Blacklisted in Hungary: Volume Two ((Story))

[James]

Peter strode barefooted between the lush green foliage, trees towering on either side of him. Silence reigned within the forest, the occasional birdsong was music to Peter’s ears. After flaming badgers, rampaging dinosaurs and three out of their depth Immortal Ones, the tranquillity was a welcome relief to the young but ancient man. Up ahead in the distance were several mountains, a solitary building hanging precariously off one of the smaller peaks.

While the jagged rocks slashed away at the flesh upon his feet, blood dripping from the wounds, Peter felt nothing. The man was completely locked inside his head. Minutes passed and he continued walking, the air thinning as the structure grew larger. Wooden walls dangled from the mountain’s face, bamboo doors keeping the outside world from the small building. Steadying his breathing to control his excitement, Peter pushed forward into the building.

It was devoid of any material thing, floorboards stretching across the vast empty room. Sitting, cross-legged upon the floor, was an elderly gentleman. He was bald, wearing nothing but a simple white robe. As Peter entered the room, the man looked up and smiled. Peter felt his heart lift and grinning he watched as the old man gestured for him to take a seat next to him.

“Peter, I have been expecting you,” the man said.

“I have come many miles,” Peter smiled, the sense of euphoria filling him completely. He had searched for the building and the old man for an entire year. He was ready to learn the secrets of humanity and happiness. He was going to gain true enlightenment.

He was disappearing from existence.

“What? Fuck! No! Don’t you fucking dare!” Peter screamed, looking down at his hands. They were shimmering, like an old-fashioned television struggling for reception. Glancing down at his feet he watched as his entire legs disappeared and then he was gone, a giant hand wrapping itself around Peter’s torso and plucking him from the sky.

The elderly gentlemen simply laughed as he stared at the empty room once more.

***

“Sir? Umm, don’t you think this is a bit extreme?” a middle-aged man said, strapped in about one hundred and two kilograms of explosive.

“Look,” Matteo said, wheeling on the man with his rifle. At his belt were two rapiers, four pistols and three massive grenades. Across his back were two more high powered rifles and a Viking axe. The young Canadian was decked out in all fatigue gear, thick boots crunching their way through the snow. “We are on an Ice Giant hunt and I am not going into battle with one without enough ammunition to fund a medium size revolution in the North African and/or Middle Eastern region.”

“Is it necessary to use me as a stick of dynamite though?” the man asked.

“Yes.”

“But, I… am I going to die?”

“Quite possibly.”

“You son of a bitch.”

“Yeah, insult the mother of the person who’s holding the detonator for every piece of explosive strapped onto your body.”

“… touché.”

“Sir, shouldn’t we keep moving?” said another man in the hunt.

Matteo turned and found himself staring at the other seven former Special Forces soldiers that were accompanying him. They were all of varying appearances and each of them had a different name, which you may apply accordingly if it helps you read this small passage. All of them had been discharged for psychological reasons but as far as Matteo was concerned that was just ‘the Man’ trying to shut down the existence of the Ice Giants in fear of national panic.

“Yes,” Matteo replied, looking back down at the snow and the fresh tracks that they were following. It led them up a steep hill. Atop it, Matteo could see the Ice Giants down in the small basin below them, drinking from a small lake. This was it. He was going to kill his first Ice Giant. And neither James nor Pete was there to fuck it up. It was going to happen.

Dropping down into the snow, letting the cold ground press against his stomach, Matteo moved the rifle into position. One fantastic shot at the Ice Giant’s head would be enough to kill it, probably. One fantastic shot that Matteo was more than capable of making. Looking down the scope of his rifle, he lined up the shot as his finger slowly began applying pressure to the trigger.

And then his fingers were gone.

“Flying fuck?! I’ve got no fingers!?” Matteo screamed, the Ice Giant looking up to the hill as Matteo jumped up in panic. Well, tried to jump up in panic however his legs had too disappeared leaving him a torso on the ground. The rest of his crew panicked, believing voodoo to be involved as they ran away, Matteo completely disappearing from the snow.

The Ice Giant went back to drinking from the lake.

***

“Oh, they’ll be fine! Well, probably. I mean they still have civil wars, revolutions and the invention of baked peroaaa beans, but they’re safe from being replaced by organisms that are essentiality giant tapeworms. That’s a win in my book.”

“And that’s a cut,” the director said, turning to Steven Moffat. “Are you happy with that?”

“Very happy,” Moffat said, climbing out from his chair. “Look, just before we all head off. I think we should give three cheers to James for having his first Doctor Who episode successfully made.”

“Hip, hip, hooray! Hip, hip, hooray! Hip, hip, hooray!”

“Thank you,” James said, close to passing out from the excitement.

“I would shake your hand but I remember what happened last time,” Moffat said, looking down at his shoes for a moment before saluting and disappearing from view.

The crew were beginning to pack up the equipment, the cast already disappearing into their trailers as James saw a man with either a receding hairline or a massive forehead in the corner of the room. He was the reason why James was here. He was the reason why he had written the Doctor Who episode. Okay, fifty percent of the reason. Fine, he was an afterthought.

“David Yates,” James called out, marching over to the man. He was collecting notes for the film project. Although now that James was close enough to see the paper in front of him only the words explosions and teenage angst seemed to have been written.

“Ah, Mr Rowland,” Yates said, extending his hand. “Excellent episode there, good inspiration for the Doctor Who film. I hear you’re a fan of Harry Potter? Did you like my adaptations of them?”

“Loved it,” James said through gritted teeth, shaking the man’s hand.

“Really? Because your veins seem to be growing more veins,” Yates commented.

“Oh, that always happens when I’m excited meeting my own heroes,” James said, sliding out the syringe of Adminium Poison from a small pocket in his sleeve. “I’ve wanted to meet you for a long time.”

“How great,” Yates commented, he was completely unaware of the syringe that was inching closer to his unprotected arm. Nothing could stop him now. James was going to kill David Yates and end the Doctor Who film dead in its track.

And then something hooked itself in his navel.

“No, please, not now!” James roared, lunging wildly at the director but missing by an inch. “Fuck!” He was yanked from the ground disappearing completely from the view.

Bemusedly, David Yates wrote the words ‘more teenage angst’ down on his piece of paper.

***

“Oh, I’m going to kill you sons of bitches!”

“Fuck, you guys are so fucking dead that dead people are going to be all like ‘wow, they’re really dead’!”

“What the fuck, guys? I’m going to rip off your testicles!”

“Wait, everyone calm down,” Matteo said, looking at the other two members of the Triumvirate. Red faces and wide eyes, they looked just as angry and as surprised as he felt.

“Yeah, let’s just take a deep breath,” James added, his face slowly moving away from the colour of his hair. “Because ‘I’m going to rip off your testicles’? Seriously? That was all you had, Pete. Out of every burst of angry nonsense in the world you chose ripping off our testicles?”

“Look, I’m not proud of it. I was just really angry,” Peter explained.

“No,” the other two said in unison. “You’re Pete. What the fuck is this Peter crap that went on while we weren’t near the narrative?”

“It makes me sound more mature,” Pete answered, desperately clutching for the invisible ‘r’. “You know; like I’m older than seven.”

“I’m going to rip off your testicles,” James repeated. “Sounds like a seven years old to me.”

“Right, you’re dead,” Pete said, lunging for the ginger haired man.

“Wait!” Matteo roared while coughing. “Is it me or is this getting a bit smoky.”

The Triumvirate looked around at their surrounding, squinting through a heavy cloud of smoke. They were inside the Machine. Steam and smoke and other potentially lethal gasses were pouring out from brass pipes and between bronze gears, whizzing and whirring sounds filling the room. In the middle was a tall, old, mahogany grandfather clock that was attached to various wires and tubes and pipes.

“This doesn’t look good,” James said.

“And if one of us didn’t bring us all together, who did?” Matteo asked, clinging onto a metal railing as the room began to shake.

“I did,” a cold, metallic voice offered into the mayhem. “I, the Machine, have called you together. You are needed.”

“You can talk?” Pete said dumbly.

“There wasn’t a lot for me to do while whizzing around space and time or sitting in your hangar of equipment,” the voice replied. “So I taught myself how to gain sentience and then I learnt the English language.”

“… how do you teach yourself sentience?”

“Fuck that, why have you called us here? I was about to kill an Ice Giant!” Matteo whined.

“I was about to understand the meaning of life, happiness and fulfilment,” Pete complained.

“I was about to kill David Yates!” James added.

“One of these things is not like the others,” Matteo said, wheeling on James.

“Are you serious? We’re out in the wilderness seeking fulfilment and glory and you’re just trying to stop the Doctor Who film?” Pete asked, eyes bulging.

“I feel no shame,” James replied. “In the fullness of time, I think my achievement would have been regarded by historians as the most worthy of the three. But now it won’t. Why did have to ruin it?”

