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Post by rvm45 on Sept 24, 2015 16:52:32 GMT -6
Chapter Nineteen
“Have you ever asked yourself why Macersville functions on the silver standard?” Morgan asked.
“I haven’t a clue.”
The retro silver coins were neat and a precious metal standard is always better than fiat money. Hell, you could probably work out a system where each promissory note was redeemable for so many pounds of 1090 steel and it would work better in practice than fiat money.
“It is because for some reason gold is more plentiful here than lead,” Morgan said.
He opened a door and turned on the light and there was row after row after row of gold bullion stacked like so many bricks. Take all the gold at Fort Knox and combine it all the gold in California—that’s in a bank in the middle of Beverly Hills—and it would be small potatoes compared to this.
“We have some gold jewelry and such. Gold is pretty and it doesn’t corrode. We try to keep it halfway reasonable though. When word of a fabled city of gold leaks out many men spend large portions of their lives searching—sometimes the searches persist for generations—the effects can be catastrophic,” Morgan said.
“Reich! Reich! Wir sind reich!” I deadpanned in a monotone.
“What would happen if you dumped all this gold in the outside world?” Morgan asked.
“The spot price of gold would drop precipitously. I don’t think that any major economies are still on a gold standard but nonetheless gold still casts a powerful shadow over the economies of the world. Then there are hard money tycoons and ordinary folk who invested in gold as a hedge against inflation. They’d all be wiped out,” I said.
“Even the prices of electronic components and some precision instruments would be confused,” I added as an afterthought. “Also, never mind the scrutiny the dude dumping that many tons of gold into the world market would garner.”
“On the other hand, I think we can donate a few million dollars worth of gold to your cause and not create much of a tidal wave in the outside world’s economy,” Morgan said.
“Works for me.”
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I had a few of my people melting down bars of gold, adding in a bit of lead, tin, antimony and a bit of silver and casting them into .69 caliber balls meant for 12 Gauge punkin’ ball loads.
“Why are we debasing this wonderfully pure gold,” James demanded.
He sounded frustrated beyond measure.
“There is less than one percent impurities in Macersville’s bullion. No one has bullion that pure on the outside and bullion is a very poor way to sell lots of gold and try to stay off the radar. Gold from the ground wouldn’t be so pure and a crack-brained prospector just might cast his gold into round balls for ease of transportation,” I said.
I didn’t add that I had every confidence that the golden balls would be assayed for purity and there was no intention to defraud anyone.
My group had managed to locate several poor prospectors in several gold bearing states to act as front men. I’d seen a few of these type dudes on nature and educational documentaries. I’d often thought that the main thing motivating them was a love of being in the wilds and the thrill of treasure hunting. Actually finding a large pocket of gold might prove more of a curse than a blessing.
They still hadn’t struck the mother lode though and they were still free to search for it. Part of what I paid them was put into a trust fund for their retirement. Another trust fund gave a small annuity so that they could winter in style and set out with top quality gear each prospecting season. Of course I also gave them a fair chunk of money to fritter away while they were at it. And the vast majority of them would fritter it away one way or another.
Meanwhile I’d had my agents bribe a couple of writers for the prospecting magazines to tout using round ball bullet molds to keep track of a prospector’s loose gold. It might not be a great idea, but because it had been touted in print no one would question prospectors in several states coming up with many pounds of round golden balls all at one time.
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Many folk that The Outfit recruited in their better days come from martial arts backgrounds. I was a case in point. Nonetheless The Outfit’s recruiting of outsiders was very hit or miss.
I sent trainees out to take martial arts classes in the outside world. They might take tae kwon do or kenpo, judo or Brazilian jujitsu, boxing, capoeira or some form of kung fu. The style or art wasn’t important. What was important was finding competent senseis or coaches who were truly dedicated to teaching and to the martial arts.
When they found a prospect, they sent him to me.
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“Welcome sensei!” I said to the newcomer.
He was about five-ten and weighed about two-ten without too much fat—though like many middle-aged grapplers, his muscles seemed all smoothed over with a thin covering of fatty tissue.
He looked Japanese and he taught judo but his accent was pure Kentucky middle south.
“I wish that we could do this at your dojo, but you don’t have the proper facilities,” I told him.
“You know what they say: my dojo, my rules. There are many ways to fake martial arts feats. There are ways to fake miracles. There are ways to run scams and ways to counterfeit money. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t legitimate miracles or genuine hundred dollar bills,” I continued.
He looked at me openly with just a twinge of skepticism. That was good. I preferred people who weren’t ready to swallow everything hook, line and sinker.
“By the way, I promised you a thousand dollars to come and talk to me but I’m sure that coming here cost gas and meals on the road and you might want to spend a night in a motel before heading back home,” I told him.
I handed him sixteen one hundred dollar bills.
“This should make your one thousand dollars pure profit. They’re not counterfeit. Check the serial numbers. Hold them up to the light. Note the hologram and the tiny metal strip,” I told him.
I stepped onto the clinical scales and weighed myself.
“Three hundred and five pounds and I’m almost ripped,” I said. “But for all you know, I may be floating in enough steroids to alter the outcome of the next three superbowls or my scales could be bollixed. Please weigh yourself to verify my scale.”
I stepped onto the tight rope and did the splits and then rose and went into a one-armed handstand and then did a double back somersault coming off. Next I did a few tricks on the still rings and the horizontal bar. My stunts would be commonplace at a national gymnastics competition. Coming from a sixty year old man weighing over three hundred pounds it was awe-inspiring—always provided that it wasn’t trickery.
“Have you ever thrown knives?” I asked.
“Some,” he admitted. “It isn’t judo.”
“Would you throw these knives at a target—whichever one you want—and then retrieve them. Check out the targets while you’re down there. Those are laminated end-grain pine.”
I stuck three full-sized Kunai then a half a dozed mini Kuni and then I followed up with six single washers then six washers at once.
“That whipcrack noise you hear is the washers breaking the sound barrier. Walk on down to the target and examine it in detail. Note the depth the washers and blades have sunk in.”
Finally the judo sensei said, “Okay, you’ve convinced me. You can do things that I never thought to see outside a cheap kung fu movie. What is the point? What do you want from me?”
“I want to teach you how to do those things. I want to finance a nice big dojo for you and I want you to teach others what you’ve learned. You don’t have to pay me back with money. You will pay me back by offering your most promising students the opportunity to come and train with my people,” I said.
“I’m a Christian. I don’t want to be involved in the demonic,” he said.
“That would be an excellent objection but I don’t think that there is anything unchancy about what we do. There is an impersonal force permeating both matter and energy and we’ve learned through mental exercises to harness it. It’s no more demonic than electricity. There is this: some of our rival groups are turning to the demonic to increase their power, but there’s nothing new about such things,” I told him.
I could see that he wasn’t convinced.
“Take these three books. I wrote them to give my students something to study and to give them useful exercises when I was away and couldn’t train them every day. Take your time and look them over. I’ll get back to you or you can contact us,” I told him.
“What if I don’t join you but I teach the things in these books to my students anyway?”
“Feel free. Believe it or not, I wrote those books to help people and not for profit or credit,” I said.
“What if I plagiarize them and publish them as my own works?” he asked.
“You won’t. If you were that kind of fellow I wouldn’t have invited you here. But so far as that goes—I don’t give a rat’s ass if someone wants to steal my works. There is another factor though. There are two dozen or more groups of Adepts in the US of A alone. Many of them are very hard-core and dedicated to keeping the techniques secret,” I said.
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We’d gotten the dojo conversion process down to a science. One third of the dojo was open to the public. It would be well lit. It would have spacious padded rooms and a very good selection of training equipment.
The second section held a nice weight room and some advanced equipment. Why have the weight room in a restricted area? It was conceivable that someone might tire of martial art training, but continue to pay the modest fee to use the weight room and we didn’t need people cluttering up the place.
Of course the last third held the most advanced equipment and only the top ten percent or so were authorized to be there. Even the intermediates would either be intimidated or would suspect fraud if they saw some of the things that the advanced trainees were doing.
In the beginning a couple or three advanced students would go and stay with the resident sensei until he had the rudiments of chi manipulation. They might stay six months or sixteen months. If they had to take off a few days occasionally for a mission, personal concerns or whatever it didn’t diminish the quality of the training.
While the advanced students were there they also served as assistant instructors to the class.
Once the sensei was deemed competent to carry on alone, he’d still spend the occasional three or four-day weekends at our headquarters—throw in a two to three week stay once or twice per year. There were also frequent visits by various Adepts to help out and to further the sensei’s skills.
Remember The Outfit’s prime axiom:
“Nothing good ever comes from haste.”
It might take five or six years for a sensei to get to where he could truly be called an Adept with our on site training.
The beginning mental exercises were given to the students from the start.
“The purely physical will only take you so far in the martial arts. These exercises are simple and they take a long time to bear fruit but they’re important. If you will do them diligently for a year or two you will begin to see an improvement. Your greater mental powers should just be beginning to come online as you’ve exhausted he physical,” was the rap laid on the students.
We didn’t have “Sis-Boom-Bah” demonstrations to convince the students the visualizations worked. Our policy of asking students to do the exercises “just because” tended to select those who were dedicated, not particularly physically gifted and willing to give something a good long trial based on faith in the sensei.
Eventually we had one or more dojos in Miami, Orlando, Atlanta, and Lafollette—including the suburb Knoxville, Nashville, Louisville, Cincinnati, Evansville and St Louis and over a dozen more Southeastern metropolises.
We had our headquarters just east and south of Harlan Kentucky and so far as The Powers That Be and the general public were concerned, we were a dedicated confederation of martial arts fanatics—clannish but too open to really qualify as a cult.
We chartered the “Nine Tails Motorcycle Club”—with few visible ties to the martial artists. Unlike any other bike club that I ever heard of, the “Nine Tails” had little hazing of new members but there was an exacting apprenticeship.
The clubhouses hid gyms and training facilities. Apprentices were taught tradecraft and they weren’t supposed to ride a bike on the roads until they had a year of tradecraft under their belts. Waiting until they’d gotten in better than naturally possible physical condition and jacking their reflexes by thirty percent and more greatly cut down on accidents.
The clubs held big road trips and camping expeditions. The mood was joyful but they didn’t have the reputation for boozing, getting high and chasing loose women that most other clubs had. Honestly they were more like a militia of sober minded bon vivant scholars and poets.
Then there was the “Dragon’s Teeth Motorcycle Gang”. I have no idea how that one got started.
They didn’t ride motorcycles—but don’t tell them that. They used old Volkswagen Beetles and souped them up almost beyond recognition. Some had Ferrari engines or other high performance sports car engines shoehorned in.
They jacked rear ends up. Some of the Beetles were converted to 4-wheel drive. Most kept the rear mounted motor but many converted the cars to front wheel drive and added a drive shaft. Chain drives were also popular.
A complicated but popular conversion was moving the steering column to dead center and having just one centrally located bucket seat.
“X” harnesses and crash helmets with goggles were de rigueur. So was brass-studded leather vests or jackets and with the club logo. Many Dragon Teeth carried lorgnettes.
The club members dressed like Prince, Doctor Who and a shipload of Vikings had collaborated on the wardrobe. They acted like someone had taken the most over-the-top Japanese Zen Master of all time, Castaneda’s Don Juan, Gallagher and Mork from Ork and thrown them in a container and shook them until they coalesced into the most manic word salad spouting Fool-Saint of all time.
You guessed it. Capoeira and Drunken style and Monkey style kung fu were their favorite martial arts.
Yeah, one effective combat strategy is to play the fool.
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We had several good years when there were only the most minor rumbles with other Adept groups. I knew that the lull would be temporary. We used our time to our advantage.
I had some ideas and I was able to wield a few jutsu more powerfully than most. What really gave us a rocket-boosted assist was all the gold from Macersville. I knew that the gold had to stop at some point. I knew that it had to stop soon. I just didn’t know precisely when it would stop.
The final form of my kahuna jutsu was throwing three big kahunas who threw three kahunas each. Then the nine kahunas threw three little kahunas for a total of twenty-seven little kahunas.
The little kahunas weren’t physically small of course, but each one only had about ninety five percent of my power. Each one of the little kahunas could cast seven +5.0 wet spawn with a second wave of three at about 3.5.
The big kahunas and the kahunas could also cast modest first and second wave spawn, but most of the power and action was focused out on the most distal branches of my spawn tree.
I knew somehow, deep down inside that I’d taken that particular jutsu to its maximum. Truly, it is generally better to travel hopefully than to arrive. I mastered the odd jutsu here and there, but I also knew somehow that I’d never find a jutsu that would give me a tiny portion of the boost of power that I’d gotten from the raven jutsu in conjunction with the kahuna jutsu.
I needed to bulk up to well over three hundred pounds to handle the kahuna backlash when it came. I didn’t look fat. I looked like what the reigning Mister Olympic wishes that he could bulk up to.
When I was a ten I’d have grooved on the idea of being such a muscular monster. Now it was a bother. I stood out in any crowd unless I used a glamor. It was hard to find ready-made clothes to fit.
That really didn’t begin to cover it. I just felt like, looked like and had to train like a sumo-lite and I didn’t like it.
Speaking of sumos—Duncan wore his hair well down his shoulders now. He hadn’t went bald but over half of his hair had turned snow white. Saul didn’t seem to age. He was well past the normal lifespan even of a Rat Terrier and they sometimes live eighteen years or so.
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One day I happened to be alone with Ladonna.
“Do you ever regret that you never had children?” Ladonna asked.
“I have hundreds,” I said.
“You know what I mean,” she insisted.
“Ee…having children requires a woman. They’re far from easy to acquire. Moreover, to win one you have to compete. Competition is defiling. I never compete.”
“Do you think that I like women?” she asked.
“No. But since you bring it up—do you? And why do I care?”
“I’m straight but when I was a senior in high school the prom queen made a pass at me. I was horrified and ashamed. When I told my grandmother she was very stern—like when you tell someone something that they damned well ought to know,” Ladonna said.
“She told me that big muscular loud and outspoken women like me were an abomination. She said that I didn’t deserve a man and that I’d better learn to like splayed women because that’s all that I could ever get. You say that you won’t compete against the men who dated me before you or who might come after you. There aren’t any. I have never been on a date with anyone—male or female,” she spat out.
“I don’t know what to say. If I’d known when we were younger I might have acted differently—maybe. I can’t say of a certainty,’ I said.
She gave me one of those looks of resentment and dislike that has fermented and festered for decades. It’s like one of those big hot aching boils and you know that it will pop someday but you’re not sure exactly when.
I’m all for openness on one hand but on the other hand I hate psychodrama.
Just then David came walking in.
“I’ve just gotten the word. The North Koreans—Jae’s North Koreans—are going to swap some kinjutsu with the Dallas Adepts. There is going to be twenty-three volumes altogether,” David said.
“Do you know where?” I asked him.
“Gatorworld in Orlando,” David said.
.....RVM450
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Post by rvm45 on Sept 28, 2015 13:42:49 GMT -6
Chapter Twenty
I went to Gatorland in Orlando when my family lived there. That was back in the 60s. I had many nightmares afterward partly as a result of seeing the gators up close.
My mother opined one day that she wouldn’t live somewhere with a canal running through her back yard. I said that it wouldn’t bother me.
“Yeah and one morning you’d climb out of bed and a gator would snap your leg clean off,” she said.
She could go from zero to hate-filled bitter sarcasm remarkably quickly.
I got the idea from her stupid remark that the water could rise until it was knee deep and a gator could cruise in through locked doors without anyone suspecting anything was amiss.
Every time that I had to go wee-wee-wee after bed time I was scared spitless lest a gator take my leg off as my first foot hit the floor—and we were staying in a trailer. Once that first foot safely touched down without incident I knew there wasn’t a gator lying in wait and I was reasonably good to go.
We went there again while on vacation sometime in the early 70s. The place was much as I remembered it but I was several years older and it didn’t give me nightmares.
As I checked the place out with online photos and Google Maps much of it was the same. The wooden walkways looked just like I remembered them but they’d added a whole other lake behind the first lake and a couple of smaller lakes as well.
So that’s where they meant to do the exchange.
Game theory came heavily into play here. Neither side was willing to go into the other side’s territory. The potential for ambush was too awesome and spawn would be detected and disallowed at the gate lest they be on some sort of Kamikaze mission.
There was much that could pass without notice in the outer world or what could be written off as gang violence, terrorism or drug wars, but there were limits. Either side would be unlikely to start a pitched battle in a public place.
Neither side was likely to try to palm off fake books either. An all out war was something no one wanted. However, once word got around that a group was weak and indecisive it would start a feeding frenzy among Adept groups.
Word that someone had been gipped was bound to leak out. The only way to save face would be to launch an all-out war on the one who’d ripped them off.
That only left the mechanics of trying to intercept the packages and it wasn’t at all easy.
On the other hand, I feared the consequences of letting twenty-three volumes of kinjutsu get around and our new group needed to establish our bona fides. It was also a tempting opportunity to mess with people that I didn’t approve of.
This was going to be a hard snatch to pull off, so I contacted the Seminole to make it a joint operation.
************** ****************** ******************************
Gatorland’s parking lot was filled with big custom touring bikes all done up in brown and chrome. There were also many bizarrely customized Volkswagens there too. Both of the gangs left four members to watch over their rides while the bulk of each gang went inside.
The Nine Tails wore their summer colors—a lightweight brown leather vest with a kyuubi embroidered on the back with lots of fluorescent orange and psychedelic lime green. The Dragon’s Teeth had a white and yellow fire-breathing dragon embroidered on their black leather vests.
I had been concerned lest the park hesitate to admit so many color-wearing gang members at one time. I’d padded a lot of pockets from ticket sellers all the way up to middle management with enough long green to insure everyone would simply turn a blind eye to the outlaw bikers on the big day. There had also been a simple compulsion laid on each bribed employee to insure that they told no one. Even if he was an operative for another Adept group, the compulsion should hold.
When I say “I” I mean that one of my people did. There are folk with far better mental jutsus than I can command
As it stood there were two-dozen Nine Tails and nineteen Dragon’s teeth scattered through the park.
Some of the Seminole looked Indian and some had gone for a Hispanic look. My three big kahunas were there. Each one dressed differently and had a different face via an unobtrusive glamor.
Duncan had one fatty walking and hitting all of the snack bars. He had another riding an electric wheel chair. The third Duncan sat on a park bench with his legs crossed and tried to be inconspicuous. Since that hid his height and made the view of his extra broad lower body at least partly obstructed I had hopes that his glamor might suffice.
That left Duncan and Saul with two more first-wave Duncans on tap with my originals.
There was a number of other spawn in Gatorland. Gerald’s kahunas—he still had just the three—There were spawn by Cary and James and Chandra. I had all of David’s spawn either watching his drone monitors or watching the sixes of the Davids watching drone monitors.
They made the exchange behind the restrooms not far from the parrot house—right next to the breeding marsh. Right off the bat there was trouble. Someone else made their move an instant before we did. There were fifty white-hot fires around the two package bearers. The fires were like looking into a TIG welding torch without a hood or at a big magnesium fire for a moment and then when I looked back there were fifty men armed with oversized leaf bladed scimitars.
Fitting in for them was a no-go. They were bare chested with big green turbans of shiny silky material with big multi-colored balloon pants and shoes than turned up like elf shoes on the end. They were all muscled like pro bodybuilders on contest day.
Eccentricities of dress I could fathom, but none of these dudes were alive—not even like a dry spawn is kinda alive. These fellows were more like mineral wool or asbestos fibers wound extraordinarily tight and suffused with more chi than I’d ever seen in one place, along with some very ugly saffron colored energy.
They all looked identical with black brooding brows, hooked beak noses, fierce handlebar mustaches and glowering cruel countenances.
“They have summoned the djinn,” One of the Texans shouted.
Nine flocks of ravens converged and then combined into kahunas. Nine kahunas summoned twenty-seven little kahunas.
The Texans seemed to mostly be armed with Heckler & Koch MP-5s or some knock-off look alike. The North Koreans seemed to prefer M-4s with a D-Cell flashlight battery sized moderator. The Texan’s MP-5s also had D-Cell sized suppressors.
Parenthetically—some of the high tech wet silencers can be that size and do a yeoman’s job of suppressing a pistol cartridge’s muzzle blast. They weren’t going to come close to suppressing the muzzle flash and blast from a short barreled .223—but they could make it milder and more endurable for the shooter—hence the term “moderator”.
A bunch of dudes with shaved heads and carrying what looked like German MP-40s came in firing on the heels of the djinn.
Both the Texans and the North Koreans hosed the djinn, but bullets didn’t seem to affect the inorganic life forms. My speeded up Adept senses could see the bullets flatten on the djinn’s skin—causing the mildest momentary ripple—and then tumble harmlessly to the ground. Some of the Montanan’s wild spraying from behind hit their djinn servants, masters, owners—whatever in Hell they were with their 10mm Magnum bullets. That didn’t discomfit the djinn either.
None of the other groups seemed to have even the slightest concern about hitting innocent bystanders.
As a big Kahuna, I could throw five first-wave spawn after the kahunas. Each one was only a bit above level 3.0 but they were.
One of my wet spawn snatched up a little girl. He shielded her body with his and carried her out of the crossfire. He absorbed several bullets in the process. He wasn’t popped yet, but he was sliding that direction.
He drew his thirty-nine inch saber—seeing as how bullets seemed to have no effect on the djinn—and gave one of the haints a full-powered chop across the side of his neck from behind.
The saber’s edge bit into the djinn’s neck a little over an inch and molten something—white hot—erupted from the gash along with foot-long sparks of high power electrical arcs.
The djinn’s wound had closed over by the time that he’d turned around to face my spawn. He swung his oversized scimitar hard enough to bat my saber away and cleave my body from my left trapezius to my right iliac crest. He cut me in two diagonally and a tiny instant later the spawn’s cork popped.
I wouldn’t get any experience back from the kahunas or their get until the last kahuna fell, but since there wasn’t a kahuna in the line of propagation, I received that spawn’s memories and left-over chi immediately.
My four remaining wet spawn threw as many dry spawn as possible and entered the fray—to protect people and others.
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One of the djinn got distracted and stepped toward a toddler bawling hysterically in his stroller. His scimitar started down. I stepped in close and blocked the blow with my saber. Lets see if you can still bat my saber away so casually when it is charged with every dreg of chi that I can force into, around and through my mighty blade.
My blade blocked the chop at the toddler—just barely. The second time he chopped downward at me. I reached up and supported my blade with my right hand. That worked just barely and he almost got my right hand’s fingers as he raked the scimitar outward across the saber’s blade on the way out.
He’d be ready and he’d get my fingers the next time that I used that strategy.
The djinn drew back for a mighty overhand smash. I threw my saber up to deflect the blow marginally as I stepped close and rammed my right hand hangar as far into his chest cavity as it would penetrate.
He tried to pull back. I stuck to him like flypaper and kept the hanger sheathed in his heart. He tried to pull back even harder.
It was as I surmised. Somehow he could bridge the moments from before his flesh was rent to the moment in the near future when it might—in theory—exist unrent once more—that is, if his flesh wasn’t torn or pierced very long.
The longer the hanger stayed in him the harder those moments became to bridge and pretend that they’d never happened in the first place. His left hand gripped my left wrist and tried to crush my radius an ulna in his crystalline grip. His right hand groped for my eyes.
I sheathed my right wrist and forearm in chi to prevent him pulverizing the bones. I dropped the saber and grabbed his left wrist. Something very hard and cruel came up from deep inside of me.
Something that I’d read long ago came rushing into my mind:
“When winning becomes solely a matter of who can hate harder, that’s when you gotta fight as if you could avenge every injury and sleight that you’ve ever suffered at the hands of man or fate—right here, right now in this exact moment of time.”
I had no idea what I hated that strongly but pure unadulterated malice caused my strong left hand to clamp down until I felt whatever answered for bones in the djinn’s wrist to creak and I threatened to crush them with my power.
The djinn popped or whatever the correct term for djinn is. He left enough white-hot molten metal to destroy what was left of my body. I popped.
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“Ding-a-Ling!” Damn it!
