: you just get something sharp, and someone who will hold still long enough, and...

In the past... whatever... I'm going to say 'month'... since wrapping up the Death Football adventure, I'd spent most of my time haggling over various points in my contract with the Tarlians (such as making sure my ex-wife didn't get put into my new, ongoing adventure series as a co-star, among other things). Other points, however, were making sure that when they kicked off their new, certain to be a hit, interdimensional adventure serial EARTHQUEST: THE JOURNEY HOME (A Webster Madison, Hired Gun Adventure), I was placed not only within my own native timeline/dimension, but somewhere within, oh, say, a few hundred light years of Earth.

I got no say, of course, over specifically where they dropped me off, but I did manage to insist it be a planet with a spaceport (they wouldn't have dumped me on a backwater anyway; they wanted an interstellar romp, not gritty survival in some jungle or desert) and I also narrowed it down to a specific section of the outer spiral arm of the Milky Way where Earth's system is. Then, in what spare time I had, I studied everything they had on file about the places, and more specifically, the peoples, who lived in that area.

Since the Tarlians, like their competitors for psychic energy, the Verrane, regard every sentient being in the universe as being at the very least a potential customer, their databases are extensive. Over the course of several weeks, I memorized vast reams of stuff on hundreds of Galactic Human sub races and dozens of sentient nonhuman races, the cultural traditions and taboos of hundreds of worlds and societies, the varying tech levels to be found spread through that particular area, and the different political and governance systems I'd have to be wary of, as I tried to beg, borrow or steal a ride or rides home.

The recorded data the Tarlians let me study is full sensory; not only did I know what all these races looked and sounded like, I also knew what they smelled like, felt like (mostly when you punched them, which is what I was primarily concerned with) and in some cases, tasted like. Three times greater than best possible human (Earth human) in all normal human talents and capacities allows me to study fast, learn quickly, and remember everything

Lost in thought, I'd been paying little conscious attention to my surroundings as I jostled, bumped, thumped, and squirmed my way along those nasty little avenues. Still, apparently my subconscious had been soaking up the ambience. It wasn't until a small, green tinted moon appeared in the narrow slice of sky I could see at any given time from the bottom of the deep canyon created by the monoliths on either side of every street, though, that enough clicked together in my mind for me to realize where I was.

Betel VI, known as a variety of things to its various populaces depending on their language, most of which translate roughly as "Mudhole". (Some of them are much more profane, and the Lydians, for reasons known only to them... and perhaps not even to them... call it "Ph'neezz-kchow", which certainly deserves a 'god bless you' from any Earth human who hears it, but which actually translates fairly exactly into English as "Full Spectrum of Rationality". Which would tell me immediately, even if I hadn't already learned it from study, that the Lydians ingest a lot of hallucinogens.) Mudhole rejoices in a roughly two tiered society... the upper caste, natives and tourists, who live in the pretty floating cities and party party party, and the lower caste, natives and... well... more newly arrived natives... many of whom are former tourists... who do all the work, pretty much as slaves of the corporation that runs the planet.

Nominally a province of the Argle-Bargle Imperium (it's not really called the Argle-Bargle Imperium, the actual name of the political entity that Mudhole is a more or less apathetic member of is a series of whistles and klicks that don't translate well, as they signify some ancient potentate's proper name, and a word that more or less means 'region where that person is boss'), Mudhole is in reality pretty much run as an exclusive resort and residence for the upper executive class of the Interstellar Sales Corporation. (Again, that's a translation, but it's a pretty accurate one. ISC makes almost nothing and sells damned near everything and is probably the largest, most influential, and wealthiest commercial entity in our entire section of the Milky Way Galaxy... but they measure wealth in material terms... minerals, chemicals, energy interactions... and as such, are of no real interest to either the Tarlians or the Verrane, who deal exclusively in psychic energy.)

ISC, like most mercantile entities doing business in the Argle-Bargle Imperium, operates under an Imperial license, the terms of which are pretty much, "you pay your taxes, we leave you the fuck alone". So it is that while Mudhole has an actual Imperial governor, (sskaa-Lrrn Bnnfagle, a fairly young Ichthalian currently between gender choices) Its Honorableness has little to do as long as ISC ponies up the quarterly valuta. Its planetary force of Imperial Killers (hey, that's how it translates) is mostly decorative, and what law exists is pretty much in the form of ISC regulations, and enforced by ISC Conservation Troopers (whom are considerably more efficient and dangerous than even non-decorative Imperial Killers).

