THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME
(A really truthful - honest it is, would I lie to you? - OTT report that tells it like it really happened and I didn't make any of this up at all no no definitely not how could you accuse me of such a thing)
Attending the Wyrdworld OTT on the 7th of July were Fulto Brim, Kaane, Ali MacPherson, Dermi (who he?), Met-Aa, Dreg, Ashtoreth, Jorrik the Fat, Max von Derfuhl, Magnum Thunderer and Lucifer Sam. That's quite enough introduction, let's get down to business...
One minute we were all standing around going about our normal business (in Dreg's case it would perhaps be wise not to enquire too much about what exactly 'normal' might be...), the next... zzzzaaapp ping! - we're all standing in front of this enormous great red dragon. This may not sound like a great improvement, but considering that Fulto had just been stabbed in the gut and Mett-Aa had been pursued by hordes of screaming melts just before being teleported, its not as bad as it sounds. Well, not quite.
Anyway, it turned out that the dragon was friendly, and an old acquaintance of Ashtoreth's to boot, so we didn't get turned into tasty fried snacks as you might expect: far from it - instead, the dragon announced that it would recite portions of The Prophecy (the great big one that describes the fate of the universe) to each of us: these bits of The Prophecy related to our future and present actions in Wyrdworld, and were as follows:
for Max von Derfuhl :
one possessed of a lifeless soul and hair of snow shall cavort with ghosts and demons in search of toffees: he shall discover the heavens and be forever remembered as rectasargax
Ali MacPherson :
a Created fool of uncertain parentage save the bottle may yet save the day: many are his skills, yet none; never steal his cigarettes, nor offer the promise of liquor to one whom the Cream Queen considers overzealous
Kaane :
tall of stature, great of strength, good in heart but short in length: loser and founder of Ursus, and the originator of a massacre still to come: he treads a narrow line and is to be wary of false friends and promises; his lucky number is one hundred and seventy five and a half
of myself, Jorrik the Fat :
he of the rigid digits and round girth, first among the Created to follow a god in entirety as She intended - yet late to see the wisdom of Uurthas, and thus prone to the weakness of slothe
for Magnum Thunderer :
one who walks a tight line between Kaos and Life, he will be tempted many times by the Thessani and either way will lose out to them: the choice as to good or evil remains unclear, but it is certain that others will pay for his gains
Mett-aa :
sharp of tongue and more so of wit - vulpine and sly, good and evil combined in one split mind: dishonest, yet true to one cause, and a purveyor of false promises; he shall cause a country to weep, and yet shall make them love him
Dreg :
a degenerate mind in a body of filth, yet even so a worthy piece of the program: he shall play a part in the overthrowing of a king, and even then shall be reviled as useless; never must he be trusted at funerals, for to do so would lead to degeneracy of the worst kind
Fulto Brim :
beloved ape of girth and length, first of the seventh to recognise its creator: he shall suffer greatly in Her name, losing love to find it once more in an unfound place
of Ashtoreth Viktoria von Feldhyser :
she shall bear a child with godhood in its veins, and lose it to evil: tragedy surrounds her and death follows closely at her heels; yet war suckles at her breast, and leaves wanting nothing more
and of Lucifer Sam :
he shall be of feline descent with a musical bent, and shall play great part in the destiny of others
- apparently, Sam is mentioned less in The Prophecy than just about anybody - with one present exception: the dragon had never heard of Dermi, our last companion, and apparently wasn't expecting him - but then neither were we, so this didn't come as too much of a surprise.
Whilst we were still puzzling over the highly cryptic nature of the various passages, and Ashtoreth was crying into her handkerchief about her decidedly dodgy future, the dragon dropped the real bombshell. It hadn't just called us here for a chat. No such luck. The fate of the world - or at any rate a very substantial portion of it - was at stake! Guess who had to rescue it...
We all knew that Shefrik was in a spot of bother, what with being attacked by Melts, humans, and undead, not to mention Snuurg and Maldred Plaguebringer - who's a bit of a bad sort if ever there was one - but we didn't realise just how significant all of this was. According to The Prophecy, if Shefrik fell, that was it. You know, IT. The End. Blammo. Goodbye Wyrdworld. Everything would get overrun by Melts and humans - boo! - and we furries would be up the proverbial creek without a paddle. There was only one way to save the city, and that was to defeat Maldred. And the only way to do that was to give him a good seeing-to with the Orb of Uurthas.