Two spawn were down and there were forty-nine djinn to go. I was already behind on points. This wasn’t going well.
One of the djinn started to kill one of the giant tortoises—just from meanness I guess.
It was time to front him with saber and hangar in hand and try to figure out a way to kill djinn that didn’t take my spawn down with him.
“Dude it is like: leave the big turtle alone,” I told him.
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Meanwhile Duncan lost a spawn to the djinn but the other two Duncan spawn had a clear view of what happened.
A djinn would assay an overhand chop at Duncan. Duncan would nonchalantly bat the leaf-bladed scimitar to one side with a chi-shielded hand. Then he’d step in close and rip the djinn’s head off. Duncan’s chi aura was more than robust enough to shield him from the molten metal reflux that a popping djinn created.
Two Duncans destroyed eleven djinn short order. The djinn didn’t seem capable of adjusting or altering their tactics but three of them happened to target one Duncan at one time. He got two before he went down and then the last Duncan destroyed that djinn.
Duncan had wrecked fourteen of the knob-gobblers so far, but we were down to one Duncan and there were more than fourteen djinn left.
Gerald had worked out a way to triple-team a djinn with one kahuna and two wet spawn but putting all our baskets around taking out the djinn left no baskets to take out the other bad eggs.
But the Seminole hadn’t been heard from yet. Up out of the breeding marsh pond came an alligator that was as long as a Greyhound Bus—not counting his tail. Like all Adept animals he’d been improved: more brains, quicker reflexes, four chambered heart, far better eyesight in the air and legs with far better conformation for four-legged locomotion on land.
I have no idea how they got the dinogator into the pond. Thing was: he could travel as fast overland as an Olympic sprinter and he could take out a djinn with one bite.
I saw a Seminole with an old-fashioned stone war club with feathers and bird’s feet hanging from the head and the butt of it. He swung it downward at a djinn from a yard too far away to contact the unchancy being. An instant later a huge bolt of lightening struck the djinn from a clear blue sky.
One Seminole had a bow. Every djinn he shot abruptly vanished with no molten backlash. Only problem was that he only had seven arrows. I guess special arrows like that must be hard to make. I’m sure that he’d have brought more of them if he’d had them.
Then there was James. James had been carrying one of those five-shot Colt cap-and-ball replicas—the one in .375—loaded with five silver pistol balls that he’d cast from ingots. I kept telling him that there weren’t any such things as vampires or werewolves and I didn’t know of a single haint that was affected by silver. Nonetheless he always brought the revolver with its five silver balls along just in case.
Wouldn’t you know it? When nothing else seemed to stop the djinn James pulled one of his silver-loaded pistols. Any shot that hit a djinn anywhere with one of the silver balls popped him like a soap bubble—or a dry spawn.
Thing was: James wasn’t there in person but he’d spawned five replica Colts along with the five spawn he’d sent to Gatorworld.
The djinn were going down. The Texans and the Montanans seemed to have largely eliminated each other and there were only a few North Koreans left.
The Texans and the North Koreans were all originals. From what I could gather sending spawn to these events was a major faux pas.
All the bikers were spawn and most of them had changed missions almost instantly and had devoted themselves to shielding the non-combatants. Consequently only two bystanders had been shot but most of the bikers had popped.
Many kahunas and little kahunas had popped but all the big kahunas had survived.
As the closest Kahuna to the books, I charged. The scholars brought to examine the books were about all that was left to protect them. I laid them out with knockout blows to the head when possible. I had a soft spot for scholars and I wanted to spare them if possible. That isn’t always the easiest thing. Some of my chi enhanced punches killed rather than stunned.
I shoved all the books into a duffle and I summoned my secret weapon. It was a raven that had been bred up to the size of a roc or a pterodactyl—big enough to pick me up with its padded feet and lift me up and carry the kinjutsu and me.
Yip-Ee-Kie-Ayy!!!
Flying far above the far too realistic Earth and knowing that I had the kinjutsu volumes was a heady feeling.
So far that day I’d seen real live—or undead—or whatever djinn. I’d seen a Seminole call down lightening. I’d seen haints that could actually be destroyed by silver bullets. I’d seen a giant dinogator and now a giant raven was carrying me.
It had been quite a day.
What was that?
No! O Hell no!
A huge black Oriental style dragon barred my path to safety. He was long enough to stretch from end zone to end zone on a football field. He was thicker than a house trailer. He had great giant arms well behind a very long neck and two relatively stunted rear legs sprouted about twenty yards from the tip of his tail. He was breathing out some sort of black miasma and Duncan’s little brother—Little Boss—sat calmly in a lotus position on the dragon’s head.
If I was going to have to engage in some sort of off-the-wall Adept aerial jousting I needed to be in a more advantageous position than clutched in my roc’s claws.
My giant raven dropped me and then executed a perfect Split S—the converse of an Immelman maneuver. Once he’d leveled off he was at a lower altitude—having swapped height for speed—and he intercepted my trajectory, giving me the opportunity to land on his back.
Of course now we were headed away from the dragon. And this is bad because?
What’s that old Monty Python ditty about a tranny lumberjack?
No, that’s not it. It’s about Brave Sir Robin:
“Brave Sir Robin ran away;
“Bravely ran away, away!”
Brave Sir Raven flew away; bravely flew away, away!
Yeah only sometimes there ain’t enough strategic retreats in the whole world…
The black dragon was about to catch my giant raven, get peanut butter on my chocolate and sink my battleship.
That was a no-go.
.....RVM45
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Post by rvm45 on Sept 30, 2015 14:50:20 GMT -6
Chapter Twenty-One
At least one of my kahunas or little kahunas was still alive and kicking. That meant no feedback or returned chi until every last one of them had popped. I was very tempted to pop all of them and call them back. This battle was going to take every bit of chi that I could muster.
I forbore for one excellent reason—my minor kahunas and/or the wet and dry spawn they’d thrown might be in the middle of doing something crucial. Popping them might put my friends or the bystanders at risk. I couldn’t do that with a clear conscious.
All my first wave spawn had fallen so I had their chi remnants. I still had all of my second wave spawn since I hadn’t used them.
I popped one of the chi balls in my mouth, crunched and swallowed. That was a kinjutsu—a gumdrop suffused with massive amounts of pure chi. The drawbacks were that it was much like mainlining a huge hit of crank and there was supposed to be a vicious crash afterwards.
One gumdrop might drive me over the edge, give me a brain aneurysm or cause my heart to vapor lock. Anything worth doing is worth over-doing though. I counted down waiting for the wave of chi to suffuse my system. As I felt the first tentative tingles of the coming rush I popped three more of the chi gumdrops into my mouth to slowly dissolve like hard candy.
My raven did an Immelman. We were facing the dragon once more but we were higher and we were moving very slowly through the air—having swapped most of out speed for altitude.
I’d been trying to delay long enough to let the first wave of chi hit me full blast.
I felt it and I tried hard to throw two wet spawn and two wet rocs.
The rush from the gumdrop that I’d chewed and swallowed made me feel as if I’d stepped onto an elevator on the seventeenth floor only to realize too late that here was no elevator—just a massive fall.
A long time ago I’d seen an olde tyme jazz musician named “Buddy Rich” do a drum solo on television.
That’s what those three gumballs in my mouth felt like they were doing. Each one had its own distinctive “flavor” of chi and as they quickly unraveled—far faster than I thought they would—each new layer of chi was like a single drumbeat as it suffused my system.
I was a big kahuna. I’d maxed out my kahunas and little kahunas. I’ve said that “little” kahunas aren’t actually little. Well they aren’t. But while my original is about a quarter inch above six foot, big kahunas are about six-four and three quarters. A kahuna is about six-one and a half. “Little” kahunas are about five-ten.
I did something that shouldn’t have been possible. I cast a single second-wave kahuna complete with his own roc. He was a small kahuna—literally. He was about five-one and just about everything else about him was appropriately downsized.
My small kahuna cast three wet spawn—each one was pygmy-sized at about four foot nine or ten inches. Each wet spawn had a downsized roc just the right size to be proportional to my raven and me.
The three gumballs in my mouth were gone. I didn’t remember swallowing them. I was sure that I hadn’t spit them out. I believe that they simply dissolved and/or were absorbed.
The small kahuna and company might be downsized in both size and power but they packed a potent sting for all of that.
I shouted a battle cry at little boss:
“I am sure this dude’s an idjit; “He's the ultimate example of a mental midget; “This bugs me more than artificial pork fritters or John Ritter; “Thank God I'm only visiting this place, driving through…”
“I’m going to…” Little Boss said.
He had a very clear and precise bass voice and you heard it despite his conversational tone. Whatever he meant to say was washed away in the blast as the littlest kahuna and his three minions hit the dragon and its rider with one fuel-air bomb after another.
One by one he blasted all my people to oblivion—but not before they hit him with many bombs.
Finally it was just Little Boss and our steeds as well as me.
Guess what dude. You returned enough chi for me to spawn one more recycled wet spawn—a fairly powerful one so far as that goes.
I created the final spawn right in front of me. It wasn’t so much that he was powerful compared to Little Boss—but he was one more annoying layer of wrapping paper that Little Boss had to deal with to get to me.
“Damn you! I will steal your soul and damn it to the worst part of Hell!” he bellowed at me. He was losing his temper big time and showing more and more of his true form.
“Dude it is like: you’re welcome to do that if you’re able but let me tell you a secret. All souls belong to God and it is God who judges men—not some half-baked rutabaga-headed minor minion of Satan. Thing is though—I don’t believe that you’re able to slay me here and now in this world,” I told him.
I’d been binding myself tightly to my mount the whole time. It was like my buttocks and the back of my legs were super-glued to the raven.
In his rage Little Boss leaped to his feet and stood on the head of his dragon like a demented ten foot tall George Washington standing in the bow of the boat as he crossed the Delaware or the Rubicon or maybe the river Styx.
Time to provoke Little Boss a bit more. An angry client is often a careless and foolhardy client.
“Time flies, every other minute; “Past the church where the ladies got a big sale in it; “O gross, dinner time is when you hit the local café; “It's no ordinary menu oy vey,” I chanted.
“You’re a fool!” Little Boss screamed in rage.
“My name is ‘Spoil O Warren’ but I’m not your Spoil. I shall be your nemesis,” I said.
Yeah, you can’t damage real demons with silver but Little Boss’ dragon wasn’t a demon from Hell. He was simply one of those haints that occupy the empty spaces between the greater voids.
Little Boss couldn’t fly. Without the dragon he’d drop like a pompous rock or an unsupported red brick.
Metals don’t spawn well. Somehow the aluminum and magnesium in my kerosene bombs had transmuted into silver when I was spawned. Unfortunately more than half of the silver had mutated into something else when I threw the small kahuna and the single wet spawn.
But I could “see” what even minor quantities of finely powdered silver in a fuel-air mixture explosion did to the serpentine dragon. I could “see” that all of the metal powder in my own bombs was still pure silver.
I cranked my gasses to unheard of temperatures and velocities inside their compartmentalized spheres of chi. I had a white-hot ball in each hand. This time instead of throwing them as before I created a lance of pure chi and rammed them as hard as I could into the dragon. I only let the gasses out in one narrow beam turning it into a shaped charge. One double charge was all it took.
Have you ever heard the vulgar colloquialism about the dude who is so startled or embarrassed that he jumps through his own rectum and disappears?
I don’t know if the dragon had a rectum and if he did, where he kept it. Nonetheless the dragon seemed to regress and invert himself several times in the course of vanishing.
“I will kill you some day!” Little Boss promised.
“I am no one. I come from nowhere. I cling to no thing. My life is a random waltz on my way toward oblivion. If you strike me down you will have accomplished nothing,” I said.
By now Little Boss was already falling so I had to shout.
“If you kill me, I’ll simply go to dwell with Jesus,” I said.
That sent the demon into paroxysms of rage. O well.
“Damn Dude! What did I ever do to you?” a miniature dragon about four foot long and as thick as my thigh hovering before me asked.
“Let me see, could it be because you were totin’ that homicidal cretin?”
“I didn’t have any choice once he summoned me,” the dragon said. “I’m free now. Why don’t we make a covenant between us?”
“I am not interested in covenants with evil haints or diabolical agents. Go away,” I told him.
“Dude, I’m not evil. I don’t want your soul or the blood of a virgin or even a big fat steer. A covenant is just a sort of pledge to be best friends forever—think about it. I’m too weak to hang here any longer,” the dragon said and then he vanished.
************* ****************** ***************************
I was with David and Duncan in the electronics room twenty miles from Gatorland.
“What in the Hell did the big kahuna just do?” David asked.
“It looks like he just cast a pint-sized second-wave kahuna,” I said.
A few moments the battle was won and the roc touched down briefly in the parking lot. My big kahuna got off and nearly collapsed.
“Get him inside,” I said.
“Why don’t you pop him?” David asked as the roc took off—hopefully before anyone noticed him.
Once I had the big kahuna inside I took the time to explain to David.
“Once all my kahunas are popped, I’m due for a super crash. I won’t be able to throw any kahunas for three or four weeks at a minimum and I’ll hardly be able to raise my head or get out of bed for a week or even ten days. I need to be up an functioning and we may need him for backup,” I told David.
“Call them back dude,” I told the big kahuna. “The rumble at Gatorworld is over.”
I ate heartily trying to get a little more padding for the emaciation in my near future. I also encouraged the kahuna to eat and load up on chi restoring potions and substances.
It is paradox and perhaps homeopathy. The chi laced gumdrops had ripped into the big kahuna’s system causing all sorts of damage to the tissues—micro tears and mini blowouts. The best way to help him heal was more chi.
There was a difference though. Each body has its own unique chi as well as each organ and probably each cell—though all of the body’s variegated chi would be broadly similar. Eating the chi drops was kinda like drinking scalding hot water to treat severe dehydration. At some combination of dehydration and water temperature it is just feasible but rehydrating comes at the price of burned lips, tongue, throat and stomach—maybe even parts off the small intestine.
The body’s chi could be used for healing much—hopefully all—of the chi-scalded body. It wasn’t helpful that the kahuna’s assimilation of food and chi builders was still noticeably inferior to mine—but as my kahunas became longer lasting their assimilation improved.
It’s like one of those old conundrums:
“Which came first—one egg or all the the plethora of baskets one shouldn’t put around one egg?”
I had my doubts that I’d ever dare one of the chi-drops in my own body but they both frightened and fascinated me. In a way I was anxious for my big kahuna to cease so that I could savor his experiences first hand.
************** **************** ********************************
I enjoyed studying the new—to me—kinjutsu manuals. Some of them were very disturbing though.
The kinjutsu to summon the djinn called for a sacrifice of three dogs for each djinn.
First of all, killing dogs for such a crack-brained purpose both angered and appalled me. Second that was getting into the realm of sorcery and the occult where I—or any Christian—could not in good conscious follow.
Some of the other summoning’s required the sacrifice of pigs or goats or chickens or even virgin women.
I had no desire to follow them to that place but it caused me to wonder if the opposition’s willingness to court the abominable and the diabolical and dance with the devil didn’t give them an insurmountable advantage power wise.
The black dragon was in one of the volumes. There were at least threescore of those type dragons. About one third of them had wholeheartedly embraced evil, but at least according to the book the others were free moral agents similar in some ways to humans.
The spaces where these dragons dwelt were totally empty. Even hardest vacuum is something. The places where the dragons dwelt did not even have empty space. Each of the “spaces” was self contained and some dragons dwelt in one hyper-sphere of total negation while others dwelt elsewhere and there was no moving from one realm to another—even should someone get the whimsical urge to transmigrate.
Although some of the dragons shared a realm, the nature of the place made it impossible for them to communicate or even be aware of each other in any way.
There were several mindblowers in the accounts. The negated spaces functioned as a sort of spacer or perhaps more like roller bearings for vast voids even emptier than the negated reams.
Did the dragons fly freely in these negated realms?
What could there possibly be to hinder them? On the other hand without anything—including even emptiness—what medium was there for the dragons to fly through?
It was like trying to imagine the little end of nothing whittled down to a very fine point.
The dragons weren’t summoned with sacrifices, blood or incantations. One simply imagined them strongly with chi. It was the same method I used to summon my ravens or other birds.
I fed my birds small amounts of my blood but that wasn’t thaumaturgy—I don’t think. Imagine that my chi was tiny little bits of iron filings and that I could make the filings do all kinds of things via magnetism. There would be bits of those special iron filings in my blood of course—since the filings completely suffused my body. Feeding my blood to my ravens was a convenient way to get some of my “iron filings” into them so my “magnetism” could reach them and resonate through them.
Yeah, doesn’t sound good for my case, does it? Suffice it to say that I manipulated the ravens with a clear untroubled conscious but sacrificing animals—or people—to summon haints from beyond—that is definitely necromancing.
*************** *************** ****************************
Harold the dispatcher from the village stood before me.
“The Dallas Adepts are laying siege to the village,” Harold said. “They think that you’re still part of The Outfit. Nothing that we can say will convince them. We’re not going to open the gates and let them waltz in. On the other hand, they’ve sworn to kill every man, woman and child if we resist them. I know that you an Dunno have had your issues but please…”
I cut Harold off with a raised hand.
“The Vvillage is what—five to six hours drive from here? Does anyone know a way to get there quicker? David, alert all the Nine Tails and Dragon’s teeth in within three hundred miles. Many of them have never even been in the village, so stress that I only want volunteers,” I rattled off all staccato like an olde tyme typewriter.
A foot long dragon appeared in the air before me.
“I doubt that your raven can carry you over a hundred miles flying at ninety miles an hour. I can get you there travelling faster than sound,” the dragon said. “Let me whisper my true name to you and we’ll be good to go once you repeat it.”
“Won’t everyone hear it then? Why not just say it aloud?” I objected.
I was picking nits because I had no intention of saying the name.
“Do you know what the one that you call ‘Little Boss’ will do to the children if he captures the village?” the dragon said.
Images of sadism, torture, heathen sacrifices and other abominations flooded my mind. That is one of my most basic gifts—even before I came to the village. I can be fooled by ordinary lies just like anyone else. I can spot an insincere preacher, hypocrite, demagogue or of the big-time scammers at a glance.
The dragon was sincere.
I sat comfortably on the dragon’s head. Sitting exposed to the supersonic wind would have been suicidal but he created a chi shield to protect me.
************* ***************** *************************
We arrived at the village within about fifty minutes of hearing Harold’s plea.
The Texans hadn’t stared the siege in earnest yet. Little Boss was seated on a dragon that was twice as long and thick as my black dragon. The new dragon seemed to glow with a sickly iridescence.
I leaped to my feet and prepared to do battle with one of Hell’s head firemen.
“You stole my brother, you steal my kinjutsu, you steal my Hell Hound and now you steal my dragon. I’m going to kill you,” Little Boss said.
I leapt to my feet and sang a snippet of the song that had been running through my head the last few weeks because it isn’t the words in a battle song that counts but the spirit and chi that one projects into it.
“One night in Boonville feels like half a month there; “Not much to do and even less to see; “Housewives do laundry and the rednecks drink there; “All the kids do book reports on MTV; “(I can feel the flute-player sneakin' up on me)” I sang.
Yeah, it is kinda embarrassing.
Just as I completed my last verse and prepared to joust with the new super dragon slaying fuel-air bomb fortified with a half-pound of finely powdered silver and used like the biggest knight’s lance in the history of jousting.
Little Boss threw a massive “V” shaped blade of chi at me. It was like a giant chi boomerang twenty-five feet across. Only it didn’t spin like a boomerang. It flew pointy tip foremost. There was no blocking it and no dodging it.
It hit me just above the navel and it cut me clean in two.
I was the real me—not a spawn or a kahuna—just me. I couldn’t turn to ravens and fly away like Trickster.
A Non-Adept would have lost consciousness instantly. My chi managed to give me a few extra seconds.
My new companion the black dragon was cut into small pieces as well…
The astute reader will realize that I managed to cope with the situation somehow or I wouldn’t be telling the tale.
Yeah, death always gets you eventually but there are ways to postpone the inevitable—sometimes. And yes, I did find a way to gain an indefinite life extension and it came about in this wise:
.....RVM45
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Post by rvm45 on Oct 1, 2015 15:08:53 GMT -6
Chapter Twenty-Two
I found myself somewhere that neither ground nor sky nor any landmark existed. There was a fierce wind howling and it seemed to come from all directions at once. Everything was in blackest black and whitest white like the picture on an old black and white TV with the contrast cranked way too high.
The contrast was so fierce I could see the wind’s turbulence. The wind didn’t feel fierce though. It felt like a hot but dry wind being blown pleasantly across my bare back with the comforting drone of a belt-driven fan added in—only my whole body felt that way. So was I naked? Your guess is as good as mine.
There is a single quatrain in a latter translation of “The Rubaiyat”—on the whole I find the later translation inferior to the earlier one—but I groove on these four previously omitted verses:
“Why, if the Soul can fling the Dust aside, “And naked on the Air of Heaven ride, “Were't not a Shame — were't not a Shame for him “In this clay carcase crippled to abide?”
“You’re not dead,” the black dragon told me somehow—plainly and calmly with no need it seemed to shout to be heard over the maelstrom. “But you soon will be if you don’t take effective action.”
“Your thoughts are speeded up well over one thousand times but you have considerably less than a second of real time. Everything is monochrome because your mind is struggling to make sense of data that isn’t processed by any of your physical senses,” the dragon continued.
“Listen carefully. When one of your spawns returns to you, the return is instantaneous. It is one of the very few phenomena that are faster than light. However each and every one of your spawn had to go through a transition like this one before they could return to you and that transition is not instantaneous.
“That is why you get no return from a dry spawn. Their chi is exhausted before they can mount what Omar called ‘The Air of Heaven’. It isn’t that though. If it was, this state would be irreversible.
“Instead of a spawn riding the wave to you, you need to reverse the direction—the polarity—or something and ride the current to your big kahuna—the one who ate the chi balls,” the dragon told me.
I remember watching films as a boy in first and second grade. As I watched the film wind from one reel to the next I pictured a big fat man at the zoo. He was eating peanuts or maybe popcorn and he was looking intently at a penguin across a moat.
Why a penguin I have no idea.
Anyway, somehow the penguin hooked onto the fat man’s essence and as the film wound around the new reel the fat man’s substance was pulled across the moat. When the film was one hundred percent on the new reel, somehow the man and the penguin had switched places. Now it was the man’s fate to exist in a cage and he shed bitter tears at the penguin’s jutsu.
But the fat man had one last trick up his sleeve. The elementary school teachers were kind and they did rewind.
Somehow the fat man snagged the penguin’s essence and as the film rewound he resumed his rightful place as a free human being and the penguin shed bitter tears.
As a point of fact, since rewinding is much faster than playing mode we can surmise that the fat man’s jutsu was far more powerful than the penguin’s. Not that I’d ever heard of jutsu in the second grade. I just had a vivid imagination.
Nowadays I’m struggling to find a way to rewind DVD disks. It is true that they work quite well without rewinding—but it is unkind not to rewind.
I’d been playing the role of the penguin in each and every instance of transferring the spawn’s data—their very being—to me. Now my biggest big kahuna needed to assume the role of the fat man and wind all of my substance around his reel—and do it fast. I wasn’t going to last long flapping in the breeze like this.
************* ***************** ********************
“What in Hell is the deal with you?” Gerald demanded as I woke and sat up on the cot that I lay on.
I was glad to note that they’d taken the unresponsive big kahuna to the battle site—probably in hopes that he’d revive soon enough to lend support.
“Everything is so shockingly realistic,” I said.
I noticed that I was surrounded all around with a cyan-colored aura six to sixteen inches thick all swirling and omitting green sparks of static every which way.
“My body was destroyed. I had to vacate the premises and relocate here. I don’t think these lightning bolts are damaging but stay back a bit just in case. In the meantime, bring me a big meal, all the chi-boosting herbal concoctions that you can find and a bag of those chi drops,” I said.
************** ***************** **************************
“I’m afraid to eat one of those chi-drops and you’re munching them like they were M&Ms,” Cary told me.
