Chapter 6: The Dint

It had been a rough night.

As to how the night was rough or in any way existent in a place like this, no one could say. Except perhaps, for the Landlord.

The place: The Dint, universe’s most popular bar, the time: Never.

Whether or not the night could exist in a dimension without any sun, or indeed, sky, did not matter. It had been rough.

Standing by what looked like a window, one of The Dint’s owners listlessly swirled his coffee around and around in his mug.

Business wasn’t the problem, business was great. Yogu felt that, somehow, he was the problem. He was living an ersatz existence, looking out a fake window at fake stars, that much like him, were only kidding themselves.

Yogu was willing to bet Mr. Soak never had problems like this, but then, all Mr. Soak had to do to solve any problem that presented itself was smile, and when next you looked the problem would have mysteriously disappeared. But then again, that was Mr. Soak’s way, not Yogu’s. Yogu did use his smile as a frequent problem solver, but his problems usually disappeared of their own free will at that point. Instead of with a muffled scream when nobody was looking.

Yogu tapped impatiently on the side of the shape shifter he was paying to be a window, in order to indicate that he wished to see a mirror. With a reproachful creak, it obliged.

Yogu was tall and svelte. His shoulder length blonde hair always glimmered faintly, even in complete darkness.

He was wearing a tasseled leather vest with a green t-shirt underneath it sporting the catchy euphemism: “Let’s Experiment!” above a picture of two hands holding a beaker and vial, pouring the contents of one into the other.

He had on baggy jeans and green high tops with rainbow laces on one foot and black laces on the other. A red and black striped scarf was wrapped casually around his neck. He commanded a pair of blue sunglasses with round frames to cover the nature of his eyes, which no being, live or dead, had ever seen.

Yogu got along with everybody. Often, whether everybody knew it or not. Beings from the far edges of the universe (where no light could reach and sanity was a detractor on your resumé) who had names like Ur-Kekk The Planet Killer and Yrthll Samedi The Space Time Continuum Devourer often waved hi and said “Hey Yogu, what’s shakin?” Even if they had never heard of him before or couldn’t produce recognizable human sound due to their proboscis.

Space pirates with more scar tissue than actual skin, mystic barbarians whose blades could shave atoms off a molecule, baby eating, slave dealing, gun toting, throat cutting bad guys (really, really bad guys) would more often than not beckon to Yogu and companionably offer to buy him a drink.

Yogu really only had one hope of ending his ennui, and that was the Event Horizon that The Dint was currently orbiting.

Event horizons are the subtle lines that celestial bodies cross when big change is afoot. An event horizon can range from the moment a star enters a black hole’s gravitational pull to when a pimply teenager has the courage to ask a pretty girl out on a date. Event Horizons meant important goings-on and various sudden happenings.

Glancing briefly at the meteorological calendar pinned up on his useless cork bulletin board, Yogu noted darkly that the damn thing never told you whether or not the “big changes” were for better or worse. Or who Venus was. Or why he had seven houses.

With the current going rates on inter dimensional Real Estate, Yogu simply counted his blessings and thanked whoever it is you thank for ownership of a lucrative multidimensional tavern when you’ve alienated just about every other pantheon with your inauspicious comments while wearing the lamp shade. As for the money he received from his customers, he need thank no one but himself for that one. Thankfully, there was no god of marketing…yet.

The Dint was the most popular bar, not by customer frequency, but by demographic.

It was simple really, The Dint occupied a pocket dimension all its own, and the entrance acted something like a wind sock, pointing towards any particularly large galactic calamity and catching whatever fell out.

Blinking his undrunk coffee out of existence, Yogu got up and left the office through a door that wasn’t there.

The room was divided into two halves. The first half was dim and smoky, more of a tavern than a bar. A number 1 of greasy wooden tables dotted the grimy floor. The tables looked like they had been thrown together in a High School shop class using driftwood from the Titanic and the floor boards of the windmill in the Frankenstein movie. You know, the one that burned down.

All of the chairs in the tavern half were specially designed with a unique concave shape to the back. They had probably been devised with the purpose of being extremely comfortable in mind. They weren’t.

However, one useful feature for the shadier patrons of The Dint was that the chairs provided you with your own little pools of shadow, making the achievement of anonymity easier than buttering bread. Which the patrons of the darker half of The Dint were very happy about.

On each of the tables themselves, a yellow lantern hung from a rusty chain attached to a slim rod that protruded at a sixty degree angle from its weighted base. The lantern provided very little light and the chain squeaked terribly. The overall impression was a troop of ghosts sitting down and having lunch in the middle of a very foggy midnight…next to an oil factory…in L.A.

Just the way Yogu liked it.

The other half of The Dint was such a sharp contrast that several people had mentally pricked themselves just thinking about it, and then died immediately from cranial hemorrhaging. It didn’t really matter. Everyone came to the Dint. Even if they did daft things like hang around ouija boards and pretend to be some poor sap’s rich old aunt, who was having a latté at the food court in lower Acheron, anyway.

The lighter half of The Dint was illuminated with florescent bulbs that, frankly, were just as creepy as the tavern’s lanterns, if not more so. It was also decorated with contemporary art.

