Wheel! Of! FISH!

The Beginning of the End

2005-01-02 - 11:00 p.m.

"That ... is one big fucking robot."

Wheel craned his neck back and watched the towering, majestic form take a broad earth-shuddering step down the wide cobbled street and unleash a hissing torrent of missiles that struck with purely Japanese accuracy into the seething morass of unflesh that streamed from the central rift.

The Action Mech (even without checking the undoubtedly titillating chatter on the Action Frequency, Wheel could just tell the damn thing was called the Action Mech. Only Bruce Wayne had more of a hard-on for naming things after his alter-ego.) strode majestically towards the primary disruption in asphalt-shattering lockstep, leaving the Invisibles behind to deal with the spiralling whirlwind of chaos that was levelling the Crescent City.

Wheel sighed and pulled out his golden pocketwatch. The golden hand with its white Zap Comix glove pointed to a small stylized lightning bolt just short of "The End".

"WEAVER!"

A wisp of gray slinked out of the rain-slashed lightning-lit flaming bloody madness; Black was suddenly standing at Wheel's right shoulder, checking the instep on his beaten loafers.

"What?" muttered the detective, brushing what proved to be a tiny fragment of dragonflesh off his shoe.

"Q'yph is still out of town, so I need you to run some errands for me."

"Why can't you ever do anything yourself, you lazy ass?"

"Because I'm central to the narrative. Now shut up. Cod only knows how long Actionhero's actually going to last in there, big fucking robot or not, so we need to get clean-up going on the ground ... sometime around NOW, I think."

"That missile barrage did a pretty good job of getting rid of the rabble. And most of the tourist district. Which is good, because that was some tacky shit."

"Yeah, but I'm scanning more side rifts ... and things look a bit ... unpleasant. Looks like we've got opportunists using the loosening from the thrice-damned trinket of Oblivion's to slide in on their own."

Black grunted. "Fan-fucking-tastic. I guess I'll go get the yahoos together. I think I saw Overdrive punching a ninja over near a margarita cart ... "

Wheel held up and waggled a negatory finger. Weaver raised his thin black eyebrows. "I'm ... NOT going to go round up the yahoos?"

"You, my lucky bosom chum, are going to track down the shadowy Doctor Curare and convince him to gather up the more capable mystics ... the big scary one, certainly ... probably the smug Asiatic ... and have them get working on sealing the rifts."

The long-limbed investigator of the arcane snorted. "That big damn hole isn't going anywhere unless you've gotten that queer little toy to start working."

Wheel sighed and prodded at the Hexate medallion, hanging in mid-air next to him. "I think Oblivion had it attuned. So ... " Wheel clapped his hands and rubbed them together with a cheery grin, "I guess you'll just have to persuade him!" The Psychedelic Illuminate plucked the dangling bauble from the air and handed it to Weaver, who grimaced with his traditional good humor and took the gaudy glistening black thing in his gray pocket handkerchief.

"What fun." Without another word, the man was gone like a whisp of cobweb in the wind to find the two bastard Doctors.

"Gotta learn how he does that. NOW!" Wheel glanced around. Madness. Bloodshed. Animal screams. Shattering glass. Stonework running like butter. Zombies gnawing on the skulls of the Yakuza. Vampires being tommygunned. A horde of chittering reptiloid footsoldiers overrunning an enclave of Agents, the plans of the Interest lying in ruins. Ghost pirates crossing swords with Yellow Mountain ninji. Professor Hephaestus Gryphon blowing a three-note call on his oaken fife that summoned the magnificent hulk of the Layla over the rooftops of New Orleans like a grotesquely well-armed Flying Dutchman. A burst of plasma fire as his own brother poured flaming death into the maw of a winged serpent. The snap of whips from the Anaconda Guard. The air crystallizing, humming, shattering and falling into shards in the street from the force of the titanic energies being unleashed just inside the gaping hole in reality where a gigantic animech waged war with a Babylonian god.

"My GOD ... you are SUCH a minx."