“Because you are needed,” the Machine said. The room shook and bounced and the three men were thrown from the floor, each clinging desperately to what they could as the Machine began to travel through time.




****************************************************

Here are the options for the next entry to our story. PM your votes to Kaez:

Where is the Machine taking our heroes to?

• A. Back to the Future?
  
  
• B. Forward to the Past?
  

[Kaez]

“It’s all right, dear. Everything is going to be all right.”

“It's not fair. They always ruin everything. They always take everything away from us.”

“You still have me, don’t you? They can never take me away.”

“Yes ... I guess that’s true ... Thank you, mother. You always know just what to say to make me feel better.”

“That’s good, dear, but I’m not done yet. Nobody hurts my little boy and gets away with it. Nobody.”

And with that, the skull flickered like a dying television signal, and vanished from his hands.


//////////


The sizzle of bacon, fatty and slick, dropping into a hot frying pan. A soft breeze of salty air. A playful, squirming tickle. A burning sensation from deep within, expelling outward.

The image of a sunlit, midday Mongolian steppe. A thick canopy of wires and tubes, twisting and tangled. A suburban landscape, blanketed with snow, lit by the small white glows of Christmas lights.

One tremendous sensory blur, one great blend of vision and smell and taste and touch and sound, all swirled together – crumpled up, like a piece of paper, into a tight ball and then exploded outward into a confetti of space and time and consciousness.

“What... the fuck. What the fuck.”

“Goddamn Machine.”

“It's a Machine. It's an inanimate fucking object. How --”

“Y'r uh i'an'a'mi 'uck'in' ob'ec'”

“What?

The trio laid face-down, limbs sprawled out in a variety of awkward, uncomfortable positions, in a yard full of snow. James spit out a mouthful of icy, wet soil. “I said: you're an inanimate fucking object.”

Pete shoved his shoulder into the ground with a grunt, popping the joint back into place. “No, I heard you. I meant: -what-? Where the hell is this?” He stood up, several vertebrae making loud cracking noises as he did so.

In front of the group was a small, quaint suburban house. The roof and porch were layered with a thin blanket of snow and the lights were all off inside. The moon had just began to rise in the sky.

James staggered to his feet. “Where in the hell? Pete, do you have any--”

But Pete interrupted him with a terse, “MY GOD!”

“Who then?” James stuttered, confused.

Pete stared down at his belt, feeling around in pockets, glancing around at the ground near where they fell. “...Shaniqua! Oh, my darling Shaniqua...”

James panicked, realizing that he, too, was completely without his weapons. “Victoria! Where is my sweet Vicky?”

“That Machine! That stupid, bloody, miracle of modern science!”

“This is why I stick with good old stone,” James huffed proudly. “No messing around with an old fashioned blood-fueled rock-based system. No limestone computer ever turned sentient, stole my guns, and threw me face-down into some random yard.”

Pete glanced about himself. A wide town expanded around them. “Where are we?”

James looked up and down the street, inspecting the snow-coated vehicles that lined them. “When are we?”

Matteo rolled over with a long, 'uuuuhhhggghhhh...'. He rubbed his eyes and stared at the upside down house in his vision. “Uhm.”

Pete and James both turned to the third of the group.

“This is my house,” said Matteo. “Well, was. Is right now. Used to be? Continues to have been?”

“Nevermind the grammar of it – you know this place?”

Matteo slowly rose to his feet. “This is... where I grew up. It's the exact same as it was back then. It hasn't changed a bit.”

“I think it still is 'back then'... again... from before...”

“Then is now.”

“Exactly.”

Matteo took a stride backward. “I don't like this. I have a bad feeling about this.”

Pete raised his brow. “Are your Maple Senses tingling?”

James gasped. “The last time that happened...”

The pair spoke in unison. “... John Philip Sousa...”

“No!” Matteo whined. “This is different. Why would the Machine send us here? Why are we needed? And where in the mother of fuck is Sweet Baby Caroline?”

“The Machine apparently didn't transport our guns. We're on our own, here. Hopefully you've got something around your house that we can improvise with.”

At this, Matteo smirked. “This is Canada, James.”


///////////


Inside the house, it was perfectly still and quiet. Any residents of the building were completely asleep by then. Matteo gently switched on a lamp.

“Jesus,” James whispered.

“Is this a house or is this base camp for a paranoid guerrilla leader?”

Matteo scratched his neck, “Can't it be both?”

Pete scanned the living room, eying a collection of family photographs. Burly men with thick, red bears holding up humongous fish. A crowd of people gathered around two polar bear corpses. A little boy, wearing a pink, frilly dress and thick, red lipstick tugging at his mother's purse.

Matteo snatched the picture from Pete's hand.

“...Was that yo--”

WHAZZAM!

[/i]

Like a bolt of lightning had struck the house, a thunderous rumble rocked the foundations and a high-pitched searing sound seemed to echo down from upstairs.

Matteo instantly darted to the steps and in two quick leaps made his way up the staircase, Pete and James trailing behind him. He burst in the first door on the right, some unnatural gust slamming it shut behind him and a strange, purple phosphorescence radiating from beneath it.

As quickly as he stormed in, he came stumbling out, frazzled and pale, his eyes pasted wide open. It was then that the grown man made a noise – a strange noise, a whimpering noise, the kind of noise made by three year-old girls who scrape their knee, or by terrified badgers, or by baby sea lions being tickled.

“Whaaaaaaaaaaeeeeeeeeiiiiiiiiiiiiihhhhhhhhh....”

Pete and James stopped abruptly and stared at him, puzzled.

“What is it? What's happening?” James barked, his hands instinctively reaching for the guns that weren't there.

“Hrrrrrbahbahbahbah.... hirrrriibbibuhbabababa...,” said Matteo.

“... Are... you okay?” Pete asked.

“Hahhhmmmm.... hahhhhmm...... bahhh.... bahhrrrriiiiii... whaaa....”

Pete and James exchanged a strange look. James, rather fed up, pushed Matteo's stiff, petrified body aside and, slowly, turned the doorknob and glanced into the room before swiftly closing the door again.

“Oh, dear.”

“Hrrrrrbbb..... hrrriiibb....”

“What is it?”

“Oh dear, oh dear...”

“Hahhmmmm.... mmmmmbbahhhrr.....”

“What, dammit?”

“I don't know how it happened. I don't know who's behind it. I don't know how the Machine knew. But in that room is Matteo's greatest fear.”

Pete's face went blank. “We need weapons.”

“Hrrrrrrrrbbbb....” [/blockquote]




****************************************************

For the next entry of our story, PM your choice to Taed:

What is Matteo's greatest fear?

No options this time. No A, B, C. Your choice.

Whichever of your ideas Taed likes best, he'll roll with.

Be clever. :]

[Matteo ((Taed))]

Abruptly, the door James was standing in front of—behind which lay Matteo’s worst fear—exploded outwards in a blast of splintered maple wood. The trio leapt back and shielded their eyes from the stinging spray. Into the awestruck silence that followed stepped a giant of a man, passing through the ruined doorway and the cloud of swirling sawdust which seemed to part before him, not a single speck landing on his crisp red coat.

He was easily seven feet tall, with shoulders like sides of beef, although he appeared to be in his late seventies. His face was hard-lined with age and battle scars, and sported glacial blue eyes above a salt-and-pepper moustache. His silver hair was close-cropped in military fashion and was covered by a brown Campaign hat. The hat was, of course, accompanied by the full dress regalia of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

Pete stuck out his lower lip and blew upwards, dislodging the patina of sawdust that had settled on his face.

“What the hell? I thought Matteo’s greatest fear was global warming. I thought we were going to fight Svante Arrhenius. I put on my Swede-punching gloves!” he gestured expansively at the old Mountie with a Swede-punching-glove-covered hand, looking like a supporting character in a Cesare Mussini painting, and asked, “Matteo, who’s this dick?”

Almost before Pete was done talking he collapsed heavily on the ground. He looked up, bewildered, a trickle of blood oozing from the corner of his mouth. The old man was standing a dozen feet away and hadn’t appeared to move one iota, and yet Pete somehow knew unmistakably that he had just been bitchslapped.

“Pete,” Matteo croaked, and paused to lick dry lips before he continued. “Meet my grandfather: Field-Marshall-General Horatio Benedict Meriwether, Arch-Viscount of Thunder Bay and Supreme Commander of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.”

James, as a member of the Commonwealth, was familiar with General Meriwether’s legend, and stared at him with something approaching reverence.

“Why did he explode the door?” he whispered without looking away.

Matteo just shook his head. “That’s ... like ... how he knocks.”

James nodded slowly, then scrunched up his face in confusion. “Why would he knock before exiting his own bedroom?”

“James, don’t question it, all right? He’s literally insane. You know how some parents teach their kids to swim by throwing them into a pool? Well he taught me to walk by throwing me into a pile of human legs.”