A crescent moon clock, lit with neon tubing and roman numerals carved in gold, ticked away as if it might never stop. It probably wouldn’t. Over in the corner, a jukebox blared jazz, disco, and really old rock and roll at volumes that surpassed the megahertz Event Horizon (the exact point in time at which your neighbors move to a new zip code). If the song had saxophones, cow bells, and/or electric piano in it, chances were good that it was playing.

Just the way Mr. Soak liked it.

The bartop itself was split into two halves according to wherever you happened to be standing. On the one side, it was made out of oak, sawdust and grime. (The former being a mere one third to the latter two components making it up.) On the other half, it was made out of tasteful formica and tasteless vinyl.

Just the way they liked it.

Walking at the pace of a man who has just gotten away with murder again, Yogu reached the front of The Dint. He looked up at the little silver bell that hung over the door. Or rather, didn’t. Like many of the portals Yogu had to deal with on a daily basis, The Dint’s front door did not exist. Nevertheless, the bell would tingle whenever somebody entered. Yogu was particularly proud of this. The bell would ring, and the customer would appear, and that would be that.

Actually, they didn’t so much appear so much as split into their base molecules as their atoms flowed along straits of space time, coasting on nebulas and cosmic thermals to reform after billions of years in their exact original positions.

This process took about five minutes.

Many would say this was utterly impossible.

At any one time there could be thousands, even millions of customers in The Dint, all drinking and eating merrily with no problems at all. There was never a shortage of seats. No one ever asked why.

Many would also say this was equally impossible.

Measuring his steps by iambic pentameter, Yogu strolled over to the one part of his bar that was not his. The Karaoke stage. Yogu had been against it from the start, but Mr. Soak had insisted. And Mr. Soak had a way of insisting that made you quite dizzy and unwilling to stand up for several hours.

The Karaoke stage, by design, was used for Karaoke when some of the customers began to get extremely drunk. Occasionally, inter dimensional bands would show up and play a quick gig before flying off again with their mystical powers. The most frequent bands were Oingo Boingo, Motörhead, Pink Floyd, Johnny Cash and Billy Joel. 2

Many would say that this was patently ridiculous. And that the author is a total whacko, and that they would rather eat a sandwich composed of tiny, vital organ devouring, nano scopic robots, than continue reading this notional tale.

Nobody was playing tonight, though. It had been a quiet night overall. All that was about to change, very, very soon. Though the environment would probably be even less inviting to any prospective bands.

The Dint was a place without worries, you came here to wait, sometimes indefinitely. That’s all The Dint was, really, a glorified waiting room.

However, unlike most waiting rooms, this one was intended to exist. Yogu had purchased the space and the Waiting Room mentality, so that he could have a bar that could hold an infinite number of bureaucrats and time dipped in jelly. However, instead of filling his room with misery, he filled it with brew, food, and entertainment. And consequently, customers.

Ironically, though the tavern half of The Dint was frequented by the less savory half of life in the universe, it was the lighter half that made people feel more uncomfortable. At least the dark half didn’t have incongruous paintings of glassy eyed clowns or dogs playing poker.

Which is where Mr. Soak came in.

Mr. Soak had agreed to give Yogu a loan for his establishment, on the condition that he be allowed to do whatever he wanted with half of it.

Just as there must be balance in all things, just as the bar had its two halves, Yogu had his own balance, his own control. That balance came in the form of Mr. Soak.

Mr. Soak now held the position of dish washer, which was how he like it. He wore an apron the color, texture and toughness of a shark. (not just the skin, but the unstoppable muscle and some of the teeth as well.) Mr. Soak’s apron would stop anything short of a meteor. (It had in fact survived a meteor strike once, but that had been quite a while ago.)

No one was really sure about the exact nature of Mr. Soak. He had short, wiry brown hair, most of which was covered by the hat he wore. It was a red baseball cap with a pair of silver wings sewn on to the sides. His eyes, ooohhh, his eyes. They were black as pitch and seemed not so much to reflect what they saw but were rather holes into somewhere else altogether.

His teeth were like chips of gray ice, each one was half an inch wide and one inch high, with centimeter gaps between each one, and perfectly squared corners and angles. He always had on a pair of worn out gray tennis shoes that had seen better days…in the Jurassicperiod. His pants were somewhere between deep sea fish and deep space asteroid in color. They were baggy and covered in pockets filled with all manner of OMITTED FROM TEXT.He always wore the same shirt. It was white with a red and blue spiral tie-dye pattern, and had a Yin/Yang symbol at the center.

Anyone who went into the kitchen always saw the same thing: Mr. Soak, up to his elbows in scalding, scummy, soapy water. A smile on his face and a tap in his foot. An old mini radio would be sounding stentorian Sotto Vocce into the room.

The oven, big enough to roast whole elephants inside of, was never lit. The massive refrigerator, that could have started a second ice age by being accidentally left open, was always empty. The ceiling fan overhead whirred along in time to the swinging of a single, yellow bulb that was constantly flickering, attached to a threadbare rubber and copper wire. Few who went into the kitchen ever came out happy.

Or, indeed, at all.

Mr. Soak was the paragon opposite to Yogu. Even those denizens of the lower Hells, who would normally be right at home with someone like Mr. Soak, found him very off putting. Mr. Soak was quite all right with this. He didn’t care either way, so long as no one entered his kitchen. 3

Despite its clandestine origins, the food and drink was always at the perfect temperature and delivered within seconds, often before you had ordered it, the other half of Mr. Soak’s deal.