The slashing black rain stopped falling on his shirt, which willomied with pleasure, and a circle five meters wide of clear, warm air extended around him. A tinkle of golden mandolins at his left shoulder, and small sharp teeth nipped his ear just above the dangling golden apple earring chime. Slender arms twined around his neck, the wrists decked in a dazzling array of Madonna bangles, turquoise and silver charms, and Day-Glo snap bracelets. A simply divine pair of breasts pushed against his back as Eris whispered in his ear with a tickle like butterscotch and starlight. "I know! Isn't it simply MAR-velous?"

Without turning, Wheel half-grinned and took her slender, glimmering hands, and turned her palms up, kissing each in turn across the Mount of Venus. She purred and the air sparkled pink. "I've rarely seen the like, O Divine Kitten. And rest assured that I've got the whole thing recorded from at least 23 angles. I'll have Knock crank out a nice DVD version for the next time you come over for hot dogs and apple juice ... but I fear, O My Goddess Discordia, that the time has come to clean up the toybox."

He felt the goddess sigh, pressed against him, and found himself thinking unclean thoughts of the Fivefold Gate, but regathered his thoughts with WheelCo™ brand hyperspeed as Eris spoke. "I suppose so. Well, be quick about it. All this chaos has me positively FAMISHED." The Divinity of Discord pulled Wheel's head back and bit lightly at the base of his neck, and his lightsaber, which he had unconsciously flipped into his hand, snapped and hummed and extended into life as the madcap goddess chuckled and faded away.

Wheel blinked behind his spectacles as the hurricane fell on him with a fury once more.

"My, there's nothing like a good theophany. NOW, then!"

There was a titanic roar and a flash of light that split the hurricane-darkened skies as the Action Mech waged war with the seething Dragon Goddess within the rift. Odd. They seemed to be moving quite slowly, but that was undoubtedly just the result of the time distortion effect (lovingly referred to as "L'Engle's Window" by observers of extradimensional rifts) common with these occurrences. Wheel tapped the rim of his round psychedelispecs and read the display on the left lens. It looked like there was a chance to constrain the chaos within 2.3 square miles of the French Quarter if they acted fast. And assuming one of the Elder Forms didn't burst through that Tunguskan rift and snork the world up like borscht through a soda straw.

So, then. Just like grammar school; concentrate on felling one unholy monstrosity at a time. His lightsaber sparkled as the dark rains ... which seemed to be slacking ... sizzled around it. He snapped his fingers thrice and his ornate cane spiralled out of the nothingness where he carried all his favorite toys and into his left hand.

Wheel grinned as red lightning forked the sky behind him, and his spectacles shifted to a blaze of octarine light. He slowly and deliberately clicked his heels against the pavement with an ice-sharp chirrup of neotech, and there was low building thrum as the Allen reserve cells of his speedsoles kicked in. The Avant Guardsman was Pollocked with an eerie glow from the weird magic and arcane science carried all about him.

"Let's do our best to impress the pretty Lady, shall we?" he chuckled.

His cane pulsed with vitae, the crystal eye glimmering. "Indeed," came its sonorous reply.

.....

Meanwhile ...

Blazer murmured Algonquin incantations and French curses as he floated cross-legged over the ruins of the square, wrapped in a bubble of Yellowknife sunlight that dispelled the last lashes of the dying storm. His keen osprey gaze picked out minute movements in the rubble.

There.

A bolt of red flame fwakoomed down, incinerating a pair of gibbering Sideways Ebon Sickness reptilians.

And there.

Ivy burst from the ground beneath a Loathley Wyrm, shrouding and strangling it.

Blazer was overseeing the final clean-up of the center of the turmoil. Serene in his quiet sun, watching the twisting madness of the central rift shimmer and shake as the titanic battle was waged by Actionhero across the dimensional barrier, the Canadian mystic had time to reflect. Within the space of a few moments, the madness in the Crescent City had died down to a somewhat manageable level ... literally, as if chaos had simply packed up and left. Which, if Wheel's thoughtmail was accurate, she had.