So, where was that then? Well, it wasn't - well, not yet, anyway - the Orb was stuck resolutely in the future, in the city of Gatehouse, and we had to bring it back: a tall order you may say, especially since Gatehouse isn't the best place for a vacation at any time, never mind what it's going to be like after the humans have taken over the world.
One method, which rather appealed to me, was to wait for the future to come to us: after all, I reasoned, it was bound to get here sooner or later, and there was no point rushing around and getting excited. This idea was quickly squashed on the grounds that it provided no means of getting the Orb back again in time to stop Maldred. This only left time travel: and there is only one way of travelling through time in Wyrdworld ( DeLorean cars having yet to be invented ), and that is to use the transdimensional Black Jaw Pub. So, where's that, then? Well, since it's transdimensional, it isn't actually anywhere in particular, and must be summoned by the use of the Holy Can of Fozterzz Lager. And that, before you ask, was in the city of Gatehouse in Fozterzz's temple. Which was fortunate in a way because that was where the Orb was going to be as well.
So now all we had to do was to travel to Gatehouse, break into a temple, nick their most prized holy item, travel into a future with even more Melts in it than the present day, nick another highly prized holy item, bring that back, and ram it up Maldred's - well, you get the picture.
"Oh, and some of you may get killed", says the dragon.
No kidding.
With the aid of some extremely dodgy activities with a rubber phallus, Fulto 'sent himself into himself' (I don't know what this means and I'm not sure I want to), and teleported us all to Gatehouse. On arrival, he instantly got himself involved in a fascinating conversation with a Verminhater - the scumbag humans who want to kill all of us furries off - well, I assume it was fascinating because it took us a fair degree of effort to drag him away, and the Verminhater looked to be getting fairly excited. While all this was going on, Ali had disappeared, taking his friskey with him. The rest of us decided to go to the temple.
Once there, Fulto got into another discussion, this time with a priest: this discourse was apparently about some obscure theological point (such as whether the gods existed or some such), and ended in a large punch up.
Fortunately for us, Max von Derfuhl had a much better plan for sneaking into the temple: he magikally disguised himself as a Verminhater (boo hiss) and ordered the priests to let us examine the temple vaults. While he was doing this, we finally found out where Ali had got to: he was wandering down the central aisle of the temple, nutting any priests who came near him and snarling at them for no discernible reason. Despite all this, the priests eventually agreed to let us in, mainly on the grounds that the 'Verminhater' was going to crucify them all if they didn't. Strange, really. One would have thought they would have been quite keen to get a chance to personally meet their god, but apparently not. It was at this point that Max turned back into a rabbit...
We dashed down into the vaults, pursued by hordes of angry Fozterzz worshippers. Fulto, who had finished his discussion with the priests in time to join us (I gather that a natural creation for the world won out over monotheism by two falls and a submission), started jumping up and down and waggling his long rubber thingie at them. The sight of a gigantic orangutan waving an enormous wobbly object between his legs and apparently threatening to indulge in some decidedly dubious fertility rites involving the aforementioned object and certain portions of the priests' anatomies was enough to put the fear of god into them (which god, I don't know).
Well anyway, we found the Holy Can of Fozterzz Lager, and we all took a drink from it. We waited. And waited a bit more.
Then, suddenly, nothing happened! This was getting a bit dull. After nothing had happened a few more times, Fulto threw the can away in disgust. Eventually we went back up into the temple.
It wasn't there - or at least, it wasn't then: but, the Black Jaw Transdimensional Pub was. "You took your time, didn't you?" asked Agnie, the panda landlady. Smart aleck.
The next morning, after Fulto and I had already had three breakfasts each, and Max had unsuccessfully tried to chat Ashtoreth up over a candle-lit dinner, we arrived in Gatehouse, in the year '84. '84 what, we never found out, since somebody seemed to have sneakily changed the dating system when we weren't looking.