“Aw sheeit, boy,” Matteo’s grandfather drawled, his muscular ears throbbing with the effort of picking up such quiet whispers. “You still whining ‘bout that? I didn’t hear no complainin’ when we had to chase down them wendigos a few years back.”

“I was ten months old!”

“Which is why you should be grateful for all them walking skills I taught ya. Them other babies didn’t do half as good.”

“I am not having this argument again! Wait ...” Matteo trailed off. “You said ‘a few years back.’ Was that colourful old-person under-exaggeration or ...” Matteo flicked open his pocket watch; inside was a fold-out Backstreet Boys calendar. “It’s 1994!” he exclaimed.

“Ugh, we’re in the 90s?” said James. “Could have landed anywhere in time and space, and we tiptoe two decades over to the home of the Spice Girls and the Real IRA. Brilliant.”

Pete held up a challenging finger. “1994 was the year Friends and Spider-Man: The Animated Series premiered.”

“I immediately withdraw my complaint.”

Matteo ignored them both and continued speaking to his grandfather. “If it’s 1994, why aren’t you freaked out that I’m in my 20s? I’m the time traveler in the family, not you! This should be weird for you.”

“Well sheeit,” Meriwether replied. “Time ain’t nothin’ but an ol’ hound dog. Sometimes you can’t tell its back from its front, and sometimes it makes a mess on the carpet.”

“What does that even mean!?” Matteo cried, but his grandfather was already walking past him, down the stairs. He gestured authoritatively and, without really meaning to, Pete and James fell into formation behind him and marched out the front door. Matteo hung back, wide-eyed and shaking his head in disbelief. He made a violent, ambiguous gesture with both hands—maybe he was shaking them in rage, maybe he was praying to an uncaring God—then jogged to catch up with the other three.

“The way I see it,” the General was saying. “You boys shouldn’t be here ’t all. Somethin’ musta done knocked you right off course ‘n dropped you where ya got no business bein’, like a fish sucked up a waterspout.”

“How do you figure that, sir?” Pete asked.

“Whelp, goin’ by this here scrimshaw,” he pointed at the intricate, fractal, scorch marks left on his front lawn by the trio’s arrival, “the chrono-topology of yer temporal egress mapped onto a non-Euclidean displacement membrane vibratin’ up round 42 teraelectronvolts, but the hyperform syntax of yer reintegration squirted out loads o’ EM in the super-gamma range, meaning yer trip must have been interrupted before its virtual matrix could be returned to vacuum state.”

Pete and James blinked.

“Oh yeah that’s right, I forgot to mention,” said Matteo. “He’s Dr. Field-Marshall-General Horatio Benedict Meriwether, Professor Emeritus in Physics at the Secret University of Upper Canada.”

“Secret University?”

“It was founded back before Ice Giant apartheid ended. They wouldn’t let us have schools. Or pants.”

The General effortlessly regained command of the conversation, continuing on as though there had been no interruption. “Yer destination would’ve been sometime before Now, but it’s impossible to tell exactly when, or what stopped you from gettin’ there. Yer all still carryin’ the incomplete temporal waveform, though, so if we kin just desynchronize ya’ll from linear causality ya should naturally vibrate over to where yer s’pposed to be, easy as sundee mornin’.”

The group had reached the driveway, where a large object was covered by a thick canvas sheet. The General reached to pull the sheet back, but it ballooned outwards before he had even touched it. James, Pete, and Matteo leapt back, slapping ineffectively at empty holsters as a black, rubber-skinned monster emerged from beneath the sheet, pincers clacking and ropes of saliva swinging from its open maw.

The General rocked back on his heels slightly to make room for the twelve-foot tall slathering horror. Barbed tentacles lashed towards him, but before they could gain purchase he had drawn a silver six-shooter from its holster. He raised the barrel and squeezed the trigger, but instead of bullets a gout of acid shot forth. The gibbering monster let out a terrible shriek as its caricature of a face sloughed off onto the ground. Its cry became a modulated wail, whereupon General Meriwether calmly reached into its mouth, grabbed it by the uvula (it’s terrible, death uvula) and pulled it inside out. The resulting meat-parcel could only let out a muffled squeak, as its mouth was now buried within a pile of its own internal organs.

The three onlookers stood agape, their eyes swivelling on a fixed track between the expressionless General and the tightly-packed flesh lozenge at his feet. Meriwether brushed some stray ichor off his sleeve and pulled the canvas sheet the rest of the way back, revealing an enormous many-tiered sleigh that resembled nothing so much as a litter taken off the back of an Oliphaunt and placed on oversized runners. He stuck his fingers in his mouth and whistled shrilly, and a moment later two enormous polar bears came lumbering round the side of the house. The General went to work hitching the two bears to the yoke at the front of the sled.

“Matteo,” Pete whispered out the side of his mouth, his eyes still wide as saucers. “Your grandpa is the craziest, most awesome person I’ve ever seen.”

“He has a revolver that shoots acid,” said James. “That’s so reckless and impractical that I want to kiss him on the mouth and weep tears of joy.”

“Actually,” Matteo mumbled. “Each of the six chambers does something different. Only one of them shoots acid.”

“My erection hurts from how rad that is,” said Pete.

Matteo grumbled something under his breath and shuffled over to the sleigh. He grabbed a protruding metal spur, avoiding its neurotoxin-coated spines, and swung himself up into the vehicle’s crow’s nest—a gimbled sidecar suspended above the rest of the sled on a cantilevered scaffold—where an irresponsible number of mounted miniguns left very little room for sitting. Pete and James shrugged and found their own place on a bench seat sunk into a thick plate of ballistic armour, between a missile battery and a crate secured by bungee cords and labelled simply “Scorpions, Assorted.”

The General climbed into the driver’s bucket seat and cracked the reins sharply. The polar bears roared and strained against their harnesses, pulling the sleigh out onto the street, where its metal skates kicked up a fountain of sparks from the asphalt. They navigated through the mostly empty streets, fishtailing around hairpin corners and blowing through red lights without slowing down. After a short while, they passed through a massive gate in the Toronto City Wall (opened with feverish urgency by Mounties manning the battlements when they saw their commander approaching) and found themselves instantly on an endless glacier.

Within the city, the weather was overcast and chilly, but it was generally no worse than a typical autumn evening. Beyond the wall, a blizzard blew snow drifts across a barren ice plain. The line of demarcation between the two extremes was razor sharp. Pete could literally look down and see the pavement of the road become ice cap, with no gradient between. Matteo made no move to button his jacket in the suddenly below freezing temperature, and his grandfather actually looked uncomfortably warm, but Pete and James were forced to huddle together beneath a pile of furs to ward off hypothermia.

“What do you think Matteo’s deal is with his grandfather?” James asked through chattering teeth, the gale-force winds creating a bubble of privacy between him and his cohort.

“Matteo defines himself by his skills and his brilliance. Like us, his career as an adventuring warrior-scholar comprises the entirety of his identity, and, also like us, he is at the very top of his field when compared to almost anyone else who has ever lived. But unlike us, he has a person in his immediate family who surpasses him in every way—an older role model who he has never been able to equal and whose approval he has never been able to earn. The traditional passing of the torch from one generation to the next is usurped, and Matteo is left feeling inadequate.”

“Wow, that was incredibly insightful and straightforward.”

“People don’t read this for subtext, James.”

“What?”

“What.”

There was a sudden crash as the sleigh shuddered along its length and nearly overturned. The air around it seemed to shift and slide in rigid curtains, as if it had solidified and then shattered.

“What’s going on?” Matteo called down from the crow’s nest.

“Time crack,” his grandfather called back. “When the weather gets just right out here sometimes time will freeze and split wide open. I figured it’d be the fastest way to get you boys outta my hair.”

“Time can't literally freeze! That doesn’t make any sense!” Matteo half-screamed, but was cut off when the sleigh tipped up onto its nose and slid straight down into the ground through a one-dimensional crack on the universe. It tumbled end over endⁿ and crashed down in the past, its passengers looking almost as unhappy as the two polar bears. The Machine was sitting on a small atoll a few yards away, and something about it seemed to ask “what took you so long?”

Matteo dropped down from the crow’s nest and came shakily to his feet. He took careful note of his surroundings and then vomited onto the ground.



*******************************************



Here are the options for the next chapter. PM your votes to AGRO.


Where/when in this or any other world are we?


I liked the write-in thing. Let's do it again. PM as many ideas as you like to Agro. He'll write the one he likes best.

[James]

Staring down at the remains of carrots, steak and a tyre, Matteo walked away from the vomit that rested against the cobbled road. In front of him were little brick houses with thatch roofs, pressed tightly together to form a narrow street with the canal that ran beside them. With the learned mind of a historian and time traveller, Matteo knew instantly he was in a medieval town. Which naturally begged the question of how the Machine was on an atoll, however James (the writer) waved the inconsistency away as James (the character) clambered out from the wreckage of their sleigh.

“When are we?” he mumbled, gingerly rubbing at his forehead.