The peripheral players had finally - and simultaneously - begun clearing away, the pinstripes, thugs, street scum and garden variety monstrous nightmares slinking back into the Big Easy to soothe their pains over overpriced croissants, cheap rum and the blood of the innocent; the mercenaries and ninjas realizing the battle had finally gone completely beyond the scope of their contracts and running for the shadows, leaving blood feuds for another day; the pure-D supernatural craziness fading even as the screaming hurricane fell into rags and tatters, starlight gazing through the rents.

Wheel had gone flurrying around the square faster than even Crackle's inhuman eyes could follow, a mad harlequin whirlwind of sound and fury, zazzing down and obliterating one after another of the unholy aberrations that had crossed through the rift in radiant bursts of hue and cry.

The Irregulars had gotten organized quickly, now that discord was no longer giggling in their midst, despite the fact that Weaver had faded off somewhere. Overdrive had served as their base of operations and Crackle and Blazer and Wheel used the towering cyborg weaponmaster as their communications center, point of reference, and heavy artillery. The operation was going swimmingly, in the sickly unlight of the portal where the towering gleaming Action Mech, seen wavering and crystalline through the rift, was moving at micrometric speeds to engage a massive lizardthing, all spikes and atomic fire and hindbrain.

The remaining Invisibles had quickly gotten into the flow. Dr. Curare was somewhere unseen, and Oblivion was off the radar as well. Holte and Achlis were doing something arcane and well-shielded at the centric nadir of the rift, and Professor Gryphon was doing a stalwart job of spearheading an Anaconda Guard assault on a Weeping Varan four stories tall.

The Jaguaritas, for lack of their shadowy leader, had roughly formed up with Kiyagi and the Guardsmen and worked at the direction of the booming Professor to destroy all the Varan's seedlings.

Seeing all this, Blazer swooped back down and hovered at the shoulder of his enormous comrade-in-arms. Crackle crouched at Overdrive's feet, his leather coat stiff with the black ichor of the damned things, grating two black blades against each other. Wheel leaned against Overdrive's broad back, muttering Zenarchist koans to recharge his lightsaber with satori. Blazer began casting a mild rejuvenatory, but the Canadian shaman's eyes widened for a moment as a beholder came barreling at them from the night sky, swivelling its disintegration eyes towards the gang of doughty madmen.

Wheel reached up without turning and lightly rapped his knuckles against the back of 'drive's skull plate. "On it," boomed the cyborg, hauling up his left arm cannon and sending out a wide-pulse spiral of ultrasound, popping the orb's eyes and sending it squalling to crash into the ground.

"Nice job, tank," grated the Spirit of Vengeance in his graverobber voice.

"Yeah, I'm a goddamn Sherman, all right." grinned the big cyborg, his TrapJaw 4.0 gleaming in the cold starlight as he laid a UV designator on a Creeping Slick trying to ghost away over a pile of Dutrey's rubble.

"No, but ..." Wheel flashed by, and a gurgling inhuman scream was heard a dozen meters away.

"... seriously, dude ..." came the doppling conversationalist as he went by again in a blur of gold and purple, and a flash of searing light came from around a corner.

"... it's standard dungeon cleanout formation ..." as an uncertain shape flurried by and ramped off a fallen streetlight, blowing a fist-wide hole in the screeching head of an enormous Sengir.

"... and you're the paladin." Wheel skidded to a stop with his hand cannon levelled at Carcinomous Slither. The hammer fell with a dry click, and Wheel raised an eyebrow as he peered at the enormous gun. The hideous chittering thing began hissing venomwords. Wheel's wards flared around him, his shirt fluttering, but the mojo was cut short with a flaring *fwakoom*, and the thing falling headless and smoking to the street. Wheel's cane, crystal eye winking, floated down into his left hand.

"Thou didst not load thine fusilier's toy with shot," pulsed the cane.

Wheel twisted his lips wryly. "Well-observed, Blinky."

"That ist NOT mine naming."

"Quiet, uppity walking stick. That's not even proper archaespeak. You're just TRYING to sound ancient."

