Wheel! Of! FISH!

You Might as Well Just Hang Around

2004-05-04 - 11:48 p.m.

Wheel landed with an astral thump and raised a puff of pixie dust. He got up, brushing stars off his non-existent shoulders, and eyeballed the Aether.

He was a twisting morphic mass, constantly shifting shapes as his mind wandered, a diaspora of forms united only by the persistent presence of his psychedelic spectacles, which had a strong enough thaumic signature to carry over with him, and enough Weyland iron in their frames to keep him from drifting apart into snowdrifts of madness. He was currently mostly himself, but as he began down the shining, twisting path between the towering ghosts of fallen swamp trees that shimmered all across the aetheric plane over New Orleans, he shifted into a bespectacled raven and then a shades-wearing raccoon. There was a haze, alive with gold and silver and green, and the impressions of buildings, creatures, and ideas flitting by on either side.

"Should've taken the toll road," muttered the spectacled squid.

Suddenly, the Virgin Mary ran by, wearing a white waistcoat under a tweed jacket and rubbing her belly, shouting, "I'm late! I'm late! Joseph, I'm late!"

Wheel, a handsome cocoa palm wearing psychedelic sunglasses across one frond, shivered with a tree's chuckle. For some reason, whenever he came here, the aether was rife with bad jokes ... his favorite sort. He proceeded on. He passed the Ghost Office, where the dead came to be shipped into various ivied castles, moth-eaten mansions, and spooky roller discos down on the prima materia. A sparkling green fairy flitted by, only to be snatched suddenly by the pale hand of a dwarfish Frenchman, who held the squeaking thing up to his lips and squeezed a few sparkling emerald droplets from it. He smacked his lips with pleasure and glanced down at Wheel, at the moment a rather fine silver Elizabethan tea service, with spectacles balanced neatly on the tip of his spout. "Care for a dram, old fellow?" the little artiste politely inquired.

The potato sometimes known as Wheel held up a branching red vine, pushing his spectacles back up his smooth skin and over his eyes. "Aucun merci, mon bon Monsieur Latrec. I never drink while disembodied."

Toulouse chuckled, dropping the drained little thing as it crumbled to motes. "Funny. I only ever drink to BECOME disembodied." He shrank and twisted, becoming a green fairy and flitting away, giggling.

Wheel rolled on.

He came to a golden signpost and heaved a sigh of relief, which was a trifle difficult as he was currently an aquarium filled with guppies, blue tang, and a squirrelfish wearing glasses. He was out of the psychic weirdness and approaching one of the better-defined Paths, all of which led to the Crossroads. He drifted fully onto Pythagoras Way, and bubbled a mnemonic spell that brought him fully into his own form, clad in a glittering polychromatic aura that was the burbling mind of the aloha shirt. He lacked the proper bones to actually crick in this astral form, but he moved his technically non-existent head in the proper way nonetheless.

"Better." He murmured. He looked up along the perfectly squared Way, and saw the shadows of the Crossroads far ahead. He could make out the twisted branches and strange fruit of the gallows tree, silhouetted against the leaden sky. "Looks as lovely as ever. Should've brought a picnic," he grinned to himself, taking a jaunty step forward.

There was a crackle and his head snapped backwards, his form going pixelated for a moment as a shock ran through him, sending ripples through his liquid body back in the dusty toyshop. The aloha shirt chirruped worriedly, its aura pulsating.

His spectacles blazed with a wash of pure octarine light, screaming like halogen beams through the haze of the Aether. Standing stark and glaring in the light were strands, criss-crossing Pythagoras Way all the way down to the Crossroads, coming from all angles and passing unto infinity. Wheel paused, one foot in the air, raising an eyebrow as he slowly drew his leg back. He dropped to one knee, rubbing his thumb across the bridge of his nose in such a way as to tone down the alarming blare of magical light pouring from his eyes. One strand thrummed just where he would've brought his foot down. Up close, he could see it was a six-sided hollow thing, thrumming and keening quietly and looking for all the world like black glass.

"I'm quite certain these weren't here before," he said to himself, "... because I have such an excellent memory for things that can kill me." He drew something that wasn't a breath into what certainly weren't lungs, and blew a curling fiery wisp of alito di vita, a trick he had learned from da Vinci during Wheel's tutelage under the Priory of Scion.

The phoenix fires of the breath of life were shredded into tatters and sputtered away as they drifted across the dark hollow strand. He could hear the faint hiss as the vibrant flame was split like paper drawn across a straight razor.

"And these DEFINITELY qualify. Ohhhh, this is not good. This just isn't good at all. I've seen some terribly bad things before, and this, while perhaps not worse than all of them, is at least as bad as the time Pantagruel was bitten by Lon Cheney at the party in San Simeon, that year when all the aconite was dead of whiterot."

He stared intently at the hexagonal pipette which had no right to be there. "And this time, I don't think a cannon full of silver shrimp forks is going to help."