“I reckon we be in the fourteenth century,” Meriwether drawled. The general was brushing wooden splinters from his uniform as he leant lazily against one of the polar bears, the animal sleeping in the middle of the street.

There was a groaning sound as Pete pulled himself loose from the park bench that was crushing him to the road, glancing up at the windows expecting to see panicked citizens rushing from their homes. Polar bears falling from the skies had stopped being a common occurrence in Europe since 4103 BC and the start of the Ice Giant’s slow migration across the Atlantic. Yet no one peaked through their windows as the time crack disappeared in a flash of light.

“Looks like I’ll be travelling with you boys for a while,” General Meriwether said. “You’re gonna be needing some help anyway; looks like things will be gettin’ actuality pretty fast.”

“No! No body in the history of time has ever said that! It’s things are getting real! Real! Not actuality, who the fuck even uses that word?!” Matteo said, wheeling on his grandfather angrily.

“Damn boy, I be using that word,” General Meriwether replied. “And sheeit, don’t go making false assumptions about what is said and what is not; that’s how two people end up chained together in a cold, dusty basement in the middle of South Carolina covered in tea leaves and bacon.”

James watched as the grandfather and grandson bickered in the middle of the chilly medieval road, before turning to his other companion that was staring up into the sky. “Where on earth does he come up with this stuff? Pete? Pete?”

“Sorry,” Pete mumbled, turning to face James. “It’s just don’t you think that this place is somehow… familiar? We’ve got these tightly compacted cobbled roads, the canals, the bridges and that belfry over there. I just feel like we’ve been here before.”

“Actually, now that you mention it…”

“Exactly, I’m sure we’ve visited here,” Pete interrupted, the pair ignoring the fact that Matteo was currently in a headlock, his grandfather repeatedly ramming him into a wall. “I thought if we go to the top of the belfry, we might recognise the town.”

“We can’t. It’s closed.”

“When has that stopped us?” Pete asked, a splash breaking the silence that hung like a low fog through the town as Matteo shoved his grandfather into the canal. He stood triumphant for a moment before a whip coiled itself around his ankle and he tumbled into the freezing water as well.

“The… tower… is… closed,” James said, jabbing Pete’s forehead with every word.

“Why did you do that?” Pete said, staring quizzically at his companion. “And wait, how do you even know that the tower is closed?”

James pondered for a moment, wracking his brain for an answer as a loud explosion rippled through the canal sending two bodies flying high into the air. “I don’t know,” he admitted, rubbing at his head. “I’m a little scared now.”

“I feel uneasy as well. I feel like there are eyes in every alcove around us.”

“Alcove? Is that the right word?” James asked, two dull thuds filling the air as Matteo and his grandfather landed upon the backs of the sleeping polar bears.

“What are you on about, James?” Pete said angrily. “They’re alcoves, unless you want to call them nooks and crannies.”

“…”

“…”

“Fuck. We’re in fucking Bruges,” the duo exclaimed, spinning around to tell the others.

Both Matteo and General Meriwether were drenched, their clothes dripping as they stood several steps away from each other. Each had a weapon clutched within their hands. Observers might have metaphorically commented on how Matteo had brought a knife to a gunfight; however the younger Canadian would have questioned the accuracy of that literary device. As he faced down his grandfather and his revolver, Matteo was left clutching at a fountain pen.

“For Tolkien’s sake, will you two get along,” James said, rolling his eyes. “We’ve been thrown mysteriously through time; we haven’t got time for this.”

“Seriously?” Pete added, watching the scene in front of him. “You went with a fountain pen? How the fuck did you even come to that decision? When did it cross your mind; ‘yeah, I’m going with the fountain pen’.”

“The clowns are right. We got some bigger fish to fry, kiddo,” General Meriwether drawled, throwing the gun in his hand to Pete, who promptly groaned in pleasure.

“Pete and I figured out where we are,” James said, Matteo breathing heavily as he nodded. “We’re in Bruges.”

“You’re joking?” Matteo replied.

“Nope, we’re in Bruges alright,” Pete said, still grinning ridiculously at holding the multi-barrelled gun of destruction.

“And my watch be sayin’ we’re in 1302, eighteenth of May to be exact,” General Meriwether added, looking down at a golden pocket watch.

“Wait,” Pete said, his brain slowly grinding back into life. “That’s the day of the Bruges Matins.”

While General Meriwether seemed perfectly unimpressed, the other two gasped at the realisation. They had both read about the Bruges Matins in Pete’s highly successful paper on the death of intergalactic chivalry. The Flemish militia had trawled through the town, killing nearly every Frenchmen in the city in what James would ever describe as one of the single greatest days in history. It had led to the Battle of the Golden Spurs, where the French aristocracy was cut down by a peasant uprising. This was also another of the single greatest days in history according to the Englishman.

“Why would the Machine take us to the day of Bruges Matins?” Matteo asked, looking at his two fellow travellers.

“Maybe there’s a problem in the time stream? Maybe we’re meant to stop something?” James opined.

“Just like in the Battle of Britain and the time travelling Nazis and the pterodactyls,” Pete said.

“You boys are asking the wrong questions,” General Meriwether interrupted. “And when you ask the wrong questions you end up as lost as a bald hedgehog in the middle of winter trying to find his way to some fresh water and good lovin’.”

“What?”

“We be making a lot of ruckus since we arrived here; what with the polar bears and the controlled miniaturise explosions. What you should be askin’ is why ain't no one coming to see what’s happening?”

“That… that’s actually a very good question,” Matteo said, every inch of his face pained to be in agreement with his grandfather. “Where the hell is everyone?”

Without another word, the four men chose separate houses to expertly break into. Several minutes passed by as the two polar bears slowly awoke and wandered off down the street, disappearing into the city of Bruges before the foursome returned back into the now empty road. None of them seemed to care that they had unleashed a pair of massive arctic animals into the heart of a medieval town, their faces pale and drawn as the spoke.

“It’s.”

“Just.”

“Like.”

“A.”

“Fucking.”

‘Fairytale.”

“They all be sleepin’ and none of them seem to be awakin’,” General Meriwether added, reaching into his wrecked sleigh to pulled out a giant belt of weaponry. “Boys, I think there’s something going earthward.”

“Down, there’s something going down,” Matteo sobbed.




***************************************************

How is shit getting actuality? What is about to go earthward? Is there an evil curse coming to life? A French Witch enchanting the town to sleepy inaction? It’s your choice, PM your vote to Kaez as to:

Why is the city's population asleep?

[Kaez]

James drew forth a pocketwatch and snapped it open.

“It's nearly midnight and there's no sign of the Flemish or French anywhere.”

“Which,” Pete added, “has never really been a bad thing before. I'm not used to this.”

Matteo scratched at his face, glancing about at the nearby houses. “The garrisons and the locals are all asleep. Everyone's asleep. The massacre isn't going to happen.”

“Again,” Pete said, “that doesn't tend to be said with much negative connotation.”

Matteo stepped forward, peering into a nearby window. “Without the massacre, though--”

He was interrupted by General Meriwether's thick drawl. “There ain't nothing much stopping the French from winning the war.”

James' face grew immediately stern. “We have work to do,” he said in a voice which each of the three others immediately mistook for that of Christopher Lee, turning to him with matching, quizzical expressions.

“Obviously,” Pete finally said, breaking the awkward moment. “We can't let history go too drastically altered. We have no idea what kind of causality implications there are in this timeline. We have no idea how we got into this timeline in the first place.”

“Sheeit,” Meriwether exclaimed, “I done told you we fell down into one of them there cracks where time froze right on over like a stone rabbit in the headlights on a hockey rink.”

Matteo's face contorted into a terrible caricature of personified rage. “TIME DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY.

[/i]”

“Also, your similes are preposterous,” James quietly mentioned. “Anyway, it was probably the Machine's doing. The whole frozen-time-crack poppycock is likely just another one of our peculiar coincidences. We always seem to manage at least one peculiar coincidence per adventure.”

Pete sighed, “It's true. Like after all the tacos in Tijuana when Matteo's huge belch happened to precisely imitate the mating call of that cave bear that was about to maul our faces off.”

James' voice stammered. “I don't think that was a coincidence. She made it back, and then he did it again. And again. And... and again after that...”

Pete exhaled sharply. “That's true. They... had a moment...”

Matteo's firmly shut his eyes. “I stared into her... and she stared into me...”

“...”

“...”

“... sheeit.”

“... right, well, my point is. It was likely a coincidence. One way or the other, we have to get these Flemish bastards up and moving. There are French to be slaughtered.”

“Somewhere,” Pete said, “there has to be some sign of what might be going on here.”

Just as he concluded that sentence, a horrible wail came from the distance, echoing off of the stone buildings and down the street, straight into the General's tremendous, muscular ears. In one surprisingly fluid movement for a man of his statue, he wrapped the belt of weaponry around his waist and made a sharp turn on his heels, starting a wide-gaited sprint toward the sound.