The cane pulsed with sulken thrums, and Wheel dismissed it back to his pocket universe with a trifold snap and a chuckle. The Irregulars paused for a moment's respite, breathing the wet ozoned night air of what was left of New Orleans. Overdrive gazed at the huge pulsating rift, where the tiny human forms of some agents of the Invisible were black against the sickly glow, the foggy forms of the Action Mech and the great beast moving at a fractal crawl in apocalyptic combat on the other side. The hardened mercenary's gleaming red eye dilated with a soft whir.

"Damn."

Crackle lit a Black Death cigarette and stared out through inky black sunglasses. "This is the fuckin' big time. Next-level shit."

Blazer nodded slowly, drinking spring water from a horn. "This is even stranger than the time that medium in Portland summoned a Nyarl."

Wheel chuckled. "Yeah. Too bad Hellboy isn't here. He'd love this." The Psychedelic Illuminate rolled his shoulders, his shades glowing with bright chaotic static. "But we've still got a job of work to do. Assuming 'Hero does his thing without killing us all AND assuming we can thaum that rift shut, there's still clean-up. Spread out, chummlikken, and let's finish running these ugly little bastards down."

Not long before ...

The rift and the chaotic magic unleashed all around put an incredible strain on the underlying weave of reality. Soft spots rotted through, non-Euclidean horrors clawed their way onto the Prima Materia, whispering syllables of undoing and mourn. And each, in turn, fell to the cracking lashes, to flashing blades, to unearthly energies and harmonic magicks. And as each fell, and as the cognoscenti of the College of the Invisible worked their arts to begin to seal the rift, and as the Hero's steel steed waged titanic war with the great powers of the Prison of R'lyeh ... it became harder and harder for the lesser beings to push through. Some slinked away before they could be hunted down. Most were obliterated.

As the warp and woof of reality were slowly drawn back together around the ragged edges of the great Hexate rift, the smaller paths were slowly squeezing shut.

In an unremarkable alley, the air crackled and snapped at the mouth of a drainpipe, and a small puddle of glistening black goo oozed through in the few moments before the portal cracked shut. Something approaching a head slucked up from the pool, opening a gaping slash of a mouth with runnels of black goo flubbering down as it laughed a bubbling aneurysm of a laugh and oozed down the wet bricks.

... Brick Calley had been a boxer who had fallen on hard times and ended up running with the New Orleans mob. His boss, a greasy bastard by the name of Carlos Giambini, had decided to play tough when the Yakuza moved into town and an outfit called Aztechnology started taking control of the shadows. He called on some old CIA connections that got his mob hooked up with some twisted old scientists with German accents. After an uncomfortably long period involving more needles and electrodes and burning chemical smells than Brick had ever hoped to come across, he had found himself transmuted. He was harder now. Stronger. Most stuff just rattled harmlessly off his skin, and he grated and thundered as he walked, a creature of living stone in a natty three-piece. Life hadn't been bad, even when things went fookin' nutso in the Big Easy. He cracked his enormous knuckles and stared out across the French Quarter from the mouth of a narrow alley. Brick had fallen back when a buncha psychos in funnybook outfits and gooks in pajamas took out a big chunk of the Giambini mob, but Brick wasn't done yet. Not by a long shot.

And then the black thing oozed around his feet and slipped upwards to throttle his soul.

... Tatsu had been a master of the Yellow Mountain clan ever since he had been exiled from the Foot all those years ago. Wide-shouldered and powerful, aged and hardened, he led the ninji into battle and was their guiding voice, receiving his orders on elegant scrolls that appeared in puffs of dragonbreath from the Emperor of the Mountain and passing them on to the clan. He had led them against the gaudy agents of l'Universite time and time again, and had never grown weary or frustrated of his countless defeats. Even now, watching from a rooftop to make certain that all his clan had escaped the madness below, he was centered. Pure of focus, iron of will, Tatsu was a warrior of rare fortitude. He was already planning ways in which the clan could avenge this latest dishonor.

And then a shambling man of pure ichorous ebon lunged from the shadows and swallowed him whole.