No one quite knew the exact details of the deal between Yogu and Mr. Soak. One thing was sure though, Yogu didn’t go into the kitchen, and Mr. Soak never came into the bar.

The lighter half of the room was currently occupied by a number of people. Three of them being Hugh, Wrath, and Timothy. Currently they were all arguing about something, Wrath coldly and disdainfully, Hugh sarcastically, and Timothy bewilderedly.

“Listen, what I meant by arachnids was…uhh…” 4

By the light of his burning bridges, Timothy fumbled for another match.

“Please, do continue,” drawled Hugh, waiting expectantly for the innards to fly.

Wrath smoldered quietly.

Just then, a barman roughly the size and weight of a baby killer whale sidled up. His vibrantly orange hair was slicked back under his little paper hat and his beard of the same color was waxed to a point.

“Dyer food iss heeerr serss.” he slurred in a voice like an Aztec tar pit reserved for the human sacrifice of those whose immortal sin had been gluttony.

He put a meal down in front of each member of the party.

A chocolate milk shake and some pizza for Timothy (it was the last real food he had eaten before being sent to the asylum, where his breakfast, lunch, dinner, 5 had all come at the same time each day in the form of a hypodermic syringe), a whole turkey and a keg of mead for Hugh, the self proclaimed barbarian, who began gnawing and guzzling away sans utensils, and what looked like a purple green lobster and a seemingly normal mug filled with what looked like ordinary steam (as long as you didn’t look too close) for Wrath.

Their feud forgotten in the wake of the sudden deliciousness set before them, they chewed in silence for some time. Timothy wordlessly pondered the appearance of the barman. Something about him seemed very familiar…

After they had finished, Wrath and Hugh proceeded to tell Timothy about themselves, their home, and trivial things like that.

They told of Edingar. Of how it had existed alongside Cosmosse (Earth) for some time. Of how Edingar’s early philosophers had discovered the other world’s existence and how they had named it after a fellow philosopher who had imagined himself inside a metaphorical glass box and promptly suffocated to death, not realizing until that final moment that he was a latent psychic.

Cosmosse; “The world we can see but can’t touch.”

They also told him of how, a little later, some more radical philosophers had built a sort of telescope to watch their sister world at a more in-depth vantage point. Of how the philosophers had driven themselves absolutely mad watching people just like them slowly but surely tear their world apart. Pollution and famine were concepts most alien to a world born with magic.

They told of how, a little while after this, the most radical philosophers, that money could pay to keep away from civilized areas, had gotten together to decide how to put Cosmosse out of its misery. 6

When the truth got out, everyone decided that they had an opinion on the matter, and eventually (as these things are more inevitable than even Death and Texas), 7 a war started. A global war. The war to end all wars.

The war proceeded quickly until eventually the once perfect Edingar mirrored its run down counterpart. At some point in all the chaos, the philosophers who had managed to stay alive obtained the Magitechnology to punch a hole in the dimensional membrane separating Edingar from Cosmosse. And this was how Wrath and Hugh had found themselves on Timothy’s world.

It would be interesting for the trio to know that the philosophers had used their technology at the exact same moment Blueberry had first detonated the anti matter. Yet still, Logic demands a little more explanation. All right then. You see, the anti matter particle was still quite small, and although powerful enough to leave a lasting crater and and an even longer lasting parade of monochromatic ribbons on the back of people’s trucks, it was nowhere near strong enough to destroy the whole of Alaska, let alone the world. But we’re not taking into account the fact that at that moment, rabid philosophers had opened a rift through Time and Space, two things that definitely don’t like to be touched. Not to mention, the epicenter of the explosion was an apartment frequently used by a certain Demonologist to conjure Homunculi and various phantasms, 8 which left a serious thin spot in Reality’s fabric. The end result was…well, BOOM just doesn’t do it justice.

There was a moment of contemplative silence and then it was Timothy’s turn to soliloquize.

Timothy told them of how he had been wrongly accused of killing his best friend, who had been the cause of Timothy’s malformed appendage in the first place, how ? had outbid death row for Timothy on the Black Market and carted him away to Goldstein’s Memorial Asylum, where he had been kept from age nineteen to fifty four and experimented on for valuable data on his magnificent arm, which was then used to genetically engineer frankensteinian monstrosities whose only purpose was to make Timothy feel more dead inside.

He also told of how he had met Professor Blueberry and instantly despised him, how he had met the autistic Merrick and instantly fallen in love with her, how he and Merrick had escaped with the help of a man named Gregor (and Gorger, the other half of his split personality), and how he had been recaptured after some time of hiding out in the nearby forest, 9 how the catatonic Merrick had not survived ?’s cruel punishment for trying to escape, how Timothy had been made to watch, how Merrick had died without a word, how Timothy had been unable to watch, how he had escaped again when ? went to court (for her annual pre-lawsuit bribe to her good friend the “honorable” Judge Kennedy, no relation, in case of any…accidents) and left him alone for the day. Which pretty much summed it up right there.

Meanwhile, several degrees of social conscience lower, things weren’t going quite so swimmingly.