It was pretty grim. Gatehouse isn't the most attractive place at the best of times, and the future was apparently not the best of times by a long stretch. The pub vanished behind us to be replaced by some sort of gladiatorial arena. The city turned out to be inhabited solely by humans and Melts, with a few animal slaves.
So, where was the Orb likely to be kept?
While we were considering this, a futuristic Verminhater came over to us, apparently wondering what a large collection of animals were doing here. Fulto decided to get into yet another involved discussion with this Verminhater, which he didn't take kindly to at all: apparently animals were not capable of arguing to humans in this time! The Verminhater insisted that Fulto bend over so that he could insert a large metal object into the ape's bum. Not fancying the idea of this much Fulto had to stuff the probe into the Verminhater's mouth and knock him out.
Further attempts not to attract attention resulted in Magnum Thunderer killing one human and one Melt, earning a shotgun - after getting a shotgun-hole in the stomach - as a reward, and Ali nutting a robot and knocking himself out. This wasn't really what we had in mind. Fortunately, before everything could get completely out of hand, Max saved the day once again. Fulto had already discovered that the uurth- power and other assorted magiks had been drained out of the world, and Max was able to track down the only powerful source of magikal energy that was left (hopefully the Orb) by using his wand. The only problem was, it was beneath us somewhere!
It looked like it was time to visit the sewers - something about which Dreg needed no encouragement whatever, diving in with obvious enthusiasm. Ashtoreth was somewhat less keen, and only agreed to go down the sewer at all if Magnum gave her a piggy back so she wouldn't have to get her dress dirty. The rest of us followed with various intermediary degrees of caution.
Well, you've guessed it, we weren't the only ones down the sewers that day: I don't know why it is, but the town planners of these cities seem to specifically design sewage systems to fit the maximum number of monsters in per mile of tunnel; these ones were no exception. We should have complained to the health and safety inspectorate, since surely having hordes of monsters infesting the town sewers can't be that healthy, but it didn't occur to us. Typical huh?
The first problem we had was with some ghoulies. Well, we thought they were ghoulies - we couldn't see them that clearly, but they were scampering about in the shadows where we couldn't see them, and making typical ghoulish noises to each other. Magnum tried to scare them off by firing his shotgun into the air: the only real effect this had though was to attract more of the swines. Thanks, Magnum.
Keeping clear of the things and leaving them to go about their scuttly business, we soon reached a wide chamber full of sewage. Hooray. Max's wand revealed that the Orb now lay above us somewhere.
"There's something alive in here!" shouted Magnum.
On the plus side, the walls didn't start closing in: but on the minus side, Magnum had another portion of his anatomy removed by a beastie before it was driven off. What with the hole he had acquired earlier in the day, there wasn't a lot left of him at this point; Ashtoreth promptly fell off and got her dress dirty after all. Ha!
The ghoulies had obviously decided that this was a good time to attack. Only they weren't ghoulies: they were female weird-thingies with sharp teeth, lots of bandages, and for some inscrutable reason, roses in their hair. Daft-looking they may have been, but they were pretty nasty as well. One decided to attack Fulto, and another two went for Ashtoreth. Fulto quickly dealt with his, and Magnum tried to shoot one of the ones attacking Ashtoreth. He hit Ashtoreth instead, although only slightly (if someone can be 'slightly' hit by a twelve-bore shotgun, that is). The only people near enough to help out Ashtoreth now were myself and Lucifer Sam, neither of us exactly renowned for our fighting prowess.
Nevertheless, I actually knocked one out with my staff, as much to my surprise as the monster's. Lucifer Sam's technique for getting rid of the remaining creature was a bit different:
"Er, leave her alone," was the cat's unusual approach. Surprisingly, this stunning tactic had little effect on the slavering monster, which had to be shot by Magnum before it stopped trying to eat Ashtoreth.
We soon discovered a trapdoor in the 'ceiling' and tried to open it. Dreg tried first, and discovered that there was something very heavy on top of it. We had to get Kaane to hold it open while the rest of us squeezed through, to discover that it was a helicopter which had so unkindly sat on the door. But how was Kaane to get through? The bear's cunning solution to this apparent problem was to wedge the trapdoor open - with his sword. Oddly enough (well, it surprised Kaane), it turned out that the sword couldn't support the entire weight of a helicopter without snapping. You can't get the workmanship these days...