... Agent Smith could not raise the Interest on his wetware phone. The damnable hedgemagics of this bumbling treehouse club of shadowfolk and Invisibles had disrupted everything. He was the last agent left, the rest destroyed by those anarchists and various horrors that had come out of the rift that had been torn open, and he was cut off. Nothing was working. But Smith was not just an agent ... he was an Agent, created to serve the Interest of these United States in the tradition of a breed that had been around since Lincoln. He had possession of technology from Area 51 and the Black Vault, he had killed some of the most dangerous men and women and unnameable creatures in the world, and he was not going to let this setback stop his mission. He reached down and adjusted his tie, straightened his sunglasses, and checked the sine regulator on his trans-fusitive spark cannon.

And then three lumbering meters of dripping coalblack came leaping down on him from a fire escape with a vacuum snarl.

And then ...

Wheel crept down Decatur Street. The majority of the battle had stayed clear of here, and his hunt had been a quiet one. A few stirges and a nanolith cloud, both easily dealt with, with only minor aural bruising and a slight nosebleed. But he was worn down. Killing these extradimensional malevolences looked easy from the movie seats, but it was draining. Each encounter tore at the gossamer edges of the soul and frayed on the mind, and despite the mad Invisible's seemingly limitless energies, he was feeling the strain. He hadn't slept in 42 hours, since the Finn, the greaser and the robot had shown up at the House to kill him.

The Psychedelic Illuminate reclined against the base of the statue of Joan of Arc, a Discordian saint whose company Wheel missed fiercely, and lit one of his custom-rolled gold-tipped cigarettes of Wonderland grass, Yeti silverleaf, and kingsfoil. His thoughts were, as ever, unreadable behind his flickering prismastic shades, but there was no mistaking the way he rubbed a hand down his jaw, sighed a curling pink cloud of smoke, and leaned back against the flank of Joan's horse with a bronzed clank.

He breathed deeply and let his thoughts drift. So much chaos, so much death, so many explosions ... and he'd just come for the hell of it.

"Ain't that always the ... hm."

With no change in expression, he pulled open the left side of his shirt, his lightsaber flipping instantly into his hand. It snapped on and he clicked the heels of his Converse to kick on his Garrick Impulse soles. They came on with an ascendant hum, and he whirled ... to find his legs tangled in a skein of black ichor. He caught a hoof of Joan's horse as he lunged for balance, his lightsaber bouncing free of his grip and fading out.

"Shazbot."

There was a savage jerk, and Wheel fell hard to his back, the tendril creeping across his legs. He reached for his shirt pocket, and another wrapped his wrist. Another swarmed for his head, but he snapped a mnemonic syllabic curse, and the air frazzzzzed. The slick, dripping tendrils smoked and popped and pulled back, but did not disentangle. Wheel's spectacles flashed as a towering monstrosity blotted out the moon-dappled clouds and cold blue stars above him. A morass of slick, fluid tendrils, in a huge slumped humanoid shape, with disquietingly human shapes flowing just under its endless black oilslick skin. A slash of a mouth gaped, and the burning red within cast a most unpleasant light on the prone Wheel.

The thing had no face, only a shiftingly hideous mass and an unpleasant grin. Nonetheless, Wheel knew the touch of the thing, and did not even need the gleaming golden apple chime earring's warning tinkle. His hot glare lit the thing with a savage golden light from his spectacles.

"M'ythshaggoth."

There was a rich greasy sucking sound disquietingly like a chuckle. The thing spoke as if with many ... somewhat strangled voices.

"We are ... *sluccck* ... HONORED that you remember our name, Daedalus."

Wheel struggled to twist free of the hideous tentacles, the aloha shirt flaring and striking ... but the damned thing had the strength of dozens, and seemed to be spawning countermagicks from its squamous unflesh.

"There's not a single Discordian who DOESN'T know your name, you slick of rancid pigshit. You killed Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst and drove Malaclypse to the city of iron. You stole the moon from Mordecai. You're a whisper in the ear of Grayface. You're a fucking quagmire ... and I thought I was rid of your grotesque reek."