All this I'd learned from the Tarlian databanks. They had a great deal of material on ISC, mostly because, in another hundred thousand years or so, when the sentient life in this quadrant of the Milky Way Galaxy in this timeline has evolved enough psychic capacity to be able to pick up telepathic projections, the Tarlians (or the Verrane, or somebody new) will most likely end up dealing with them... or someone like them... as middlemen.

Going over all this data in my head, I realized that it meant getting up to the spaceports in the sky, and thus, off this lousy rock, was going to be a little tricky. The economy on the surface of Mudhole is a slave economy, with no real cash or much of anything else of worth changing hands, ever. The downsiders work in various factories (the huge, disquieting monoliths) in exchange for food and shelter... if they're lucky. The constant Brownian movement on the streets results from shift changes, staggered to take advantage of every minute of every day and every night, because the sleep cubicles are also assigned by the shift, with every work day starting with one slave-worker being shaken awake roughly by another one who wants to get into his cot.

Not everyone is employed; there are always misfits, incorrigibles, and other losers who wind up on the streets, can't get or hold a factory position, and generally avoid starving to death only because they get dragged down and eaten first... or manage to join a gang that keeps itself fed by doing the dragging down and eating. Unlike other slum cultures, there is no criminal subclass because the only laws are there to protect the upsiders, who can't be reached, much less hurt. There are no pawnshops, no jewelry stores, no banks, no liquor stores, no drug dealers... nothing worth stealing at all, because the only things of worth on the surface are food and shelter and labor, and all of those things are commodities controlled by ISC.

I was finding this all very depressing.

A shadow passed over me and everyone within twenty yards of me and then skimmed on down the street. Looking up, I could see a saucer shaped craft moving at little more than a brisk walk thirty feet or so above my head. Most of its bottom was a transparent oval mirror. I was fairly certain that from the other side, that mirror was transparent, and probably crowded with upper tier tourists, come to gawk at the lowlife down below.

Thirty feet away. Ten lousy yards. Moving at a relative snail's pace... but it might as well be light years, for all the good it could do me...

Wait. TWENTY feet, from the top of one of those narrow metal staircases leading up to a monolith's entrance... seventeen feet, from the railing around the platform at the top of those ladders. And the best jumper in the world can leap seven or eight feet up... which meant I could jump at least twenty, twenty five... even without factoring in my strength belt.

I bolted. People (human and non) got shoved every which way as I shot down the street, knocking anyone who got in my way head over whatever as I hauled ass, trying to not only catch up with the slumming saucer, but get a good ten or twenty yards ahead of it. My shapeless robe morphed into bike pants and a tee, my cowboy boots turning into spike soled athletic shoes, my feet slamming the muddy cobblestones of that nasty street with a sound like machine gun fire as I ran. From above it must have looked like Bugs Bunny tunneling under Elmer Fudd's lawn, except the clods of dirt getting thrown to either side were protesting factory drones.

I passed into the saucer's shadow and just as quickly, back out of it. I was moving against the crowd, which was good, because by now a good two or three seconds had passed and people were actually shoving to get out of my projected path. As the now yammering and gesticulating crowd opened up ahead of me, I picked up more speed, and drew a bead on the narrow metal ladder-stairs I meant to vault to the top of and bounce off to reach the saucer.

Once I reached the saucer, I could only hope there was something to hang onto... or, if I were really lucky, some easily accessible way to get inside. Still, I was willing to bet that if some insane downsider actually jumped on top of an upsider vessel, the pilot's first panicked instinct would be to head back upstairs... and I was sure that if I could hang on at all, I could hang on long enough to pull out Vastator and cut my way inside.

I veered towards the stairway, ready to jump, grab, whirl around, jump, and grab again...

...and caught, from the corner of my eye, someone at the top of a metal staircase to my left I was bulleting by, pointing a long black stick with a slender metal needle sticking out of the end of it at me...

There was a blinding flash of bluish white light, and something hit me like a wall of fire, and I distinctly remember being hurled up into the air, tumbling head over heels, utterly limply, and seeing the metal ladder I'd been running towards looming up...

I'll bet it hurt like hell when I smashed into it.

