Wheel! Of! FISH!

The Mourning After

2005-01-25 - 1:55 p.m.

The road was torn into blurs and shadows as the Kirby Cycle roared on.

In a looming and portentous city far away, Crackle vaulted neatly through a shattered window and landed on the worn floor of the apartment where he'd been killed on St. Crispin's Day twenty years before. He sniffed the air, and tasted no particularly innocent blood. Asherton had been quiet since he his return after he'd been pulled away by Wheel's imp ... it was an industrial hive of scum and villainy, all living in fear of the Spirit of Vengeance. Which was convenient, because he had no time to mete out much in the way of dire revenge today. He was here to pack a change of coats and then he had to catch a ride to the City for the funeral.

Streetlights strobed by across the dirty South, truck drivers instinctively swerving clear of the barely-perceived rush of the Cycle.

Blazer walked across the snowfields of the woods north of Alberta, towards his medicine lodge - the Hart's Chamber. An aging sasquatch named Stu roared a greeting through the trees, stirring a pot of buckwheat groats and whiskey. Blazer bowed his head serenely back, and ducked into the hazy darkness of his lodge, running his hands over pots and pouches, refilling his belt and vest with components and herbs, checking his smokepots and his rough-hewn ice palantir. All was well, and Stu could keep ward on the lodge for a while. There was a funeral to attend, and the medicine man would not miss it.

With a sudden dazzling twist, the Cycle roared around the narrow drive-thru of a chicken shack. A hand projected through the dark purple canopy of the bike and collected a steaming sack held tremulously out the window, and the bike was gone with a twinkle, leaving seven dubloons spinning on the counter.

A handful of dark forms looked up in alarm as the door of the Half-There Tavern burst open, but their fear subsided to grins, hisses, chuckles, and welcoming snarls as the huge cyborg proprietor of the establishment walked in. Overdrive grinned a metallic grin at Tansey, the fire-eyed half-succubi who co-owned the bar and ran it in his absence. He leaned down to collect a kiss on his gleaming cheek as he ran his eyes over the bar. A good crowd, and there was still plenty of the exotically expensive liquors and ludicrously cheap beers favored by shadowfolk. The bar would be okay for a while ... and Overdrive figured that since he'd restocked on his return from New Orleans, he could spare a crate or two of hooch for the wake.

Receiving a coded signal from a nearly invisible satellite, the Kirby Cycle pulled a hard turn a half-mile short of an Interest roadblock and blazed a trail across a nightdark field, weaving between alarmed cows, tore through a coastal suburb and hit the Gulf at subsonic speeds, cutting a huge rift of water as it tore across the starlit sea like a Jesus outta hell.

Weaver Black sighed chitteringly to himself as he reclined in his beaten, creaking chair, propping his feet up on the battered desk of his office aboard the Gojira. He flipped through the stuffed manila folder Zulma had put together for him on the November affair. A morass of confusion, lies, doublespeak, death, murder, extradimensional horror, and cosmic unlikeliness. In short, a really superb case.

The bike ripped across the seas, leaving a daggerwake of rolling waves and confused sea animals. Far below, Eclipse picked up a disturbance on the scanners, and smiled to herself as she identified the signature of Wheel's cycle. She continued her course for her undersea dome, to pick up the professor and the lettersmith for the funeral. No one will want to miss this., she thought broadly.

Because you all loved him so much?, returned a white dolphin swimming to port.

Kind of ..., she thought back, ... but really, we just want to see what's going to happen. Between the Will and the missing body, it's BOUND to be good.

Achlis leaned against the carved oaken railing of the Layla, soaring high above rational space, resounding with hammering as Professor Gryphon's crew of trolls and Mussulmen worked to keep the fantastical airship afloat. The Layla was pristine, all the cosmetic damage she had suffered during the Battle of New Orleans, which Hephaestus insistently referred to as the "SECOND Battle of New Orleans", having been repaired long since. The big Viking mage sipped from a tankard of sputtering Teach grog and grumbled as rubbed the bridge of his nose.

"Wipin' out that nest of basilisks is enough to gimme a damned migraine for a month," he muttered.

"Pain is fleeting," murmured Archimedes Lochs.

"Hollow Eastern claptrap!" roared Professor Gryphon from the flying bridge, "Pain is the truest kind of permanence! We ALWAYS remember pain!"

"Just because you will never forget it does not mean you have to suffer from it," replied the reporter/mystic/martial artist.

"Maybe hitting YOU would make me feel better," Achlis grinned.

"Keep it down, you lubbers," bellowed Gryphon, "Don't ye have any respect for the dead?"

"Of course ... but for our breed, Professor, death can be as fleeting as pain."

The airship sailed on as the sun rose. Far below it, the Kirby Cycle buzzed across the sea and then up onto the sand, spraying a huge roostertail of white beach all over an early-rising beachcomber whose metal detector beeped insanely and then exploded as the Cycle went by. Under the bike's canopy, a single finger prodded a switch that kicked on the speakers, and Isaac Hayes blared.

Weaver Black flipped through crisp monochrome surveillance photos he had acquired through some highly questionable circumstances. The rift sealing with a burst of spiritual miasma. The shattered hulk of the Actionmech. Curare and his cadre walking off into the night, a glint from Curare's eyes as he glanced over his shoulder back at the camera. A series of photos showed Agents loading the dead Agents onto a black helicopter while a government Stormwatch team worked frantically to turn the titanically unearthly Battle of New Orleans into a freak hurricane with heavy water and wind damage ... this photo clipped to a headline cut from the next day's Times-Picayune: "Hurricane Lethe Kills Dozens". The Estrellas escaping quietly at the height of the chaos, presumably back to their Estrodome. A brief conference of the New College of the Invisible in the rubble of Dutrey's, and then everyone breaking up, to tend to their own gardens before the funeral. Q'yph fractallizing away with the Irregulars as Wheel climbed onto his Kirby Cycle. And another photo, small and dark. A shot of a body in the smoking wreckage of the Action Mech.

The cycle burst through a chainlink fence and plunged down a forty-foot incline, swerving neatly onto the highway and blasting past a large sign ("Welcome to the City that Works!") fast enough to cause the automatic radar detector behind the sign to spark up and burst into flames.

The photo was crystalline and hazy at the edges from the unholy warping effect of the R'lyeh harmonics, but the body was still clearly visible. Weaver stared at it for a long, long time in the dim dusty sunlight of his riverboat office, and pondered exactly whether it meant anything that while this was definitely a body, it was just as definitely not the one Actionhero usually used.

The sun climbed grudgingly over the towering temples to commerce and crime as the Kirby Cycle roared into town like a peyote-soaked Technicolor version of Rebel Without a Cause.

Another day in the City got rolling.