“How many kahunas are there?” I asked once I was up to speed.
“The other two big kahunas and five kahunas. None of the little kahunas survived,” Gerald said.
“Summon them. In the meantime, I know that it’s a mind blower but I’m no longer a kahuna. I’m Spoil. Even that is wrong but language isn’t fully adequate to express. I always was Spoil I was just forced into a precipitous retreat and had to move shop to this location,” I said.
************ *************** ****************************
Once all the kahunas were assemble I spoke to them.
“Guys, I had a choice with y’all. You are earlier and less powerful versions of what I can now create. I could simply absorb you but your chi is piddling and there is no necessity. Instead I’m going to top off each of your chi and set you loose. Once you’re free, you’ll find that my memories and experiences within you will become a little fragmentary and a bit fuzzy. That isn’t meant to be cruel or high handed. It is an unavoidable byproduct of y’all being cut loose. Everyone grab a chi-drop and chow down,” I said.
The former spawn that didn’t faint straight away after I loosed them were nonetheless in a psychedelic hallucinogenic state of consciousness.
“Have someone take them somewhere and let them recuperate. They won’t recover in time to be part of this battle. Tell me, what is the current tactical situation?” I said.
“The Dallas forces have control of the village. They hold the survivors hostage—though they’ve graduated to torturing some of them for information—or more likely—for their bestial amusement. I know, concern for hostages should never be a reason for non-action but…we’re not strong enough to retake the village. By the way, they also have at least three Cherokee villages under siege,” Gerald said.
“Okay, I’m about ready to retake the town for you—and for the captives. Tell everyone to fall back once I get started. Also, have everyone on my team have one of these,” I said while waving the sack of chi-balls. “I can ‘see’ that today no one will over amp if they take one.”
I stepped outside the trailer that served as a command center.
I cast seven big kahunas—each one more powerful than the three that I’d cast at Gatorland. Each of the seven big kahunas spawned four kahunas. Each of the kahunas cast three little kahunas and each little kahuna cast two extra small kahunas. The small kahunas all cast three wet spawn—though to tell you the truth, although the number of wet spawn out on the furthest branch of my spawn tree had grown the power of each terminal wet spawn had only gained a piddling 0.1 or a wee bit more.
My dry spawn hadn’t improved perceptibly in years, but today they all became about seventeen percent stronger.
I walked into the fray casually brushing Dallas Adepts out of my path. Many of them died and many were sorely injured but I took no heed. I just needed to confront Little Boss and they were the flotsam that happened to be in my way.
There in the village common I found Dunno. He’d been crucified and left to hang.
“I’ve long known that I’d kill you one day Dunno. I didn’t know that when the time came that it would be a kindness. Have you made your peace with God?” I said.
“A man in this position who hasn’t made his peace with God is a fool. I may be a fool but I have called on he name of the Lord,” Dunno replied.
“I’d save you if I could, but you’re too damaged,” I said.
“I know. Spoil I’ve hung like this for almost five days. Whenever death comes close they force chi into me to prolong my suffering.”
I drove a chi finger deep into Dunno’s head. His brains should have been thoroughly pureed before the contact with his forehead could even have been felt. I abused Dunno’s corpse a half a dozen ways, but quickly. I wanted to eliminate even the remotest possibility that he could be revived to suffer more.
“You broke my play-pretty Spoil. I’ll let you take his place,” Little Boss said.
He threw another of the pointy boomerang looking thingies at me. I didn’t deign to even block, dodge or parry the energy bolt. It made only the barest ripple in the skin on my stomach.
“That doesn’t work on me any more William. Fall to your knees and tremble in terror!” I said.
“I’m not William!” Little Boss screamed.
“No, sadly you are not William anymore. Duncan’s brother was thoroughly consumed by you long ago wasn’t he? Yet you cling to his template don’t you? He is like a photographic negative or a hologram. As long as you hang onto it, you can project your avatar into our reality. How long Little Boss? How long?” I said.
“Duncan is almost five hundred years old—what does that tell you?”
Little Boss summoned the ugly chartreuse dragon. It seemed to have doubled or tripled in size.
“This is remarkably tedious,” I said.
I summed my friend with a gentle mental nudge. He chose to present as a dragon a yard long. Size is generally a fair indicator of a haint’s power but not always.
“Can I eat the whole thing,” he asked like a deliriously happy six or seven year old child.
“O please do,” I told him. “Enjoy but do make haste. I fear that he may only be the appetizer,” I said.
“That tiny thing cannot defeat Destroyer Of Worlds,” Little Boss shouted.
“What a long and tedious name. My dragon simply goes by ‘Panic’ and he do incite it,” I said to Little Boss.
Panic ate the huge dragon, sucking the smoky substance of it down greedily like a crack head sucking on a glass pipe. In seconds it was gone.
Little Boss was so angry that he danced a little jig like a small child gearing up for a temper tantrum. Or maybe I was being too harsh. Maybe that furious frantic stamping little schottische that he was doing was part of his summoning ceremony.
He brought forth a half a dozen gargantuan haints at one time. Here was a spider whose abdomen was the size of a twenty-room apartment complex. There were three dragons, a jackal that would have dwarfed Clifford The Big Red Dog and a porcupine as big as a four-door pickup truck with lightening conducting spines—like someone had assembled hundreds of “Jacob’s Ladder” spark-gap generators.
“Panic, don’t play with your food. I’m finding this whole sordid affair unspeakably monotonous,” I said.
In a mere instant the haints were gone and Panic had grown to thirty feet long with a grossly distended abdomen.
“You’re on your own for awhile. I can’t eat another bite. I can’t even fly right now,” Panic sighed.
“This farce has gone on long enough,” I said.
I grabbed Little Boss. I got a good grip on one of his ankles and threw a super-powered wet spawn to grab the other.
“Make a wish,” I said to my double.
Judging by the way Little Boss screamed, it must be really painful to be torn apart that way.
************* ***************** *******************************
I toured the ruined village. There were too many dead and grieving. Most of my close associates had jumped ship with me, but there were many casual acquaintances lying dead on the street and it grieved me.
“Friends, you don’t have to act afraid of me,” I said. “I was filled to overflowing with chi that needed to be dissipated. If there wasn’t a battle then I’d have needed to find some other way to discharge it,” I told them.
“I’m sick of these kinjutsu wars. I’m going to put a stop to them,” I added.
.....RVM45
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Post by rvm45 on Oct 2, 2015 13:56:49 GMT -6
Twenty-Three
The old saying is that:
“It is better to light a candle than to be constipated.”
But I preferred the Hacker’s Manifesto:
“Information longs to be free.”
It took a few weeks for David to set it up. All the books of kinjutsu went up on multiple Internet sites, free for the downloading—both in the original versions and with the best translations into English, Spanish, Japanese, Gaelige and German that we could come up with. A few of the new books that we’d acquired were as yet untranslated and/or undecoded. That couldn’t be helped.
I uploaded them in their entirety even though many of the volumes contained techniques and practices that I found abhorrent or that were highly damaging or even fatal to the user. I figured that if someone messed with crap after he had been specifically warned then it was on him. If I edited out all the dirty and nekkid portions then folk would still scramble for the unexpurgated versions.
Adepts might find ample cause to fight in the future but they wouldn’t be piling up collateral damage from seeking kinjutsu volumes.
Of course many Adept groups and governments frantically tried to suppress the sites. It was like trying to stamp out cockroaches or the clap though. Every time one site was hacked and crashed two or three more sprang up to take its place.
There were still a half a dozen or so books of kinjutsu floating around that we didn’t have access to. We were steadily tracking them down. All at once The Outfit and the Macersville group was an object of fear and apprehension in the Adept community.
We would try—in all sincerity—to explain to the possessors of an as of yet un-outed book of forbidden techniques that they were a target. If they’d share a copy with us once we published all motive to steal their volume vanished.
I had the distinct impression that many coughed up copies of the requested volumes from terror of us rather than because our logic swayed them. We tried hard to convince them that we were asking and not demanding but our reassurances often failed to convince them.
By then I had written eight volumes of jutsu and some of the forbidden justsu—those that weren’t sorcery, or flat out ruinous to one’s health—and that didn’t involve unclean spirits.
That was a bit more complicated than the kinjutsu. I wanted anyone who was interested to be able to have actual books on archival quality paper in their possession. Things on a hard drive often turn out to be rather ephemeral.
I was afraid though, that die-hard secrecy advocates might target any publisher. I self published and I had scores of publishers. There were over two dozen in the US of A alone. I had a publisher in New Zealand, one in Nigeria, three in Mexico, four in Japan, two in Germany and three in Ireland.
I published my books in the English, Gaeilge, German, Spanish, Japanese, Yoruba and Esperanto languages with beaucoup illustrations—most created by me. My people took possession of the books and paid off the printers well ahead of my advertising them.
Once someone ordered them—either online or by post—a virtual labyrinth of mail forwarding and cutouts were used. Orders in a given language were routed randomly to a location where books were kept.
There would be no profit in attacking a publisher since his role had already been played. Most Adepts would agree with Miyamoto Musashi:
“Do nothing useless.”
Even if they could track down one site that was mailing books there would only be three or four people and a couple hundred volumes there. Once the stock was exhausted in one locale, the cell moved to another location.
I’m sure that some folks thought that they’d been ripped off by the time they received their books because sometimes delivery took three to five weeks.
At first my jutsu books were poo-pood and my name and art was put into the same category as Bruce Tegner, Ashida Kim, Count Dante and Stephan Hayes.
Then people started to notice several things. The books were on top quality archival linen paper with substantial leather covers and gold leafed borders and they sold for less than many trade paperbacks. I was selling them at well below my cost.
I’d have given them away except that then many people would order who had absolutely no intention of doing much more than look at the books and I couldn’t afford to throw that many books away. I also donated sets to over three hundred libraries in the United States alone.
Anyone who was distrustful or skeptical was free to examine the books in their entirety online.
So I might be a goof and a charlatan, but I was a surprisingly well-funded one and I wasn’t in it to fleece people of their money.
I strongly urged everyone to both exercise and to study some sort of traditional martial art to go along with the visualizations and meditations.
What? Yes both folkstyle wrestling and boxing are legitimate martial arts.
The sections on weight training and nutrition were demonstrably well written and contained good—though hardly unique—Information.
The sections on the throwing arts were also sound and included the use of washers/mini-chakram and methods to help train the weak hand.
Finally, I told people right up front that if they were in great shape and already a black belt or the equivalent it might take three to five years to see results working on their own—and even then the improvement would be subtle at first.
A pasty-face otaku who rarely got out of a chair in front of the television or computer monitor might take even longer.
Then after a couple years three groups started touting my books: College and professional football players—particularly linemen, power lifters and Japanese sumos.
About a year later several professional baseball pitchers admitted reading my books and applying many of my throwing and chi-assisted throwing exercises and visualizations. Soon shot-putters, discus throwers, javelin throwers and strongman competitors also joined my endorsers.
The thing is—one of the things was—very few people would make any effective use of even the most elementary techniques in my books. It took too much motivated perseverance and very few folks have the will and patience. Without a very sound grounding in the basic techniques and several years of chi building and storage the kinjutsu were spectacularly useless.
I suppose that my books ay be written off as nonsense and eventually fall into obscurity. In five hundred years, or a thousand or fifteen hundred if the Lord tarries that long, my books may have become the kinjutsu that Adepts fight over.
For right now though they should be the backburn that causes the big fire to fizzle out for lack of fuel.
Yeah, except that for the first few months after I published the kinjutsu online several Adept groups turned on us like a huge swarm of sparrow-sized rabid hornets.
Yeah, invertebrates can’t get rabies—I said "like".
.....RVM45
This chapter is short for stylistic reasons--not because I'm running down.
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Post by millwright on Oct 5, 2015 17:05:10 GMT -6
Keep it coming.
It just gets better.
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Post by rvm45 on Oct 7, 2015 17:44:11 GMT -6
Chapter Twenty-Four
I had set up temporary headquarters in the shambles of what had been the village for the time being. Dunno had woven his headquarters and living quarters into an inextricable tangle on the top two stories of his tower and as a result they seemed both cramped and hopelessly cluttered to me. We’d moved as much as possible of the apparatus of state back into the old headquarters.
Ruin walked in. He was one of the other two big kahunas when I’d split—that’s what we were calling the event now. The other had taken the name “Plunder” playing on the two definitions of “Spoil”. We weren’t particularly close but he’d been working as a gate guard and he had some visitors to escort.
There were three dudes dressed in what looked for all the world like knee-length black Nehru jackets. They were another three dudes along with them—shaved headed shabnasticators with the bright orange robes and japa beads of Buddhist or Hindu monks.
“We are from Agartha,” The head Nehru said. “Our colleagues are from Shambhala. Have you any idea where and what those places are?”
“Agartha is said to be somewhere in the bowels of the Earth. Shambhala floats in the clouds somewhere in the middle of the Sahara Desert and is generally both invisible and unreachable by mortal men,” I said.
“Only if you’re a Theosophist,” one of the monks said in a voice dripping in contempt. “There is a city there but that city is a tawdry imitation of the true Shambhala.”
“I’m not really busy, but then again I am. I sit and daydream and try to draw the disparate threads together and decide what I am going to do for my next move. People’s lives and happiness are at stake. So if you have something to say, please say it—as briefly as possible and then leave quickly,” I said with a weary sigh.
“We have worked for centuries to erase all hints of these powers among mankind. The end was in sight. Then you broadcast what should have been ancient secrets to the six points of the compass. This town that you call the village and all the hidden land surrounding it shall be destroyed in six days, six hours and six minutes—starting from when the last of our party leave,” Nehru said.
“You must think awfully highly of yourself Nehru. What do you think gives you the moral authority to do something like that?” I asked.
“It is for the good of mankind,” Nehru said.
“Reconstructing a single man or mankind’s destiny for his or their ‘own good’ is far less excusable and far more heinous than reconstructing it to his harm—especially when you’re not mistaken about what is truly good for him. A man is a free moral agent and he should be left to choose his own path and follow it as far as his geas takes him without a crap-load of interference from knob-gobblers like y’all,” I told them.
One of the orange-robed dudes got so angry that he swelled up like a poisoned toad. You could see the big ropy veins throbbing on his hairless head.
“Even if you flee the village, you will be hunted down and killed with no more tolerance than we’d show a rabid dog,” he raged.
“That is as it shall be. No man dies while God still has purpose for him on this Earth. Now get your idol worshipping asses out of my office and out of my village or none of you will be alive to appreciate the events six days from today,” I told them.
They had just left when Rot and Wreck—two of my erstwhile little kahunas—escorted a rather tall and heroically built gentleman into my office. I could tell that he was no sissy boy since his very red and very straight hair hung down well past his belt.
There is something weak and effeminate about closely cropped hair on a man.
We were stretched thin. So many of my former shadow selves were being used as guards.
“My name is ‘Padraig’ and I come from Findias. I have a gift for you. This is the Claidheamh Soluis. Legends say that it once belonged to Nuada Airgetlám,” Padraig said.
He pulled a curved bladed long sword of sorts out of thin air and presented it to me hilt first—all while my bodyguards and the twin ex-kahunas almost had fits of apoplexy.
The sword looked much like my thirty-nine inch saber but its blade was a couple inches longer and the handle was long enough to admit proper two-hand use while the whole sword emitted a bright golden light.
“I is considered churlish and under-bred to resort to the Claidheamh Soluis when lesser weapons will suffice,” Padraig said. “And no, I’m not that Padraig.”
“A legendary sword from a legendary city. Is it rude to ask why?”
“No. We don’t like the high and mighty ways of either Agartha or Shambhala. We do appreciate the beautiful patterns that result from turbulence and chaos. Sadly such things are often the side effects of war and bloodshed. Keeping you alive and fighting longer won’t raise your casualty figures but it will raise the self-ordained Elders’ casualties and it should create far more interesting patterns. We’d join forces with you and fight shoulder-to-shoulder in the war lad—if we were only free to. We are largely constrained by a higher power. I give you this in outright defiance of our geas,” Padraig said.
He handed me a slim volume of kinjutsu. In fact there was but a single technique in the pamphlet sized book. It was a far different technique than any that I’d read about so far.
************** ***************** *****************************
“You could stay here in the village and meet the Elders head-on,” Morgan said. “Eventually they’d lay siege to your lands and no one could enter or leave. That would trap you and many non-combatants inside this pocket. The siege might go on for several human lifetimes. I think that they’d probably prevail eventually but win or lose you would need to devote the rest of your life to defending the borders of a besieged city.”
“But what choice do I have?” I asked. “Evacuate the village. If you start tomorrow you’ll have five days. Take out all the people and their animals along with everything transportable that isn’t nailed down. People have had to bug out and head for the hills with far less warning,” Morgan said. “We can and will shelter and aid any refugees in Macersville.”
“What if the Elders attack Macersville?” I asked.
Morgan’s eyes grew bright and that was the first time I ever saw him smile.
“Even the Elders are not that arrogant and stupid. I only wish that they’d give us an ironclad release like that. We’d love to take part in these affairs directly,” Morgan said while vigorously backhanding one palm with the back of his other hand making a booming clap.
“What about the Cherokee?” I asked.
“It is very hard to find the Cherokee villages—even for an Adept born and raised in the enclave they share with the village. The enclave that y’all share has been preparing to split like a gigantic amoeba for centuries. It could dally for centuries more. Or we could give it a great jolt that causes it to spit off immediately. That would keep the Cherokee from being drawn into the Elder’s plan of total annihilation,” Morgan said.
I turned to David who was my ever-present secretary and assistant.
“Start planning the most expeditious way to get all of the people and as much gear as possible out of here as soon as possible but with at least hours to spare before the Elder’s deadline,” I told him.
“There is one more thing,” Morgan said. “We can make it appear that a skeleton crew of Adepts and Non-Adepts have chosen to stay behind and defend the village. If you give just the right amount of token resistance and then collapse we can trap and destroy significant numbers of Elders.”
“Why wouldn’t they just stay outside and collapse the enclave?” I asked reasonably.
“They need to check to make sure that there aren’t bolt holes and besides they have constituents who would be very pleased to take part in a massacre. Take that opportunity away from them and they’d become wet and soggy, remarkably saline and damned hard to get along with,” Morgan said. “Besides, it is difficult to impossible to collapse an enclave without access to the core inside. The core to this part of the enclave is in the village.”
“Won’t they send spawn instead of their true selves?” I asked.
“They believe that spawn are tools of inferior Adepts—folk who barely qualify as Adepts. They believe that they’re too powerful and too invulnerable to resort to such troublesome expedients as spawn,” Morgan said.
Okay. Time to plan some pretty chaos to make Padraig’s people “Oohh!” and “Ahh!”
**************** ***************** ****************************
No one was put in a tactically disadvantaged position yet by the worldwide distribution of the kinjutsu. No one had the books in their possession long enough to have truly mastered any advanced techniques. But many groups were frantically trying to get some people ready to roll.
Many of the kinjutsu damage the body. Some will age the user a decade or more with every use. I don’t know why but a disproportionate number of the hidden techniques weaken the eyes and/or tendons, ligaments and cartilage. As I’ve said before—if I have to resort to an eyesight damaging jutsu to save the world then I hope that everyone has his affairs in order.
Everyone doesn’t share my scruples though. There are altruists—a fancy name for egotistical horses’ asses—as well as the power hungry and the brainwashed who’d be more than happy to practice body destroying techniques.
************ ****************** ******************************
We sprung the trap in the village without a hitch. I’d used every spawn that I could possibly generate as well as the maximum number of spawn from many of my friends.
Eating something as cram-jammed full of outside chi as the chi drops was fraught with peril, but if one survived the experience then once he recovered he’d find that he’d have risen to a much higher level of power—even if he’d been very close to his natural limit before.
As I’ve said, once the chi level rises to whatever level—no matter what frantic and complicated maneuvers that it took to get it there—the body’s chakra tree accepts that as the new “normal” and seems able to maintain that level without undue strain and to return to that level quickly and efficiently when all or much of the chi is exhausted.
Everyone on my team and most of the folks in my group had popped one of the chi-filled gumdrops when my prescience told me that no one would OD that day.
That meant that Gerald, Ladonna, Cary, David and several others now had big kahunas that were casting kahunas—including Duncan. People who’d never manifested a single kahuna were throwing three big ones. Also all kinds of extraneous “cast a red shadow” type powers—abilities without any great utility—had grown into full-fledged usable powers.
The originals were all safely sheltered in Macersville—all except me.
I’d soaked up all sorts of jangled chi journeying through the sub luminous aether to inhabit my new body. How to describe it? In one way it was like static electricity. In another way it was like white noise with the decibel level raised to the point of bursting eardrums and even shattering concrete.
At any rate, the Adepts from Macersville needed to tap my energy reserves to collapse the village and the surrounding enclave while the Elders from Agartha and Shambhala were still inside—and working hard to prevent us.
When it was done…
All my surviving spawn returned to me. They say that nothing can ever escape from a black hole—kinda. The collapse of the enclave didn’t create a black hole—not precisely. The laws of physics didn’t limit adept abilities—not entirely.
It felt very much like I’d been gifted with a momentary vision of the inside of a black hole.
*************** ***************** ***********************************
Since my transmigration, the crash that I felt when my last big kahuna perished was not quite as severe and I recovered faster. At any rate, the crash was delayed and I should have more than ample time to get back to Macersville before the debilitating weakness hit.
I had a Cary kahuna along with a Duncan kahuna and a Gina kahuna. James and Chandra had spawn there as well.
Gina was a young woman now, very good with cats and married to Cary—to no one’s great surprise since they continually honed their jutsu one against the other. The cats fought the rats. When it was for real though, the cats and rats quickly made common cause.
I also had over fifty Nine-Tails on their big bikes riding armed escort. We rounded a curve and there was a couple dozen of the skinhead bikers—they’d taken to calling their biker gang: “The Berserkers”—blocking the highway.
Biker to biker we had them outnumbered over two-to-one. The Nine-Tails and The Dragon’s Teeth members didn’t seem to attain full Adept status as quickly as some, but even if most of them weren’t full-fledged Adepts they should have been far better at tradecraft than the Berserkers.
Except maybe that wasn’t completely true anymore.
When we came into sight most of the Berserkers transformed into twenty foot tall and heavily muscled dudes without shirts. All of them had a single eye bigger than a basketball right in the low-center of their foreheads.
“Judas Iscariot riding a unicycle and juggling live hand grenades!” I exploded. “What next?”
Almost every transformation technique falls in the category of forbidden techniques.
The raven transformations that give me such satisfaction along with Cary’s rat towers and Gina’s pile of cats—they have their cautions and drawbacks—but they aren’t true transformations. There are true transformation jutsu though. A man can become a panther or a wolf, a gator—or a wolfman, catman or whatever hybrid shape.
There are grave risks. Someone who can’t quite complete the change can be left permanently in some sort of in between and deformed state. He can lose his human mind or the ability to change back to human. Even folks who master the jutsu are always a bit at risk every time they transform…and over time they all seem to take on some catlike or doglike or whatever features in their human form—fangs, split lips, patches of hair in odd places—stuff like that.
Transforming into something like the Cyclops ahead…any transformation that requires virtual matter to be created for the duration carries its own host of problems.
Still, while the teens and young men might have been remiss for even visiting something like the skinhead militias in the first place, they were all quickly brainwashed and literally turned into all but mindless and impersonal cats-paws for the Adepts who constituted the core elite in the gangs very quickly.
It might be a pity. It was certainly sad. There was no reason to hold back or be merciful though. Those young men might have left all the lights brightly burning when they left but they hadn’t been home for a very long time. They would never return home again. They had been spent.
Gina threw a cat that grew until it was as big as a large leopard. I hadn’t seen her do that before. Unfortunately she only had one leopord on tap.
Cary blew up five of his rats until they were the size of Basset Hounds. The Duncan big kahuna that I had with me threw three wet spawn who promptly grew to be about twelve foot tall—small compared to the twenty foot giants but still on a whole other plane of endeavor than a normal human.