Endgame (excerpt)

2009-01-06T04:06:00.000-08:00

Chapter 1. Great Day In The Morning

I woke up feeling, all things considered, pretty damn good.

I stretched a little in bed and rolled back and forth, enjoying the way the mattress felt underneath me. My futon had never been this comfortable before. At first I assumed I must have slept remarkably well the previous night. A feeling of warm contentment and general physical wellbeing seemed to suffuse me utterly. Honestly, it was damned near blissful.

So, this had to be Saturday morning, right? No workday weekday wake up could possibly feel like this...

Except that, dimly, I could recall watching NYPD BLUE last night... couldn't I? Andy and Bobby had had that case where they got into a fender bender with a guy who turned out to be a terrorist… huh... And Channel 33 showed the syndicated cop shows on Tuesday night… that meant this should be Wednesday... And that meant, if I was waking up feeling this well rested, I had to be seriously late for work.

Having worked that all the way through, I opened my eyes in a bit of a panic... and found myself someplace entirely strange.

"Well, shit," I said, scrambling up on my elbows in what turned out to be a rather larger, and considerably more comfortable, bed than the futon I usually slept on. A single light, feathery soft, silky coverlet of some sort slid down off my naked body as I pushed myself up, and I felt the pillows behind me... whatever they were... seem to almost reposition themselves to support my new posture. It would have been a scary and sinister feeling, if it hadn't been so overwhelmingly, luxuriously comfortable. "GodDAMN," I profaned yet again, as I looked around me in wonder.

The room was proportional to the bed, which is to say, large. Mostly empty; off to my left, the wall I was apparently leaning against was interrupted by glass-paned double doors which faced east... or west... or, screw it, whichever direction the sun was currently shining from, as bright, rich, buttery rafters of sunlight were pouring at an angle through them and splashing into a golden yellow rectangle on the floor.

Beyond this rich swath of bright warmth, I could dimly see a darker doorway with what looked to be a red brick, arched frame running around it, leading into a cool, shadowy room that had within it vague shapes and distant gleams putting me in mind of a bathroom.

Off to the right side of that doorway was a tall, rather antique looking chest of... I was guessing... cedarwood drawers. That wall continued on for another fifteen feet or so and met the wall opposite me at a right angle.

In that particular wall, about five feet out from the corner was a broad open doorway with a genuine by God hanging beaded curtain in it, the beads of randomly varying sizes, colors, cutting styles - some were faceted, some oval, some smoothly round - and consistencies - some were dull, some gleamed reflectively, some seemed made of a transparent substance.

On the other side of the beaded doorway... this one was framed in what looked like fretted stone pillars leading straight up, without fuss, to a straight across, punctilious upper beam... there was six foot tall, oval, bronze framed, rather old fashioned looking mirror on the wall, which, as it happened, was directly across from the left corner of the bed (as I was in the center of the bed, and the bed was vast, I couldn't see myself in it).

I normally put my beds in a corner of the room so I have walls on two sides of me; this one was pushed up against one wall (behind me) but on the right side of me there was about four feet of empty space between me and the wall on that side... which unlike the other walls in the room, was made of some sort of dull, dry, reddish brown, carefully cut and fitted together rectangular stone blocks, with three tall, narrow slit windows in it through which I could see thin slats of bright blue sky.

Immediately to the left of the bed was a small stone table, with rounded corners chiseled into various shapes taken from nature... a bunch of grapes, a pumpkin, a pinecone... whatever the corner furthest away from me was, I couldn't make it out. Folded up on the table was what looked like a small pile of black and red silk.

Other than what I've described, the room was featureless. I'd never been there, or any place remotely like it, in my life.

Glancing back over at the table, I realized I wasn't seeing the one item that has been beside every bed or couch or sleeping bag or mattress tossed into the corner of a porch I've ever laid down to go to sleep on since the age of 6 or so... my glasses. And as soon as I realized that, I also realized I was seeing perfectly... better than perfectly... I was seeing sharp details at an impossible distance, even with fully corrected vision, and more than that, I was seeing things in richer color and greater depth across a broader spectrum of hues than I'd ever experienced before.

I was hearing more broadly and deeply, too... a regular, repeated whishing sound that had to be waves on a beach, somewhere off beyond those glass doors and the arrow slit windows. A very faint, distant murmur, as if of voices. A sort of fuzzy, muted rustling I couldn't place. My own pulse, slow and regular.