In a corner booth in the darker half of The Dint, Atropal nudged his gourmet Italian dish of cauterized pasta and scorched lobster with a stump and sighed resignedly.

Since going to Hell, Atropal’s personal doctor had prescribed a diabolic diet well, not so much of a diet as a curse really of

LET NO FOOD STUFFS CROSS THIS WICKED MAN’S MOUTH HOLE WITHOUTETH TURNING TO ASHETH. Knowing this curse extended beyond the physical reach of the demonic dietitian, Atropal had all his food cooked at the Level At Which Food Begins To Taste Bad Event Horizon (Emeril) and added one hundred degrees, in order to save himself the agony of having a perfectly good dish turn to ash on his tongue.

His prominent hooked nose quivered with avarice at the once delicious meal. It was the kind of avarice that can only come from things you can’t have. Like that deb who’s dating some jive skeezix, or that lux ice in the jeweler’s window. It is notable however, that both problems can be solved by applying bricks to the situation. This was not the case here. Hell’s doctors had long ago been made magically immune to bricks, to save Satan a lot of clean up.

Atropal’s waist length black hair glowed faintly as a side effect of being in the nether world for so long. 10 His bloody-pancreas yellow-flecked-with-red eyes were marked out by the quicksilver pupils that characterized higher demons (like Sentinel) and lower humans (like Atropal). Both of whom liked to disembowel things.

To the right of him? was utterly failing to consume her shot glass of Absinthe and saucer of caviar.

Bugger, she telecommunicated.

It is rather difficult to pick up cups and plates when your hand is a mass of metal and leather. And you have no head.

To the right of her, Professor Blueberry silently contemplated the lonely glass of water placed in front of him not too long ago by the orange haired bar man’s tavern counterpart. His hair had been unruly and full of split ends and his beard ought to have had a wild life preserve all its own with a silly British anthropologist doting on it day and night and writing notes about it.

The apron he wore didn’t look nearly as strong as Mr. Soak’s, but that sort of thing didn’t really matter because the man’s chest looked like it could dull swords, blunt axes and make bullets ricochet. The apron had been covered in the prerequisite ominous stains that are required by any self respecting innkeeper, knackerman, or mass murderer.

“Okay,” said Atropal with an air of finality. “My hands. Give them to me.”

Oh certainly, replied ? sarcastically. As soon as a certain someone returns my head

“Hmm?” mumbled Blueberry, being drawn slowly but surely from his thoughts.

My head if you please.

“Mmm. Can’t.”

What?!

“MMM. CAN’T.”

Why ever not?

“It’s gone.” He said simply.

When ? gave him the kind of look only a headless person can manage, he attempted to explain.

“As I recall, you swallowed a bit of my anti matter, which caused your head to cease existing. That’s why.”

Hmm. said ? thoughtfully.

Abruptly, she slashed him across the face with one of her stolen hands. Blueberry fell to the floor, shrieking violently, blood spurting out from between the fingers clutched to his wounded visage.

Atropal looked on uninterestedly, or at least he seemed to. Even in death, he was still quite good at seeming. He was in fact, endeavoring to separate his beloved appendages from his slightly less beloved sister via a butter knife clenched in his teeth. This caused quite a scuffle, which Blueberry inevitably joined into, if only to kill them both.

Across the room, DOUGLAS, the defunct and worshipper-less Ur God of Ice and Fire glanced up from his white wine spritzer and stared. Atropal? He was sure that he had killed him. Very sure. The kind of sureness that can only come from things like stomping on an ant or watching the sun come up. The opposite of the kind of sureness that comes from a super hero 11 watching his arch nemesis die from falling in his own daft secret pit into his own daft secret vat of acid. (Because you just know he’s going to come back as a cyborg or something.) or the sureness that the brave and scantily clad heroin gets when she finally chops the head of her vengeful zombie lover off for goodness sake. I mean, the wise old man said it was the only thing that could kill him. But the dread demonic power of the inevitable sequel will always bring him back. Honestly, they should just forgo stitches, put a zipper around his jugular and then just stop caring.

“Oh. Well.” grinded the Sumerian deity.

The Ur god stood up from his seat, unscrunching himself from the position he had been sitting in to attract the least notice possible. His knees had been practically level with his ears.

Fully extended, DOUGLAS was seven feet tall and weighed in at a good fifty stone. He appeared to be made of turquoise ice and every feature of him, his short hair and long beard, his durable but simple clothes, his piercing eyes, were all made of purple fire. He began to walk forward.

Even farther away from Hugh, Wrath, and Timmy than Atropal and company, sat Offshoot and Nostrildamus.

“Here now, I can’t see a durned thing with these idiot chairs.”

Offshoot exhaled loudly in what sounded suspiciously like a sigh.

“That’s the point. You can’t go around having a bloody great tavern where everyone knows your bloody name and address. You gotta have wossname, anonn-immety.”

“Oh.” Nostrildamus looked askance.

Offshoot continued ranting, though in a different direction.

“And what’s with the service? Man said this was the best stinkin bar in the whole stinkin universe. And we haven’t even gotten our drinks yet! We oughtta call the food critics on these suckers.”

“Naw, come on, Offshoot. Nobody deserves that lot.”

And indeed, nobody did. But Nostrildamus had more to say on the matter.