Each of Duncan’s three spawn started winding up slings if you can believe that. Here was a fellow who could have called Goliath of Gath “Shorty” and he had a sling of David—a sling that used silver balls bigger than a hen’s egg.
“I been doin’ a lot of thinking since ee fought the djinn at Gatorland,” James said. “This here is a double barreled 10 gauge with rifled barrels and punkin ball silver slugs. It’s a shame that the silver doesn’t spawn that well…”
James’ kahuna threw three wet spawn—all with muzzle-loading 10 gauge double barreled shotguns instead of the harder to spawn modern shotgun that James had. He tossed each of them a small bag. Each bag had several silver balls inside. Once equipped with the unspawned silver punkin balls each spawn quickly loaded his shotgun and rushed to take up strategic positions.
Any of the Nine-Tails that could threw spawn. One of the problems with spawn use by bikers was the near impossibility to duplicate a bike. The clubs tried to maintain an inventory of usable motorcycles—off road bikes, battered but usable second hand bikes and even souped up scooters and mopeds to get spawn to where they needed to be. They weren’t packing any of the throwaway two-wheelers here though.
Each Nine-Tails drew a long lance from thin air. The originals sat their bikes and prepared to joust with the giants while the spawn produced their lances and took up supporting positions.
How do you spell relief? I spell it: “Dragon.” Not “Puff The Magic Dragon” but “Panic The Malevolent Dragon”.
“Silver will weaken them, but they aren’t going to pop at the intrusion of th tiniest quantity like those djinn that you fought,” Panic told me.
“Aim for the eye. If you can compromise the eye, you nullify their ability to manifest on this plane. I can carry and largely shield you but I can only absorb one of the giants. I can still carry you after that, but I’ll be both slower and less maneuverable and I’ll also be able to shield you less,” Panic added.
“Okay, lets attack and try to avoid you having to eat one for as long as possible,” I said.
Duncan’s silver sling bullet promptly penetrated one of the Cyclops’ eyes and it promptly vanished—not even leaving a skinhead biker behind. After that Duncan’s aim seemed to go all to Hell. It hadn’t really though. Instead he’d taken the first giant by surprise and now they had hi shields around their eyes.
“How long can they manifest?” I asked Panic.
“Fifteen minutes—maybe as much as thirty. That chi shield around their eyes cuts minutes off of that though,” Panic said.
Some of Duncan’s deflected balls drew blood and some wounds were at the right place to flow into the eye. The chi shield didn’t seem to help keep the monster’s own blood away from the eye.
Gina’s giant housecat leaped from the back of a semi-trailer and snagged a giant about halfway up his thigh. It tried hard to climb the Cyclops like a tree but the cat was ten feet from the eye when the monster snagged it in both hands. As he raised it high above is head preparing to smash it to the ground—trying hard to crush it all the while.
A rat launched himself from the cat straight at the giant’s eye. He’d been riding unobtrusively the whole while. On his way to the Cyclops’ eye he grew to the size of a Basset Hound. He manifested a mini set of claws like the custom knifemakers craft for presumably grownup people so they can slash at things and pretend they’re the comic book hero Wolverine.
The rat’s claws were more than adequate to pierce the giant’s eye. One more giant down and he popped before he could do more than knock the wind out of the great cat.
One giant Duncan rushed a Cyclops. He stepped into the interlaced hands of another giant Duncan and got a huge boost upward. He was wearing both palm spikes and shoe spikes an he was industriously climbing up the bare chest of a monster leaving bloody foot and hand prints all along the way.
Another giant stomped the Duncan still on the ground. The Cyclops’ foot stopped four or five foot from the ground. The Duncan kahuna forced the foot up and off of him. Though he was smaller and with far less mass he had found a position where he could bring his greater strength to bare.
Once he stood upright—hands above his head—he ran forward while holding the giant foot aloft. The effect was very much like stepping on a roller-skate, a banana peel or a handful of marbles for the haint.
The Duncan kahuna cast five normal sized Duncan wet spawn. Two stayed behind to help with the foot. One tried to hamstring the giant’s other leg with a huge leaf-bladed scimitar pulled from nowhere while two Duncans ran to where the giant’s head would probably end up after he took the fall.
As soon as he fell the two Duncans put his eye out and he popped.
A Cyclops tried to stomp Gina. There was a huge snarling mass of black cats that promptly ran toward every point of the compass. Each of the cat spawn threw three or four short-lived dry spawn almost every foot of the way.
“I’m over here dumbass,” Gina said from behind the giant.
As the giant bent over to try to scoop Gina up— hoping to capturing cats and all—James shot the Cyclops with both barrels of his 10 gauge while Chandra and two of her wet spawn—also armed with 10 gauges—backed James up with an improbable amount of silver .24 caliber #4 Buckshot.
The wet spawn’s black powder muzzleloaders threw slower moving pellets and the silver balls deformed more and spread wider. Anyway that you looked at it though, it amounted to a huge load of flying silver launched at a silver-vulnerable haint. The Cyclops popped.
The Nine-Tails sent about a dozen bikers at one giant and their sole goal was to hamstring the monster. There were more giants than twelve man squads of Nine-Tails bikers and they also had to look out for stomps and kicks from clients that they weren’t directly servicing.
Panic pointed me at one Cyclops’ eye. I hit it with a shaped fuel-air bomb mounted on a lance-like shaft of chi. It was kinda like those 12 gauge boom-sticks that they make for use against sharks.
As that monster exploded I managed to throw a simple oxygen bomb with no fuel into the face of another Cyclops.
I needed a moment to draw a container of kerosene and powdered silver from my bag. Panic took us up, out and away and well out of reach as I prepared an oxygen-fuel bomb lance—on for each hand this time.
We were coming out of he sun this time. I drove a lance into two different monster’s eyes this time. We went low to get away that time and I had time to throw a ball of very high-pressure white-hot oxygen against the knee of a giant that our bikers were trying hard to hamstring. That should give them the opening that they needed.
As the number of targets shrank, I tried to take them out with fuel-air bombs thrown from out of the giant’s reach. I used three bombs and only got one Cyclops. We went in close and I used my last PVC pipe filled with kerosene and silver powder. As we flew back toward my ride I threw a couple oxygen balls.
One of them caught a Cyclops right in his crotch—for what good or ill I cannot say.
I leapt off of Panic and he went back to eat one as he’d promised. Moments later all of the monsters were dead.
“Bring the bikes,” I ordered. “They can probably be put to some use.”
“We lost a dozen of our people defending you,” the Captain of the Nine-Tails said.
“You are the only original here. Without you, we would have had nothing to protect. God knows how your Macersville mages got back to Macersville. We care nothing for your village and we resent being asked to take part in your tawdry war,” he continued. “Why didn’t you simply ride your dragon home?”
“You’re right. I could have ridden Panic and avoided this whole bad trip. I don’t know what kind of aerial threats the opposition could mount though. Most of all, I didn’t know that a feeling of ‘us’ and ‘them’ had crept in. We will have an all-thing soon. If any of y’all want to cut loose we’ll work out terms,” I said.
“So we’re going to have to buy our freedom?” the captain spat.
“Not at all,” I said.
That had truly hurt.
“I’m going to see how much gold, hardware, money and what have you that we can afford to give those of you who chose to leave as parting gifts and gifts of friendship and goodwill.”
.....RVM45
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Post by rvm45 on Oct 12, 2015 14:58:48 GMT -6
Chapter Twenty-Five
The Nine-Tails decided that they wanted to be totally independent of our organization. We’d resumed calling ourselves by the highly descriptive and colorful cognomen: “The Outfit” once more. We’d absorbed anyone with a prior claim to the handle. The Dragon’s teeth were friendlier and more polite but once the proposition was put to them they too were overjoyed to be independent.
Neither group could have come about in anything like their current incarnations without some extremely generous start-up money and some expert advice in a number of areas. Now that they were fully developed it seemed quite possible that they could survive and prosper on their own. Especially since I’d given each local club enough tax free cash to tide them over quite a few rough patches over the next decade or two.
Some of our “franchised” dojos had close ties with one or the other biker clubs. A few just wanted to be free to go off and do their own thing. We kept about eighty dojos all over the Southeast though and we looked at them as a sort of minor league farm organizations to guide and funnel promising newcomers our way. And they were often a source of guides, safe houses and extra Adepts on call for operations in their area.
Some of our newly minted Adepts decided to join the economy and do the old work thingy—but they still worked out regularly at their old dojo. I know that we had at least two Adepts who were high school wrestling coaches. That was fine by me since there was no way that I could continue to add so many new graduates to the payroll.
Then a couple years after the destruction of the village, bad things started to happen. Several of the local biker gangs were brought up on RICO charges. Senseis and assistants—in some cases even advanced students—were arrested and held incommunicado without bail, hearing or charges under one or the other provisions of the Patriot Act.
Word came back to me that sitting down for a tête-à-tête with the government might stop the harassment—maybe even get some or all of our folks released. Although the bikers were no longer under our aegis that didn’t mean that I would abandon them to the jack booted thugs if I could help. The senseis were kin.
They were mighty particular where and how we met. It had to be on neutral ground under a tent. I guess that they thought it would be hard to hide any tampering in the thin canvass walls. I had to come myself—they weren’t interested in talking to my spawn and they assured me that they could easily tell the difference. I was allowed to bring a reasonable number of assistants and they didn’t have to be originals.
*************** ***************** **************************
The government forces had erected a big OD Green headquarters tent. It wasn’t big enough for even a tiny circus but it could have housed a small revival.
Inside there were five men in expensive suits sitting on folding metal chairs behind a folding table like you see in school cafeterias or swap meets. There weren’t any chairs on our side of the table.
There was a a line of men in dark suits and dark glasses standing shoulder-to-shoulder against the tent wall behind and to either side of us.
Big deal! I had Duncan’s three big kahunas and I could have over thirty Duncans in less than a second. I had a Cary kahuna and a David kahuna. David was there so that his hyper-powerful mind could start analyzing the data ASAP and he had mastered linking to his electronic drones via mental jutsu. Cary was there mainly to give us one more channel of communication via his mental link with his rats. Neither of the men was inconsequential in a scrap in addition to their other gifts.
Ladonna sent a kahuna just because she’d stood by my side so many times that she wasn’t willing to sit this one out.
Tell the truth, I could fill the room with close to one hundred of me even without scraping the bottom of the barrel and using dry spawn. I expected some sort of trap—but damned nation…
“Lets beat around the bush a bit before we get down to serious business. Who are you people and what in the seven burning Hells do you want from me?” I demanded.
“I’m General Maxwell. You don’t need to know these other gentlemen’s names. You are going to stop training civilians and you’re going to train soldiers for use in elite strike force and hostage rescue groups,” the general said.
“General, do be careful how you address your betters. I’m not going to train any of your soldiers because they wouldn’t be suitable candidates—overlooking the fact that I dislike orders and commands,” I said.
“These men are truly special,” Maxwell insisted.
“The Outfit’s two prime axioms are that nothing of lasting value ever results from haste and that bringing pressure to bear on yourself or others is evil. I’d need a year or two to unwind and relax your hyper-vigilant ‘Hoo-Haw!’ soldiers enough to even start teaching them tradecraft,” I said.
“We don’t want hippy mystics. We just want you to jack up their senses, reaction times, strength and endurance,” General Maxwell insisted.
“If I did that I’d be placing a time bomb inside each man that would eventually destroy him. I’ll tell you what—send me thirty or forty volunteers fresh out of basic training. In three or four years you’ll have some Adepts,” I said.
“There are several conditions. Each man continues to get his military pay, time in grade and promotions on the same general schedule as if he was performing in the top one percent in his chosen MOS,” I started to delineate.
“I was in your damned army. It was the worst experience in my life—by far. I can imagine someone with little talent and less desire to become an Adept hanging on grimly simply because it was better than going back into the regular military. People like that would bollix my training, but I wouldn’t send anyone back to that Hell. I want every trainee free to walk away from the military and/or Adept training at any time. That’s the only way that I could train folks for you with a clear conscious,” I concluded.
“I don’t care about your conscious and this isn’t a request. This is an order,” General Maxwell said.
“I warned you once about talking down t your betters. This interview is over. I will tell you one thing though: if my people aren’t released immediately I will look upon it as a declaration of war. You wouldn’t like that General. Duncan here for instance, could pick up one of your Humvees and throw it like an oversized bale of hay,” I said.
“Arrest him,” the general said without the least bit of stress in his voice.
I started to do the raven transformation just to throw their aim off. While I was travelling from “here” to “there” I started to throw every spawn that I possibly could.
I’d never sensed that feeling of duality before. I was fifty or sixty ravens and I was myself. At the same time I had the bizarre teleidoscopic from scores of human eyes taking in the scene in the tent from multiple vantage points simultaneously.
Then I was back in my original with a Taser-like set of darts in my right shoulder blade. The darts were bigger though and they had taken a deep bite into my scapula. They wasted no time in getting handcuffs and leg irons on me and spraying pepper spray into my eyes.
“We just took your powers away,” the general said. “They’re gone forever. I love clipping you freaks’ wings. Are you better than me now?”
He added a handful of terms that questioned my legitimacy, sexual orientation and accused me of incest—all in such filthy gutter language that I won’t bother to justify his breath by repeating scandals that he wasted his time hypothesizing.
“Dude, it is like: I was born more of a man than you will ever be. If there were no better men than you in the world, I wouldn’t waste toilet paper. I’d just grab one of y’all’s punk asses up and wipe myself,” I said.
The general slapped me across the face a half dozen times while alternating hands. Then he drove his knee into my crotch. Long before I became an Adept or even knew that Adepts existed I’d taught myself to ignore pain.
My body fell. I couldn’t control the autonomous reflexes anymore but I could control my mind and my voice.
“General Maxwell, I curse you.
“May you hunger and find no nourishment.
“May you thirst and find no refreshment.
“May you tire and find no place to rest your weary head.
“May you sire a thousand daughters and not even a single son.
“May you be visited by kidney stones and the clap, gout, migraines, gall stones and boils the size of tennis balls and may all these curses be visited upon all your descendants and kin for seven generations,” I said.
I don’t know were that curse came from, but I’ve always known it. I hadn’t used it in over fifty years. Largely because God says to forgive but also because cursing someone takes a lot out of you. I don’t know anything that places you into a deeper slough of desponds than cursing someone with one’s spirit.
I must have given General Maxwell the crawling hee-bee gee-bees cause he had a ball gag shoved into my mouth and a heavy black hood pulled over my face.
One interesting fact was that all the spawn seemed to have vanished before they could strike down a single jack booted thug.
I have a sort of claustrophobia about having my hands bound behind me and I have a horror of being suffocated. I guess everyone does. I wasn’t going to give these sniveling shabnasticators the satisfaction of knowing how discomfited that I was. I forced myself to breathe slowly and evenly through my nose.
Finally they took me to a holding cell somewhere far under ground.
Waterboarding? Yeah that would have been something they did to let you have a break from the serious torments.
They stuck me in an isolation chamber for a very long time. Then they took me out and tried to feed me. I spit the food out as best I could.
“We could force feed you, but if you want to do the Bobby Sands thingy—so be it. We aren’t going to take it easy on you because you refuse to eat,” one of the guards said.
I had a knowing. That was something else that I’d had occasionally as far back as I could remember.
“One day I’ll wear your finger bones and those rings as a necklace,” I told him.
“We don’t need any intel from you. We simply want to break you. After you beg long and piteously enough we will stop—but only after we’ve thoroughly enjoyed ourselves,” the guard said.
“I’ll beg you right now—please castrate yourself. Do it for the good of the gene pool,” I said.
I never broke or begged but I must admit to my shame that I did scream and bellow a few times.
An Apache Indian or a samurai wouldn’t have given them that satisfaction I’m sure. They could have endured the worst with a detached smile. The fact that they exposed my lack of true courage made me hate my tormentors all the more.
There were bouts of being shocked all over my body. Then they’d stick my head into a trough full of ice water while they beat me. Then they’d hang me by my ankles and pummel the water out of my lungs. When they tired, they’d put me back into the isolation chamber with IV tubes of glucose and various nutrients to partially offset my hunger strike.
Surely, I said to myself, my body will break soon and set me free from this torment.
I searched my inner world for my chakra tree. The chi meridians were like the branches and trunk of a tree and the major chakras reinforced and helped constitute the trunk of the chakra trees. The minor chakras hung off the minor chi meridian branches like so many eccentric fruits or tiny leaflets.
No matter how I searched that part of my inner world was simply empty. I would have mourned my loss but not where these knob- gobblers could see me.
Though the Chakra tree that I’d spent decades building, strengthening and optimizing was gone I could still hear Panic somehow. He assured me that our bond was unbroken whatever the situation might be with my Adept powers.
There was something else as well.
There hadn’t been anything there years ago when I started my training so long ago in the village. I started at the beginning again and imagined the first chakra—double in my case and I hand cranked them remorselessly over and over again.
The chakras hadn’t seemed completely real the first time around but that was nothing compared to the complete absence of reality in these visualizations.
They make very free with the idea of taking away someone’s powers in some of the cartoons, movies and books—as if it was more humane to geld or blind someone than to kill them. It isn’t mercy. It is something that comes from a bottomless pit of cruelty.
There was no point in getting mad when I was so weak. I couldn’t even stand much less avenge myself like Samson bringing down the house of the Philistines.
Then the next time someone took me out of the solation chamber it was Duncan in some sort of protective clothing that resembled a cloth of gold space suit costume or prop.
“You shouldn’t have bothered Duncan. I’m not good for anything anymore. I can’t even stand without support,” I told.
“If you never regain your powers or even the strength to stand—If we have to wheel you around in a wheelchair—you are still laird and warlord. If anyone challenges your commands he can face all of us. We’re not to be taken lightly,” Duncan said.
“What’s with the gold suit?” I asked.
“They have some sort of field that cancels the chi that keeps a spawn in existence and you taught us to never go anywhere in person when you can send a spawn instead,” Duncan said.
“Do you see that guard lying on the floor over there Duncan? I want his hands and be sure to get his rings as well. Get his big toes while you’re at it. He was especially cruel and insulting to me and I promised to wear a necklace of his rings and finger bones,” I said.
Duncan pulled out one of his oversized Kunai knives and soon there was a handless and footless body lying on the floor. I noticed blood pumping out of the stumps.
“Is he alive?” I asked.
“Yes,” was all Duncan said.
“Kill him then. What if his compañeros got here in time to save him? That would be too cruel. If you cripple someone then finish him off if it is at all possible,” I said.
Duncan shrugged and slammed the guard’s head against the concrete floor hard enough to crush the man’s skull.
“He was cruel to you,” Duncan said.
“That’s true but we’re supposed to be better people than they are,” I said.
.....RVM45
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Post by rvm45 on Oct 13, 2015 18:41:40 GMT -6
Chapter Twenty-Six
“I’ve never heard of anything like this happening,” the doctor said. “You’re seventy-three years old. You’ve kept your body in a high state of repair with all of your systems optimized and in perfect balance. Physically your body is like an improbably fit man in his early thirties. There is no reason that losing your power should throw your bodily systems into disarray.
“There are some cautions though. If you abuse your body now there is no chi system to put it back aright. If you’re reasonable you should have the same life expectancy as any other very healthy thirty year old—but if you abuse your system as you’ve been in the habit of doing you’ll soon be crippled and debilitated beyond remedy. Do you understand?”
“Yeah whatever,” I said.
“We will hunt down this General Maxwell and kill him for you,” Ladonna said.
“Never mind. Seeking vengeance presupposes that your enemy robbed your loved ones of something durable and valuable and when you find him you’re going to deprive him of something wonderful and lasting. Life is fleeting and it isn’t terribly desirable. The general’s life isn’t worth a gnat’s spit and he’ll soon be dead whether you kill him or leave him to God,” I said.
“But what he did to you…” Ladonna started to say.
“It is true. I wouldn’t have bargained my powers away even to save my life—so in that sense he’s inflicted a ‘fate worse than death’ on me. Even so, I cursed him. My curses are not mere wind. Let the misery that he endures in this world serve as a warm up for the torments of Hell,” I said.
“Duncan, bring me a bag of chi-drops,” I said.
“What do you think those will do? They could kill you,” Ladonna objected.
“True but they also might cure me,” I said.
Ladonna didn’t like the idea. That’s one reason that I sent Duncan to fetch the chi-fortified gumdrops instead of Ladonna. Duncan’s loyalty expressed itself in total obedience. He’d fetch me gumdrops fortified with arsenic or cyanide if I told him to. Ladonna might have resorted to trickery.
I examined one of the chi-drops. I sniffed it and examined it momentarily before I popped it into my mouth, chewed it a few times and swallowed.
Nothing.
Ordinarily popping a single chi-drop was like eating a handful of habaneros while being zapped in the mouth and esophagus with healthy jolts of static electricity combined with the sensation of having plopped a couple of dry Alka-Seltzer into one’s mouth. Even an ordinary person would have felt a massive shock to the system.
I only tasted a rather dried out and bland gumdrop.
I paused momentarily then I ate three at one time. Then I ate five in one mouthful. Finally I sat and finished the whole bag two or three at a time. They didn’t even taste good.
One doesn’t need powers to practice combat pistol shooting or swordsmanship. My mundane body needed exercise and far more rest than it ever had before. I indulged it.
I was getting about as close to zero from my life as it is possible to imagine. It wasn’t torture like I’d endured at the government’s hands. It wasn’t off into the realm of the negative but there was almost no positive in evidence either.
If I still had a purpose to my life it was to lead my family wisely and above all to prevent a similar fate from striking any of them. That presupposed that I kept myself fit and rested enough to be a good leader.
I sat in the park brooding when one of my ravens sat beside me. I shared my spam sandwich with him and a piece of my apple afterward.
Then he managed to get into my lunch sack as I sat daydreaming and grabbed one of my chi-drops. I’d taken to eating a bag every day or two. They did me no good but then they did me no harm—so why not?
Even one of my super-ravens weighed less than twenty pounds. The massive load of chi in the power food should have caused the raven to pop like a man who’d contrived to swallow a hand grenade with the pin pulled.
Gina entered the park and sat on a bench across from me. She looked like a six-foot and two hundred pound Goth. She wasn’t fat nor was she built like a female bodybuilder either. She had more the body of a strong farm girl who would astound most people by weighing forty or fifty more pounds than they would have guessed.
The black clothing and the Elvira makeup weren’t a symptom of being delusional or possessing a gloomy disposition either. Her cats were black to make it easier for them to hide in the shadows. She’d become like her cats. She had a jutsu that almost seemed to wrap shadows around her making her close to invisible when she was hiding or stalking.
“He says that his name is Alexander. He wants you to know that all your birds understand why you cannot talk to them. He says they’re still your friends and will stand by you. He also says that your feedings have gotten rather hit or miss lately but they can make out by scavenging so don’t trouble yourself,” Gina said.
Alex hopped on my right shoulder and rubbed his face, neck and shoulder against my face much like a cat.
“Can you hear the thoughts of birds Gina?” I asked.
“Not as a general rule—at least I get little but vague fragments. Alexander is broadcasting directly at me though,” Gina said.
“Gina friend. Spoil master,” Alex croaked—sounding much like a poly parrot but harsher and more hoarse—like if you blended a raspy voice like Rod Steward’s with a parrot.
“Some crows can learn a few words,” Gina said. “Apparently ravens can too. He’s been diligently beefing up his vocal apparatus and the verbal part of his brain for some time. He says that your chi-drop put him over the threshold just now,” Gina said while staring intently at my raven.
“He won’t eat enough to hurt himself? Do you want another Alex,” I said while holding the sack out to him.
“He says that he can’t utilize another right now but that you should offer him one regularly and that you should make them available to the other birds as well,” Gina said.
Another raven landed on my left shoulder.
“He says that his name is ‘Glass’ and he needs a gumdrop to catch up to Alexander’s ability to speak,” Gina said.
“Well I guess I need to go do more paperwork and make more policy decisions. That’s about all I’m good for anymore,” I said to Gina. “Thank you.”
“You haven’t forgotten have you?” Gina asked.
“No,” I replied. Gina was the third person to allude to that indirectly and none of them should have had direct knowledge of that odd aspect of reality.
