Wheel! Of! FISH!

End of the Line

2005-01-08 - 2:25 a.m.

The fifth time he was sent cartwheeling through the air by a flailing tendril while zipping by at Mach 2 in an effort to slash at the squelchingly unpleasant mass of the unholy quagmire, Wheel paused a moment to reflect that perhaps he had had better ideas before he crashed through a bike rack and went rolling across greasy slick pavement, only stopping for a frank exchange of ideas with a brick wall.

Biting back a groan as the panchromatid amoebic aloha shirt flooded his system with systemic hallucinogens that provided the rather convincing illusion that smashing into a brick wall didn't hurt, Wheel kipped up and flashed back to the fray in a flurry of urban filth.

Blazer gritted his teeth as he conjured up a twisting spiral of icicles and sent it galeing for the center of the towering dripping heap of M'ythshaggoth, the quagmire's squealing songs of unravelling fraying at his mind. The thing chortled a sickening bubbling laugh and let fly with a wide-array sinewave plasma burst from its lower mass. Blazer barely had time to cross his arms in a rough deflecting ward as a ragged blitz of bright hue shot by, Wheel swinging his golden lightsaber in a wide arc to deflect the shot.

Overdrive growled, his right shoulder servos grinding heatedly as he hurled a wrought-iron cemetery fencepost that shot straight into the thing's drooling slash of a mouth. The ivied cross at the tip of the post flashed white-hot as the post burst out through the back of the thing's monstrous head in a spray of molten iron gobbets and nightichor. The alien thing screamed a bubbling cauldron scream. It twisted along its own axis and plunged down towards the big cyborg, nearly ten meters of running unholy ebon sickness ... but Crackle was there in a heartbeat, springing off Overdrive's wide shoulders, eight silver Trejo knives flying from his outflung blackgloved hands and plunging with searing hiss through the endless black slag of the quagmire's head. It reared back, roaring with a chorus of damned voices that shattered windows and caused the premature births of two-headed cats for a dozen blocks around.

"*KREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEKRRRLLLLLSSSSSSSSSS!* YOU WILL ALL TWIST IN THE BOWELS OF M'YTHSHAGGOTH, WORMS - *SLLLLURRRK!* - AND BE FEASTED ON FOREVER!"

It plunged down after them, filling the street with a rolling, plunging tidal wave of unadulterated horror. Crackle leapt from rooftop to rooftop in great bounds while Blazer soared above the street on a clean north wind, Overdrive folding a rocket out of his wide backplate and blasting along as Wheel led the charge in a long roadrunner trail of dust and debris. The Avant Guardsman grinned as intensely addictive psychotomimetic blood trickled from the corner of his mouth and trailed off behind him while he sprinted, spinning off in sparkling globules.

"Bit of a merry chase, isn't it?" the mad Illuminate asked with a half-grin, pirouetting away from a hardflung manhole cover that hummed by like an enormous wasp.

"Oh, yeah," snarled Crackle, tumbling down a five story drop to a tar roof and landing with a shuddering crunch, crouching and springing again. "Just like Brer goddamn Rabbit."

"Are we THERE yet?" grumbled the Metal Merc, swooping in a tight curve past a sickleswinging tentacle edged with glimmering shards. "FRAG!" He fired a short ultrasound burst from his left arm cannon, and M'ythshaggoth squealed in five unknown keys.

"Almost. I've been smelling the sea for five blocks." Blazer murmured, his eyes far away while he spawned a trailing cloud of oak embers behind him, swathing the morass of the quagmire in a fog of smoky purity.

Wheel nodded as he whipped around to hurl a jack-o-lantern with a sputtering fuse back into M'ythshaggoth's path. "Yep. I can see sodium chloride and heavy metallic pesticide swirls in the air." A tremendous explosion shook the ground, and the howls on their heels redoubled.

"You can ALWAYS see swirls in the air," muttered Crackle, zinging an arbutuswood kris down into the midst of the unken thing before leaping away from a gout of bubbling cerulean acid.

"And they've yet to guide me wrong, Snap." The Spirit of Vengeance grimaced as the pop culture shaman popped off one of his least favorite nicknames. "Now, stay focused. We have to make certain this thing doesn't nab any of US, because then the rest of us schlubs are not only gonna have to deal with an exponential increase in that oily bastard's power, but there'll be some phenomenally dire metaphysical consequences, as first observed by Tobin in WAAAUUGH! ..."