"And we *slrrrrrp* have longed for the taste of you since you and the old one and the woman sealed us away."

The thing began oozing forward, still grinning a wide brimstone grin, the power it had absorbed from the swallowed souls slowly overbearing Wheel's wards. Wheel cursed a string of bright logos that seared the air, but the quagmire kept oozing forward.

"Your power will enable us to *koooorrrrlllp* tear that rift open for *sllllk* good, Fizzlewick. And then *KREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEK!*"

The thing reared back, tendrils pulsing and flailing, its hideous unflesh running like a Black Mass candle. A huge hole was burnt into the center of its mass.

"Get your god-damned slimy paws offa my brother, you ugly sonuvabitch." Across the street, Overdrive kept his smoking plasma cannon levelled at the thing and unleashed another burst of angel-white light, searing into M'ythshaggoth with a greasy-egg sizzle.

The thing continued pulling back, losing mass as it filled in the gap and allowing Wheel to roll free with a gasp. Crackle was by his side in a flash, helping the mad Invisible to his feet, only to be snatched by the collar of his leather coat and blitzed clear as M'ythshaggoth seized a mailbox in its ebon tendrils and brought it down with a crash where they'd been standing a half second before.

Wheel skidded to a stop behind Overdrive as the big cyborg continued pouring blinding white light into the mass of the alien quagmire. Blazer worked a ward restorative while Wheel guzzled a bottle of Electromagnetic Brain and Nerve Tonic from his shirt, panting heavily as he leaned against Overdrive's broad back.

"I owe you one, bro."

"Like hell you do," grunted the big guy, leaning to the side as a piece of plate glass the size of a turkey came whipping by at head height.

"What the crap is that thing, Wheel?" asked Crackle, clinging to the facade of a building and scuttling clear of the hail of debris hurled by the flailing, smoking monstrosity.

"A quagmire. A big fucking quagmire. And I've gotta say I'm pretty damn impressed that you're holding the bastard off, 'drive."

"Don't thank me. Thank the good people at ... at whoever mailed me these capsules. They fit the matter chamber of my fusion cannon, and came with a with a note indicatin' they'd save our asses. Looks like they were right."

He tossed a small golden glass ampule over his shoulder, which Blazer caught and peered at closely.

"What's in it?" asked Blazer, shaking it with a rattle like a can of spray paint.

Wheel straightened up, and lit another gold-tipped cigarette, exhaling a quick ring of smoke. "Teeth."

"Teeth?"

"Saint Jude's teeth. Sacred relics, baby. Looks like someone gave our paladin a holy avenger."

Overdrive chuckled, but it trailed off as the blaze of pure white light sputtered to a halt. "Yeah, but my holy avenger's runnin' outta ammo. Gimme that."

"Not yet." Wheel shook his head. "It won't be enough to finish him yet. We need to exhaust his resources, which is gonna be a LITTLE tricky since it looks like he swallowed enough poor bastards to keep him going like the Energizer Bunny."

"So whatta we do?" Crow croaked, flipping down off the wall as a Volkswagen bus was hurled through the plate glass window he'd been clinging to. The Irregulars watched M'ythshaggoth, no longer barraged by the distinctly unlikely blessed plasma cannon, began seething and heaving and pulsating and doing other disgusting things, most notably growing.

"We get him to follow us." Wheel reached out his left hand, and his lightsaber came zinging across Decatur Street into his hand. He kicked it on with its traditional ominous hummmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

They began backing down Decatur Street, firing spells and projectiles into the growing black tentacular mass of unholy unpleasantness which began flolloming after them with the most unpleasant squelching sound you can imagine.

"And not to nitpick, but where exactly are we GOING?" asked Blazer through gritted teeth as he conjured a Logan Wall of flurrying razors which M'ythshaggoth tore through with a rather hideous splattering effect.

"The docks, my good man. The docks." Wheel fired a few rounds from his hand cannon, and kicked on the accelerators in his shoes, and the Surreal Cavalry charged after him with hell on their heels.