“Sides, if we wanted drinks, we shouldda gone to the bar. The guy what owns this place musta figgered that whoever wanted food and drink would want to order at the bar and whoever didn’t would just want to be alone.”

“And just ow do you figger that?”

Nostrildamus beamed with inner pride.

“Cuz…there’s no waiters!” He sat back and waited for the shower of praise from his partner in Gray Goosetry. What he got instead, was a shower of spit and vitriol.

“WHY, THAT’S THE BLAME STUPIDEST, MOST IDIOTIC, DOWN RIGHT TORPID IDEA THAT I’VE EVER-”

Ever what? you may say, well we won’t find out just now because something has obviously happened to further influence the plot.

“Hello boys. I trust that you are doing your jobs just like I told you to. Right?”

There was Yogu, with both hands on either bounty hunter’s shoulders, tightening painfully on the italics.

“Y-yes, s-sir. You know our motto, right? Cuz, cuz, it’s on a wossname, Plak on some blocks right outside our place, ain’t that right, Offshoot?”

“Err, yeah. Right.”

Yogu grinned evilly at the camera and turned back to his two servants.

“Then why aren’t you capturing them right now?”

Through the red haze of pain, Offshoot spotted what Yogu meant almost immediately.

“Th-that’s them? B-but wh-what’re they doing here?”

Yogu shrugged, not releasing his grip.

“I do not know, but fortunately, neither do I care. You have your orders, take them.”

Abruptly, Yogu’s acute sense of the future kicked in and gave him a brief glimpse of what fate had in store.

There were footsteps like a giant’s, then a scream, then a crash, then… It was clear to Yogu from his extended flash forward that none of the three he sought would be in his grasp tonight. No matter what he did, Fate 12 would just get in the way. Therefore, Nostrildamus and Offshoot were doomed to fail, at least for tonight. Though this did not stop him from sending them on a suicide mission.

“Boss?”

Yogu’s eyes refocused.

“Just get to them now! Before-”

He was, of course, too late.

There were the footsteps of the giant, and all the rest. Offshoot and Nostrildamus left to carry out their futile mission.

Yogu closed his eyes and took several deep, calming breaths. It was okay, it was okay. If he disappeared now, he could claim ignorance of the whole thing and be done with it. There was a nice mug back at the bar filled to the steaming brim with a bit of coffee and a little something extra to help calm his nerves. It wasn’t his problem-

There was the unmistakable tinkle of a mug filled with coffee and a little something extra being broken and splattered all over the ground. His eyes snapped open.

Okay, now it was his problem.

Back at Hugh and Wrath’s area, Timothy gawked at DOUGLAS?like a toddler going to the circus for the first time.

“What do you think he is?” Timothy wondered aloud.

Hugh, of course, (skilled battle master that he was) was less concerned with the big, shiny giant, and more concerned with what it was looking at. He finally noticed Blueberry?, and Atropal. His eyes narrowed.

“Friends of yours, Timothy?”

“Huh, wazzat?” said Timothy through a metaphorical mouthful of awe and intimidation from the giant.

Wrath rolled his heat sensors exasperatedly.

Timothy finally looked at what an annoyed Hugh was pointing at. His eyes bulged in his head and his lips thinned to a hair’s width line. Pure hatred suffused every fibre of his being.

Flex.

His arm expanded rapidly and tore free of its sleeve prison where it had, until that moment, been sitting there nonchalantly, doing its best to look normal. It had no such illusions now.

Lightning, in all the colors of the rainbow, crawled and crackled all across his arm in random arcs and spikes. Quicksilver thorns five inches long poked out from chocolate eclair black skin everywhere from shoulder to fingertip. There were only three fingers, but each one ended in a diamond edged point, had the versatility of six double jointed thumbs stacked one on top of the other and contained the strength of an arm wrestling champion. His hand was sheathed in variegated fire.

Hugh and Wrath stared at Timothy in much the same way he had, until recently, been staring at DOUGLAS.

No mercy…

He leapt…

At the very back of the seedy tavern, in alphabetical order from left to right, sat Akromos, Graistone, Plot Twist, and Sentinel. And in front of them, their drinks. A virgin strawberry Daiquiri, a bowl of sulfuric acid with added copper sulfate for that great foamy taste, a glass of yak butter with Jimmies, and an obsidian goblet filled with a mixture of the blood of a purified virgin and some Rot Gut.

No one was drinking.

Sentinel turned around in his chair to see what all the commotion was about. It turned out to be Timothy, DOUGLAS?and everyone else in the bar, in the middle of a brawl. Sentinel grunted.

“It’s about time.”

Abruptly, a pair of swords whirled into existence in his hands. The first was jet black with red shadows floating, submerging, and resurfacing intermittently within the jagged blade, which was less of a solid blade and more of a blade shaped hole into somewhere else, somewhere bad. When you turned the sword sideways, the blade became invisible. The hilt was a complicated arrangement involving carved bone and precious gems.

The other was as cold as ice and had a blade that looked as if it had been designed by M.C. Escher on a bad acid trip. It was filled with twists, curves, hooks, points and edges, some of which seemed to extend into more than three dimensions. Its color was a burning bluish silver. The hilt appeared to be made out of an hourglass filled with bluish black sand that defied both gravity and time and had its own microcosmic thunder storm, complete with tiny forked lightning bolts.