Wheel cut off as he was jerked from the road in mid-hyperstride by Blazer, who floated serenely upwards as a surging tide of tentacled howling mass came bursting from the gutters on both sides of the streets, tangling in front of the Irregulars.

"Bastard cut us off!" cursed Crackle, triple-lutzing into the air and bursting feathered black wings from beneath his coat. Wheel, dangling by one hand in Blazer's grip as the Surreal Cavalry shifted their charge down a narrow factory sidestreet, let his lightsaber fade and flip back into its holster and reached into his pocket universe, pulling out a gleaming golden ring with a stylized L and orbiting star as its sigil. He nimbly slid it onto his ring finger one-handed, and then let go of Blazer and soared through the air, his Legion flight ring glowing.

He arced around and rocketed down, the aloha shirt trailing and flowing in a haze of shifting colors, to hover just above the towering, leering mass of M'ythshaggoth.

"An impressive gambit, tomnoddy, but you'll still have to sing for your supper tonight."

The thing screeched a hellsbreath note and congealed the dripping tip of one tentacular squamous pseudopod into an enormous stony black fist that whistled through the air at the grinning Wheel ... only to be split like a ripe cantaloupe as the golden lightsaber flashed back into his hand. The ancient thing rose even higher and roared in agony and rage, and plunged forward again, drawing its sprawling non-Euclidean form after it as Wheel spun and rocketed away, trailing golden sparks. The flying Irregulars closed ranks with him.

"Cheesed him off real good," Overdrive grunted approvingly.

"Of course. No-one likes being called tomnoddy."

The chase went on for far too long. M'ythshaggoth was growing by the moment, and its inhuman discordance grew commensurately with its grotesque physical mass, twisting odd bits of reality, fraying at the moonlight. Moreover, it was old, and clever, and knew when it was being coursed. Even as Wheel's trickster taunts and the ancient Discordian vendetta drew it onward, the beast kept its damned cunning. Feeding itself into drains, running like black blood through the sewers under the streets, bursting from the ground and the walls, running between alleys ... the gnats stung it, but it was patient, and had grown fond of the taste of each of them as the chase drew on. The mercury and gunsteel of the knight. The springwater of the shaman. The black ash of the deathstooper. And especially that rare vintage, the intoxicating madness of the laughing one.

Soon they would be within. Soon they would be M'ythshaggoth.

Finally, there were no more mousemazes of concrete to play this game in. The little ones had finally finished their little amusement and now found their backs to the sea. M'ythshaggoth found a thought echoing within its vastness; a strong resonance from the tattered drifts of the thing that had called itself Agent Smith:

Inevitability.

...

Wheel popped a Tyler Pharmaceuticals painkiller (Now with Miraclo™!) while the aloha shirt knit together the gash in his shoulder. Blazer used his one good arm to conjure a glass bottle of steaming whittlebark tea as Overdrive yanked a length of steel rebar out of his leg with a squealing, grinding sound. Crackle simply crouched on the warped and age-smoothed dock, hands dangling loosely, not even seeming to breathe despite the bump under his coat where a broken wing had not folded back completely.

They stood ... and crouched ... and floated ... at the end of the farthest pier, stretching out into the bloodwarm Gulf of Mexico under a phosphorescent blue nightsky. Arrayed before them, sprawling under the eyes of God like a desecrated corpse, was the corpulence of M'ythshaggoth, spreading across the dockfront and towering above them, wrapped in majesty.

"Nowhere else to go, bub. Interesting plan," growled Overdrive, his red ConnorDyne eye flickering as he rerouted power through his systems, "But if we wanted t'die heroic deaths, we coulda done it back on Decatur Street."

"Wheel's always got a plan," murmured Crackle, tracing burning patterns in the wood of the dock, his inky black sunglasses fixed on the unholy mass of the monstrosity that watched them with a brimstone smile and infinite predatory patience. "Or I wouldn't be here."

Wheel grinned.

"Honestly, bro, I thought you'd have learned by now. ALWAYS trust the fuckhead."

He strode slowly down the docks, lighting one of his gold-tipped cigarettes and puffing a cloud of fat silvery smoke that cut the miasmic reek of the extradimensional monstrosity, until he stood with the tips of his Converse at the end of the planks, facing the foe.

"M'ythshaggoth, you bedunged bit of demon spadge ... not a bad bit of trickery. It's almost as if you've got us cornered."