After the rest of us had moved the helicopter out of the way to allow Kaane to climb in, we had a good look around. We had found a museum dedicated to the fall of Shefrik. Ever wanted to know how the world is going to end? Well, here is what the captions on the various exhibits told us:
Shefrik fell after four days of struggle (it had been under siege for three days already when we left, which was a bit worrying). It had nearly been captured earlier when a black tom cat (cor, I wonder who that was?) had opened the back door to the city in order to stretch his legs, and found a vast Melt army advancing on him. He shut the door pretty quickly. However, with the aid of several tanks, (and the helicopter), the main gates to the city were blasted into fragments and the armies charged into the city anyway.
Mentioned as bravely fighting in the defence of the city were Ali MacPherson, Ashtoreth von Feldhyser, Fulto Brim, Humdinger Bumklinger and Batman. Brave they may have been - but they were all killed.
Lucifer Sam, incidentally, was stabbed in the back whilst 'indulging in an act of copulation'. Not perhaps a wise activity whilst your city is being sacked, but on the other hand, quite likely more enjoyable than the alternatives. Snuurg by all accounts killed a staggering seven hundred and forty two people during the battle. Show off.
So, this was what would happen if we didn't get the Orb back! Fortunately, the Orb itself was in the museum as well. Now all we had to do was get it back again and everything would be all right.
Whilst we were all congratulating ourselves on a job well done, the Verminhaters turned up. We noticed this when Dreg ran back from some part of the museum he had been exploring, screaming about large humans with big guns. Just in case we didn't get the message, as soon as he had finished saying this, there was a gunshot, and a large portion of one of Fulto's arms was forcibly removed from his body. Ali went one better when the next shot removed a big chunk of his spine; Dermi - you know, the little rat I mentioned at the beginning, the one we hadn't heard of before - then used the Orb as a large bowling ball, flattening half a dozen Verminhaters in the process. He then proceeded to slaughter another Verminhater with a quite staggering display of strength and combat ability. Hmmmmn...
Ashtoreth shot two more Verminhaters with her big gun, and Dreg and Mett-Aa killed another two. Myself and Max had by this point decided that discretion was the better part of valour, and pretended to he dead. Magnum, who wouldn't have had to pretend very hard by this point, nevertheless decided to be a true hero and smashed his way into one of the tank exhibits. It was at this point that the real violence started.
Kaane charged forwards screaming some slogan or other, only to have one of his arms blown off at the shoulder: when this didn't seem to bother him too much, the Verminhaters blew off a few more chunks of his anatomy - this still didn't stop him, as the bear had obviously gone into some sort of battle-frenzy, charging into the remaining Verminhaters, and managing to disembowel two of them with his remaining arm.
Fulto Brim turned into stone - quite how that had happened we didn't find out until later. Magnum tried to get into a tank: he didn't fit, so he climbed out again, and used the tank as cover while he blasted away at a few more Verminhaters. Of course, if he could see to shoot at them, they could fire back, and only a short while later Magnum finally met his end. It was a heroic way to go, though.
Ashtoreth continued to fire away at the enemy, ducking behind a wall for cover. Lucy's contribution to the proceedings was to burst into flame for no obvious reason and collapse to the floor looking decidedly unwell. I do hate the smell of singed cat hair...
Another volley of shots fired into the room where the rest of us were hiding, and blew several holes in the wall in the process. Unfortunately, this was the part of the wall that Ashtoreth had been taking cover behind, and she was blown halfway across the room before making a considerable mess on the floor. Dreg (who was proving a lot more useful than we'd expected) speared the final Verminhater and all was quiet at last. All the same, if Fulto hadn't returned to normal and we hadn't managed to put Lucy out we would have been down to half our original strength.
Fulto's first action upon recovery was to teleport us all outside again - well, all except for Dermi: what was going on?
"Well, Fulto", we asked (as you would do under the circumstances), "What were you doing turning into stone, then? Not very constructive help was it?"