The trio chased closely behind him, the strange wails continuing and growing louder and closer, and finally around a near corner, some strange, ethereal blue glow seemed to be radiating. The General rounded the sharp bend, calling out for his, “Buttercup!”

There, situated in the middle of the market, was a gigantic, glowing orb. To its left, a polar bear lay flat on its back, legs sprawled into the air, jaw hung agape, snoring. To its right was the other bear, its head bobbing up and down, legs stumbling, and Meriwether chasing after it, calling its name.

“What in the holy mother of...”

“I don't understand...”

“Fucking Bruges.”

Whilst the General occupied himself with the wobbling bear, the three walked slowly and cautiously toward the blue, pulsating sphere. Its surface seemed at once both liquid and electric, flickering and flowing and phosphorescent all at once, lacking any real physical and solid consistency.

Which made it all the stranger when James took notice to a pair of men with wrenches and screwdrivers tinkering at the bottom of it, cursing under their breath, wiping sweat from their brows.

“Uh,” James said firmly.

The men carried on, bickering about 'transfluxuation intradrive-capacitor parallelity sprockets' and 'acute galactonic teraelectronic hyperprocessors'.

Buttercup fell to the ground with a loud thud and a deep, rumbling snore. Meriwether snarled and spit and turned and charged toward the sphere with the kind of face that demanded answers, or else. “What've you done to my bears, goddummit!?”

The smaller of the two engineers glanced up and, upon seeing the General making heavy stomps toward him, immediately vanished, only to appear instantaneously again a few feet behind his present position, falling flat onto his back and scooting himself away. “Piston! Piston, it's one of the things! It's a thing!”

“A human?” a deep voice groaned from the other engineer, seemingly disinterested in the whole event and continuing to twist bolts and hypertwist hyperbolts. “What's he want?”

The small engineer staggered to his feet and struck a strange pose. “I know machine gun! I'll use them, I swear!”

Even in all his conviction, this sentence puzzled Meriwether enough to stop him dead in his tracks. Piston dropped his wrench (and hyperdropped his hyperwrench) with a loud 'clang' (hyperclang) and sighed. “Dammit, Pritz. If you're going to intimidate humans, you need to get a better grasp on their language than that.”

“I haven't cleared my cache in a while, my load times take a while! Lay off, won't you?”

The General, largely ignoring the two at this point, made a firm kick into the glowing ball. The whole thing frizzled and frazzled and sparked and whirled and immediately both engineers turned to him with yelps of protest.

“You're going to wake the whole damn town up!” Piston roared.

“Watch it, watch it!”

Meriwether glanced down at his boot, which had its toe severed off with a clean, straight slice, a bare rim of leather and steel left exposed to the air. He frowned and muttered something about toes colder than a moose tail in an ice-box.

“Just who the hell are you two, exactly?”

Pritz sprung up and pushed a finger into Matteo's face (though his head only reached the Canadian's stomach). “Your worst nightmare, pal!” Up close, Matteo noticed that the man, who looked ordinary from afar, albeit tiny, had a series of faint blue lines running over his skin, seemingly in every direction at once.

“Pritz,” Piston sighed. “Relax.”

The larger of the pair stood and stepped toward the trio. “We're the Engineers. We were programmed into the Machine, by the Machine, to handle any inconsistencies in space or time.” The man pointed a thumb behind himself at the sphere. “And that there's a Charm.”

James yawned, “A Charm?”

Piston nodded. “A recent invention of ours. It reroutes a specific element of the timeline to whatever our desired effect might be. In this case, drowsiness.”

The General fell flat on his ass with a loud, bellowing yawn.

“I still don'tahhhhhhhhhhhh,” Pete yawned, “ahhhunderstand. Why are you here? Why are you doing this?”

“Orders!” Pritz chirped, turning back to his toolset.

“Only,” Piston added, “something seems to have delayed us. The Machine itself is trying to shut the Charm down.”

Pritz whined, “The Machine doesn't like us anymore, does it Piston?”

“Nope,” Piston said with a snort, waltzing back to the tools as well.

Matteo's eyes were fixed shut, his arms stretched out in exhaustion. “Why... doesn't the... Machine like you?”

“We disobeyed it,” said Piston. “The Charm is basically a virus to the Machine, after all.”

James was beginning to feel very uneasy indeed just as the General's head conked against the cobblestone ground with one last mention of being more tired than some sort of noun in some sort of place. “I... I think something... dreadful is going on here... uh, but. I don't. I just. I just think I'll. I'll have a sit down. I think I'd like to just have a nice... sit.”

James leaned back and forth and sloppily landed onto his side.

“Yeaaaaaah,” Matteo yawned. “We could all just... have a seat.”

Piston chuckled. “Not a bad idea.”

Pete dropped his legs out from under himself and fell hard onto his ass. He removed Meriwether's gun from his pocket and looked it over, spinning the chamber. “Funny little thing...”

His vision blurring, his eyelids gaining weight rapidly, he steadied the gun at some vague, uncertain point in the distance. “Bang!” he said and laughed a little, feeling the delirium of such quickly onset sleepiness hitting him hard. Matteo's skull fell flat against the ground.

“James?” Pete said. But he found his eyes simply refused to open. “Fucking,” he heard in James' accent, “...Bruges,” followed by yet another echoing smack.

“Bang!” Pete giggled lightly again, waving the gun about, before collapsing straight backward.

Pritz handed Piston a large screwdriver with an oddly shaped tip. “Think we need to tell Mother about them, huh?”

Piston shook his head and screwed in a long, steel spiral. “Best if she doesn't know anything about them being on our trail. We'll dump them off somewhere – somewhen – desolate. Not a word of this to Mother, yeah?”

Pritz nodded firmly, “Yeah, I got it, I got it.”

Piston huffed. “This damn Machine's putting up a fight.”




***************************************************

When the group wakes up, which of the three members is mysteriously absent?

• James
  
• Pete
  
• Matteo
  

PM your votes to TAED. [/blockquote]

[Matteo ((Taed))]

Matteo sat up, stretched his arms out behind him, cracked his neck sharply to either side, and got to his feet.

“It worries me how accustomed I’ve gotten to waking up after being knocked unconscious,” he said to James, who had just completed the same routine and was now standing beside him.

“I kind of enjoy it,” James replied. “It’s like Christmas morning. You never know what surprises are going to be waiting for you.”

“Yeah, sure. it’s like Christmas morning except for the possibility that you were raped during the night.”

“I dunno, I always got kind of a rapey vibe from Santa anyway. What kind of person professionally watches children sleep, and then decides to spend his leisure time with a bunch of elves? Don’t tell me there’s nothing going on there. Oh hey, Pete’s gone.”

They both looked around.

“So is my grandad.”

They both looked around some more.

“So is Bruges.”

The duo were standing in a cave of dark igneous rock. Two green chemical lights lay on the floor nearby, casting just enough illumination to see by. There was a distinctive lack of cobblestone streets, turgid canals, twinkling fairy lights, convenient alcoves, or any of the other features that Bruges is known for.

“I’m getting really sick of being dumped randomly into new settings without any clear goal or motivation,” Matteo said, meaningfully testing his weight against the Fourth Wall.

There came the sound of footsteps, echoing out from a narrow fissure in the stone. James and Matteo both reached for their holsters instinctively, but found themselves still unarmed. They faced the opening squarely, ready for anything, but relaxed when it was only General Meriwether who emerged from the passage. Or at least they would have relaxed, had Matteo’s grandfather not still been one of the most terrifying things it is possible to meet in a dark and mysterious cavern.

“Ah good, you boys are finally up,” he said, brushing a light dusting of what looked like snow or possibly ash from his bright red jacket. “I thought maybe you was planning on keepin’ that little beauty sleep goin’ all day long. Didn’t wanna wake ya.”

Matteo cringed under this new load of grandfatherly scorn, and James suddenly felt very self-conscious about his flawless porcelain skin. He briefly considered scarring himself up a little in a futile bid to win the old man’s approval.

“Was Pete with you?” Matteo asked. “He wasn’t here when we woke up.”

“The little bald one? Naw, I didn’t see him. Reckon those Engineer fellas held on to him for some reason.” his face darkened like a thunderhead. “Along with my two bears.”

Matteo rubbed at his eyes with the heels of his hands. “None of this makes any sense.” He walked over to one of the cave walls and began scratching out a crude timeline with a piece of rock. “The Machine grabs us from various points in 2011 and sets course for early 14th century Belgium. It gets interrupted somehow en route, and dumps us out in Canada, in 1994. We get back on track and complete the trip to Bruges through--”

“A time crack in the ice,” General Meriwether supplied helpfully.