The thing's malformed infernal slash of a smile slipped for a moment. "Your *klrrrrrrrrrrrksssssslllsss* japes cannot save you now, Trickster. There is nowhere else to *slrrrrrrrrsh* lead this buffoon's chase, and you will not flee and leave this mortal rat's nest in OUR *kllllrt* tender embrace."

"Right on both counts." Wheel took a long slow drag of his cigarette, and rolled the silken fog around his tongue, and looked up with a Cheshire grin. A shiver of irritation ran through the quivering mass of the vast atramentous thing.

"THE *SKSSSSSLLLLSSHH* END IS UPON YOU, ACCURSED FOOL! YOUR FLESH WILL BE OUR *KORRRRLLLL* FEAST!"

Wheel half-smiled and puffed an eloquent smoke ring. A faint roaring built, and gulls wheeled frantically overhead. He slowly lifted his right hand, clenched in a fist, the middle knuckle a protruding fico. "Tell me something, you Jell-O mold's uzzard ... can you hear this?"

The waters of the Gulf took on a bright, twinkling glow, and a gleaming feminine form appeared rising out of the water at the end of the dock.

A half-grin tugged at Wheel's mouth. "Want me to turn it up?"

As Wheel dramatically offered a gesture so ancient that even the Old Ones were pissed off by it, a great column of sparkling blue water burst a hundred feet into the air directly behind him, and M'ythshaggoth gaped a flickering gape in its roiling shadow. At its crown, controlling the raging, frothing sea, was the Lady of the Waves, Eclipse.

The dagger of bright sea plunged down, arcing over the Irregulars, and the whole of M'ythshaggoth was subsumed by frothing anarchy. Eclipse floated down gently to land next to Wheel, salt water running with grayblack cresting his rubber soles as he puffed and watched impassively.

"Good timing as ever, my lovely," Wheel removed his cigarette and planted a light kiss on the Lady of the Waves' cheek.

"A pleasure, Wheelie, but ..." she cast a dubious eye at the steaming, bubbling chaos, "... I don't think the Nereune Wavesword is going to be enough to finish it."

Wheel snorted a curl of smoke. "I should certainly say not. But it will strip off a bunch of that excess blubber the foul bastard was carrying around, and give us something we can cut down to size." A shuddering, aqueous roar shook the docks.

"Hm. Get into the water, dovelet, and for the love of Lennon, DON'T let that thing in for a swim." Eclipse nodded and leapt gracefully into the air, plunging beneath the surface with barely a ripple.

Wheel squared off and flicked the stub of his cigarette away, arcing in a trail of sparks to land with a hiss in the running slick of seawater.

"Form up, boys." The Irregulars lined up in a standard Dirty Dozen formation, and faced the molten, heaving and slimmed form of M'ythshaggoth, now barely seven meters of unending horror and wrath, long arms trailing to the ground, its gaping maw an endless howl of sullenflame rage.

The ragged, wounded, exhausted shadowfolk faced the thing down. Wheel's shades flickered a thousand thousand rainbow hues while stubbornly refusing to reflect the darkness. The Psychedelic Illuminate gestured slowly and deliberately, his finger a cocked starter's pistol.

"Take this ugly magnum of fortified fucknard down."

Blazer floated to the forefront, his creased bronze face serene as M'ythshaggoth roared redblack flames, deflected at the last moment by a burst of seafoam with a bubbling hiss of steam. The Canadian mage offered a faint smile and nod to the ocean as his hands worked in elegant conjuration.

He smiled a cold smile and scattered a handful of ice, pebbles and copper discs at the jetten thing. The components faded into thaums and atomagics, and there came a great rumbling. The quagmire screamed in its damned chorus of captured voices as great stones came bursting up through the ground, arcing neatly into the air and slamming down into the squalling monstrosity. Soon it was buried under a heap of stones, but already heaving them aside and squamishing between the cracks ... and Blazer closed his fist, sealing the whole mass in a gleaming prison of crystalline ice with a loud *CRACK!*.

The ice steamed for a long quiet moment, sealing the cacophony of the raging Elder Horror in a sickeningly familiar prison. As the ice began to quiver at ultrasonic frequencies, the crystal interlacing ravaged by songs of undoing, Blazer spread his hand wide, bursting the glacier and stones alike with a sharp burst of electric blue ozone and leaving M'ythshaggoth puddled on the street, struggling to regain a bipedal form as its hominid shape ran and melted like a T-1000 in a smelting vat before collapsing into a morass of tentacular pseudopods and unpleasant secretions, perhaps fifteen feet tall, with its hideous head rearing from what was left of the body and piping a Fury's song.