Ironically, just then, a piercing howl throbbed through the Aether. Wheel snapped his attention past the shining black death that crisscrossed his path. That howl had come from the Crossroads, and was now trailing away, somewhere to the counterweird.

"Oh, carpfish. This situation is not improving in the least." His mind flickering like starfire, he pondered how to pass through this present darkness. The things were strung like wire in no man's land, and if he drifted across them as even the faintest mist, he'd rather suddenly find himself of two minds. But then he grinned.

"Sgniw sih spalf ylfrettub a, namdam yreve fo traeh eht ni," the Psychedelic Illuminate whispered, plunging his fist through the pulsating rainbow aura of the aloha shirt and into his chest. He pulled it free and carefully opened his mind and his hand. There on his palm flapped a tiny golden brown butterfly with lovely Mandelbrot wings. Wheel blew sibilantly across it, and it flittered down the path, dropping unexpectedly, zinging suddenly up and taking seemingly meaningless sideways jaunts. And despite the certainty of death on every side, the glowing winged beauty came to rest on a grey flower at the edge of the Crossroads.

"Spiffy." Wheel grinned, and gazed intently at the twisting, laughing indigo trail left by the chaos butterfly, shining bright in the octarine blaze of his spectacles. He pulled himself up by his ponytail and folded his limbs like an origami trick, rolling himself into a bolt of illumination and blazing along the path taken by the butterfly, which fluttered aside as Wheel struck the dirt of the Crossroads with a *shazam!* and burst back into himself. Wheel looked around with a grin, and then beckoned at the flitting avatar.

"You. C'mere." He held out his open palm, and the chaos butterfly landed on it, flexing its wings softly for a moment before Wheel folded it over neatly and swallowed it in a neat mouthful. "Mmmm. Bread-and-butterfly."

His chuckle died on his spectral lips as he gazed around the Crossroads. Choked with grey dust, the clouds overhead low and rumbling with flashes of violet lightning, the Crossroads were positively spiderwebbed with the gleaming black things.

Wheel found his voice. Falling easily into the patois preferred by N'awlins loa, he shouted, "Papa? Where yat, Papa? I be true bringin' good stuff for Legba-man. I be ... oh, bugger, where ARE you, you shifty old bastard?" Wheel's left hand twisted in a pattern that conjured the golden, plump living soul of a bunch of bananas, Legba's favorite. He walked across the wide heart of the Crossroads towards the gallows tree, ducking under the skeleton feet of the strange fruit. He heard the cicada chirring that he knew all too well as the laughter of les morts. As Cerebus had once told him with a dour smile, "It's the undead ... they have a great sense of humour."

He glanced up warily, into the grinning faces of the hanged men of the great grey gallows tree. He saw that the black glass had pierced many of them in a dozen places ... not that they minded. Now that he was this close, he could see the hollow wires ran through the tree itself, as well. But, careful as he was to step around the hexes, he was more interested in the dead. They were all, to a corpse, pointing in towards the great trunk of the tree, obscured by the swinging legs of the damned and the waxy grey leaves of the tree itself. Wheel muttered a curse and then shouted a Word, blasting dead men and branches aside in a rainbow maelstrom of Erisian flame. He noted with an unoccupied corner of his mind that the spell had not harmed the hollow strands. But his attention was drawn more immediately to what he saw by the bole of the gallows tree.

Slumped there, hands dangling at his side and pipe in the dirt at his feet, Papa Legba was pinned to the tree by a thrumming black hexwire which ran into his chest.

"Oh, shit," Wheel whispered. "Oh, fucking hell. Oh, flaming buggering shit on a Jesus-jumping shingle. What the HELL? What the blue HELL?" He started to back away, and stopped just before running into another of the damned dark glassine strands.

"What ... the ... DEVIL?" he cursed, unable to pull his eyes away from the venerable, kind-eyed loa nailed to the tree like some sort of populist rabbi ... unable, anyway, until he heard a nasty, nasal laugh from a branch overhead.

"Wha'indeed, lil' Roue?"

A long, lanky figure reached up and pulled the noose from its neck, swinging from it for a second before dropping neatly to the dirt between Wheel and Legba. A tall, skeletal man in a tattered black tuxedo, topped by a tall dusty top hat, the fellow cocked a hollow eye at Wheel and laughed shrilly.

"Wha'INDEED? Wha's this I fin'? Someone done a POWERFUL hurtin' t'my own blood, and then one'dose nasty cachés come sniffin' 'roun'. YOU done a hurtin', Roue? You done a hurtin' t'GHEDE's blood?"

The loa of laughter, revelry, and the grave took a long step forward, a cemetery grin on his leather face. Wheel almost took a step back, pausing before he could cut himself off at the knees. He raised his eyebrows at the laughing, furious Dead Man.

"Ahh ... hmm ... banana?"

Somehow, though, he just didn't think this was going to be a good time for bananas.