Akromos put a hand on his shoulder.

“Please don’t. You know we are forbidden to interfere with the affairs of mortals.”

Sentinel turned and sneered.

“Edingar is dead. We are no longer bound to its rules.”

He cackled insanely and plunged into the fray. Akromos stared after him for a long time. He appeared to be thinking. Noticing this, Graistone spoke.

“I DO NOT APPROVE OF WANTON COMBAT AND DESTRUCTION, BUT NEITHER DO I SEE ANY NEED TO INTERVENE.”

A passing air borne bar stool obliterated itself in a small cloud of splinters on Graistone’s shiny cranium. This did not appear to affect his stance on the matter at all.

Akromos sighed and clicked his fingers. With a puff of thick and curly Hokusai smoke, a white marble staff appeared in his hands. On either end was a golden ball with a serpentine whiskered dragon wrapping around and around the orb and attaching it to the staff. The staff itself was so encrusted with gilt and runic markings of gold, that it didn’t look as if it would last one minute in a battle. But appearances can be deceiving.

Akromos whirled the staff experimentally. It bent like willow. The really, really good kind. For the first time in a long time, Akromos smiled. He waded into the melee. He only needed to hit an opponent once before locusts engulfed them from inside out or they were transfigured into pillars of salt.

WhapthwackwhapwhapthwapwhackthwapthwapCRACK.

Oh yeah. He was good at this.

Plot Twist sat there and grinned at nothing. Graistone sipped a bit of his elemental soup and took a quick glance at the Being Of Ultimate Chaos, who was idly stirring his glass of butter with a long finger.

“I’M GLAD YOU’RE SHOWING RESTRAINT ON THIS SITUATION. I EXPECTED BETTER FROM THE OTHERS, BUT STILL I AM GLAD THAT YOU DECIDED TO…OH.”

Graistone sat alone for awhile. Then, in a movement that was like watching how mountains formed very, very fast, Graistone stood up and began to walk forward.

Grievous Bodily Harmsworth had been Britain’s top underworld cage fighter until the country had been vaporized along with all the rest of them. He enjoyed snorting soap shavings and drinking glycerin nitrate for a bit of fun. When it came to bottom feeding, Grievous was at the top of the food chain. In every fight he had been in, he had emerged victorious. The trouble was, this meant he could refuse no one’s challenge and had to stand his ground, no matter what. It was for this reason that he was extremely unhappy to see the avalanche on feet rolling towards him. A metal avalanche on feet. With lots of sharp, pointy bits.

Graistone hefted its double headed ax and shiny war hammer (both of which contrived to be loud even when not making noise) and sent Grievous hurtling through the sound barrier. 13

Meanwhile, Hugh had gone berserk, slicing and dicing anything that happened to be near him. Laser shields from dystopian post apocalyptic worlds in distant alternate futures, other magic swords encrusted with mystic runes from barbarian tundra long past, Kevlar and titanium armor from the present, all were cut to ribbons. Flying tables and chairs had their molecules ripped from end to end by the manic scream of the pulsing blade, while air molecules (being a good deal less dull) got the Hell out of the way.

Wrath was encased in a giant suit of conjured, transparent armor. The plasma armor flowed wildly and snapped opponents in two with manic tendrils, like a small typhoon made alive. The suit evolved to suit whatever purpose Wrath required. Periodically it would sprout a tube and spit gouts of flame that resisted all methods of extinguishing, or one of the tendrils would sprig a spiky ball or cleaver and send opponents flying, occasionally in two pieces.

Over in the non-smoking section, DOUGLAS had found Atropal.

“Now. I’ve. Got. You!” yelled DOUGLAS in his grinding metallic throat.

Atropal began frantically running his stumps through his hair, gathering the nether world equivalent of static cling. Drawing back, he hurled the resulting energy sphere in DOUGLAS’s direction. DOUGLAS?caught it with childish ease in one of his great hands and clenched his fist. The energy resisted for a moment, vibrating the fist into a blur, until it changed color to a form of force compatible with DOUGLAS??He slammed his fist into the floor boards, sending a terrible shock wave back at Atropal.

Timing it just right, Atropal leapt into the air and tucked into a ball. The soundless explosion sent him flying with minimal harm done. He somersaulted through the air and landed in the corner with his back to the wall in a fighting stance made rather useless by his handless state.

Just as DOUGLAS raised his fists together in a finishing guillotine blow, Atropal leapt sideways and out of the corner. The neatly avoided explosion propelled the still rolling Atropal a fourth of the way across the bar. DOUGLAS rolled his flaming, icy orbs vexedly and resumed his search for the man he had killed what seemed like such a long time ago.

Meanwhile???? slashed madly at Blueberry. He dodged effortlessly, and what he couldn’t dodge, he regenerated. Abruptly???? slashed the air with both clawed hands, threshing Blueberry’s face into bloody chicken wire. Almost immediately, his skin began soaking the blood back up like a sponge. And what his skin couldn’t catch Blueberry’s tongue licked up and swallowed back into the system. The fight continued tirelessly, neither foe abating. A particularly nasty attack had Blueberry backing off for a few moments while he held the two halves of his skull together so the bone could reknit with minimum strain. His opponent seemed likewise impervious to attack. It wasn’t that she healed like he did, she just ignored the wounds completely, and eventually the deliberate non attention forced others to subconsciously not believe in them either. Only the removal of her head seemed to be permanent. The severance was too massive a trauma to be ignored. Blueberry struck blow after blow, never missing. He was a mad fighter, anything in hand became a weapon. A tabletop was hurled frisbee ‘o’ death style, afterwards its legs became clubs. A bottle was a blunt instrument, then a sharp one.