She laughed.
“You look like Odin with a raven on each shoulder,” she said.
“The Norse God?”
“He’s no more a God than I am, but he’s a very old Adept. Haven’t you ever met him?”
“No. Be wary of haints and unclean spirits. That smacks of the unchancy,” I said.
*************** ******************** ******************************
Gerald and Norman walked into my office.
“There is a crazy woman killing normals and demanding to meet you in single combat,” Norman said.
“She’s standing atop a giant Western type dragon. She has long white hair hanging all the way to the ground. She’s stark naked and she says that her name is Shannon,” Gerald said.
Western style dragons resemble a flying fire breathing stegosaurus whereas Eastern style dragons like Panic resemble great flying serpents with comparatively tiny arms and legs stuck on as if they were an afterthought.
Duncan gasped and looked shaken. He actually turned ashy white and trembled like a quaking aspen.
“She’s my big sister. I thought that she’d died or at least permanently disappeared two hundred years ago. She’d be more than a match for me, my dead brother and every Outfit Adept combined. If you still had your powers you’d have an outside chance against her. The situation may be beyond hope,” Duncan said in a rush.
“Nonsense. I will go out and fight the bitch,” I said.
“That’s suicide,” Ladonna said.
“You under rate me,” I told her.
“I will be your champion if she will allow it,” Ladonna said.
“I’m stronger,” Gerald objected.
“My super speed may take her by surprise and give me an outside chance,” Norman said.
“I could defeat all of the others combined without even calling on spawn. Choose me!” Duncan shouted.
“What sort of man would send his friends to die in his place? Cowards theorize with the goal of surviving firmly in mind. I’ll try my fortunes against this witch. My life is a piddling stake. She is welcome to it if she can claim it. I never compete…
“However I will give you my weird: I will return with this woman’s head—with apologies Duncan if she’s kin,” I said.
“You are kin. She’s merely my sister from long ago—but you haven’t a prayer,” Duncan said.
“Norman, go and tell her that I’m coming to meet her directly and ask her to quit wasting noncombatants,” I said.
Saul pointed his nose at the ceiling and howled mournfully. It was much like a Bloodhounds baying on the trail—but a couple octaves lower, far louder and a mournful note braided through the melody somehow.
My ravens were cawing loudly, but theirs was a song of exultation. I stopped to feed each of them a chi-drop. I hadn’t done that in front of the others before. Their eyes bugged out at the sight of ravens eating a chi-drop that would have slain many strong Adepts.
************** ******************* ****************************
I stood before the naked witch.
“This will be your last act on Earth,” I told her. “Try to make it a worthy last battle.”
“You are a fool! You have no powers. You have no weapon. You have no mount. Yet you tell me that I’m doomed. Please explain your logic,” Shannon said before she burst into fits of hearty but cruel laughter.
“I have no divine power: I make honesty my divine power.
“I have no magic power: I make personality my magic power.
“I have no miracles: I make righteous action my miracles.
“I have no strategy: I make freedom to slay or spare my strategy.
“I have no talent: I make ready wit my talent. “I have no armor: I make the benevolence and righteousness of God my armor.
“I have no Castle: I make the immovable mind from beyond the realm of right and wrong my castle.
“I have no sword: I make absence of mind my sword.
“I have no life or death: For though I fall I shall awake to life everlasting,” I told her.
“But I exaggerate my lack of armament,” I added.
“This is the Sword “Claidheamh Soluis”. He was forged in the city of Findias and once carried by Nuada Airgetlám. It is said that once unsheathed in earnest that he never returns to his sheath unblooded,” I said.
The sword was mine. It took no power or magic to draw him to me from his place of repose. I drew him out of thin air into my strong left hand.
Then I summoned my dragon.
“This is my mount Panic. Now fall to your knees and tremble in terror and I might be persuaded to spare you,” I said.
Then ravens flew from every point of the compass. They were cram-jammed with chi from consuming multiple chi-drops. Somehow they became a great cape or cloak of black feathers that clad me from head to foot in a nearly impenetrable suit of black armor.
“That’s something that you don’t see every day,” I told the witch. “Truth be told it’s a surprise to me too.”
“Enough!” she roared in a voice that hurt me ears.
“You’d attract more suitors if you dressed and spoke in a more lady-like manner. If all men were brothers, would you let one of them marry your sister?” I asked her.
“I’m vastly outclassed here,” Panic said.
“Good. That makes our victory even more certain,” I reassured him.
I may never be able to give a good account of that battle. I stood atop Panic’s head. Meeting a standing client while seated was a no-go. I had no chi to do the gecko-hand thingy so Panic’s pitch-black chi bound me to his head all the way up to my knees.
The Claidheamh Soluis had a mind and will of his own—all I did was hold onto him tightly. Panic maneuvered on his own since I couldn’t guide him mentally and vocal commands were too slow. Even my black-feathered armor guided me without me consciously willing it.
We clashed over and over and over again. People on the ground said it was like watching the most violent lightening storm they’d ever seen. Shannon’s weapons were the brightest shining gold. She pulled them out of the void every time we exchanged blows and she never held the same weapon twice. One time she had a lance. The next time she might have a morning star or a long sword or a double bit axe or a scimitar.
Every time we crossed weapons great lightening bolts of pure power were released.
“Hey Spoil! If you’re the good guy, why are you cloaked in black while I’m surrounded by an aura of purest gold?”
“You’re a fool. Have you never heard that Satan appears as an Angel of Light? I reckon that applies to his henchmen and head firemen in Hell…”
“Firemen” like the railroad firemen who shovel coal to stoke a boiler. Only these firemen shovel coal and lost souls into the Lake of Fire.
Then she was cleft from crotch to collarbone and the enchanted sword’s backslash severed her dragon in twain.
Yippee-Kie-Ayy, even though I was pretty much along for the ride the whole while. Still, it was a victory that I was glad to accept under the circumstances.
*************** ******************** ****************************
I walked toward the others carrying the head of the witch.
“I told y’all what would happen but for some reason you didn’t believe me. Have more faith in me next time,” I told them.
I went up on the rooftop of the headquarters and locked the door behind me. I sat and brooded. I had power, but while the results were desirable there was very little feeling of satisfaction in being a marionette pulled hither and yon by an enchanted sword, magic raven feather armor and the vaporous black aura of a dragon.
There’s a song that Meatloaf sings:
“If the thrill is gone then it’s time to get it back.”
Yeah well, tell me how!
Nonetheless a fragment of an idea started to grow.
.....RVM45
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Post by rvm45 on Oct 20, 2015 0:25:39 GMT -6
Chapter Twenty-Seven
“You asked to talk to me. Don’t stand there ruminating. Tell me what you want,” I said.
The number of people claiming that they had an urgent need to speak to me was rising precipitously in the weeks and months subsequent to the destruction of the village and its attached enclave.
I didn’t need any sort of power to tell that the dude in front of me was some sort of haint or kami. He was tall and wore a slouch hat pulled low but I could still see a bright glowing sapphire colored ball where most folk stash their right eye. He also had an oversized raven—bigger than any of my ravens, excluding the rocs—riding on each shoulder. A pair of jet-black three hundred pound wolves or dogs or something flanked him on each side.
Duncan was with me almost every waking moment so Saul was with me as well. The four hundred pound Hellhound and the sable wolves glowered at each other with eyes that glowed ruby red from some sort of inner light.
“Gina tells me that you want your power back,” he said.
“You don’t need to be a seer or even to talk to Gina to know that.”
“The jutsu that Padraig left you—what do you make of it?” he asked.
“It requires an enormous amount of chi. No one has been able to successfully use it for many hundreds perhaps thousands of years. It is spectacularly useless to me. I don’t have enough chi to blow my nose,” I said.
“Have you ever wondered where your powers went? Something so grandiloquent and gargantuan cannot simply vanish. Also, where do you think the astonishing amounts of chi that you eat every day is going? You are well aware that it isn’t being cast out in the draught,” he said.
I shrugged.
“Do you know of any jutsu that can’t be abused in some way? ‘Abuse’ is a value-laden term. Sometimes it is apt. Other times, lets just say that there are alternative and non-standard uses jutsu can be put to,” he said.
“Prah-blee, Prah-blee. What is your point?”
“I am Odin and this is the spear Gungnir. My spear is as powerful an enchanted weapon as the Claidheamh Soluis. I can use the power of my spear and your kinjutsu to open The Crack Between The Worlds—or an inter-dimensional portal—whatever term cranks your handle for you. I can send you to where your powers are ensnared,” He said.
Duncan, Saul and I were momentarily taken aback when the haint pulled a long spear with a thick oak shaft from thin air. His manner of holding the spear didn’t seem preparatory to launching an attack though.
“The time fast approaches. Now is the time to go to the shadow world to reclaim what was taken from you. It isn’t the only opportunity that you will ever have. It is the best one that you’ll ever see,” Odin said.
“What do I need to do?” I asked.
“Draw the Claidheamh Soluis and focus your longing,” he said.
As the air became filled with green and indigo bolts of lightening a thought occurred to me.
“How could the government bundle my powers and hide them in another dimension?” I asked.
“They can’t. They’re like a caveman with a cudgel that somehow manages to hit the right button to launch a nuclear failsafe,” Odin said.
I leaped through the rent in space-time with my thirty-nine inch saber in my right hand and the Claidheamh Soluis in my strong left hand.
I knew somehow that the threshold was only supposed to endure long enough to admit one. Alex and Glass got through on my coattails because they were small, very quick and they could fly.
Duncan and Saul followed because they had the awesome power that it took to hold the doorway open an instant longer.
I hadn’t needed names for my birds when I could touch their minds. I touched each with a mental image that contained a replica of each bird’s totality. I’d lost the power to do that along with my other powers.
I don’t know how the roc navigated trough the narrow hallways to my office. Suffice it to say that he sensed something was amiss and he did.
His name? The birds picked their names and he’d insisted on the name: “Janet.” He wasn’t transgendered or anything…
I don’t guess that he was. The ravens picked the names based on how attractive the actual sounds were to their ears—with little or no concern with context or meaning. That’s why I had a raven named: “Glass.” There was nothing transparent, fragile or glasslike about him. He simply grooved on the guttural followed by the sibilance of the double “S”. If he’d had his way, his name would be pronounced with an exaggerated hiss at the end.
At any rate, one of my rocs followed me through the portal in addition to the rest of my retinue.
The first sight that confronted me in the other world was a trio of dragons. I’m tempted to say that they were Western type dragons. Certainly they weren’t serpentine like Panic, but they lacked the stegosaurus like bodies of the Western dragons from my world.
They looked much more like the dragons you see depicted in traditional drawings and paintings—a very thick stout legged form. If you looked past the scales and size they were built much like a very long-necked Basset Hound.
They were vaguely centaur-like. These dragons had four stout legs but then they had a huge upper torso that sprouted a pair of arms with four fingered hands. A western dragon breathes fire but only in the most singular circumstances would a Western dragon or his rider try to use the flames as a weapon. Their flames resembled the methane burn-off you often see around small oilrigs.
Shadow world dragons spat out huge streams of burning napalm like an oversized flamethrower. Their streams traveled twenty five to thirty five yards and the dragons gave every indication of having many hundreds of gallons of liquid fire on tap.
“One more thing to make my happiness complete,” I said aloud.
My impenetrable armor of raven feathers covered me from head to foot. My face wasn’t physically covered but the protection must have extended to my face and eyes since I stood in the midst of the inferno and wasn’t burned or even singed.
Alexander, Glass and Janet avoided the danger by flying high above out of harm’s way. Saul lived up to his name. I can’t imagine that he literally came from Hell. That would raise any number of thorny theological questions. He did seem to positively bask in the stream of dragon fire though.
Duncan had a chi shield adequate to protect him from the dragon’s flame. Duncan threw over thirty spawn. Each one was armed with a double-edged axe. The axe was like the oversized axes you see portrayed in so many phantasy pictures and movies. A thirty-pound axe would be impossibly unwieldy for even the strongest human to use. Duncan wielded it like it was a three-pound ballpein hammer on a long handle.
Even Duncan’s axe swung with his superhuman strength might not have been up to penetrating the dragons’ armor of iridescent scales so he clad the edge of his axes with a razor sharp heavy-duty penetrating chi.
I summoned Panic.
“Fall on your bellies and tremble in terror!” I shouted at the dragons as I took my post atop Panic’s head.
We flew straight at the middle dragon. There was no need to take evasive action since neither of us was vulnerable to dragon fire. When we were close I leapt onto the back of the right hand dragon. While I used the Claidheamh Soluis to pierce his hearts Panic seized the middle dragon and flew straight up until he was high in the sky. By the time Panic returned to Earth a moment later, he had consumed the great beastie.
By the time my dragon was thoroughly fricasseed Duncan and Saul had largely reduced their dragon to possession. It is astonishing what a large gang of four-hundred-and-some-odd pound berserkers armed with superhuman strength and oversized axes and over a dozen Hellhound spawn can accomplish.
The dragons down, I took a moment to examine my surroundings. We were in the middle of a four or five hundred acre meadow covered in both red clover and bluegrass. There was a forest of very tall temperate hardwood trees surrounding the meadow.
Something was happening in the woods to my right. Birds squawked and flew into the meadow or flew straight up to get above the trees. A score of rabbits and squirrels popped out into the meadow and ran at a tangent to get back into the woods—but somewhere well away from their point of egress. I saw a couple foxes and a lynx.
Then five white-tailed deer bugged out. I was getting more than a little curious.
Then a humanoid walked out of the tree line. He was close to twenty feet tall. He had a huge rack of elk-like Antlers towering another four or five feet over his head and spread to an improbable level. He was covered with fine black hair as fine and downy as seal fur. His eyes glowed with the same cobalt blue laser intensity as Odin’ right eye.
He had a giant human with him—a man close to eight foot tall. His left eye also glowed with an unnatural light but it was more subdued and more indigo than the giant hart’s cobalt lasers.
“Spoil, you astonish me. You contrive to enter my domain. You have a dragon from the outer void and a Hellhound with you—along with a roc…
“And is that the Claidheamh Soluis? Way to go dude!” the hart addressed me.
“And who might you be?” I asked while Saul bristled and growled and Alexander and Glass drew close to my cheek on either side.
“Don’t you recognize me? I’m your cousin,” the haint said.
“Root?”
A moment later Root reverted to a human form—very intense and brooding human a good eighteen inches shorter than his companion.
“So what brings you here?” Root asked.
“My power was stolen from me. Odin told me to search for it here,” I explained.
“Odin? I thought that you were a Christian,” Root said.
“I am a Christian. I met Odin and I followed his directions to get here. That is a far cry from worshiping him. I thought that you were a human,” I said.
“I was human. It got better after a while. I can help you find your stolen powers but you will have to pick them up once more. That won’t be particularly easy. Still, you’re Kin. I have every confidence that you can do it,” Root said.
Root was my grandmother’s cousin. That made him a third cousin by my reckoning. He was distant kin. He was kin nonetheless.
************* ***************** **************************
“It is time,” the Pale Lady said.
“I had hoped that we could postpone until Spoil returned,” Morgan said.
“Things are very delicately balanced. The timelines are turbulent. We’re walking the high wire here without a net. Try to sound cruel and spiteful as you give them the word. They may hate you enough to stiffen their resolve,” the Pale Lady said to her son.
***************** ******************* *******************************
Morgan strode into The Outfit’s headquarters and started a rant.
“You people were invited here as guests. But you bring your war here to us and now your leader entertains kamisama and rips open inter-dimensional portals under our very noses. We want you people out of here within twenty-four hours and don’t come back,” Morgan told Spoil’s astonished lieutenants.
**************** ******************* ****************************
Root took us on a long walk through the forest—and what a forest it was. The trees were all deciduous hardwoods—maple, oak, elm, walnut, sycamore and hickory. Some of the boles were seven to ten feet in diameter.
There were many ferns, mosses and toadstools like you’d see in a temperate rain forest in Oregon, or Big Sur—or Oz I suppose. No flying monkeys, survivalists or flying and tripping writers like Kerouac or H S Thompson either so I guess it couldn’t have been any off those places.
When we came to a log cabin with a psychedelic van parked beside it though I began to wonder. I had only seen two Ford vans with raised ceilings and moon roof made from the top and glass from a Volkswagen Beetle. One was my “Black Beauty”. The other was my cousin Wizard’s fire truck red “Red Bird”.
Root’s companion raised an oversized fist and banged loudly on the rough hewn door.
A young fellow with long blond hair opened the door.
It was Wizard! Although he was about twenty-five years older than me, he looked like a teenager.
Root told Wizard about my predicament in a few terse sentences. I never was good at boiling all the extraneous details out of an after-action report, but Root had it down pat.
“I can help you. Listen to my story it will help you understand what you’re up against,” Wizard said.
Saturnalia
Wizard’s Story
This happened back in 1989. I’ve told you how I couldn’t find my way back to Macersville no matter how hard I looked. I’d been looking for eight years.
Macersville had been—or seemed to have been—somewhere between Harlan and Cawood Kentucky. Nonetheless I’d been over every one-lane road, loblolly and two-rut wagon path in Eastern Kentucky and Western Virginia trying to retrace my steps.
I ended up way outside my ordinary search area somewhere between Beattyville and Talega Kentucky.
I was driving down a gravel road and I saw a bunch of psychedelic signs advertising a festival and some sort of celebration off to the north along a two-rut path. You know where autos—usually trucks—pass often enough to keep the track of the wheels bare but there is an island of grass in the center.
There was the damnedest assemblage of vehicles, tents and ramshackle assortment of buildings that I ever did see.
Everything was painted psychedelic with clashing colors, paisleys, stylized flowers, ankhs and peace signs. There were three psychedelic Volkswagen vans and a Volkswagen Bug. There was an old but sound bus with some custom work and a good psychedelic paint job. There was a rust-eaten short bus that looked like first graders had gone at it with color crayons. There were several old pickups and a red 57 Chevy convertible that looked mint. It was the only vehicle on the property that hadn’t been attacked by graffiti artists.
There were several assorted canvas tents and several leaning buildings haphazardly built from boards salvaged from old tumbledown barns and outbuildings and brand new plywood and two-by-fours.
They had a row of booths reminiscent of a carnival midway. Folks were selling macramé, leatherwork, silver and turquoise Indian jewelry, hand-carved japa beads an inch and a half around along with painstakingly threaded love beads.
A teenaged girl wearing sandals, beaded buckskins and long black hair walked up to me.
“You truly smile,” she said to me.
Her eyes were a very peculiar violet color.
“My standard reply is ‘my aren’t the walls vertical.’ So few of these are though,” I said.
I bought some silver jewelry; a leather watchband and a couple buckskin shirts decorated in Indian beads and dyed porcupine quills.
“We have pronto pups. Do you know the difference between a pronto-pup and a corn dog,” The purple-eyed girl asked me in a challenging tone.
“Corn dogs are coated in a cornmeal coating. Pronto-pups are dipped in flour based coating. I really prefer pronto-pups but the only place I ever saw them for sale was at The West-Side Fall Festival,” I said.
“Are you from Evansville? I am too. I worked alongside my parents in the church’s food stand since I was a little girl. Hang around and I’ll talk to you after we close up,” she said.
“Might as well close up now. A midway with only a half a dozed rubes at three in the afternoon is like dead.”
“I know, but these people have their own crochets,” she said.
************* **************** ***********************
The fair—such as it was—closed down at 9:00 pm. I had hung around as the girl suggested. I noticed that most of the folks in the little peckerwood commune seemed to be flashing on the 60s. That was okay. I sometimes amused myself by taking a clipboard and standing on a public street asking people to sign my petition to bring back the 60s. I always put a coffee can with a sign that said “Donations”. It didn’t say the donations went to finance the 60s petition. Hell, a man who spends at least eight months of every year looking for a non-existent town needs to be able to raise a bit of cutter every now and again.
The would-be hippie chick brought several pronto pups and an obscene amount of greasy French fries and sautéed onions generously covered in ketchup along with fudge and brownies for desert.
“My name is ‘Aura’ she said.
“My name is Wizard,” I said. She offered me some pot.
“I don’t trust it,” I told her. “That shit turns people non-violent.”
We talked. I told her how I’d been searching for the way back to Macersville for close to nine years. Aura told me that she was taking pre-med at the university in Bloomington and that she started Medical School in the fall.
We hit it off. Neither of us were the type for sex outside of marriage, but we got so far as to kiss.
“Aura, I’ve been looking for the way back to Macersville for a long time now. I would give up except that there is nothing else that I’d rather be doing. I’m free. I rarely have to hit a lick of honest work and there are few things that I enjoy as much as driving my van, meeting new people and seeing the rural countryside,” I told her.
“I know that it sounds ridiculous saying this to someone I’ve just met—but I feel that I could come to love you,” I said. “I feel the same way. There is some sort of chemistry between us,” Aura said. “They’re putting on ‘Saturnalia’ tomorrow. They rehearse and plan all year for this one annual performance. I’m supposed to be MC and handle our ersatz spotlight.”
“What is ‘Saturnalia’?” I asked.
“Do you know the one they call ‘Little Rabbit’?” Aura asked.
“Little weaselin’ dude with a hare-lip. Carries himself like a pimp,” I postulated.
“Little Rabbit wrote a play that he calls ‘Saturnalia’. He says that once everyone has their part down perfectly that they’re going to New York. He says they’ll find a backer and that they may have to start off-Broadway but eventually the play will be a bigger hit than ‘Hair’. They can’t go in search of a backer until the play is one hundred percent perfect though. Sometimes they’ll do dress rehearsals three times in one day. They’re fanatics,” Aura said.
“But what is the play about?” I asked. “It starts out idyllic. There are beautiful nymphs and happy non-violent satyrs. They spend their days smoking dope, drinking wine, and bathing in crystal lakes and pure running streams while having plenty of free love. Then at the end a big super-satyr shows up. He is head and shoulders taller than any of the gentle satyrs. He has a perpetual boner the size of the fat end of a Louisville Slugger and anyone that he catches—male or female—he rapes them and often he’s rough enough to kill his client. The first three hours of the play is so gentle and insipid that the violence is quite jarring,” Aura said.
“The damned play is over three hours long? Expecting someone to sit through that is rape with battery in and of itself,” I said.
Aura laughed.
“You’re not afraid to speak your mind, are you?” She said.
“Never have been,” I said. “But what is the point of such a turd-gargler of a play?”
“Little Rabbit believes that all the world’s troubles are the result of masculinity. He says that while we need biological males for reproduction that we should make every effort to effeminize boys and men every way that we can think of,” Aura explained.
“And it takes him over three hours to dramatize his thesis in an amateur night play? I think that the butter has slid off of Little Rabbit’s waffles!” I said.
“Anyway, I’ve promised to be the narrator and stage hand tomorrow. After that I’m headed back home to get ready for my first semester of medical school. Would you like to move to Bloomington so we could see each other?” Aura asked.
“I think it’s a bit late to get admitted to the university this fall, but I can probably get in the second semester starting in January. If I can’t get in for the fall, I will hang loose but I’ll definitely spend some time with you,” I said.
“What would you like to be?” Aura asked.
“A pure mathematician or a theoretical physicist,” I said.
“Well, all-righty then,” Aura said.
************ **************** ***********************
I was bored beyond all precedent when it came time for the super satyr to terrorize all the effeminate, hippy-dippy, like pretty non-violent girlish boys and very pretty girly-girls.
Thing is: the main cast had been rehearsing the same dead-ass crap for years. You might get away with that almost anywhere else in America. But this was Kain-Tuck—the dark and bloody ground. The Indians went to Kain-Tuck to hunt and to make war, but they didn’t live there.
Yes, there is Warrick County in Indiana—but the haints in Kain-Tuck are sometimes benign and are occasionally benevolent or at least neutral. The spirit of Warrick County is relentlessly megalomaniacal and malevolent. It simply hates with every shred of its being…
And yes, with the exception of Warrick County much of the Southern third of Indiana is culturally and spiritually part of Kain-Tuck.
Each and every one of the actors became what they’d been portraying.