"Stone Cold Stunner. Well-played, old man," Wheel smiled beatifically as Blazer bowed from the waist, still floating Indian-legged, and drifted to the left. "'drive?"

The big cyborg took a long stride forward and locked his left-arm cannon into place. With a low throaty metallic chuckle, he slid a golden ampule into the matter chamber of the fusion reactor in his shoulder, and a series of silvery lights ran down the length of the plasmagun.

Overdrive grinned, and a chorus of vengeful angels burst from the end of his arm cannon, burying M'ythshaggoth's glass-shattering shriek of agony under sacred harmonics.

The Irregular's enforcer ran his fingers over touch controls just above his solar plexus plate and the blinding white purity increased twofold, M'ythshaggoth twisting like a speared worm as the blessed weapon tore into his inessence. Long ghostly fingers clawed at the sky from the smoke rising off the damned thing.

It was glorious.

But like all good things, it came to an end all too soon. The plasma cannon sputtered as the tooth of St. Jude was consumed and the Doc Brown™ fusion generator died down, the blazing alabaster light flickering and fading away, leaving M'ythshaggoth a smoking heaving mass, once again humanoid in form, but now barely cresting nine feet, slumped like a broken marionette against the side of a panel truck.

Overdrive slowly lowered his arm cannon and stepped to the right.

The Irregulars watched the shattered beast shudder and heave.

And then the chilling laugh of the thing echoed across the empty dockfronts. The luminous sea churned as the laughter sent shivers down Eclipse's spine and Wheel's eyebrows knitted above his inscrutable specs. Purple sparks flew as Overdrive ground his TrapJaw 2.3 and Blazer cursed quietly in Algonquin. Only Crackle crouched still and unaffected as the steaming, slogging quagmire forced itself to its stumps.

"*klllllrrrrk* ..."

"Enunciate when you speak to me, shitspawn," Wheel snapped.

M'ythshaggoth allowed a gleaming red smile to form across its bulbous head.

"You think you have enough *ffflllrrrssslll* power to end our material body, Daedalus? *ssssllllllppp* It took the whole of the old one's power and the life of the bitch last time. And you're hardly *rrrrpppppfff* the wizard you were."

The thing shook with chortles as Wheel's lips curled from his teeth in silent whitehot Zen fury. The pop culture shaman reached into the pocket universe stitched into the right side of his aloha shirt (currently flowing with an oddly fetching pattern of cannabis leaves, golden apples, and red splotches against a blueblack starry field) and pulled forth a squat, gray glass bottle with something quiverous and luminescent within. He set it on the dock in front of Crackle and knelt to speak with the black-garbed man as M'ythshaggoth roared under a sudden assault of ultrasound, flame bolts, and battering waves.

"When it's time, uncork this."

"What is it?"

"It's a bottle made of glass blown by a banshee with a bolt of magic lightning inside it."

"Oh. That was gonna be my first guess. You want me to aim it at that thing?"

"Doesn't matter where you aim it. It's going to head for the sky faster than you can believe ... so I NEED you to wait until the right moment."

"How will I know ..."

"You'll know. I gotta go ... Pudd'nhead is shaking off the distractions."

Indeed, M'ythshaggoth was lashing out with counterspells, still rending the night with his black laughter, forcing Blazer and Eclipse to cast a heavy curving woven shield of water and air. Wheel strode forward, parting it like a curtain, and stood facing the heaving monstrosity that had been the bane of Discordia since time immemorial, the quagmire, the living conspiracy.

The thing stopped and watched him with no eyes, its corrupt mass barely moving, the ghastly shifting of arms and legs and heads visible just beneath its oily taint when it was still.

Wheel grinned.

"Hungry?"

The vast brimstone maw of M'ythshaggoth gaped wide as it prepared a host of entrapments, undoings, and sicknesses ...

... all of which proved unnecessary as Wheel kicked on his speedsoles and rushed headlong into the mass of the quagmire with only a faint *gloop!*.

And then he was gone.

There was an eternal silence.

"NO!" snarled Overdrive, kicking his weaponry on in a massive blitz of blind fury, his red eye wide and his human eye bright and glassy. A high keening came from the seas which boiled with black fury, and Blazer narrowed his eyes, hooking his fingers like claws and muttering ragged curses that curdled the shadows.