Neither combatant’s aspirations amounted to anything.

Oooba the crusher, Scipio the impaler, and Moloch the incinerator, (the best bounty hunters Stavromula Beta had ever known) were standing around with nothing much to do. Every time someone got near them, they inexplicably died.

Oooba stared down at his metal hands and flexed them boredly.

Suddenly, his piggy eyes spotted someone striding toward them. He had no hands.

This looked promising. The man was carrying several butter knives in his teeth and he had long hair like that of a woman. Oooba nudged Scipio, who nudged Moloch. They all grinned stupidly. Scipio extended the retractable spikes from the holes that dotted his body like a fatal block of swiss cheese with arms and legs.

Moloch snatched a lantern from a nearby table that had somehow managed to avoid being destroyed in the mad tussle. He smashed the lantern over his head, relighting his extinguished body.

As the stranger got nearer, he jerked his head to the the side, loosing one of the kitchen implements with a tsing noise. A lathe wielding gem smuggler (who had been eyeing Oooba’s shiny hands and wondering idly, whilst gutting another man like a carp, if he could pass them off as expensive gauntlets) adjacent to the handless man crumpled to the floor with a small hole in his head. Various others who had been next to him dropped as well.

About twenty feet away from the first kill, a knotty forest troll found a still vibrating butter knife imbedded in his rooty cranium. He reached up and felt it. And then shrugged and continued fighting. Abruptly Oooba realized why no one had gotten close before this. He looked down at his detachable hands and gulped nervously. This did not look promising.

Plot Twist had become rather bored. He hadn’t found anyone who lived long enough to present a real challenge. He opened his mouth into an O-shape and engulfed a crowd that was mildly in his way in a micro black hole. Abruptly he felt a heavy hand on his shoulder. He turned to view the owner of the impertinent hand. It was a blue-striped uniformed thug wearing a Greek Fisherman’s cap. He had a face like the grille of a mac truck and muscles like ships filled with sacks filled with crates filled with watermelons filled with lead.

“Ullo guv. You looks like a real treat. Now hold still whiles I grrbbllbbrrbbllbrlblbrllrlblrbl.”

The thug sagged as his bones turned to water and his muscles, skin and organs turned to ash.

Plot Twist grinned with freshly renewed Cheshire gusto.

Sentinel roared with mad glee. Wherever he moved, waves of people fell down dead. He swung his blades like a horizontal windmill that would have had Don Quixote rethinking his job options with a speed that would have made a temp working at Enron proud.

In the dead center of the room, Offshoot and Nostrildamus fought back to back. Knives, spells, nets, poison darts, heavy rocks, and the occasional explosive whirled in and out of their hands in a seemingly endless supply. Still, they had had no sign of Wrath, Hugh or Timothy since the fight began. Wait! There they were! By some miraculous chance, all three had their backs to the Gray Goose. The bastards would never know what hit them…

Abruptly, their legs were swept out from under them and they both fell hilariously to the floor. Their now numerous Enemies For Life took this chance to dog pile on top of them. Before their vision was entirely obscured by the press of bodies, they heard and saw a kindly-looking old man merrily twirl his antique fishing pole and say, “Oops.”

The boss was not going to like this…

Behind the bar, Otis and Sebastian Albrecht, the two aforementioned barmen, cowered and held each other. This had not been in the job description. Now, given, the alternative had been oblivion, but still, you’d think there’d at least be holidays.

Yogu was getting worried. His mighty powers of charisma didn’t seem to be working. At least not the way he wanted them to.

Whenever he could manage to catch some random brawler’s eye, the conversation would go something like this:

“Oh, hey there Yogu. Can’t talk right now I’ve got this graallkgurglegurgle…”

It’s rather difficult to carry out a conversation when any small distraction causes you to be strangled/shot/garroted/bludgeoned.

Yogu didn’t want to do this, but he had no choice. He reached behind the bar with an air of doom and pulled out a silver soup spoon and a small water glass.

He began tapping one against the other in an insistent manner, the way the groom at a wedding does to get everyone’s attention just so he can lose it again with his long, boring speech. Yogu had no intention of losing anything at the moment. The fight ground to a shuddering halt. Until only Timothy was left.

Timothy had found ? and Professor Blueberry halfway through the altercation and had not left their presence since. He was now pounding them both indiscriminately with his massive fist.

“…And some of this, and some of this, and, ouch, huh?”

Hugh had politely kicked Timothy in the ankle as a very definitive signal.

Timothy spotted Yogu by he bar.

“What? It’s just some guy doing that thing that grooms do, you know…that…thing…”

He trailed off into terrified silence. Yogu was staring directly at him. Thankfully, he turned his attention away from Timothy, cupped his hands around his mouth, and addressed the bar as a whole.

“Thank you. It’s around ten of the clock. Last call. If you’re planning on leaving, better do it now. If not, then you’ll be helping Mr. Soak in the kitchen in order to pay for some of the damage you’ve caused. All right?”