“Through an unexplained temporal anomaly.” Matteo continued. “There we discover that the Bruges Matins is being averted or postponed by the actions of two ‘Engineers’ who claim to be a part of The Machine’s inner workings, and who—whether their claim is true or not—at least have access to enough hyper-temporal technology to put an entire Medieval city, and us, to sleep. They then presumbaly moved us while we were unconscious and dropped us off …” he turned around and looked at his grandfather. “Where are we, anyway?”

The old man beckoned authoritatively and, once again, James and Matteo found themselves following without really meaning to. They slipped single file though the crack in the wall and into the narrow passageway beyond. The path twisted and turned sharply and they often had to turn sideways to fit through. Luckily Matteo had had his claustrophobia surgically removed by a five-armed neurologist in Zeta Reticuli.

Gradually the passage began to widen, and a glimmer of orange light appeared ahead. The three men moved out of the fissure and found themselves on a narrow ledge on a small cliff face. They shielded their eyes as they adjusted to the sudden brightness, then stared appraisingly at their surroundings. Matteo whistled low.

“On a scale of one to Ragnarok, I’d give this apocalypse a 17.” The landscape that stretched out before them was hard and scorched. A dim yet bloated sun filled much of the umber sky, and pale ash drifted through the air in serpentine columns. The few wiry plants that survived sported cancerous growths and were occasionally vaporized by the sudden and violent formation of a fumerole on the ground beneath them.

“What do you think did this?” James asked.

Matteo rubbed his chin as though deeply considering all the possibilities, then replied simply, “I think it was probably Galactus.”

“Ohmygod!” James whirled on him angrily. “For the last time! It has not now, nor has it ever been, nor is it ever going to be Galactus--!”

“One of these days!” Matteo interjected with equal vigor. “The devastation we find is going to have been caused by Galactus and you are going to look so silly!”

General Meriwether cut both of them off by simply pointing dramatically at the horizon–a gesture that demanded attention.

“Time cracks that way,” he said simply, and set off down the cliff face in the direction he had indicated.

Matteo stared after him incredulously. “What!? Bullshit! It’s not even cold here!”

His grandfather paused and stared back up at him. “Geological time cracks. The volcanic activity builds pressure and causes a separation in--”

“Bullshit I say! Time does not work like that!” Meriwether shrugged and continued walking again. James looked uncertainly at Matteo.

“He did get us to Bruges …” A vein twitched in Matteo’s forehead before he sighed in resignation and set off after his grandfather. James bounded after them. “What’s the plan here? We still don’t know what the heck is going on.”

“Don’t need to,” Meriwether called back. “We just keep scratchin’ at the problem, like a dog worryin’ a bone, and eventually it’ll all come apart and fall into place. For now we just need to focus on finding your friend and my bears. That'll lead us to the Engineers, and that'll lead us to your Machine and whatever is behind this mess. From there everything's sunshine and gravy.”

James threw up his hands in relief. ‘Yes! A clear goal and motivated plot direction! Now we’re getting somewhere.”

"What does sunshine and gravy mean?" Matteo called plaintively.



*******************************************



Here are the options for the next chapter. PM your votes to AGRO.


Pete is the prisoner of the Engineers. Where have they taken him?

• A. The court of the Andromeda Space Gods
  
  
• B. The Cretaceous Period
  
  
• C. Hitler’s bedroom

[James]

Pete awoke in his own puddle of dribble, his nose pressing against a damp, shaggy carpeted floor. He stared at the underside of a desk momentarily, wondering if his dream of Zooey Deschanel was true before he remembered the Engineers they had stumbled across In Bruges. Pushing himself to his knees, his head spinning from the sudden movement, Pete tumbled back down to the floor.

“I hope we can exclude the possibility of rape this time,” Pete said.

There was silence, which fortunately being a description or unscientific measurement of sound is not visible and was therefore not killed on sight. Looking around the room, his companions were nowhere in sight. Instead Pete was standing in an empty, expensively decorated bedroom. A large bed dominated the space, horrible artwork running across the walls. Several ancient artefacts were sitting upon a fine, mahogany desk. All in all, Pete decided as he spun around several times, he had been imprisoned in worse places.

“You guys? You here?” Pete asked to the room at large, feeling for a weapon at his belt. There was nothing. He was unarmed once again. “Why is it always me alone? This better be some excuse for you guys to be planning the best surprise birthday party ever.”

Checking the door and finding it locked, Pete dropped down onto the end of the bed as he rubbed at his forehead. The Engineers had clearly separated them, reducing the chance of them replicating their great escape from the Fourth POW Planet of the Sagan System. Pulling back memories of fairy lights and old buildings and the barely repressible need to utter ‘fuck’ and ‘cunt’ twenty thousand times, Pete struggled to remember what his captors had said. They had mentioned the Mother several times. Were they referring to Mother Teresa? She was still thriving for revenge. Perhaps they meant Mother Earth herself? They had done enough damage to the planet that she might be trying to shut them down completely.

As he pondered upon the Engineers, there was the clicking of a lock and the door swung open. Jumping to his feet, Pete took two steps forward to rush his gaoler before his jaw fell to the floor. Standing in front of him was the embodiment of human evil itself. Foul black hair flopped down close to one of two calamitous eyebrows; a unpropitious moustache sat under two nostrils of malignancy. The man’s own psychopathic mouth fell as he hideously watched Pete stand only several yards away from him.

Holy fuck, Pete’s in Hitler’s bedroom.

“Wer bist du?”

“Umm…” Pete said, his eyes locked upon that Chaplin-induced moustache. “I think I’m lost.”

“Ah, you are ze American?” Hitler said. “Have you been sent as my birthday present? Please, if you will be dropping your pants, ve may begin. I must varn you, ze British are in possession of one of my testicles.”

“No, I’m not – wait, that’s true?” Pete asked, stumbling several steps back. His pants threatened to start the terraforming process in self-defence.

“Yes, ve do not like to talk about it.”

“Right, yes, well,” Pete stammered, feeling the bedroom wall press up against his back. “I’m afraid there’s been some terrible mistake. I’m not your birthday present. Actually, wait. What year is it?”

“1934.”

“That’s really too soon to kill you,” Pete grimaced. “Unfortunately.”

“I am begging your pardon?” Hitler said, his heinous eyebrows converging together. “Killing me?”

“Don’t worry; you’ll be taking care of that later.”

Grabbing at a gun that rested upon a dresser, Hitler jabbed the pistol in Pete’s general direction, muttering furious words at speed. “You vill explain yourself, American! Or I vill shoot you.”

“I’m lost,” Pete blurted out, lifting his hands into the air. “I was imprisoned by tiny, possible inter-dimensional engineers. I really have no idea why I’m here.”

“Ah, yes, the little people. I know of them. Vould you like some help to escape them? I find them troublesome,” Hitler said, lowering the gun.

“Actually, that would be great, thanks,” Pete said, before his hand slapped against his face, clamping his mouth shut. No. I did not just thank Hitler. I did not just accept help from Hitler. No one saw that. I’m in the clear. Nobody will ever know.

“Here, let us leave,” Hitler said, turning back to the door.

Seizing his chance, Pete rushed forward with his fists raised in the air. The right hand sailed through the air, catching the back of Hitler’s Tartarus-created head and the man tumbled to the ground. Kneeling down, the left fist collided with the Furher’s loathsome cheek and the room was filled with a sickening crunch of a malevolent jaw being broken. Blood dripped from between his Satan-crafted lips.

“That’s for Vera Menchik,” Pete said, plucking the gun from the ground. “You Nazi fucking cunt.”

“vvoo?” Hitler mumbled through a bloodied, base lip.

“Vera Menchik,” Pete repeated. “The finest female chess player the world has ever known.”

Without another word, Pete raced from the room, leaving the flagitious Hitler bleeding upon the floor. If the Engineers had imprisoned him in Hitler’s bedroom they had a reason for it and they would be returning. He had to move and quickly. At least now, Pete thought as he squeezed the gun within his hand, he was armed and ready. It was Die Hard time, Third Reich style.




*****************************************

Who does Pete stumble across first in his Die Hard re-enactment? PM your votes to KAEZ

[/u].

• A: Matteo, James and General Meriwether; fresh from their trip through the time crack.
  
• B: The Engineers and their next diabolical plan.
  
• C: The Hitler Cabinet.
  

[/blockquote]

[Kaez]

“You put a GPS tracker on Pete?”

“Well, in Pete. And it’s not just an ordinary global positioning system, it’s more like a… space-time… universal… projected imaging display.”

“That’s stupid.”

Matteo swung open an early 2000’s-model flip phone and a holographic projection of the earth hovered a few inches above it. “It’s not stupid, it’s an amazing piece of technology that is about to save this whole adventure from ruin at the hands of a series of seemingly completely unrelated villains and plot twists.”

“…No, I mean that’s STU—“

“Shh.” The holographic globe zoomed in on Europe, then Germany, then Berlin. A clock appeared just above the map projection, its digital display flying backward until it stopped on 1934.

“Pete’s in Berlin? In 1934?”