"Dermi tried to steal the Orb", he explained, "and I tried to take over his mind and get him killed. That's why I turned to stone."
"But Dermi isn't one of the Created. He can't have been, be wasn't in The Prophecy."
( - a note to the uninitiated: when one of the Created makes any attack on any other Created being, they are turned to stone - by the power of the gods, or whatever - mainly to ensure that they work together instead of against one another.)
"Not as Dermi, no: but that isn't his real name - his real name might be a bit more familiar."
"Do tell. What was it then?"
"I think 'Snuurg' wouldn't be a million miles from the mark...that's why Sam caught fire, because he tried to grab Snuurg's demon-sword."
"Oh deary deary me." (Or words to that effect).
So now we had to get the Orb back, and dodge Snuurg as well. With two of our best warriors lying in a yucky mess on the floor, and another pretty close to the same way, things definitely weren't looking up. How were we going to get out of this one? The pub wasn't due to turn up for several more hours, and when it did, Snuurg would be there waiting for us anyway.
Dreg's suggestion was that we construct a life-size cardboard replica of the city of Gatehouse to fool Snuurg. We disagreed.
We got the Orb out of the sewers without any further difficulty, and wandered around the city a bit trying to think of a way out of our predicament. Fulto disguised himself as a fat washer-woman, so he could pretend the Orb was his washing.
While we were doing this we found something which may be of interest to other inhabitants of Wyrdworld: in the city square was a set of statues commemorating the six 'heroes' who had been mostly responsible for wiping out the animals and destroying our beloved world; I'd better mention who these chappies were so that we can all look out for them: One was a seven foot tall human in ornate plate mail, who looked fairly distinctive; the next was a human in chainmail armour - I'd guess that one of these two was Viscount Antares, but you never know. By this figure was a female human in leather armour - well, a few bits of leather anyway - not exactly enough to act as armour really, but there you are; the last of the human effigies was another male, depicted in black robes. I was betting that this one might have represented Maldred Plaguebringer, but having never met any of these first four (thankfully), I had no real idea.
Next was a statue of Snuurg, whom we all of course recognised, and then another even larger melt (!) standing next to him. Now, there was no way we were allowing a future where Snuurg had a great big statue erected to him, and we all got massacred, to come to pass: drastic action was called for.
Fulto used the last reserves of his waning magikal strength to have a vision: he saw a ruined building surrounded by Melts - it looked a bit like the temple of Fozterzz. We all dashed round to where the temple had used to be, and sure enough that was the building. Now we just had to get past the Melt guards.
We started a fire nearby, and all the guards ran off to deal with it. Well, alright, most of the guards - one was still left standing in front of the gate. I staggered over to him pretending to be drunk, and whilst he was distracted, Dreg tried to sneak over and kill him: unfortunately the guard noticed, and turned around to shoot Dreg, wounding him slightly; so I clobbered him over the head with my quarterstaff, and with the aid of Kaane, managed to tie him up and gag him.
Fulto clambered over the fence while Max, Kaane and myself ran through the gate. Alarms went off everywhere and hundreds of guards started pouring in from all over the place. We began to suspect that the sneaking-in plan had not been altogether successful.
Meanwhile however, Mett-Aa had sneaked over to some Melt vehicles, and grabbed a large machine gun bolted to the top of one of them: whilst he mowed down any Melts coming anywhere near the place, Max and I started searching the rubble, and found the holy can of Fozterzz lager - just where Fulto had carelessly thrown it after we summoned the pub. I poured some of my home-made booze into the can and drank some. The pub didn't appear: well, it hadn't last time either, so no surprises. But where was the thing?
By now, Mett-Aa had used up all the ammo in his machine gun, and the Melts started firing back with impunity: Mett-Aa was blown out the back of the truck, full of bullet holes but still conscious; I cast a spell to find the Pub -
"I drank some booze,
Then I drank some more,
come on Koffemil,
Let me find the Black Jaw.