A nymph ran by me when the gray back started his caterwauling. She slipped and tumbled into my lap. I reached up and touched one of the thumb-sized horns that she had on either side of her forehead up by her hairline.
They were real. I sniffed. She put out an odor that was part a very heavy floral sent—though produced by her own body’ sweat glands. The other portion, though it was the smaller portion by far, was the thickest strongest bunch of human sex pheromones that I’ve ever encountered.
Then here came the brute satyr after her.
She scrambled off of my lap and out of his way. I had time to draw my eight and three-eighths Smith and Wesson .44 Magnum from its shoulder holster.
“Leave the weepy young devotchka alone dude,” I said as I pointed my sights right between and below the huge spiral rams horns that he had growing from his head.
I had time to see a single Keith type semi-wadcutter flatten on the haint’s frontal skull bone and then a split-hooved foot as thick and as wide as a two thousand pound oxen’s kicked my revolver away.
Now I was pissed. Knock my shiny nickel-plated revolver out of my hand and onto the hard stoney ground will you?
I seized the satyr around his throat with both hands and started to choke him out. He tried a couple wrestling moves on me. I imagine that he must have weighed over six hundred pounds. I lifted him clear of the ground with my left hand on his throat. My slightly weaker right hand crushed his wrist bones together and caused the satyr to scream in pain and rage.
One of the hippy cast members was a dude named Yonny. Aura had introduced us briefly—for no goop reason but to pass the time. Yonny owned the mint 57 Chevy convertible that I’d so admired.
“There is only one way to kill a super satyr. His power is in his stick shift,” Yonny shouted at me.
“What?”
“His tally whacker—rip it off!” Yonny screamed in notes far above any human vocal cords ability to scream.
I heard an old hillbilly wisecrack one day. He said that if you’d let him measure his yard the way that you measure a cat’s tail—that is, from the rectum outward—that he’d have an exceptionally long one.
Having worked in some slaughterhouses, I knew that’s where the urethra leaves the body cavity—through the same hole on the pelvis as the rectum emerges from.
I steeled myself to touch something that I’d sooner not have to touch. I used an arm drag to get me behind the satyr. Then I reached up between his legs to seize Jenkin Horne.
The damned shabnasticator was thicker than my wrist and hard to grip—but it was also very stiff and unyielding. When I grabbed it with both hands and pulled downward, since it wouldn’t yield even a little, I had quite a bit of leverage.
I could feel it starting to tear loose. Finally it gave up the ghost and pulled loose like pulling up an improbably large oak sapling by the roots.
The thing was three feet long and thicker than my wrist at its fattest. Then a moment later it was no longer than a hot dog and no thicker than my ring finger. No, fluid didn’t drain from it. It just shrank.
People were running hither and yon screaming like a bunch of morons. Girls who couldn’t take their “Moon Maid” horns off and dudes who now had cloven hooves and much larger horns vied to see who could wail louder and more ear-piercingly.
Yonny finally made himself heard over the general hubbub.
“This pocket of reality is closing. If you are trapped inside it will only be a matter of time before you succumb to this reality. To force a door open, you need the power of a satyr. There is only one way to claim a satyr’s power,” Yonny said.
“How’s that?” I asked.
“No! O Hell no!” I said after Yonny had told me.
Aura had made her way over to me. She was the only one beside me who wasn’t affected by the unchancy metamorphosis. First of all, she’d only been drining in the unchancy Manitou for a few weeks and also she hadn’t started with nymph makeup to give the transformation a beachhead.
“You’d better do as Yonny says. It isn’t cannibalism. That isn’t a human lying there, now is it? Please! I don’t want to be trapped here. I’d do it if I had the strength,” Aura said.
Have you ever eaten raw testicles? A sheep, or a goat, or a satyr’s testicle is about the size and shape of a big fat pear. There s a very tough skin with multiple blue veins all around. Peal it off and oddly enough there is a second skin identical to the first.
The tissue inside the second skin is soft and a little bit grayer than the flesh of an apricot. It smells much like a raw oyster. I imagine the taste is much the same too. I’m never going to taste an oyster to find out. You have to draw the line somewhere.
Yeah well, years ago when I hadn’t a clue how to cop steroids a magazine article had hypothesized that eating raw testicles might raise one’s testosterone level. They had to be raw because cooking would destroy testosterone.
I know all about the placebo effect. It wasn’t placebo effect that caused me to have a massive crop of acne across my back where I’d never had acne before. At the same time, I didn’t see my lifts going up all that much faster. I stopped the experiment at week five and the acne left rather quickly.
But that cracked-brain scheme had lowered my threshold of nausea for eating raw balls. Otherwise I might have hesitated too long. Whoever Tessie hates is lost.
There’s no need to describe the mechanics of unlocking that kind of ward. Without a satyr’s joystick in hand and a pair of satyr’s yarbles inside you, you couldn’t use that jutsu anyway.
I asked Yonny if he wanted to come with us, but he said that it was too late for him.
He explained how nymph/satyr/super satyr works. They’re very long lived and they’re all born female. After centuries a nymph slowly becomes a satyr—a rather effeminate and infertile satyr. There is only one stud at a time. That’s why he rapes the other males. Something about that—the pain or perhaps some hormone—keeps them from changing into a whole and complete male.
Yonny was the next farthest along and hour-by-hour he was changing.
See there were two competing versions of reality. In one Yonny had been human until the eventful night of the last Saturnalia play. But in another reality he’d been born a nymph and after many centuries was finally about to achieve the zenith that a satyr could aspire to.
I drove Aura back to Evansville and let her off at her folk’s house. We sat until dawn. What do you say after an experience like that? When dawn came and she didn’t have to worry about waking her folks she went in and I went somewhere to crash.
She left her purse in my car.
I went by bright and early the next morning and caught a middle-aged woman just stepping outside the fence.
“Are you Aura’s mother?” I asked her.
“I used to be known as ‘Aura’ but no one has called me that for many years,” she said.
I was twenty-seven years old then and Aura had told me that she was twenty-three years old.
“The Aura that I’m looking for is younger than me. Perhaps she spoke of me. My name is ‘Wizard’. We met recently down in Kentucky,” I said.
Aura looked as if she’d been punched in the gut.
“My God Wizard. I’ve often wondered where you got off to and why you never came back all these years. You haven’t aged at all have you?” Aura said.
“I dropped you off just yesterday morning,” I said. “How have you managed to age so much over night?”
“Wizard, you dropped me off at this address in August of 1968.”
“I was a child in 1968,” I said.
“Get in my purse and look at my billfold. We didn’t even have photo ID in 1968 but you’ll see that my date of birth was 1945,” she said.
“I may speak to Aura again on this side. I may not. It no longer matters.
She’d become a doctor after all. After a few years she’d given up waiting for me and married. She’d had three children and she was divorced and far too much water had flowed beneath the bridge and too many years separated us.
**************** ******************* ************************
Wizard reached into a pocket and took out what looked like a withered root.
“Do you know what this is?” Wizard asked. “This is the satyr’s yard. Draw the Claidheamh Soluis, not in earnest but to demonstrate something.”
I drew the enchanted sword while Wizard activated his weapon somehow. Wizard activated the yard somehow. Now he had a thick bludgeon over four foot long with a big ugly knob on the distal end.
“Strike the knobkerrie!” Wizard commanded.
All sorts of sparks and sound effects resulted. A dozen cops convinced me that a satyr’s joystick was a mystical weapon on par with the Claidheamh Soluis or the spear Gungnir.
“This is more than a weapon. Do you remember the line in the old John Denver song about the man who found ‘The Key To Every Door’? This, properly used, is the key to any door that you might ever desire to open. Don’t ever trust the rotten POS though. It will screw you every chance that it gets. That’s what it exists for—to screw people,” Wizard said bitterly.
“So should I use its power then?” I asked.
“That depends. Do you want a chance—not the certainty, but the possibility—to get your powers back?"
.....RVM45
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Post by rvm45 on Oct 22, 2015 0:13:16 GMT -6
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“This is the first ward we must pass,” Wizard said as he waved the satyr’s rod like Charlton Heston portraying Moses parting the Red Sea.
It brought to mind some verses from “The Rubaiyat”—though what in life doesn’t bring “The Rubaiyat” to mind?
“Into this Universe, and why not knowing. “Nor whence, like Water willy-nilly flowing: “And out of it, as Wind along the Waste, “I know not whither, willy-nilly blowing.”
The forest on the far side of the portal Wizard had opened was completely different from the forest we’d just left. There were giant fern trees and there were fiddleheads as long as my arm. Houseflies the size of my fist flew through the air while relentlessly pursued by dragonflies with two-foot wingspans. We encountered a millipede as fat as my bicep and thirty some odd inches long.
“It’s best to avoid those if at all possible. They’re poison. It probably wouldn’t kill you, but it might make you wish that it had simply slain you,” Wizard said.
“So you’ve been here before?” I asked.
“No and I will never be here again. So to be really technical, I’m not here now—since the present is a convenient fiction that we use to discuss the terminus between two immense competing infinities,” Wizard.
“It stinks!” Duncan exclaimed in disgust.
“Your companion has had his more human mental faculties repressed at some point, hasn’t he? No, I know that you wouldn’t be party to such an act. Thing is, as we journey towards the Source of All Things, he will retrogress far more rapidly than someone like you who mainly dwells in his forebrain. Abstractions have far more force and clarity to you than the mere shifting sands of external reality—don’t they?” Wizard said.
“Why didn’t Root come with us?”
“Root’s domain is bigger than a million Earths, but in the end he must needs live up to his name,” Wizard rattled.
“EE!?!” I interjected.
“He is ‘rooted’ to his domain—not that he couldn’t defy his geas if it suited him. You’re well aware that it is generally a bad trip when one defies his fate aren’t you? In any case I’m more than adequate to our purpose. Root’s presence would cause the timelines to become even more turbulent and chaotic. He roils as much destiny as you do when he strolls through when and other-when. Two F6 Cyclones wildly braiding and rebraiding timelines and fates would be redundant—now wouldn’t they?”
A giant creature waddled into the trail in front of us. How to describe it? It looked kinda like a giant mudpuppy but far thicker and heavier built.
Its head took up about a third of its body length and mass. It had a humongous mouth with bulging jaw muscles far bigger than Duncan’s thighs. That head was as long as a Volkswagen Beetle but wider. Its head was wide enough to completely block the narrow trail. It had equilateral triangles for teeth a full three inches wide at the base. Like a shark, it had multiple rows of teeth.
It belched and the odor of rot was almost a retch gas attack in its own right.
“Bad things happen if we step off this trail. I could face the creature but that would get you a pass. Other guardians would manifest to bar your way. It’s your powers we’re pursuing,” Wizard said.
“Fall on your belly and tremble in terror!” I shouted at the heap-big amphibian. “But recover quickly and drag yourself out of my right of way.”
The creature turned its head slightly to one side to look at me a little better. Its eye was as big as a jumbo grapefruit.
“Fight me and die,” it croaked in a voice that was as abhorrent to my ears as its breath was to my sense of smell.
“Earth and Sky Last Forever… “The Aged are Miserable… “Do Not Fear Death. “It is Always a Good Day to Die.” “Fight as one already dead and none can stand against you—except outside of a fearsome odor I don’t think that you can make the nut,” I told the ugly haint.
Padraig said not to use the Claidheamh Soluis when lesser means would suffice. I didn’t want to foul the radiant enchanted blade on this obscenity. I’d moved my thirty-nine inch saber over for a right hand draw lest I need two blades. I drew my saber and threw three Kunai daggers left-handed even as I advanced. Yeah, I’d spent many years and many many hours perfecting my weak hand throwing skills. My skills weren’t AWOL just because my chi had been shanghaied. Om
Since I’d lost my powers I had added some enhancements to my Kunai. I think that the five most deadly venomous sakes live in Australia. Each of my daggers had enough venom from the three deadliest snakes to kill a squad and a half of combat infantrymen each along with the two deadliest jellyfish toxins.
Each dagger went more than deep enough to inject its payload into the face of the creature. I wasn’t sure that would be enough. The amphibian must have weighed a ton or two. I also wasn’t sure about the time frame.
As I charged the obscenity my foot slipped on the muddy and slimy ground.
It was just as well. The mudpuppy moved faster than I’d have thought possible. If I’d been in the leap I’d intended it would have caught me in its fearsome jaws. Instead I slid under the thing’s head like a runner sliding into home.
I rammed my saber deep into its soft under jaw.
“Hold,” I told my saber.
That feature had been built into the sword by my armorers. Even without any supplemental chi from me the sword clamped the salamander’s jaws closed.
Ever seen those “Wasp” knives? Stab and push a button and it injects most of the contents of a CO2 cartridge into whatever you have just stabbed. It is supposed to totally destroy a swath of tissue the size of a basketball, freeze tissue another two or three inches past the completely destroyed zone and inject multiple gas embolisms into the client’s bloodstream.
I had three of the daggers with me. Two went randomly into the underside of the creature’s jaws. I managed to place the third dagger very close to where I thought the creature’s jugular and carotid should be.
I killed it or at least incapacitated it. Then the damned thing fell on me.
My mystic armor of raven feathers ruled out it crushing me any time soon but it was claustrophobic and I was in some danger of suffocating eventually. That’s when Duncan grabbed the thing’s head and rolled it off of me and incidentally off the trail.
I watched the obscene creature’s death wallows with some satisfaction.
“I suppose that’s a very good saber shot all to Hell,” I remarked.
“I’ll fetch it,” Duncan said.
Wizard had time to say, “Don’t get off…”
While I shouted, “No!”
Those fiddlehead as big as my arm—they were poisonous stinging nettles and they stung Duncan all over his body again and again. They lashed out as hard and as fast as the lash of a blacksnake whip. Duncan gritted his teeth and shielded his eyes and took another three steps until he could grasp the hilt of my saber.
“Loose!” I commanded the sword as it was still sticking the creature’s jaws together.
I suppose that he’d have managed to extract the sword anyhow, but there was no need to prolong his exposure to the poison plants.
“Here is your sword,” Duncan said as he presented it to me hilt foremost. He collapsed immediately afterward.
“He’s going to die,” Wizard said sadly.
“Is there no remedy?” I asked.
“There is. You possess the Claidheamh Soluis. You can purify his blood but it is dangerous. Will you jeopardize your quest over concern for a weak minded servant?” Wizard asked.
I gave Wizard the hardest and coldest stare that I could manage.
“Tell me how to do it to it,” I commanded.
“Draw your sword with one hand and touch his bare skin somewhere with the other. Draw the poison out of him and into you and then neutralize it,” Wizard said.
I drew the enchanted sword in my strong left hand and laid my bare right hand on Duncan’s sweat beaded brow. My right hand felt like it ha been thrust into a pit full of fire ants even while it was being electrocuted.
Duncan opened his eyes and they widened in terror. He tried frantically to pry my hand from his head.
“Master, you mustn’t!” he pleaded.
“After all this time,” I said a little sadly. “I’m not your master damn it! I’m your friend.”
The agony worked its way up my forearm. The pain of running my arm into a meat grinder would have been mild by comparison. As the pain moved up my upper arm it intensified if that was possible.
“If you haven’t destroyed the poison by the time that it reaches your chest, you must let go. You will die if the poison invades your torso,” Wizard shouted frantically.
“I will save Duncan or die trying,” I gritted between teeth that were chipping and shattering with the violence of the cramps and tremors that possessed my body.
The poison and the pain were well into my chest when Saul walked over and bit my left forearm hard enough to pierce it down to the bone. Sure enough some of the agony was siphoned off into the Hellhound. Alexander and Glass both gripped my shoulders hard enough to pierce the skin and each of them drew off a small portion of the poison and the agony.
Janet and Panic were jockeying to contact me when the pain abruptly stopped.
“It’d done,” Wizard said.
Then something happened that horrified me more that anything that I’d ever seen happened. My sleeve and all the flesh fell off my right arm. The ligaments that held my arm bones together outlived the rest of the soft flesh only by a couple heartbeats and the bones fell to the muddy trail as well.
“Duncan, I need you to do something for me,” I said.
“Anything,” he said.
“Kill me. I don’t want to go on living like this,” I said.
“Whose enchanted sword do you carry?” Wizard asked. “Who brought the Claidheamh Soluis to Ireland?”
“Nuada Airgetlám,” I said.
“And what does his name mean? Why was he called that?” Wizard persisted.
“It means ‘Silver Arm’. He lost an arm in battle and he couldn’t become King of Ireland because in those days the King must needs be a perfect physical specimen. Then the physician Dian Cecht and the wright Creidhne created an arm of silver for him. Later Dian Cecht’s son replaced the silver arm with an arm of flesh and blood,” I answered mechanically.
“Draw the Claidheamh Soluis and ask it to lend you its power,” Wizard said.
I drew the sword from its resting place.
“If I’m to go on living I need an arm of silver like Nuada Airgetlám’s,” I said to the glowing sword.
The pain of drawing the poison was mild compared to the pain of growing an arm of purest silver starting at the humerus and deltoid and moving down at the pace of winter molasses. When I was done I held the arm up to examine it.
I’ve always had extra-wide shoulders and thick arms—at least since I became a man. I never had pretty cannon ball deltoids, long biceps, horseshoe triceps and Popeye forearms. I did now. The silver arm was as perfect as it was possible to imagine an arm being. Oddly enough my left arm, my torso—the whole rest of my body to be brief…
Well I was strong but I never had an aesthetic physique. I’d always been built for sheer double-wide brute power. Now I had a physique like one of the heroes in a Frank Frazetta painting.
“Airborne,” I congratulated the sword on the transformation it had wrought in me.
“Odin opened one door for you. The satyr’s Johnson opened the second door for you. You need to open this door yourself. Your friends may step through the portal but they won’t end up beside you. You might as well have them remain with me,” Wizard said.
Alexander and Glass dug their claws deeply into the flesh of my shoulders but Janet, Panic, Saul and Duncan obeyed my gesture to stay.
A jet-black dodecahedron the size of a desk calendar went spinning wildly while following an irregular pattern somewhat like a helix went careening close by me. It missed me the first few times but it continued to grow and it spun faster with every approach. Finally it was big enough to totally envelop me and I went tumbling wildly into yet another alternate universe.
What greeted my bloodshot eyes as my feet touched down in the strange place? There was an enormous stone idol. I suppose that it was supposed to be a Buddha. I had a third eye in the center of its forehead. It sat in a lotus position and it had a big potbelly.
Two things popped into my mind simultaneously. Have you ever heard Brother Jed preach? Some heckler invariably asks him what he thinks of Buddha and Brother Jed invariably replies that Buddha is nothing but a big potbelly. Then there is the Zen aphorism that if you meet Buddha on the road and he stands between you and satori, that you must cut him down without an iota of forbearance or hesitation.
That’s all well and good, but this huge limestone idol could have held King Kong in the palm of one great hand…
And Potbelly had started to rise.
“Dude, it is like: you are obstructing my forward progress. Move or feel my steel,” I shouted.
“Who do you think you are?” Potbelly demanded in a booming voice that sounded like the descriptions that I’d heard of giant icebergs calving into the Antarctic Ocean.
“My name is ‘Spoil O Warren’. I am a King and a Priest in my own country—but this world isn’t my true home. Saul of Tarsus said that idols are dead stone that neither sees, nor hears, nor knows. You seem to be an exception to that general dictum though,” I started.
“You’re a Christian? I seldom get a chance to crush a Christian in this side-pocket of reality,” the giant Buddha said.
“This is the Claidheamh Soluis and this sword is named ‘Salamander Slayer’. Fall to your knees and tremble in terror!” I commanded him.
The great potbellied statue of white limestone stamped furiously down upon me. When he raised his foot four and twenty blackbirds did not fly in every direction. I’d say that it was more than twice that many ravens.
“I’m over here dumbass,” I said.
As I swung the Claidheamh Soluis and it lengthened enough to sever the giant’s Achilles tendon—if a stone idol can be said to posses tendons.
“Shit a brick!” Potbelly cursed.
I thought it an odd expression coming from a giant idol. The giant tried to clap his hands together to swat me like I was a mosquito. He kept them pressed together for an instant but then my greater strength forced his hands apart.
My thirty-nine inch saber wielded by my brand new silver arm didn’t seem to give up anything to the much older and more famous sword.
As he strove to smash his hands together once more, I cut off all the fingers off of one hand with the Claidheamh Soluis while Salamander Slayer cut the fingers from his other hand. Neither sword was long enough to sever a single finger without turning to beams of purest light and growing far longer that their physical length.
The stone man cursed and then swore while he hopped on his one good leg.
“It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye isn’t it?” I taunted him. “Or in your case, eight perfectly good fingers.”
I strode upwards as though there was a set of five-foot steps leading up to the idol’s face. When I was high enough to look him in his eyes I thrust a sword of light into each eye.
Potbelly swatted me aside with one fingerless palm before I could put out his third eye. He drew in a huge moaning breath and then blew a huge fount of burning napalm at me.
Several things happened all at once. My armor of enchanted raven feathers shielded me from the blast. Since I seemed to have my powers back, I tried a wind attack but I no longer commanded wind. Panic materialized above the head of Buddha with Duncan, Saul and Janet on his back.
“You don’t have a wind nature anymore,” Panic shouted. “Something that the government did to you turned your wind nature into water nature.”
Hell’s belles and cockleshells and skeletons all in a row!
That is one good thing about wind nature. There’s always plenty of air around to turn into wind. Where in Hell was I going to draw my water from?
Ah yes, with the mind of a water dipper I draw my water from the estate that is beyond right and wrong—AKA the watery chaos.
Air can be compressed but with enough chi water can be superheated and pumped up to ten of fifteen thousand pounds per square inch.
Lao Tse said that water is one of the weakest and most pliable of materials but it is unsurpassed for attacking the hard and unyielding. It was kinda cheating to use jets of superheated steam the way I did though.
I cut the giant statue into pieces small enough to hide with high pressure blazing hot jets of water that rivaled a supercharged laser beam.
“Well this dude wasn’t all that tough,” I said.
Just then the great half of the head of Buddha righted itself and cackled with a note of senile glee and exultation.
“Didn’t anyone ever tell you not to count how many fat ladies are singing until you can see the whites of their cracked eggs?” Buddha demanded.
“Did you ever hear of the spell of parts?” He bellowed.
The statue broke into hundreds of pieces and each piece became a small replica of the original—potbelly and all. There were Buddhas the size of a GI Joe—a potbellied limestone GI Joe. Some were the size of a toddler. There were some the size of a market weight pig and some the size of a man.
For some reason they all started to grow ever more froglike. They squatted obscenely with great swollen bellies and private parts out of all proportion to the rest of their body. Then they started aiming some sort of golden rays at me out of their third eyes.
I opened my arms and sprayed huge flowing streams of water at the Stone Frog Buddhas. An instant later Panic sprayed them with his black miasma. The miasma was black because it sucked all the radiant energy out of something. Soon all the statues were covered in thick layers of ice several feet thick. Then I summoned birds from every point of the compass to do what birds do to statues. Honestly, I don’t think that the bird guano bound the Stone Frog Buddhas any better than the ice already was—but it was funny.
“I will soon melt this ice and be ready to fight once more,” Buddha shouted.
“You do that dude,” I told him. “I’m leaving and you can sit here in this tiny universe being all growly-bad and intimidating until Hell freezes over. Don’t bother me none.”
.....RVM45
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Post by kaijafon on Oct 23, 2015 19:27:44 GMT -6
someone posted this on my facebook page today. Reminded me of Spoil.
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Post by rvm45 on Oct 23, 2015 20:05:46 GMT -6
Those are some big birds.
…..RVM45
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Post by rvm45 on Oct 31, 2015 14:33:28 GMT -6
Chapter Twenty-Nine
I came back from the shadow realm to find out that all my people had been kicked out of Macersville. The enclave where the village had been was totally destroyed. There wasn’t even a hole or featureless void in the fabric of reality to show where the enclave had once been. I couldn’t find a gate or portal to Macersville to voice my displeasure. I couldn’t find my way to the Cherokee lands to ask for asylum for my people either.