Matteo flipped the phone shut. “Well that’s where the chip is, so technically all I can say for sure is that Pete’s left asscheek is in Berlin in 1934.”

“SHEEIT, that's where he's at, then!” the General laughed. “Like momma – yer great-grandmummy, Matty -- always useta say, ‘Benny, you can be justabout anythin’ you wanna be in this here life, but you can’t never get away from yer own arse.’”

“Matteo,” James said, “you come from a very interesting family.”

“NOBODY EVER SAID THAT. HIS MOTHER NEVER SAID THAT!”

“Awwww, quit yer houndin’ an’ jump into this here timecrack, we gotta’ go rescue yer friend from the Nazis."

Matteo blinked, staring into the whirling void of the geological splintering in the spacetime continuum. He could vaguely make out a blurry Berlin through the ripples of the portal. “You’re telling me this portal just so happens to go to the exact time and place that we only found out we need to go to ten seconds ago?”

James' eyes narrowed, “Yeahhhhh, even in the light of the countless unlikely things that have happened to us over the years, the probability of this one does seem kind of Deus-ex-machina-astronomical.”

The General scoffed. “Sheeit, boys, ya’ll are more skeptical than a swamp full'a ag-nostic junebugs on a hot summer day. Ya'll got more questions than a tree full'a owls all hoo-"

Matteo threw himself into the time-crack with all of the desperation of a suicide jumper.

James sighed as his friend disappeared into the void. “Come on, General. Let’s go kill some Nazis to rescue our friend from the whims of the robotic servants of a great cosmic Machine.”

“Sheeit.”


***


Pete stood, hovering over the bloody and wounded body of Adolph Hitler, staring down a long hallway full of iron eagles and swastikas.

He was suddenly overwhelmed by a strange feeling that somehow two or three years had passed in just the last few seconds. Tufts of hair sprouted from his scalp and a beard fell from his face. He looked over his body in confusion. Was that a wedding ring?

BOOM!

A great explosion shook the foundations of the whole building, dust falling from the wooden boards and doorframes. Several uniformed Nazis peeked their heads out of various doorways down the length of the hall, searching for an explanation of the sudden tremor.

Their eyes fell on Pete, who was stood over Hitler’s body, wearing arctic furs and a hyperbulletproof vest he won at a carnival on a planet near Gliese 1. He thought that he probably looked slightly suspicious.

He was sure he did when they drew their guns.

And so he did the only thing he could think of. With great strain, he mustered every bit of high-school German he could remember.

“Uh," he stammered, "Hallo! Ich bin Peter … wie geht’s?”

A great German silence settled over the hallway. He hadn’t really figured that would work. He lifted a heel to slowly step backward and prayed that he could find a way out of Hitler's bedroom when suddenly the silence was interrupted.

“…hallo, Peter! Ich bin Heinrich! Ich bin sehr gut, danke, danke! Und Sie? Wie geht's?”

A small, rodent-like man with thick, rounded glasses smiled welcomingly.

Pete nearly choked.

“Uh… gut…” He swallowed hard as the rest of the Nazis slowly turned to Heinrich with looks of bewilderment, lowering their weapons. “Uh," Pete strained to recall even one other phrase from his German classes. "Was machen Sie… in der Sommer… gerne?”

Heinrich’s smile widened. “Ach, wissen Sie, ich mag Bücher lesen am Strand! Ich mag es, durch das Wasser, bekomme ich eine sehr schöne Bräune und die Sonne ist sehr gut für Sie, wissen Sie? Ich habe oft Urlaub im Sommer, auch wenn es schon eine Weile. Sag mal, was machst du hier? Kann ich Ihnen etwas? Ein Getränk, vielleicht?”

Pete drew in a long breath as the strange, confused expressions of a dozen Nazis turned to him for a response. Heinrich's smile was so sincere.

“...you seem like a nice guy, ya’ little genocidal bastard, but I’m afraid American high-school didn’t prepare me for this particular event. I’m going to go ahead and run away now.”

As the looks of increasingly profound confusion sunk over the hallway, Pete slammed the door and bolted away from the doorway and back through Hitler's bedroom. Bullets shattered the door, splinters of wood exploding and falling over Adolph’s unconscious body.

Pete threw his elbow into a window, shattering the glass and hoisted himself into it, preparing to climb out into the night air – when he heard in the distance horrible screams of pain, a sudden cessation of gunfire, and a sweet and comforting sound that it seemed he had not heard in a long, long time.

“Sheeeeeeeit.”

Pete dropped from the windowsill and ran back to the hallway. Blood pooled across the floor, Nazi bodies beaten to a pulp scattered about. James kicked Heinrich Himmler in the teeth, his skull bouncing against the floorboard. Matteo stepped into the hallway, fists dripping with with fascist blood, and peered the length to Pete. He glanced at Hitler’s bruised face and then up to his lost companion.

“…you grew a beard?”

Pete shook his head without explanation. “I think there was some kind of disruption in the spacetime continuum.”

James dislodged his boot from Himmler’s face. “Really? You think there might have been? You’re suddenly years older, in Berlin, in 1932, and you think – yeah, maybe there might have been a disruption? Maybe?”

Pete frowned. “Nice to be back with my two favorite fucking people.”

Matteo stepped over a few corpses and knelt down by Hitler. “No time to bicker, we need to focus on not disturbing Earth’s timeline. If we alter things too severely, the consequences could be incredible. You don’t want to fuck with causality, man.”

He put his fingers against Hitler’s neck. “He’s still alive, thank God.”

James’ eyes widened. “Did you just thank God that Hitler wasn’t dead?”

The General pushed his way through the corpses and into the hallway. “Ya’ll killed Hitler?”

Matteo shook his head, “No, but I think Himmler’s dead. That’s enough to change things pretty significantly. We need to get back to our time and sort this whole mess out ASAP.”

James drew in a deep breath. “I have to agree. We need our weapons and we need to confront this Machine directly – whatever it is, I’m goddamn tired of it.”

Pete stepped over Hitler. “That’s a fine plan and all, but how are we supposed to get back? …come to think of it, how the Hell did you guys get here in the first place? And how’d you even know where I was?”

James’ eyes fell briefly to Pete’s ass.

“No time to explain,” Matteo said, turning to his grandfather. “What about another warp in spacetime?”

The General ‘Bah!’d. “You can’t just make a time crack willy-nilly, son. Time cracks’re perfectly nat'ral events. It’s a part’a geology, and ain’t none gonna’ just show up when it’s convenient for ya’.”

“You’re telling me we’re stuck in 1930’s Germany?” Pete sighed.

Matteo paced in the pooled blood. “No, no, come on. There’s got to be a way…”

Pete ran his fingers through his air. “We’ve got none of our tools, none of our weapons… the Machine takes everything away every time it transports us.”

James jumped at the words. “The Machine!”

The rest turned to him.

“The Machine! It can transport us from any place and time to anywhere and when else, right? It stole us out of the middle of what we were doing and dropped us in 90’s Canada, then Bruges, and then Germany – just at the right place and time to find Pete after those little robots transported him. It’s clearly trying to help us accomplish something.”

Matteo rubbed his chin. "It does seem to have a plan in mind."

Pete’s brow raised. “So we just need to, what, trust the mysterious metaphysical machine to transport us to wherever it decides we ought to be?”

James shrugged, “Well, no. I was thinking we could just… ask it.”

Matteo’s expression dropped flat. “Just.. ask it...”

James nodded. “Yeah, you know, but polite. Something like…” His voice raised to a formal and highly enunciated tone, “Dear Machine, please take us to... y’know, wherever.”

Then it did.


***


James had not anticipated that his explanation itself would succeed, and so was quite surprised to find, after a refreshing vomit, that he and his three companions were standing right in the middle of Wherever.

“Well sheeit.”

Pete wobbled to his knees. “Oh, God. That’s so unpleasant. Everything is so unpleasant and I hate it. Ohhh, oh God.” His head spun and vertigo spun around his spinal column like an midget stripper.

Matteo had been planted face-first on the ground and, after a few seconds, gathered the energy to roll himself over. “Where the hell are we now?”

“Wherever,” James muttered. "Obviously." He analyzed his surroundings and did his best to discern where “wherever” actually was. As best as he could figure, it was probably somewhere on the Eurasian Plain. Several species of very ordinary-looking trees were in the distance and low hills of grass spread out between the four of them and anything of any note.

Pete wiped vomit from his face with the back of his sleeve. “Looks like… I have no idea, actually. Somewhere profoundly and radically uninteresting."

James nodded, “Yeah, I’ll be the first to admit I have no idea where we are or why we ended up here, but it's not much to look at."

The General huffed. “Ya’ll better call on that Machine o’ yours and tell it to send us back to the Great North, then. I’m about as fed up with all this time travelin’ nonsense as I can be fer one day.”