And M'ythshaggoth laughed, long and loud and soulcrushingly, and reared up a dozen meters, its hideous nonflesh swirling and alive. Overdrive's plasmcannon fire burst harmlessly through it, and its burbled words of undoing that drove Blazer to the ground with black blood running from his nostrils and sent cracks of darkness running through the sea.

Still rippling with sickening laughter, it began to speak the Chant of N'astirh, an eldritch spell designed to tear rents in reality that would make the Tunguska rift look like a papercut.

Crackle watched impassively, hands dangling loosely by his bent knees, the quivering and glowing jar at his fingertips.

M'ythshaggoth spoke.

"... esh ka anuung rama - Fnord ..."

There was a momentous pause, and the Irregulars all gazed in stark confusion at the massive quagmire as it paused in mid-loom.

"... kil nixt ta tfarq - FnordfnordFnordfnord - ka rama jokaash - fnordFnordfnordFnord ..."

The thing choked off its echoing magick and a rumble grew deep within it. Its unpleasant appendages flailed and flowed about its reeking corpulence for at least the second time that day. Its mouth gaped wide and flickered hellfire.

" ... WHAT IS - FNORD!"

A golden blade of light burst from the center of its mass, and a black-slicked head forced its way through into the cool night air just behind the hand clutching the lightsaber, psychedelic spectacles bursting with the rage of the seraphim.

Crackle knew.

He shifted imperceptibly and dug his long black thumbnail into the golden wax sealing the cork, peeling it free just as Wheel clawed free of the clutching undoing ichor and shouted a single echoing word.

The lightning bolt burst free of the mystic bottle and raced for the nightsky.

"SHAZAM!"

The lightning crashed down, and there were no words left.

...

A thirteen-foot smoking, glowing crater was blasted into the surface of Dock Street. At the center was the accursed onyx smear that was left of M'ythshaggoth, barely quivering. Towering above it stood a figure of majesty, wrapped in purple and gold, a lightning bolt emblazoned on the barrel chest, the hair flowing neatly back as the white cape caught the freshening night breeze.

Overdrive clanked up behind the superior fellow, taller even than the cyborg.

"Nice outfit, bro," he grinned.

Eclipse giggled a wavy giggle as she rolled in with the tide. "Oh, I dunno ... a bit showy, even for Wheel's tastes."

A gentle smile crossed the tall figure's face. "Yes, ma'am, it is something of a funny costume. And moreover, it's borrowed. The wizard knew he'd lost a lightning bolt somewhere ... and won't he be surprised when he finds out where!"

He laughed a light, genuine laugh like sunshine, hands on his shapely hips.

"I'd better go. Normally the wizard would be quite angry at this kind of roguery ... but I think it'll be all right. Your friend has a good heart, and a really lovely soul, despite his weird affection for - fnordfnordFNORDFNORD, ELEUTHERIA, DAM - You mean darn - IT!"

There was a crash of thunder, and where the towering caped man had stood Wheel now reeled drunkenly, clutching his head. "My God, the horror! The horror! The clean thoughts, pure heart, untouched loins, unwieldy biceps, and fucking wisdom of that horny bastard Solomon in your ears every damn second!"

Wheel slumped against Eclipse, heaving a slow and contented sigh as he took a long pull of Syrian Panther Sweat from a flask pulled from his shirt, which shimmied and crackled with mystic static.

"Got the schmuck good, though, didn't it? Admit it. None of you silly bastards saw that coming."

There was a general hubbub of relief and laughter from the four as a gentle warm breeze blew the miasma of battle away across the city.

Unnoticed by the Irregulars, a black slick slid putrescently away, slipping down the mouth of an alley. That arrogant fool had not finished the job, and he and his ridiculous friends would pay for it. M'ythshaggoth knew how to slip unseen through the world, gathering power until the time was right. It had been greedy this time, but this was just the beginning ...

A heavy black boot laden with silver buckles clomped down, catching and pinning the tiny scrap of quagmire, which screeched horrifically. Crackle dropped to his haunches and plucked the thing up in between two black-gloved fingers, holding the squirming bit of malevolence at arm's length. He smiled quietly behind his black sunglasses.

"You've shed too much innocent blood to slip away like that, my little friend."

The spectral assassin slipped two fingers into the flesh beneath his jaw, and pulled, exposing a blazing skull with pinpoints like fragments of diamond in the depths of its deathless eyes.

"VENGEANCE IS MINE!"

There was a piercing, spine-shivering squeal, and a wisp of smoke curled up from the dark alley.

And finally, save for the rift carved into the heart of it, the City of Saints was cleansed.