Timothy suddenly found himself being pushed hurriedly towards the door.

“Hey! I wasn’t finished!” said Timothy, peering into the gloom at the broken bodies of ? and Blueberry.

“Neither was I,” said Hugh remorselessly, buffeting Timothy along and thinking longingly of the second plate that had gone unordered when the fight had started, “but you don’t see me complaining, do you?”

Wrath was already at the door, mumbling an incantation.

“But,” Timothy began.

He didn’t get to finish. Because he was suddenly engulfed in blazing white light.

Tingleingleingle.

Offshoot and Nostrildamus looked at each other. Offshoot spoke first.

“Let’s stay. He owes us a drink anyway.”

Nostrildamus’ eyes widened to the size of dinner plates and his hands began making involuntary no, no motions.

“Okay, does you want to explain to the boss why we haven’t got our quarry?”

Offshoot appeared to think on this.

“No, not really.”

“Okay, does you want to wash for Mr. Soak?”

“No. That guy gave me the jibblies the first time we met. Never again would be too soon for me.”

“Okay, now on top of breaking all his fern-i-cher and failing to bring home the bacon, does you want to ask him for a drink?”

Offshoot paled and grimaced. Nostrildamus combined wooden headed stupidity with distressing insight a little too well.

“Let’s go.”

“I fort you’d never ask.”

There was a slight whoomph and a second tingleingleingle.

At the very heart of the quickly emptying Dint, Yogu sat down on an old creaky stool and sighed. This room had no doors in or out. It was built not so much of actual substance, so much as it was built with the light and shadows you’d have left if you took away the actual substance. In front of the stool, right at elbow height, was Yogu’s private bar. It was flat, black, three feet by two feet square, and completely bare. Yogu clicked his fingers and a menu appeared on the bar top in the same way that food appeared in front of anyone else who sat down.

Whatever appeared for the patrons of the bar was a reflection of something inside themselves, a memory, a feeling, a personality. Now, what does that kind of thing say about a man who gets a menu?

Yogu picked up the menu and smiled.

It was good to be king.

In the kitchen, the radio finished its static ridden rendition of Pagliacci and began to croon in the dulcet tones of Figgaro House.

Mr. Soak grinned in only the way he could. He had heard every word of Yogu’s little speech. New help soon.

That was good. Mr. Soak had been getting quite famished.

1 Does ? count as a number?

2 Oh what? Elvis, right? Shut up!

3 And no one did. At least, not twice.

4 INCIDE JOKE!!!!

5 And ten hours of dream haunted, fitful, paralysive sleep.

6 On Edingar, priests were a bit less full of hellfire and most of their duties amounted to keeping the temples clean. The Gods definitely existed, and made sure everyone knew it. Philosophers existed in place of Missionaries and Televangelists to further the betterment of the people’s lives. Priests were very meek people who had simply chosen the job because it was indoors with no heavy lifting. They did not have to have any self confidence to defend against those who questioned the existence of their God. The Gods took care of that. Almost immediately. Though the need to do so seemed to have waned a bit.

7 Just start driving, you’ll end up there eventually.

8 The only reason Demonology had not spread to the rest of the world as a convenient way of disemboweling people who looked at you funny, was that the Demons could not stand humidity. Anything above 20º Centigrade and what you had left was…basically mud. So the government kept it quiet, and in the meantime, the hopeful vengefuls stocked up on dry ice…

9 Unintentionally omitting the hiccup in linearity caused by the anti matter, as his mind glazed over the terminal paradox lying in wait in the recesses of his cerebellum.

PLIB.

10 Though Atropal had been insane in life, he was not so now. Being insane required things like a brain. And glands. Of these, Atropal had none. It is, of course, impossible to be chemically imbalanced without any chemicals to begin with. Thus he was constantly lucid. A disposition he was not happy about; because it meant he could not hallucinate away the pain inflicted upon him daily by the demons of hell.

“B-but I don’t like the weather channel!”

“Sorry, but Emeril ran out of pasta, and we’re on back-order as it is. You’ll just have to take your suffering where you can get it.”

11 COMBINE TO FORM VOLTRON!

12 Rotten bastard…Orders a few drinks and thinks he owns the place…

13 You may be wondering how on earth Nostrildamus, Offshoot, Akromos, Plot Twist, Sentinel, and Graistone can all be existing all in the same place all at the same time. The answer is painfully obvious. Because Time is relative and can do whatever it wants, including move in a circle.

The important thing is not to think of Time as a one way road constantly being built ahead of you. There’s all sorts of time travelers and worm holes going up and down and side ways and all the rest. We know these anomalies exist because probability states it so very clearly. In an infinitely curved universe, everything is possible. If it wasn’t, then it wouldn’t be infinite.
So instead, think of Time as a great big pool filled with everything and anything, with Fate as an old man sitting by the pool with a fishing line. Fate is constantly aware of all of time, not just what’s in front of him (id est, the future and the present). Which is why time is stoically unalterable. Time fits together like a jigsaw puzzle. Everything (past, present, future) has already happened, all at the same time. So it stands to reason that Sentinel and company should be able to view Offshoot and Nostrildamus without the whole lot of them imploding and vice versa.