My sense of smell seemed equally enhanced. Where normally I suspect I'd have smelled little in the room except dry, somewhat dusty stone and a slight smell that was more a warmth than an odor wafting around the bed, now I became aware of a richly textured mosaic of aromas in the air around me. Flaring my nostrils, I took a larger sniff and could feel it; almost see it, a criss crossing quiltwork of currents and countercurrents in the air around me, carrying various different subtle scents from various different directions.

Through the open windows, and more faintly, the closed glass doors, I could smell salt walter with an underscent of something dry and alkaloid; from the shadowy room, I could smell wet stone, a faint aroma of rust, a pleasant scent of soap, and fresh water... all associations that, to my provincial late 20th Century American mind, said 'bathroom'.

I realized I had no idea how I knew all these things, but I did.

I slid my legs off the side of the bed... and stopped short, having caught sight of my reflection in the oval of mirror on the wall next to the beaded doorway.

When I'd gone to sleep, I'd been... well... myself... medium height for my time and culture (just under six foot tall), heavyset (a few pounds over 250, pretty much all of the excess being laziness and poor diet derived flab), doughy arms and legs and belly with no discernable muscle definition, a fat face I distracted attention from with a well trimmed goatee, long brown hair well past my shoulders that I usually pulled back into a ponytail, but not while I was sleeping.

Now... well... I looked different.

My hair and beard looked much the same as I remembered, although the touch of grey in my goatee seemed to be gone. My face was thinner and somewhat younger appearing than I'd seen it since, oh, my late teens, although for all the youthfulness of its appearance, I could still see something around my eyes that seemed markedly different from how I remembered looking at 19. My body had been entirely transformed into something I barely recognized - sleek and muscular, narrow waisted, deep chested, and broad shouldered, with beautiful definition along the ridges of my abdomen and the smooth, hard curves of my deltoids and upper biceps.

My skin seemed almost translucent and I could clearly see the tracery of my surface veins underneath, a look I'd only really noticed before on Bruce Lee and in Paul Gulacy drawings of Shang Chi, Master of Kung Fu, which I'd been told usually denotes almost no body fat at all.

I looked like I could win a fist fight with Xena. In fact, I looked like a frickin superhero... albeit one with my face. Thinned down and with a more distinct jawline than I'd seen in fifteen years or so... but still, definitely my face. That was my irritating little smart ass grin, absolutely.

Glancing down, I noticed that my naughty bits apparently hadn't gone through any similarly enhancing transformation... oh, well. They'd been adequate to their tasks heretofore, although it had been quite a while since those tasks had included anything except urination and masturbation.

It was no damned wonder I felt so amazingly good, if this was the body I was wearing now. I glanced at the mirror again although I didn't have to; I found my visual memory was such that I could just as easily review the mental image I still had of my reflected image in detail. Yes, my eyes were still brown.

I slid silently to my feet with an easy, effortless, quiet grace I'd either never experienced before in my life or, if I'd ever enjoyed it at some point in my childhood, had long since forgotten. Strange bedroom, idealized body, sounds of the ocean outside... if this was alien abduction, they should market it better; someone was missing out on a fortune in admission fees.

"Your new appearance pleases you," a dry, cold, yet oddly familiar voice said to me.

I whipped around like a scared cat and saw, standing at the foot of my bed with a big smirk on his face, one of those short, ugly, swollen headed alien freakazoids from the original STAR TREK pilot movie... you know, the ones that kept trapping Christopher Pike in various realistic mental illusions.

"Oh, you gotta be shittin' me," I groaned. "Do I look like a lost Starfleet Captain to you?"

"This image is a mental projection," Big Head said drily. "It is to give you a familiar..."

"Image, visual reference point, context, whatever," I said. I reached out, snatched up the folded red and black cloth from the bedside table, realized it was a black silk robe with red trim - the most I'd been hoping for was a towel - shook it out, and put it on. "Fucking nasty little alien peeping tom is what you are, buddy. Not to be cliché, but where the hell am I?"

"Your modesty forces you to cover yourself in the presence of one you know to be only an illusory façade and surmise to be alien?" Big Head said, in exactly that 'what a cool lab rat we have here' tone he always used on Pike in the pilot. "How fascinating."