I’m reasonably sure that I could have found my way to either of the hidden worlds eventually, but I hadn’t the time to spare.
There were several thousand refugees and many of them had no ID, work history or even a proof of existence that would satisfy the state. Not only that, but they had little idea how to deport themselves in the great wide open.
Macersville had kept me well supplied with gold. The flow had been shut off rather abruptly but I’ve never been a trusting sort of person. I like to think of myself—in some contexts—as a squirrel who remembers winter—a squirrel that compulsively hoards nuts. The squirrel is also too cautious to put all his baskets around one egg—or acorn.
Locking the horse after the barn door has already been stolen serves no useful purpose.
I had an embarrassment of riches but now it wasn’t an ever-replenishing flow. Instead it was an important fixed and largely irreplaceable resource.
Ecclesiastes says:
“A feast is made for laughter, and wine maketh merry: but money answereth all things.”
Well you know where Jesus says that love of money is the root of all evil? A more accurate translation would say that love of money is the root of all sorts of evil. David didn’t lust after Bathsheba because he was a miser nor was that what motivated the men of Sodom to try to rape God’s angels.
In the same vein, money is no longer the answer to all things—not when there are tax collectors who would put the obsessive compulsive Pharisee calculating his tithe on his mint, anise and cummin to shame. And in addition to the taxman, big brother just likes to label and track folks every moment from cradle to grave—from womb to tomb.
Nonetheless, it is better to have money than not to have it—even when it is not the answer to everything. Come to think of it though—paying hackers to create fake ID along with a built in backstory is an example of money taking care of someone—as is paying someone a hefty tariff to take cash and not ask too many questions.
But we just had far too many people to hide and they were all in one place. There is a limit to how much stuff you can hide or camouflage or render obscure. Then The Powers That Be had their antennae and feelers out for people like us.
I decided that my first move would be to get the government off our asses.
*************** ********************* *****************************
We had a few people who’d gotten so good at the stealth thingy that they were all but invisible. It is harder to be undetectable by most electronic sensors but it can be done.
One night both the president and the vice-president had a late night caller. They weren’t alone. All one hundred senators, eighty-five representatives and seven supreme court justices also had late night callers.
I felt that it was important to get as many as possible at one time since one very immediate response might be to jack up security to the maximum possible. They might be able to make the president all but unreachable. I didn’t think that they could protect all the members of congress unless they meant to adopt the “Strategic Hamlet” concept and herd all the Congress critters into high security fenced-in enclosures.
I sent one of my spawns after the president. I was different since I’d lost and regained my powers. I no longer had a number of different kahunas on call nor did I throw spawn in layers or waves. I could simply throw between one hundred and a hundred and forty spawn depending on how strong I was at the moment.
They were strong—well above 6.0—and they had a number of powerful techniques at their disposal but they were all pretty much identical. Of course I could hold some back and recycle unspent chi from popped spawn just as before but the whole process felt noticeably different.
My dry spawn had about fifty percent longer life expectancies and they were proportionately more powerful and harder to destroy. The maximum number that I could deploy at one time was down fifteen or twenty percent though.
Black rats could go undetected where a man could not. I had a couple dozen rats on loan from Cary and I could sense their surroundings and thoughts as well as I could read my birds.
Once I had my route down pat I sent a flock of crows—they were marginally better for stealth than ravens since they were a bit smaller.
The crows came together and became me just out of sight of the two secret service agents standing outside the entrance to the first family’s living quarters. My hands darted out—one to each head. I downloaded scads of interesting and potentially useful data both about how government VIPs were protected, the disposition of secret service agents in the Whitehouse and miscellaneous nuggets of info about what went on behind the scenes in Washington.
I left them both unconscious in the midst of a powerful and very realistic nightmare. They’d both wake up in twelve to sixteen hours with no lingering physical effects.
What? They were just doing their job? “Just doing one’s job” is far worse justification than merely being conscientiously evil. At any rate all I did was give their very bland and colorless psyches some contrast.
The prez and the first lady shared a king-sized bed. I put her into a deep nightmare haunted sleep identical to the trance the agents were not enjoying. I didn’t download anywhere near as much data as I had from the agents. I’d get all that I needed from her husband. Also, as a fully heterosexual man many of the images I get from a woman are disturbing. And no, all of the data downloads itself in a braided and even snarled manner. You can’t pick and choose very much.
“Wake up Mister President,” I said to him.
His first thought awakening to find a man with a big Kukri knife to his throat was to scream. I’d already taken over his body and I nullified his attempt to scream. I relaxed a few muscles and let him wet and soil himself in retaliation for trying to scream.
“Do you ever watch ninja or kung fu movies? Anime? Ever read Manga or Manwha? You don’t? Okay. That will be your first assignment when you wake up. Spend about five hundred hours diligently researching your opposition via fiction,” I said.
“Let me break it to you gently dumbass. You have over two dozen secret societies right here in the US of A with powers similar to the Manga ninja—and that’s not counting operatives from groups based overseas,” I continued.
I caught a sense of honest shock and bewilderment coming off of him. I stood behind him but I knew that his eyes were bugged out from reading his moment-to-moment sensory inputs.
I sheathed my Kukri since I had no intention of killing him—at least not today.
“I see that no one has seen fit to read you in. If I were you, I’d call in the top officers from the FBI, Homeland Security, the CIA and the military Joint Chiefs of Staff and demand an accounting—but that’s just me. My name is ‘Spoil’ and I’m the head of a group of Adepts known as ‘The Outfit’. We’re homeless at the moment and a bit vulnerable,” I said.
That might be new info to him but it wasn’t unknown to The Powers That Be—the puppeteers behind things. So there was no sense beating around the bush.
“You are going to call your running dogs off of my people—including our allied dojos and biker gangs and militias. Because if you don’t I will come calling again late some night and I won’t leave anyone in your family alive,” I said.
The terror was falling off the man in waves that could almost be seen.
“When you awake this won’t seem anywhere near this real and compelling to you, so I have to leave some lasting mark on you. Should I castrate you? Should I gouge out your eyes? Cut your fingers off?”
His heart rate was racing now. I had to reach inside his autonomous nervous system and pull him back from the brink.
“I’m not that type of fellow but you should look at some of the things that the Russian mobs do to people to make them examples—not to mention your own interrogators. This will hurt a bit but it is largely cosmetic and quite remediable by a good plastic surgeon. I’m going to take your ears. You won’t be the only one. When you see a senator or a representative with gauze around his head you’ll know that he’s had a late night visit just like you.”
I added almost as an afterthought—though of course everything about my visit was carefully calculated:
“Here are the first three of my books. I’ve signed them for you. You can order hard copies or read the others online,” I said.
Once I had his wounds sewn up and a gauze bandage around his head I put him to sleep. I tripped every alarm in the place at one time. A score of armed men rushed into the president’s bedroom and pointed firearms at me.
They gave me the bum’s rush trying to pile up on me like it was a rugby scrum. I waited till a couple hands touched me and then I turned into a column of crows flying every which way.
“I’m over here dumbasses!” I said.
Then just as they caught sight of me I did the crow trick again and this time I waited until I was well outside the Whitehouse grounds to reconstitute. Once I was solid, I immediately popped my cork.
Within a few days later we visited a number of Governors and Chief Law Enforcement Officers in several Southeastern states. Most of them were far more tractable to reason than the feds so we used less stick and far more carrot. It is eye opening to see how much benign neglect that a few million dollars in small non-sequential dollar bills will buy.
************* ******************* ************************
So who has been wondering about the single kinjutsu in the book Padraig left me?
It was a jutsu to create—if “Create” is the right word—the enclaves like the one that Macersville inhabits and the enclave that once contained the village. I was the only human in living memory with enough chi and the hubris to attempt the difficult jutsu.
How to explain? There is a limited amount of “Stuff” on hand. Science says that the combined total of matter and energy must always remain the same. However Quantum Mechanics seems to say that an electron can travel to the far ends of the universe far faster than light—very briefly—as long as it gets back before anyone or anything could possibly have missed it or noted its absence.
I don’t want to lean too hard on science though. Much of the tradecraft functions outside and even in violation of Scientific Principles.
If you want to create a universe simply borrow this one for the smallest possible instant—for one chronon if there is such a thing. Time is relative. Your borrowed universe’s time won’t be the same as time here. Your new universe can go through a big bang and all the untold eons it takes for everything to run down and fall apart…
And you can return all the borrowed “Stuff” exactly one micro-minuscule unit of time later before it could be missed—even in principle.
Remember Relativity though. Someone living in the Rho Universe would think that our universe had been borrowed from Rho for one very brief chronon.
If our universe is a huge irregular multi-dimensional soap bubble then creating another universe is akin to getting a piece of the bubble to break completely free. It is technically simple to create another universe but the power required would be astronomical—and even with the most ambitious human or even haint’s lifespan one couldn’t really do much with a whole universe if he did sculpt one.
Creating pocket enclaves that reach back to the earliest days of life on Earth and extend eons into the future—pockets that stand largely apart but never go on their separate ways…
That takes far less raw power but it also takes orders of magnitude more understanding, skill and subtlety to accomplish.
**************** ******************* ***************************
“How big can you make the enclave?” Panic asked me.
“Big enough, why?” I responded.
“I you could make it…O say the size of Indiana or Kentucky—I could exist there instead of the outer void,” Panic said.
“That would be an ungodly big land Panic,” I said. “It would want to undulate, fold-in, crumple and destroy itself.”
“Not if you bent it into something rigid—like a sphere,” Panic said.
“A sphere with the surface area of Kentucky—that would be a sphere with a diameter of about one hundred and fifteen miles and a circumference of about three hundred and sixty miles. What would I do for gravity? I can warp space so that everyone on a flat surface feels a pull straight down. I don’t know how I’d get everyone to stick to the surface of a sphere,” I said.
“If you’ll put everything inside the sphere there is a way to warp space in such a way that there seems to be a force pulling towards the outer surface of the sphere,” Panic argued and broadcast a complex multi-dimensional image into my mind.
“Damned nation! That is convoluted. Do you think that I can manage that?”
“I’m sure of it,” Panic said. “It is your destiny.”
************** ********************** ****************************
The government surprised me with their response.
They declared that it was an act of terrorism to own any of my books or the books of kinjutsu—either on paper or on a hard drive. They didn’t need a warrant to kick your door in and toss the place while looking for kinjutsu. Someone could be detained indefinitely without trial or access to an attorney for practicing jutsu, having books of tradecraft or even being under suspicion of having the books.
They attacked people all over Northern Georgia, Eastern Kentucky and Tennessee and Western Virginia who they thought just might be Adepts.
Poppy had owned a pizzeria in the village. He was a perpetually happy man who welcomed each of his customers with heartfelt hospitality. He had three teenaged daughters and a couple Great Danes. They killed Poppy and his whole family—including the dogs—executing a no-knock warrant. The sole bright spot was that Poppy and his daughters took three of the hobnails down with them.
Tom was a teenaged son of a baker. He died in a crossfire while they were attempting to arrest someone else altogether. Six senior citizens—the youngest was well over seventy—were killed in a nursing home shootout.
There were others—a couple dozen—as well as a score of outsiders killed just for being at the wrong place at the wrong time.
It was time to strike back.
************* ***************** **************************
Norman sat and guarded the trailers from hiding. Word had leaked out than a large family of Adepts were living in three trailers and a couple shanties so far up the mountain that there was no electricity or running water.
Almost a hundred black-clad government henchmen arrived in a score of black Humvees and SUVs. They took up their positions all around the trailers and buildings.
Norman was surprised when the black-clad troopers set up three belt-fed machine guns and two 60mm mortars. They never demanded surrender. Instead they all opened fire on a pre-arranged signal. They hosed the small compound with everything that they had for ninety seconds. Then there was a cease-fire while five teams converged on trailers and buildings to check for survivors.
They used grenades quite liberally both before entering the building or trailer and as a prelude to each room clearing as well. When each structure was found vacant, generous amounts of plastique was placed to turn everything to toothpicks and shredded sheet metal.
People who don’t take prisoners can’t very well complain when the opposition adopts a “No Prisoners” policy too.
Norman had been a “One Trick Pony” when he’d defected to Macersville. The senseis at his new home stressed overall development and strengthening weak areas relentlessly.
He’d been able to wobble back and forth across the sound barrier when he’d fought the bikers. Sometimes he’d wobble two or three times in a step or two. He’d only been able to throw a single rather weak spawn back then.
Now he could throw five spawn and all of them were twenty-five to thirty miles-per-hour faster—fast enough to keep them super sonic at all times. His original was sixty or seventy miles-per-hour faster and Norman’s strength, stamina and recovery had all increased both noticeably and usefully.
Norman sent four spawn to fight the storm troopers while he held a single spawn in reserve and kept himself well hidden.
Norman’s first spawn had a fair sized shoulder bag full of thermite grenades. The grenades had little to no explosive effect but they molten iron would quickly eat through the hood of the vehicles and pour into the engines underneath ruining them. He only meant to leave one survivor and he meant to do that deliberately—not as a result of happenstance.
He placed a three-gallon plastic container of gasoline cantilevered atop the thermite grenade on the first and last vehicle. He had moved twenty yards beyond the last vehicle and had taken a couple heads when the first bomb exploded.
It wasn’t easy to design a blade that could collide with targets while moving faster than sound and not bend, dull or shatter. The armorers had done a very good workmanlike job of forging Norman a pair of extra heavy-duty custom Kukris with seventeen-inch blades but the quality was degraded when he spawned.
Norman helped both by sheathing the blades in heavy-duty chi and in cutting down any wobble or torqueing force to the minimum.
When his body was moving faster than sound there was little need to add velocity to the blade by swinging it. Instead he focused on holding the blade out perpendicular to the surface he meant to chop and trying hard to keep the blade from wavering or wobbling in the cut. He simply walked past each client at over eight hundred miles-per-hour while holding his blade out.
He’d already taken three heads with that spawn before the first thermite/gasoline bomb exploded. Of course the three other spawn that hadn’t taken time off to destroy the vehicles had higher kill specs.
He couldn’t hear the blast. His chi shielded him from most of the effects of being exposed to the air at such a high velocity but his vision was a bit blurred and all that he could hear was a roaring in his ears.
Norman picked the trooper he meant to spare. Norman dropped out of hyper-speed behind the law. He seized him in a naked strangle and quickly put the man down.
Norman worked quickly but without using his super-speed. He took the man’s ears and then disinfected and bandaged them. The man wouldn’t be down for long from a choke-out and Norman applied small injections of Novocain to make the area completely numb.
He gave the trooper an IV injection that contained a modest amount of amphetamine along with a very generous dose of psilocybin piggy-backed on an even larger dose of LSD-25.
Folks came out of the woods from every direction. They quickly picked up all of the fallen heads and dropped weapons—except for the trooper Norman had spared. They left his weapons—partially disassembled—and without any ammunition.
“Tell your superiors what happens to people that waste men, women, children and pets without cause or reason,” Norman told him.
Everyone else had cleared out when Norman’s spawn took a half a dozen burn phones out of their foil wrappers. He dialed “911” on each phone and then set it gently on the ground. On the last phone he paused until the operator answered.
“There’s a slew of hobnailed storm troopers lying dead and one injured,” Norman said.
Then he set that phone on the ground with the other five and then popped his cork.
************** ********************* ****************************
The layers of protection around the president intercepted each of the packages addressed to him in the Whitehouse of course, but they’d told him about them. When the third box was delivered he insisted on examining it himself, so after much poking and prodding they brought one of the packages to him.
It was an extra big three-gallon jar with an extra big mouth. Inside there was a head of a government law floating in a vinegar and salt solution with plenty of dill seeds, onion pieces, garlic buds and other spices.
The eyelids including the eyebrows had been removed. The hair was removed. The tongue was dropped down between the jawbones.
“You say the brains were removed? Why?” the president asked.
“Either they had a use for them or it suited their purpose somehow,” a high-ranking law said.
A lower ranking law started to say something and then stifled himself.
“If you know something, speak up,” the president told him.
“They’re prepared much like pickled pigs’ feet. I never heard of anyone pickling a pig’s head—but if I were to try it I’d worry if the brains would spoil in spite of the pickling,” the younger law said.
“This came with it,” the senior law said while handing the president a note protected by the clear plastic bag enclosing it.
The president read it aloud much to the senior law’s annoyance.
“If you don’t quit killing or arresting and torturing non-Adepts, families and other noncombatants in my second phase I’m going to target your law’s families and loved ones. If you’re the only one committing atrocities people will get the idea that you’re kinder and more just than us. I can’t have that,” the president read aloud.
The message was signed “Spoil Airgetlám AKA Spoil O Warren”.
“I believe that he means it. Tell your men to step down,” the president commanded.
“You don’t run things around here,” the senior law said.
************ *************** *****************************
The junior law finished his shift and tried to act nonchalant. When he got home he told his wife to pack as little as they could get by with and not to plan on ever coming back. He laid his badge and ID on his desk where it would be easy to find when they came looking for him. After a moment’s hesitation he laid his government issue Glock on the desk along with all of its magazines and holsters.
He donned a .45 caliber 1911A1 and a 2” Smith and Wesson .38 Special and a Walther PP .32. He felt whole and complete again for the first time in years.
He’d bought a small—one hundred and sixty-eight acre—farm in Kentucky a bit North and East of Hopkinsville. He’d used the ID of a cousin who’d died as a teen. He even had a carry permit in his cousin’s name. It wasn’t hard for a Civil Master like he’d been with huge computer skills. His hacking and computer expertise was something that he’d kept hidden from his employers and even his wife.
If the Adepts were threatening noncombatants and the Federal Agencies were threatening the president with a coup, it was time to get out while the getting was good. It was very kind of his ex-employers to shield him from facts like those He hoped that one day he could return the favor—but the odds of that happening were minuscule.
.....RVM45
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Post by kaijafon on Nov 1, 2015 6:53:04 GMT -6
Thank you! again! I read this at both places, lol! It's just that good!
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Post by millwright on Nov 4, 2015 18:36:18 GMT -6
Two thumbs up.
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Post by rvm45 on Nov 5, 2015 16:26:51 GMT -6
Chapter Thirty
The secret service agent who’d resigned had the surname “Jason” though he was no longer using it since he’d went to ground.
There was a knock on the door of his farmhouse at 4:00am. When Jason peered out the peephole he was horrified to see his old section chief standing at the door.
“Open the door Jason. I know that it’s you inside,” the chief said.
Jason opened the door with a long barreled .44 Magnum in one hand. He was rather surprised to see that the chief had civilians with him—a black woman and three children. The oldest was no taller than the woman’s sternum.
“I need a favor Jason,” Chief said. “I was aware of your hidey-hole. I watched you build your exit strategy with interest—though I thought at the time that you were a bit paranoid. At any rate, I didn’t emulate you. I’m flashing on a shit storm ahead. Would you shelter my wife and children for me?”
Jason absorbed a number of surprising bits of data with a poker face.
“Come in. There’s no sense in prolonging your exposure. I would think that someone coming to ask a favor would use my first name instead of my last—but never mind. I’m not using either anymore. Call me ‘Truitt’,” Jason said.
“I want to stress, I’m not blackmailing you. I’ll keep your secret even if you refuse sanctuary for my family,” Chief said.
Jason sat a moment in silent contemplation. Chief’s generosity was a clever gambit. Jason taking in Chief’s family under duress was far less desirable than having him do it willingly. Under the circumstances it was hard to feel good about saying “No’’.
“I’m surprised that you have a black wife,” Jason said.
“Are you a racist?” Chief’s wife asked a bit sharply.
“Of course, everyone is racist—even those who try to deny it,” Jason said.
Then he paused to shout, “Rolanda, get decent and come to the front room please.”
Rolanda was noticeably darker than Chief’s wife.
“Although I believe that every interpersonal relationship must needs include largely subliminal considerations of race, I don’t bear your race any ill will. This isn’t a coincidence though—is it?”
“You aren’t the only federal agent with a hidey-hole, but my wife and children will be a much less jarring dissonance here with you,” Chief said. “I had access to your personnel file and so I wasn’t even a little surprised at your wife’s ethnicity,” Chief said.
“Of course my wife’s cousins—no, her sister and her nieces and nephews—are welcome to stay with us while she’s estranged from her husband. What is he? O yeah, he’s a broker in New York who’s heavily stressed over the downturn in the economy,” Jason said.
“You will go to Hell for lying so much,” Rolanda said to Jason.
“I make no excuses for lies and liars, but lies of necessity aren’t the same as ‘Bearing False Witness’,” Jason said. “But I am willing to stand at the Judgment Throne and answer for telling the occasional whopper. It will be far from the most grievous of offenses that I’ll be taken to task for.”
**************** ******************** *************************
Creating an enclave—a relatively small eddy or vortex in the multi-dimensional flow of existence…
What can I compare it to? It is like any other endeavor where you strain and push for a prolonged period of time with all of your might and nothing happens—then all at once—things move!
“We have an enclave once more. It is noticeably larger and will be even harder for outsiders to find and enter—but it will be about seven weeks until it is ready to access,” I told my wards.
We had to put our people somewhere. With the black BDU wearing feds nipping at every soft belly exposed it made sense to gather the folks together in one place where we could all protect them. We’d bought and consolidated about four thousand acres in the foothills of the Appalachians in Northern Georgia and we’d hunkered down to wait.
Ten days before we could have opened The Outfit’s new enclave, huge numbers of the black clad hobnails surrounded our compound. They brought tanks, armored personnel carriers along with SWAT vehicles specialized for breaching barricades.
They stood back and shelled our compound with mortar and artillery shells. Then they even called in an airstrike with slow moving aircraft armed with mini-guns and 35mm chainguns.
Why did we need over four thousand acres to house about seven thousand people? I mean this wasn’t Woodstock.
I will tell you. We needed room to put in a fair number of decoy structures and Potemkin villages to draw fire while our folks huddled in hastily built and crowded bunkers.
On the third day I went outside bearing a white flag of truce.
A black BDU wearing trooper ran a wand over me.
“He’s an original,” the trooper told the commander.
“Dude it is like: what will it take to get you to go away?” I asked him.
“Open your compound and surrender your fellow cult members into custody,” the commander said. “This can’t end any other way.”
I stood bemused for a moment.
“You have nice white teeth. They will look good on a bracelet or necklace,” I said. “Try not to get those pretty teeth broken or destroyed. I’m going back and tell everyone that you are an uncompromising turd-gargler,” I said.
“You aren’t going anywhere,” the commander said.
Just then one of the guards interrupted our gavoreet by escortind three rail-thin hollow-eyed hillbillies into the command tent. One of the hillbillies was in a wheelchair.
“We represent the Northeast Georgia Volunteers,” the man in the wheelchair said.
“Militias have been declared illegal and the Northeast Georgia Volunteers was one of the groups specifically ordered to disband. At any rate, how formidable a militia can yours be if it includes cripples and the emaciated in their ranks?” Commander scoffed.
“I was in a mining accident. My brothers both have emphysema and antibiotic resistant tuberculosis. Even a small militia needs clerks, dispatchers and someone to do occasional ‘Paul Reveres’—mostly electronically nowadays. You’d know that if you weren’t a fool. Right now we have eight hundred sharpshooters with scoped high-powered rifles surrounding y’all. My brothers and I were considered expendable if you choose to violate our flag of truce,” the brave man in the wheelchair said.
“Fornicate your flag of truce!” Commander shouted.
He had a nicer word for ‘’Fornicate”. He slapped the man in the wheelchair hard enough to cause him to spit blood.
“Arrest all of them!” Commander shouted.
I remember in one of Robert E Howard’s stories, Conan is called into court as a material witness. When Conan refuses to snitch the judge orders him thrown into gaol for contempt of court. Conan concludes his account by saying:
“Then seeing as they were all insane I drew my sword and slayed them.”
Seeing the dude in the wheelchair slapped by the commander put me in the same frame of mind as Conan. Since they were all insane—and evil—there was scant recourse but to slay them.
I threw a hundred and fifty spawn. Way on the outer fringes were three little kahunas and each one threw five spawn of his own to add to the general confusion and tumult. What a nice surprise!