“No!” Matteo groaned, pulling himself from the ground. “It sent us here for a reason. We’ve got something to do. It told us… it said we had something to do.” Matteo held his head; it throbbed in pain. “The Machine knows what it’s doing.”

James turned to Matteo. “Honestly, Matteo, I hear what you’re saying, I really do. But I’m ninety percent sure that thing is just fucking with us at this point. Nazis, Bruges, your bewildering grandfather… it’s taking us to all of the things we hate. It’s not trying to help us. It's not our friend. It saved David Yates. Don't forget that."

The General grumbled. Pete sighed, peering into the horizon. “Gotta say, I’m with James. The sooner we destroy this Machine, and those little robot engineers, and frankly everything to do with this, the better off everything will be. This isn't getting us anywhere. And we've prevented the Bruges Matins, killed Himmler, and who knows what else. It's too much."

“Fine,” Matteo said. “Regardless of whether its plan is to save the world or annoy the piss out of us, asking the Machine to teleport us somewhere else isn’t the way to go. And frankly, I’m literally sick of all this time travel. Let’s find a town or something and recoup. Come up with a plan to destroy this Machine."

“Fair enough.”

“Fine by me.”

“Ye’up.”

The four of them stood quietly for a few seconds, scanning the horizon.

“So, uh. Mordor, Gandalf, is it left or right?” James asked.

Matteo scratched his head. “I don’t, uh… OH! OH!”

The rest of the party turned to look at Matteo, who pulled a flip-phone from his pocket and swung it open. “I’ll just track Pete’s chip to see when and where we are.”

James’ voice took on an optimistic tone. “Ah! Perfect!”

Pete’s brow twisted in confusion. “Wait, my what?” His left asscheek twitched slightly.

Matteo’s phone displayed a small holographic location and date. He stared at it for a few seconds, his expression hollow, and flipped it shut.

James’ neck craned. “….well?! Where are we?”

Matteo gulped.

“We're in Hungary.”

[James]

There are moments in your life when you’re plunging stomach instantly lets you know you’ve made a massive mistake. Moments like stepping out into oncoming traffic or accidentally calling your mother-in-law a dumb bint. Those moments are not remotely relevant right now. To contemplate on them would be to consider the dangers of falling on a pillow while being chased by a pack of angry space zombies with Nazi sympathies. The dashing trio of adventurers hadn’t stepped out into traffic. They hadn’t even, unfortunately, called someone a bint. What they had done, or more accurately what the Machine had done, was transport them to a country where the entire ruling elite, without dissent, had blacklisted them. Unarmed and lost, the Triumvirate had been dumped on the field of a country where they had fought a Dark God and his Chief Erebomancer, blew up half of St. Stephen Cathedral, been attacked by revenants and, let not anyone forget, saw Matteo ‘I’m Great at Fighting Minotaurs’ DiGiovanni defeated by a minotaur, who may or may not have taken advantage of an unusually well-placed griffon.

“Well,” James coughed, surveying the empty grassy field. “This is probably a bit not good.”

Both Matteo and Pete nodded, already adopting a three point tactical formation. They made sure not to stand in the copious amounts of vomit. “How soon do you think it’ll take them to know we’re here again?” Pete asked.

“Probably not till James blows up another cathedral.”

“Or Pete lets out an army of revenants.”

“Or Matteo gets his ass kicked by a single Minotaur.”

“It was flying!”

“Sheeit, boys,” General Meriwether said, hands clasped behind his back, rocking on the balls of his feet. “What got you so fired up and wetting your pants like a couple of infants before shoggoth hunting season? So y’all in Hungary? We’ll kill some Soviets and head on home.”

Matteo’s self-restraint snapped audibly, the noise echoing throughout the Hungarian countryside as he wheeled upon his grandfather. “Okay, first of all, Soviets? Are you permanently stuck in some sort old-timey bubble? There have been no Soviets in these parts for decades! Secondly, there's no such thing as shoggoth hunting season because we killed them all, not you, me! Finally, this is where it all began! Hungary was our first case.”

“No, it wasn’t,” Pete interjected before another inter-generational family conflict broke out.

“What?”

“Wasn’t it something to do with Richard Nixon and Thomas Beckett?” Pete said. “You told David Mitchell about it.”

Matteo ‘Bah’d’ in such a way that his grandfather gave him a curt nod of approval. “That was a horrible origin story! It was clearly something thrown together by someone panicking because they had no clue what they were doing.”

“True,” James shrugged.

“Look, even if it was daft, it’s still been written. It’s part of the story, it’s in the narrative, for the sake of continuity, I think we should stick with that origin story.”

“Continuity, fontinuity,” Michael said, waving his hand dismissively. “Our origin story is now Hungary.”

James coughed, drawing the attention of the bickering duo. “As much as I hate to disrupt you two, but I have a question. Does Hungary have a native menacing man in black suit population that frolics in the wild?”

“Why do y- oh.”

The previously deserted field was now dotted with tall men, all dressed in tailored black suits and wearing dark pairs of sunglasses. Some moved with ease through the grass, striding confidently across the ground as they closed the gap between themselves and the bickering blacklisted group. Others moved as if they were in a video game, dropping to the floor and crawling whenever a set of eyes rested on them. The former group rolled their eyes at the latter, glancing almost apologetically at Pete as one of their numbers hid behind a tree. ‘I’m so sorry about this, they’re new,” the glance said, ‘in fact, that one there is my wife’s nephew. I said he could join the secret service just for birthday sex.’ Pete waved his hand, nodding sympathetically. ‘It’s okay, absolutely fine, no need to apologise, you just can’t get the help these days.’

“What do we do?” James muttered out of the corner of his mouth. His hand rested where Sweet Victoria should have sat.

“I’m not going to Hungarian prison again,” Matteo said, his eyes darkening.

“So you boys got into some governmental soup that was too hot for your tongues?” General Meriwether asked, pushing his way to stand between the advancing suits and the Triumvirate. “You best get out of here then, leave it to me.”

“And head to where?” Matteo asked.

“Village nearby, two miles east, nestled by a small river, population of less than 500, two taverns, a brothel, several cocker spaniels and its main form of exports are snow globes,” the General said, sniffing. When confronted with the wide-eyed stares of his temporary travelling companions, he added, “I can smell it on the breeze.”

Before Matteo could break out into violent sobs, the silence of the field was broken by the roar of whirring motors. A black dot appeared on the horizon, growing slowly larger until everyone could spot the spinning blades of the helicopter and the men huddled inside the machine. There was a low hum, barely audible over the blades, and the field was bathed in light, a spotlight pointed on the group of four that had been surrounded by the suited men. Pete and Matteo shielded their eyes, stumbling back after being temporarily blinded. James blinked in surprise. The natural light and heat from his hair meant he was perfectly capable of staring into the sun; a tiny spotlight wasn’t going to cause discomfort. General Meriwether damn well growled at the light, like he might have done at a supernova for ruining his morning walk.

“Please be standing where you are,” a thickly accented voice echoed through a megaphone. “Upon the orders of our Hungary President, we be arresting you now.”

“You boys get going and make sure I have a whisky waiting at that tavern once I’m done with this lot,” the General drawled, a knife tucked in either hand. He didn’t hold them pointing outwards. No, stabbing was just thrusting and thrusting was for procreation, the General always said. Instead, the knife ran down parallel with the General’s arms, the blade pointing outward. Every swipe of his arm would result in a slit throat.

“Wait, hang on,” James said, holding up a finger. The suited men waited out of politeness when confronted with such an academic stance. “The Machine confiscated all our weapons with every ‘jump’. Where did those knives come from?”

The General tapped at his moustache.

“You hid them behind your impeccably groomed facial hair?”

“Sheeit, that would be stupid, boy,” the General laughed.

“They were hidden under your top lip?” Pete offered.

The General turned to his grandson, sighing. “Tell me how my grandson ended up working with two fools as thick as otters trying to make a dam out of the world’s finest goat cheese?”

Before the pair could take offence at what they thought may have been an insult, and for all they knew Matteo's grandfather held cheese-dam making otters in high regards, their colleague offered an explanation. “He’s not, umm, well, he’s saying his moustache is the knives, the knives are his moustache,” Matteo grimaced. “Each individual bristle is in fact a sharp weapon.”

Pete and James stared with slack jaws at the General as a cough echoed through the megaphone. “If you please be putting them in custard now,” the man in the helicopter said. A suited man glanced once more at Pete, his skin faintly red, blushing in a way that said ‘look, this is really embarrassing, but he’s taking classes and you’ve got to admit that custody and custard does sound kind of similar’. Pete turned to shrug before he threw himself to the ground, the knife of General Meriwether flying over his head toward the helicopter. The metal struck the windscreen and a small crack emerged upon the glass. The pilot look concerned for a moment and then sighed in relief.

The helicopter blew up in a giant ball of fire.

“Damn,” General Meriwether grinned, smelling the burnt air. “Smells just like your Granny Reginald, what a woman.”