I wasn't paying much attention to the idiot. Under the robe was more stuff... a coiled up leather belt with a heavy metal clasp, and a pair of neatly folded, yellowish-brown gloves that looked like rough leather.

"Hmm hmmmmmm," I said, picking up the belt and letting it unroll between my hands. The leather was supple, sturdy and tough, obviously well oiled and cared for, worked and filigreed in an elaborate, seemingly non representational pattern of intertwining, almost floral looking runic designs.

"Pretty," I said.

The buckle was heavy indeed, probably weighing a pound or more; even with my new strength, it had a weighty solidity in my hand. It was crafted of some slickly smooth silvery metal of a duller, darker shade between true silver and iron, and shaped into a modified ankh symbol I immediately recognized as the hooked cross emblazoned on every album cover ever put out by 1970s guitar rock legends Blue Oyster Cult.

Which, of course, meant I knew exactly what was going on, here... except Big Head didn't look at all like anyone from my friend Jeff's BOC based roleplaying campaign in which I'd played a heroic and intrinsic part for years back in and just after college.

And Jeff had been dead since 1993.

I sighed and turned back to Big Head. "Okay, what's the haps here, O Master of the Mind? Is this all some mental illusion or what?"

He smirked evilly at me. "This is no illusion, human. You are what you appear to be, and this is a real place, albeit far removed from the fields you know."

"Dude, you need a dialogue coach," I said. "Or a quick rewrite from Quentin Tarantino. Your lines just blow."

I pulled the gloves on, suspecting what they were. Flexing my fingers in them, I found they were so light and supple I was barely aware I had them on. They reminded me of Sam's description of 'agent's gloves' in PUPPET MASTERS... so soft he could feel a dime and call heads or tails in pitch darkness. I wasn't sure about the 'stirring boiling acid' part, though.

I turned, pointed a finger at Big Head, then abruptly shaped my hand as if I were holding a pistol and willed it to be so. Sure enough, a gigantic Old West Colt .45 revolver appeared in my hand, pointing straight at the evil dwarf.

He regarded me blandly. "Yes," he said, "you see that you have been regenerated into an avatar of your idealized fantasy icon, a character you portrayed for years in an imaginary game construct in your youth. You see we have also provided you with the accoutrements used by you in that role."

I smiled. "Yep," I said. I pulled the trigger. The gun made a muffled barking sound and bucked slightly in my hand. Something like a burst of green New Year's Eve streamers without the confetti flew straight through Big Head and exploded in curling emerald papyrus-like strips against the wall behind where he was standing, crumpling to the stone floor and curling up again, looking like a discarded, oversized pom pom.

Big Head looked disgusted with me. "I am here, as with all your Chosen Companions, to see you property accoutered and give your basic orientation. I shall warn you now that although you have been Chosen, the final cull is not yet finished. You are, and will continue to be, tested. Failure in any regard will result in your rejection as a final Companion." He glanced behind him, then added drily, "Such foolish displays seem unlikely to reflect well on you."

I sighed, twirled the gun - Lady Logan, a magical weapon the idea for which Jeff and I had stolen from a popular SF novel of the 1970s - on my finger, let the butt snap back into my palm... then clenched my fingers and sent it back into the mystic limbo accessed by the gloves.

"Of course, you at least showed the common sense not to fire one of your homing rounds," he admitted, with an even wider than usual smirk. Lady Logan, like the weapons carried in the book I referred to, fires six different types of charges - an entanglement cartridge like the one I'd just shot at Big Head, that would wrap itself around any solid target it hit; an explosive round, an incindiery round that tended to make anything it hit burst into flames, a charge that exploded in a cloud of knockout gas, a shotgun-like cartridge of razor sharp pellets with a nasty spread cone, and, last but not least, a bullet that zeroed in on a target's body heat and, when it hit, burned out the central nervous system with a burst of focused electricity.

I'd always thought that last bullet was rather unlikely as a piece of technology - a bullet, after all, is just a ballistic missile hurled along a mostly straight line trajectory (as gradually deformed by any gravity fields it experiences) by a channeled explosive charge.