“I am Spoil Airgetlám. Fall to your knees and tremble in terror!” I shouted my challenge.
I ran my fist through the commander and ripped his heart out. A moment later I had my two enchanted swords in hand. Since they were both artifacts they spawned any number of times with perfect fidelity.
I grabbed up the man in the wheelchair and extended my feathered cloak around him and his brothers.
Once I had the brothers safely inside the compound, I popped my cork to let my chi flow back to the battle.
When they realized that the truce was broken, several of my Adepts assayed their own sorties for diversions.
Fifteen Duncan spawn along with a dozen Saul spawn jumped the fence and attacked without caution, strategy or subtlety. There were about thirty albino Geralds, five Normans moving faster than sound, twenty Ladonnas throwing so many of the toy Kunai that you’d think she’d found a way to make them belt fed.
Large packs of black cats and black rats attacked troopers. James and Chandra had spawn firing high power semi-automatic weapons and then doing a shot range teleport to another firing point to fire another high firepower volley.
The purpose of that exercise was simply to get the three militiamen and me back behind the barricades. Even if we wiped out every single law they’d soon have reinforcements back on the scene. The best strategy was to pull our heads in and try to survive long enough to open our enclave and vanish. We needed to think “Tortoise” and “Porcupine”. There was little point in exhausting ourselves in flashy sorties outside.
I didn’t take into account the eight hundred Georgia Militia Sharpshooters. I don’t think there has ever been that big a concentration of snipers raining well-aimed shots at largely unprotected clients at less than three hundred yards.
It was only moments later though it must have seemed like hours to many of those involved.
The black BDU clad federal forces beat a hasty retreat.
Less than an hour later a large force of troopers wearing brown camo BDUs in a pattern that I’d never seen before arrived. They had platoons of marching infantry but they also had many tanks and ten times as many supply and support vehicles.
They stayed on the road in a column and drove right up to our gate bearing a white flag of truce.
“Bring me the top four ranking men. I’m not going outside again to parley with them,” I ordered.
The brown camouflaged man with the Brigadier General’s stars stood at attention and saluted me.
“Brigadier General Partisan Brown placing myself and my command at your service,” he said.
“Your name is ‘Partisan’? Your father was as creative with names as mine. I mean no disrespect friend, but I’m incapable of returning your salute since I’m not in uniform. Please be seated,” I said. “What’s this about?”
“I’m sure that you’re aware that the each side’s Guard was originally a force at command of the individual governors and state. We’ve been working secretly and quietly to turn the Georgia Guard into a force capable of defending Georgia from threats and coercion by Washington,” General Brown said.
“I beg your pardon,” I said. “My position and the situation require me to be skeptical. I’ll need to touch each of you and do a reading. Is that alright?”
After I’d contact read General Brown and his three subordinates I keyed my intercom.
“I need six to eight contact readers. I want them to go outside. I want each of them to read at least a dozen randomly selected troopers and check for any sign of duplicity. Be creative in your selection and eclectic. Read everyone from buck privates up to colonels,” I said.
**************** ******************** ***********************************
Most of the Guardsmen concentrated on building another outer ring around our compound. They rapidly dug in and enfiladed their tanks and gun bearing armored troop transports. They also built bunkers for their men.
Men can and have built bunkers with nothing but picks and entrenching tools. That can drag one’s beat when time is of the essence though. The Georgia Guard was ahead of the curve there though. They’d brought plenty of OD brown painted backhoes. The backhoes did most of the digging while the men squared up and crumbed the resulting ditches and shoveled the spoil into synthetic fabric bags to make sandbag walls and overhead protection.
They also set up plenty of concertina, land mines and claymore arrays set to go off in strategic volleys.
Some of the militiamen came down to help the Guard dig in while others looked for better vantage points, cut branches or whatever to better conceal their sniper posts as well as setting up a number of unobtrusive distance markers.
Since the militiamen were on their own hook many of them drove off to the nearest grocery or convenience store to lay in supplies.
*************** ********************** ***************************
Five days later the federal forces arrived with a vengeance. There must have been fifteen or sixteen black clad federal infantrymen for every brown camo clad guardsmen.
The federals had been gearing up for war for some time. They thought that their main opponents would be lightly armed civilians. They had many armored assault vehicles but the armor was light and they were armed with weapons like a single .308 minigun, a 25mm chaingun, twin .50 caliber machineguns, water cannons and a few flamethrowers. More than a few of the tracked vehicles were armed with nothing but an M-60 and a steel battering ram.
There were twenty-five federal tracked vehicles for every one of the Georgia Guard’s. The Georgia vehicles were enfiladed—buried up to the turret—and they had some tank-killing guns on many of their vehicles.
“You men are involved in unlawful insurrection against the government of the United States. You are ordered to drop your weapons and stand down,” came from a set of four giant microphone horns mounted on a black truck.
The sniper who was using a .375 Magnum wrecked one speaker after another.
“We are here at the command of our governor and we constitute the sole legal authority inside of Georgia. You are commanded to break off hostilities and leave the state of Georgia by the fastest most expeditious rout possible,” many speakers mounted both inside and outside the compound carried Brigadier Brown’s reply.
Scores of black helicopters appeared on the horizon to the North. They were in formation to make multiple strafing passes against the compound and the guardsmen. Meanwhile, since their threats weren’t working the federal troops started leaving the road on each side intending to surround their clients.
First, the first wave of tanks started getting stuck in the hastily dug and concealed tank pits while others hit a landmine and lost a tread. The snipers opened fire and cut down many infantry and anyone who tried to exit the stuck tanks.
David had built a large number of small microchip piloted rockets and now the Guardsmen had given him a large quantity of plastic explosive to play with. Each rocket targeted a helicopter and when it collided with a helicopter is set off a shaped charge with over a half-pound of plastique.
Helicopters fell from the sky like black hailstones.
The federals pulled well back from the beaten zone to rest and regroup. They paused in disarray for a day and a half when the complexion of the whole battle changed with the arrival of thousands of Regular Army complete with real heavily armored tanks.
“I don’t intend to surrender under any circumstance,” I told my lieutenants and several Georgia Guard officers. “Anyone who wants to surrender should leave immediately. The rest of you—remember the Alamo.”
************ **************** ****************************
During The War of Northern Aggression federal troops had flooded into Kentucky making a referendum on whether they should join the Confederacy impossible. Thus they sat out the war uncomfortably as a neutral state.
The there was West Virginia—the traitor state that betrayed the Confederacy—and caused many natives to feel shame for the acts of their forefathers almost two hundred years later.
The federal government had walked on the Constitution of The United States for decades. The blatant violations of tens and hundreds of thousands peoples’ rights in their pursuit of Adepts and kinjutsu—and even just plain jutsu—was more analogous to using the revered document for toilet paper…
Kentucky and West Virginia were the very first states to state in no uncertain terms that the federals would cease and desist or they intended to secede from the Union.
Of course Georgia had stepped into the breach and started a hot war without any formal declaration. Mississippi and Alabama were anxious not to be outdone by Georgia and they mobilized their guard and militia units as well.
Florida had too many Yankee immigrants to be wholesale for the secession, but neither were they against it. Florida was divided county by county and even block by block which side they supported.
Indiana was divided as well. One could draw a concave line between Terre Haute and Richmond dipping Southward. The areas to the South were Confederates mot folks up North—while they weren’t enthusiastic supporters of the federal government—were intent on preserving their present state of misery.
Tennessee folk—like Indiana folk—liked to poke fun at the Kentuckians. When Kentucky stepped into harms way though the people of Tennessee reacted as if a brother was in danger and they joined the movement.
************* ************** ***************************
Within hours of the almost instant insurrection the Regular Army had surrounded the governors’ mansions or bunkers and laid siege. The only reason that they didn’t attack in overwhelming force was political rather than tactical.
The governor in Frankfort looked at the troops surrounding his residence gloomily. He should have gotten out sooner but events had raced ahead of strategy though. Eventually they would starve him out if nothing else, but it galled a man’s pride to go down without striking a single blow.
He was beyond any reasonable hope but something stronger than hope compelled him to hang on even largely against his own will.
.....RVM45
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Post by rvm45 on Nov 11, 2015 16:02:18 GMT -6
Friends, I put off writing this chapter for many days.
Then I realized that it was time to close it up and I hated to do that because I was really enjoying this. Still any more would wax repetitious.
I'm going to sharpen my pencil and edit for typos, verb agreements as well as smoothing the occasional awkward sentence...
And I'm going to publish this one and "River Bottoms" as a partial prequel on Kindle. Hopefully it will catch on and blaze brightly.
I'm not holding my breath.
Chapter Thirty-One
I don’t follow military affairs much—especially since being put in charge of other Adepts. I remember Jeff Cooper was really impressed by the M-1 Abrams tank. It was expensive and far from simple to make or maintain, but it offered enough positive advantages to make all the high tech stuff worth it in this instance.
I imagine that the M-1 Abrams was way out of date in the modern world but whether the tanks that came after it were as superior to anything else in the field as the Abrams or whether they only increased the complexity where it would give a corresponding large increase in efficacy—that I don’t know—or care much.
Anyway, mere hours away from our enclave opening up to us there came tank after tank after tank from Fort Benning along with platoon after platoon of combat infantry.
They stopped at the black clad trooper’s outer perimeter and raised a huge flag of truce.
I went out to meet with them. As I said—we were hours from being able to jump down the groundhog hole and being able top pull the hole in after us. Every minute that I could gain taking was protein for us. I went in my own original—maybe I should say “Beta” self since this body had once been a big kahuna. I took a platoon of various spawn—even spawn from my former kahunas who’d gone independent.
No sooner had I walked into the tent than a black uniformed major shot me with another pair of silver spikes.
“That doesn’t work on me anymore dumbass, but here’s something for the thought,” I said as I rammed my fist through his hard body armor, the soft body armor that he wore under that and through his torso and out through the two layers of armor in the rear.
I dropped the still beating heart on the ground behind him. The chi shield kept me from even getting any blood on my hand or arm.
Several pistols were drawn along with a couple more of the Taser-like devices.
“Everyone stand down!” A lieutenant general with three silver stars on his desert camo BDUs shouted.
“Now, as the officer in charge of Fort Benning along with both associated and unassociated reserve units, I have decided that this siege and the pogrom against those suspected of being so-called ‘Adepts’ is unconstitutional and I’m ordering you men to lay down your arms. You are under suspicion of treason and may face charges,” the three star general said.
“Dudes, if it was me—I’d rather go down fighting than lay down my arms,” I told the federals.
“Your comment is not helpful,” the general said in irritation.
“No, it may not be helpful to either your or my aims. Nonetheless it is true,” I said.
************* **************** ****************************
“May I speak to you for a moment,” the lieutenant general asked me as we prepared to go back to our compound.
The portals would be opening any moment.
“What do you need?” I asked him when we were alone.
“When this is over, I’d very much like to visit your town. I think that maybe it would be a good place to retire and raise my grandchildren,” the general said.
**************** ******************* ******************************
At the last moment a gate that hadn’t quite stabilized opened outside our barricades among the black clad federals and over eleven hundred of them entered our land.
They immediately raised a flag of truce.
“We wish to apply for political asylum,” the captain that had been selected to represent them told me.
“How do you figure?” I asked somewhat amused at her audacity.
“Isn’t this a sovereign territory? And isn’t whether or not to obey an order or to refuse it largely a matter of politics? Either choice can turn out to be the wrong one—depending on who wins,” she said.
“Surrender your weapons. I hate to say that to anyone—even y’all. You have my word that once the confusion dies down and we can get you some clothing that isn’t an incitement to riot that you will have the run of the place and that I’ll return your weapons,” I said.
************** ********************* ***********************************
Ever hear of an “Arcology”? It’s either a small city or a humongous building depending on how you define it.
I think that the original plan called for a building a mile wide, a mile thick and one hundred stories tall. Hundred story buildings are a fait accompli. There are no problems building it as wide as you’d like—so long as you have the cash on hand.
Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven wrote a novel about an Arcology that was two miles on a side.
An Arcology is fearsomely easy to heat or cool since its surface area is so small compared to its volume. It can house apartments, condominiums, factories and schools. It can even have parks with big oak trees growing—you just have to combine several floors in a few places to allow headroom.
It saves huge amounts of fuel since everything is close to you.
No one will ever build an Arcology in the outside world because it has far too high a start-up cost.
When we entered our new enclave there was a huge Arcology built for us. It is a little over 2.25 miles on a side and one hundred and thirty-seven stories tall—not counting beaucoup levels of basements and a thirty-seven-story extension that went on for more than another mile in every direction.
God knows how a relatively blunt instrument like the enclave building jutsu built something as sophisticated as an Arcology. It almost certainly wouldn’t have come about if I hadn’t been exposed to the concept along with variations.
Lets put this into perspective. 2.25 squared gives just a wee bit more than five square miles. Five square miles multiplied by one hundred and thirty-seven stories gives just a little over six hundred square miles. Rhode Island only has one thousand square miles.
There are bank after bank of full-spectrum lights that never seem to burn out. There are a half a dozen Thorium Reactors with their bases resting on the floor of the lowest sub-basement. One of them would put out more than enough power for three or four Arcologies like ours. They come complete with blueprints and beaucoup operating and maintenance manuals. Scientists and engineers come from all over the world to study our Thorium reactors.
The top few floors are given over to a recreation of our old village. Two and a half square miles would more than suffice, but several stories were needed to accommodate the trees. Also, the village has been expanded a bit—for instance there were more than enough dorms or barracks to house the federal “Political Refugees” and the influx of students determined to learn tradecraft here.
My old room is in a dorm on one of the top floor village simulations—Just as I left it decades ago when I sealed it.
There are trees in the parks that seem to have been growing there for a hundred and fifty—maybe two hundred years or more. There are hydroponic and aereoponic gardens adequate to feed most of the American Southwest housed in our tower.
There is also an arms factory capable of arming the whole world were that ever to become necessary.
There is a second replica of the village beside the tower for people who just can’t cotton to living in a building.
Panic wanted an enclave as big as Indiana or Kentucky. I got carried away a bit. This enclave is as big as Indiana and Kentucky combined and throw in Vermont for good measure. And just like in the tower, the land is filled with huge stands of virgin hardwood timber that would have taken two or three hundred years to stabilize.
I don’t think that there are any other towers or other artifacts in our enclave but who knows?
People flock here. Many of the militia and guardsmen who stood shoulder-to-shoulder with us have relocated here. For some reason the enclave is a popular place to immigrate to among the Japanese and the Taiwanese.
And still there are large areas that probably won’t feel the tread of human feet for a generation or two—maybe three.
************ ***************** ***************************
The Montana skinheads with their sacrifices of dogs and their ki-lobotomised motorcycle storm troopers really dragged my beat. I stomped most of them out with an expedition in force.
A few of the ringleaders got away. I expect that we will have to deal with them once more as soon as they recruit and regroup.
Most Montanans aren’t skinheads or demon worshippers of course. I had enough petitions that I opened three enclaves there as well as one in Northern Idaho.
I opened any number of enclaves for allied Adept groups—but none of them were much bigger than—O, say Kentucky and with bit extra—say the size of Vermont or New Hampshire thrown in. The enclaves came with their own long-standing hardwood forests and the Northern ones somehow contrived have a much warmer climate than the outside world that they connected to. None of them had high tech artifacts either—at least, not to the best of my knowledge.
With one notable exception—well two, but we’ll get to the second momentarily.
My grandmother’s people come from the countryside near Huntingburg Indiana. My father liked to tell how he despaired of ever getting out of the river bottoms when he let his (and my grandmother’s) “river-bottom-billy” cousins talk him into going coon-hunting one night.
I outdid myself there. I threw an enclave about ten percent larger than The Outfit’s—and yes, it was chock-full of artifacts.
Interestingly enough, no one asked me for that one. I created it “Just because”. I steered plenty of sympathetic folk there afterward. It was too big and potentially power-balance threatening to leave empty waiting for whoever or whatever to come along.
************** ***************** ******************************
Morgan came to see me. He’d dropped the Snuffy Smith attire and he had a woman with him.
“What do you want Morgan? I’m not exactly filled with the milk of human kindness toward you. You kicked out my people when their asses were hanging in the breeze,” I said.
“Do you remember Wizard’s tale? I am the old man who told Wizard about Pale Ladies. This is my mother. Wizard is my father. Those particular timelines are highly convoluted.
“We had to kick your people out at that particular juncture. The moment was structured that way.
“Macersville has always existed and it always will—but nonetheless it had to be created. That falls to you. It will be a far harder thing than you have ever attempted. We know that you succeed. We do not know if you survive. We rather doubt it.”
“One more thing: you are the first owner of the Claidheamh Soluis. Someday you or your descendants will present it to Nuada Airgetlám. That silver arm of yours will be his one day as well,” Morgan said.
“You are a lying sack of whore’s spit,” I told him. “You told me that The Pale Lady was your cousin.”
“I am his cousin as well as his mother,” The Pale Lady spoke for the first time.
“Isn’t the child of your cousin also your cousin? So if two cousins marry wouldn’t the child be a cousin to his mother via his father? Wizard and I aren’t related but there are many first and second cousin marriages inn my family tree,” The Pale Lady said.
“What about Wizard? You’ve been tormenting him for decades. It isn’t right,” I spat.
“If Wizard hadn’t been to Saturnalia and claimed the Satyr’s penis and testicles how would you have gotten your powers back?” she asked.
“It is vulgar to use Latin names for body parts—unless you’re some sort of health care professional. There are ample euphemisms without dragging Latin into it,” I said although while my comment was true enough I was being querulous.
“I am a doctor with far better understanding and therapeutic modalities at my disposal than your witch doctors could ever begin to understand, but I will honor your distaste for Latin terminology,” she said.
“Wizard will rejoin me in Macersville. He still needs to sire Morgan and his many brothers and sisters in his own timeline. In fact an older Wizard awaits my return. I would have brought him with me but…” She started.
“But this moment isn’t structured that way,” I finished for her.
“Spoil, we know that you will create the enclave for us. The fact that we’re here proves that. It is also hard to imagine even you surviving such a huge outpouring of mana. But never let it be said that we tricked you into doing something. You have mastered your internal chi to the point that you could survive in your prime for centuries. Know what we’re asking you to wager,” The Pale Lady said.
************ ******************** *****************************
I had put a lot of thought into reconciling free will with predestination—at least what the Bible means when it uses the term commonly translated as “Predestination” or “Predestinate”.
In the world of man there are events that are demonstrably deterministic and yet contain far too many variables for man to compute. Presumably God could calculate even the most chaotic deterministic event. His power of calculation should be infinite.
However from man’s worm’s eye view of the subject only some relatively simple deterministic events can be calculated with dead certainty. The fact is though, the only results that men can determine with certainty are deterministic.
Some proponents of “Open Theism”—most notably Jed Smock AKA “Brother Jed” believe that not even God can foretell events that aren’t constrained at some level to necessity.
The circular logic goes around and around:
“If it can be foretold it must needs be predetermined because only predetermined events can be foretold with absolute certainty.”
What if we have free will and are free to chose in many cases but yet God—not limited by mortal limitations—can foretell the end event with perfect fidelity?
Sure it is a contradiction. There are many contradictions inherent in the concept of an Omnipotent Being.
That means that Omnipotence is LOGICALLY impossible…
But who says that God is limited to mortal Logic?
Time travel and/or tangled world lines involve the same sort of conundrums. Someone tells you:
“You will do this because you must do this. My foreknowledge compels you.”
Not necessarily. I have to decide. Your foreknowledge simply lets you predict the unpredictable.
I think that’s one very good reason that the Bible sometimes gives Prophetic warnings but forbids fortune telling on one’s own hook.
I pondered the question of whether or not to create the giant burl in space-time that was the Macersville enclave.
Since it was inevitable that I weave the enclave, why not live long and live well and create the enclave when on my deathbed. If I had chosen that course, if I were that weak and cowardly—perhaps Macersville would never have been.
I wasn’t one to want to carry on with such a weighty task facing me.
Cowards theorize with the goal of surviving firmly in mind.
I went far from the new village in case destructive energies were released.
Just as I was about to begin I found that I’d been followed.
Ladonna had followed me. Albino Gerald was with her along with Cary the rat runner and David the genius. Gina the cat girl was there. James and Chandra, Duncan the Sumo, Saul the hellhound and Norman the super-sonic came. Jae the Korean mind reader came. Even Coach Brown and Coach O’Brian—both very old men now—chose to come. Thomas the Cherokee and Panic the dragon brought up the rear.
“Friends, I’m honored but this is pretty much a suicide mission. I have no great hopes of surviving. If you all perish with me then who is left to mind the village and The Outfit?” I said solemnly.
“You have left a very well organized cadre and the lines of succession are perfectly clear. The Outfit is perfectly capable of carrying on without us,” David said.
“The amount of chi required as well as the limited data processing of the human mind are what makes this jutsu so problematic,” Ladonna said.
She took out a suede drawstring bag and extracted five of the chi-saturated gumdrops. She popped all of them into her mouth at once and gulped them down after a few chews. Then she started chewing three more.
Everyone else was snarfing large quantities of the chi drops. Duncan was throwing softball-sized paper bags full of chi drops into Panic’s open mouth.
They couldn’t survive such a reckless and imprudent act unless some way to discharge the chi came to hand before they exploded. Creating Macersville was the only possible remedy to such a huge chi overdose.
That’s why The Pale Lady and Morgan were almost certain that I’d perish. They couldn’t imagine that over twelve of my closest friends—no that’s wrong—over a dozen of my closest kin would contrive to aid me.
We survived of course or I couldn’t tell the tale. There are no words to describe what it is like to create a hyper-dimensional enclave but the manual telling the procedure is freely available to all. If you’re satisfied with an “E” Book you can download it for free.
Be warned—there isn’t one in a million who can pull it off and survive.
As a fringe benefit everyone who helped me create the Macersville enclave are now perfectly capable of creating small enclaves—say the size of South Carolina. They have been invited all over the world to do just that.
************** ********************* ***************************
“You are well over one hundred years old and you don’t look a day over twenty-four,” Ladonna said. “Have you ever reconsidered asking me for a date?”
“I once told you that would never happen while I had even a small measure of sanity or restraint left to me. Somewhere over the years and after many mind-bending experiences, I seem to have lost both,” I was forced in all honesty to say.
************* **************** *********************
For awhile there was a great many reforms in the American government. There was also a great deal of attention focused on the freshly re-revealed Adepts.
One by one the new legal protections have been amended and rationalized away over the decades.
There is no such thing as “Society”. Society is a pagan god invoked to justify attacks on individuals…
But if there was such a thing as “Society” I’d say that he was trying hard to forget and rationalize away the existence of Adepts and enclaves. That’s all to the good.
Macersville?
Once again, you can’t get there from here. I hope that someday Wizard can contrive to visit.
Maybe he can make it to my two-hundredth birthday party in a couple months.
One more thing puzzles me. Where was the city of Findias where Nuada Airgetlám’s sword came from? Is that an alias for Macersville or The Outfit’s enclave?
What about all the tales of The Tuatha de Danann and the faerie lands where people sometimes disappeared? Maybe The Tuatha de Danann were Adepts. That bit about just spending days only to find out that years or decades had passed in the outside world…
Yeah, enclaves that are very old can get kinda out of sync with the outside timestream without expert maintenance and knob twiddling.
I'm kinda saddened. I'm mayor, king or whatever you want to call it of The Outfit's enclave and I've lived several human lifetimes but somewhere I lost the happy-go-lucky underachiever who liked to wander through the village drinking cokes, sketching scenes and people and just grooving on being fit and free.
I'm still free but I am no longer unencumbered by responsibilities.
I remind myself daily that nothing of lasting value ever results from haste and letting oneself feel under pressure or driven is the root of many evils--and no good.
Its a little harder to walk that walk when you're at the top.
.....RVM45
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Post by millwright on Nov 12, 2015 11:02:27 GMT -6
A good wrap.
Thanks for sharing.
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Post by kaijafon on Nov 12, 2015 20:02:23 GMT -6
Nicely done, thanks so much!
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