Good poetry it may not be, but it found the pub alright: it was beneath the rubble. Max and I tunnelled through and clambered into the pub; Kaane dashed back for Dreg, and rescued him just as loads of Armoured Personnel Carriers turned up, with Snuurg leaning out of the lead vehicle brandishing a simply enormous machine gun, thunderously mowing down everything in sight - walls, trees, vehicles, other melts - he didn't seem to care, and was clearly just enjoying the moment. Mett-Aa ran to the pub, with bullets whizzing about him; Fulto staggered in, but Ali seemed to have gone missing: it turned out that he had gone back for Ashtoreth and Magnum's bodies, and then cast the following spectacular spell:
"Transport me to the Black Jaw,
Cos I don't want to stay here no more,
Bring Ash and Magnum as well,
And make it pretty nifty 'cos I'm running out of time.
The spell worked (believe it or not), and so we were all in the building as it disappeared, just avoiding Snuurg as his APC ground to a halt outside.
Well, we were safe at last. Or so we thought.
As we all took a while to recover from the tension of those last few moments, Fulto and I chatted with Agnie the panda while getting a round in: she was always interested in hearing the tales of those who made use of her pub, so we gave her a fairly edited version of the recent events - of the quest, the Orb, and of Snuurg's disguise-deception; Agnie asked to see the Orb - she'd heard of it before but never seen it, even through all the travels she'd undertaken as landlady of the Pub. Two of the others brought the artifact forward, and Agnie picked it up in one hand as if it weighed almost nothing: a horrible smile crept across her face as, to the surprise of all, her body began to expand upwards and outwards, twisting and changing, until Snuurg stood grinning there before us, just as the pub touched down back in the present. He immediately bolted for the door, and was off with our prize.
Most of us were for a moment too dumbfounded to do anything, but Lucifer Sam chased after him. Sam was going to do something heroic after all! Hooray for Lucy!
"Here, give us that," he suggested.
"No", Snuurg replied.
"Oh, fair enough, then", Sam conceded.
So much for heroism. Mett-Aa had caught up with Snuurg as well at this point, and tried to discover if he was ticklish (he wasn't). Fulto, who had also arrived by now, grabbed hold of Snuurg and gave him a big sloppy kiss! That did the trick: Snuurg dropped the Orb in shock, and Mett-Aa grabbed it and started trying to play basketball with it to keep it away from Snuurg. He grabbed it back though, but was then pounced on by Fulto, Mett-Aa and myself.
Carrying the weight of all three of us and the Orb, Snuurg raised his sword and uttered something obviously magikal: all of us were teleported into the middle of a Melt camp along with the Orb. All was lost!
"Look," explained Fulto to the 500 hostile Melts, "I'm really Snuurg in disguise, that bloke over there is Fulto Brim in a Snuurg suit!"
This trick didn't work.
"Come on," said Mett-Aa, "if you surrender now, we'll go easy on you." That didn't work either. At this point the Orb vanished into thin air: Max had managed to teleport it away; his magikal energy was so low, however, that he didn't get to specify where it would be teleported to, and we never did find it again.
I managed to use the beercan to re-teleport myself and the other two prisoners back to the Pub, where the real Agnie explained away a lot of the recent confusion: apparently, after the Snuurg from this present tense - disguised as Dermi - had been disappeared by Fulto's magiks, he had gone to meet with his future self, and the two of them had hatched the little scheme that led to the loss of the Orb: the future Snuurg had been the one chasing us as we were diving for the Pub; the present Snuurg had already got there ages ago, and had bound and gagged Agnie in the beer-cellar: he would have killed her, but knew that the pub could only work while its patron was still kicking. After that, it was a simple matter of disguising himself again by his sword's magik, and that got us to where we were now - i.e. stuffed: if we didn't find the Orb the next day, then Shefrik would still fall, and we would have failed; but there was little we could do about that, so the dragon sent us all back to our original locations, after kindly resurrecting Ashtoreth and Magnum.
Still, at least the disappearance of the Orb ensured that it could no longer be used by their side either, where it could have proved instrumental in bringing about the Uurth's doom even sooner than expected. So, we had that as a 'consolation' at least as we all headed off back into our own parts of the world again.
...as Magnum went on his way, he noticed something was a bit amiss:
"Hang on a bloody minute!", he screamed, "Where's me bollocks gone?!?"
I knew we shouldn't have let Dreg look after the bodies.