While I imagine some sort of homing package could be built into something that small, and I'll even go along with the electrical charge that burns out a central nervous system, I nonetheless have difficulty grasping how a tiny little piece of... whatever... can alter its imparted vector in flight without some sort of self contained propulsion apparatus... and when you start talking about building a guidance system, lethal taser charge, and thruster jets into a package the size of a .45 slug, I stop listening.

However, Jeff liked the idea and made it work in his game through the simple expedient of not thinking about it too much, i.e., 'magic', so I assumed it worked the same way here. And as I'd learned in Jeff's game once and only once, one does not fire a body heat seeking bullet (however it works) in a restricted chamber if you are the only living creature there. ('I' learned this in an imaginary battle against tattoo vampires, and no, you don't want to know what they are, but they don't have body heat.)

Beyond the homer bullet, Lady Logan flat out defies conventional physics in other ways, as she somehow manufactures her own ammunition, and I select which sort of charge to fire through sheer mental effort. And, one last point we very specifically kept from the original book - she's set to my fingerprints. No one else can fire her, or even pull her trigger.

So I ignored Big Head's smirk and repeated, "Where am I? And don't give me that 'far from the fields you know' crap. If you're here to orient me, then orient me, goddam it."

Big Head crossed his tiny little arms rather petulantly on his tiny little chest. "The data will be of little value to you, but in fact, you and your fellow Chosen are on your native world, but on a parallel timeline in which animal lifeforms higher than a protozoa have yet to evolve. We constructed this facility as a place for your orientation and further testing, prior to your embarkation on your true mission."

"Um hmmm," I said. I fingered the robe I was wearing with my gloved hands. I knew what the belt, and more importantly, the belt buckle, were, along with the gloves, obviously. About the only item that was missing was...

I looked down at my arms, clad in the billowing red trimmed black silk half sleeves of the robe, and with the same sort of mental effort I'd made to 'draw' Lady Logan from the storage dimension within my gloves, I 'willed' myself to be wearing cowboy boots, blue jeans, a RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK t-shirt, an old, ratty green cable knit sweater, and a grease stiffened, ancient denim jacket with a random pattern of battery acid holes in the left shoulder... my Webster Madison, Hired Gun outfit.

The robe shimmered and abruptly, with a not unpleasant, silky smooth shifting sensation on my skin, morphed into the outfit I'd imagined. "Yes!" I said exultantly. "I've got my presto change-o suit, too!"

The suit, which could shift at its wearer's will into any reasonable article or outfit of clothing, had been a gift from... yes, I know how it sounds... the patron deity of Jeff's RPG, the Blue Oyster. Lady Logan had also been a gift from that particularly weird divine entity, as had the gloves of holding, as had the belt and belt buckle that was the last item on the bedside table.

As I now had jeans with belt-loops, I picked up the belt with its heavy metal buckle and threaded it into place around my waist, finally hooking the clasp firmly. A warm, surging rush of physical power and confidence went through me as I did so. The belt buckle's specific attribute was apparently fully functional, as well. I smiled.

I extended my arm, flexed my fingers, and concentrated again, calling up another memory. This time what appeared in my empty grip was a heavy, black metal, two handed pommel with very little guard, the haft itself wrapped with rough, well tanned sharkskin strips for a solid, no-slip grip. Protruding from this pommel was a five foot length of dark, double edged metal about three inches across, inlaid with four different deeply chiseled runes running up the central length of the blade.

The sword was heavy; heavier than it should have been, I somehow knew, if it had simply been composed of the finest, most densely layered stainless steel ever forged by mortal man. Of course, it wasn't; it was forged of obsidium, a mythical alloy composed of meteorite iron, powdered diamond, sea salt, and starlight, cooled once in dragon's blood and reforged, cooled a second time in the heart of a hurricane; and the third time, after the final forging, in a pool of perfect water.

Or so the legends said. In Jeff's campaign, I'd taken it as spoils from the dead body of the Champion of Chaos, after I kicked his scrofulous ass and saved the universe (a relatively small and limited universe, granted) for the good and noble Forces of Order. It was called the Elemental Blade, and I had named it Vastator, which I recalled reading in some science fiction book was Latin for 'destroyer'. (I was young and pretentious then. Sue me.) It possessed frankly preposterous powers, and I honestly thought Jeff had made an appalling mistake as a Game Master in letting me have such an enormously powerful weapon.

For all its deceptive weight, I found I could handle it easily one handed, striking a fencer's stance and running through a full thrust-parry-slash-parry-flourish-slash-bind-thrust series in the mirror. My wrist wasn't even tired at the end of the sequence, nor was my arm trembling. I knew how much Vastator weighed (although, honestly, I don't think that was anything Jeff had ever told me, it just seemed to be more of this information I 'just knew'), and if I could handle it as easily as this, I was pretty goddam strong.

Of course, if I were really Webster Madison, Hired Gun, and not just Webster Madison, aging fat fanboy geek, then I would be pretty goddam strong. The Hired Gun, as the appointed protector of humanity, is what Jeff referred to as an 'avatar of the Race', meaning anything any human could do, I could do... and my natural mental and physical capacities were mystically amplified three fold. In other words, take the Olympic record holders in every athletic category and multiply their greatest feats of strength, speed, agility, stamina, and accuracy by three and you had the basic bodily abilities of the Hired Gun.

I flourished one more time with the magical bastard sword, then flexed my fingers and willed it back into my gloves' mystical holding dimension.

I sat down on the edge of my bed and fixed Big Head with a glare. "Okay. Let me see if I have this straight so far. Your race, the Big Headed Bastards of Betelgeuse 17, has snatched up a whole bunch of folks, including me, in order to go on some mysterious mission. You've transformed me, and, probably, the rest of them, into... what?"

"We merely used our highly evolved mentalities," Big Head said testily, "to harness the nascent capacities of your own sentient minds to transform the energy of your physical bodies into forms compatible with your most deeply held desires. To accomplish this it was necessary for us to isolate members of your race with the most well developed active imaginations, who had closely and strongly identified with a particular fantasy projection figure."

"You..." I paused, and thought about it. "You grabbed a bunch of geeks, in other words, turned them into their fantasy heroes, and set them down here."

He flicked his gnomelike fingers dismissively. "As you wish."

I shook my head and smiled sourly. "And now you think we're going to go whipping off across the universe and fulfill some wildly unlikely and probably insanely dangerous quest for you, right? This plot sucks." I stopped for a second and made a clicking noise with my tongue. "So, what do we get out of it? What's our big reward for saving the universe, or finding the Holy Grail, or whatever?"

I leaned back against the wall and put my cowboy-booted feet up on the bed. Big Head, to give him credit, didn't even notice. He did, however, seem to be getting exasperated with me in general. "In the first place," he said, sounding like he was starting to be annoyed, "as I have already stated, testing continues, and our final group of Companions has not been selected. If you fail any of our further tests, you will be returned to your normal space-time locus in such a way as to believe this to be all nothing more than a lurid dream. Assuming, of course, that you survive your failure, which is unlikely."

"Oh, great," I said. "You haul us to some alien world against our wills, and then you test us to destruction? You're real nice. I'll bet there is no actual mission; you guys just get your kicks running rats through mazes until they die."

"There is a mission," he said, now definitely sounding aggravated, "and it is very important, or else we would not be expending such vast amounts of mental energy on the recruitment of a team of suitable representatives. As to the potential lethality of our tests, that is regrettable, but the mission itself as you surmise will be highly dangerous and our testing must be in earnest. While death will, of course, always equate to failure, that is not to say that it will be inevitable. Furthermore, one of the purposes in this orientation is to secure the permission of the sentients we have chosen before we subject you to any actual danger. If you wish, we will now return you to your natural space-time locus..."

"Under such circumstances as I will think this is all merely a lurid dream," I said. "Yeah, yeah. Anyone accept that deal yet?"

His big ugly gnomish face creased into his usual unpleasant smirk. "We had anticipated that such an offer would be met with universal refusal by the group we had Chosen," he said smugly. "So far these anticipations have proven accurate." He regarded with mocking solicitousness. "Do you wish to be returned to your native space-time locus at this point?"

"Dickweed," I told him, cheerfully. "I should say 'yes' just to watch you have an aneurysm."

He cocked his head over to one side and narrowed his eyes at me. "You would not," he stated. "Our analysis of your basic personality matrix states that you would never willing return to your conventional existence when offered an opportunity at self actualization and what you think of as 'adventure' in a context where you wield superhuman attributes at an unearned level of competence."

"Adventure," I quoted mournfully, "is somebody else in deep shit a long, long way away." I glared at him again. "And, by the way, you can bite me."