Wheel! Of! FISH!

Entropy Rides Again

2004-03-23 - 10:18 p.m.

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With a chuckle, Wheel pulled off the wide purple Thompson eye-phones and the sleek black Sogo data gloves, dropping them into the lower drawer of his desk and kicking it closed. His ancient Thornleylogic-16 computer was shut down with a wave of his hand over the theremin keypad. As Wheel stretched out the kinks in his back, a small pointy-eared grey-furred beast hopped onto his headrest. A voice purred near his ear.

"Rrrrecidivist. Why do you still use those things instead of getting some purrrrfectly afforrrdable implants?"

"Because on cold mornings the silicon chills to a lower temperature than your headmeat, and gives you world-class brainfreeze. What are you doing in my study, beastling?"

"They're here."

There was a sniggering laugh and a tiny *pop!* of displaced air as the felinoid imp vanished somewhere back into the House. Wheel, with a twist to his lips, stood up from his snark-hide recliner, and swung a black leather satchel from the desktop over his shoulder. From his pocket he pulled a handful of bric-a-brac, from which he nimbly plucked a small white capsule printed with a tiny drawing of a door. He tossed it against the rosewood-paneled wall of his study, where it burst with a tiny tinkle. There was a chittering and hissing as nanites boiled out of the pill and into the wall, fulfilling their life's purpose as they built a very serviceable door. He pulled it open, and stepped into the hallway outside. As the door shut, the kinetic energy kicked the recumbent nanites back into life long enough for them to completely remove all traces of the door, restoring the wall to its pristine smoothness.

Things had been going strange and sideways lately. The Actionhero himself, Johnny Chinaman, had been lost to the College of the Invisible again, wandering America in search of Ghede only knew what and espousing a religion so batty that it made Wheel's own hodgepodge of overwrought mysticism look like a stolid Protestant faith. There'd even been whispers of an elaborate plot to enthrall the Man Who Walks Alone and Quentin Holte, Swashbuckling Journalist ... with boots. Boots. Terrific. Wheel would have to look into that, assuming he wasn't horribly killed tonight.

The Arcanologist was off jandering across the abyssal planes, looking for answers again after teir library had come under mystic assault, and the informers murmured that Doctor Oblivion had gone a bit daffy and vanished into the shadows after the latest attempt to kill him. Someone had caught Pairodox in one of his own dual conundrums, and worse still, Curare was back, walking the cobbles of the voudoun-soaked French Quarter and leaving madness in his wake, and his Junglefreak padded alongside him, draped in the pebbled psychedelic skins of agaric crocodiles and grinning with bits of smoldering salamander in his filed teeth.

Someone was playing a Greatest Hits list, counting down the members of the Invisible College one after another, like Stones tunes in a fifty-minute music hour on your classic rock station. And on the off chance that the smoky imp Q'yph had not been lying for his own amusement, it looked like the hits were gonna keep on coming. The aloha-clad pop culture shaman tilted back the head of a bronze bust of Alan Moore and flicked a concealed switch which pulled back a glass display case filled with explicitly sexual Aleut lithographs to reveal a brass pole behind the wall, which he slid down into darkness.

Outside the House, three men lurked in shadow.

In a blur-suit and monocular GrayFox-2.0 combat mask, Operative 112263: bred in the body-banks beneath Las Vegas from the hundred greatest warriors, hunters and cold-blooded murderers in the Pentagon gene banks, his frontal lobes assaulted since his test-tube birth with images of war, pain, death, loyalty, and apple pie. One of 600,000 perfect soldier clonelings laying in wait for the day when America needed to be swept clean of impurities, released on this mission as a test run. His motivations were simple, his mind free from doubt. His breathing and heartbeat were lovingly regulated by graceful machines.

Hung with a trenchcoat an overlarge moondappled trenchcoat and a topped with a slouch fedora, lighting a cigar with a dully sparking fuse, Juan "Nitro" Luciano: a Mafiosi of Cuban and Italian ancestry with a rare talent for demolitions and chemistry who had been recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency for some particularly delicate wetwork at an embassy in Africa. Johnny had been passed around from agency to agency to cabal to shadow government, his unwavering obedience and cold-blooded mastery of high explosives both treasured resources. Johnny had seen things his goombahs from Brooklyn had never even dreamed of ... things that man dare not speak of ... but he was never fazed, as cool as the smooth metal of the Fichetti slivergun in his hand.

Wrapped in a grungy black leather jacket, the spikes and studs blackened with ash, a tall Finn chanted quietly as he waved the neck of a matte grey Gibson guitar hung with pentagrams and adorned with Black Sabbath stickers ... Saatano Paskiainen: Satanist of the Fifth Circle, and a headbanger par excellence who had innovated no less than four popular death metal hand gestures, Saatano was a bard of dark music, a hellish mage rocking the world of the weak do-gooders with the black harmonies of the Prince of Lies, weaving hard-driving notes of terror into the fabric of the Xian world, bringing the spineless men of Christendom to their knees before the enormous electric phallus of Beelzebub. He was also a Pisces.

"Jumalauta", spit the sleek blonde Finn. "How much longer do we have to wait for this buffoon? And why did the Interest send THREE of us?"

"Not a bad question, ese. From what I read in the files, this fuckin' joker is just some peesashit nutcase with a bunch of comic book ideas and a bag of cheap tricks. Feh. Maricon."

"DESIGNATE Wheel = FUNNY 1."

There were chuckles in the darkness, as the three killers awaited the inevitable moment of opportunity.

A few meters behind them, perched atop the sleek black van they had arrived in, Wheel grinned as he quietly pulled a small square of blotter paper printed with the image of a smiling man wearing goggles from its glassine envelope, and placed it carefully onto his tongue. With the sound of squeaking balloon animals twisting, the Jack Winks acid took effect, and Wheel's flesh and bones ran like Silly Putty. Wheel's arms stretched from the car, seven meters across the yard of the House to coil around Johnny Nitro's head. The Mafiosi flailed his arms for a moment, shrieking, but was cut off as Wheel's fantastically stretched limbs spun swiftly and viciously, spiralling free with a snap and whipping the thug's head around to face backwards, his glazed eyes wide in shock. The other two assassins backed up as Wheel took an elongated step across the crackle-dry bluegrass and witchazel and kingsfoil and triffidweed that covered the lawn. There was a faint dusty creak as the Invisible's body snapped back to its usual proportions, leaving only a faint sheen of plastic on his skin. He flashed a sparkling smile at the two surviving intruders.

A crackling bolt of black lightning split the air. "SUKSI VITUUN!" shrieked the irate Finn, his guitar neck spewing red smoke. The bolt blasted twisted a lamp-post across the street into a smoking helix.

A smooth voice spoke from behind Saatano's leather-clad shoulder. "Watch your mouth AND your magicks, yahoo. This is a nice neighborhood. I don't want you singeing the ears of those nice Baudelaire children next door."

"HOW .. ?!?!" roared Paskiainen, but he was cut off with a thunderous boot to the ass that sprawled him on the lawn, where he was seized by a furious tangletree sapling. Wheel flashed back across the yard. He held up his sneaker-clad foot with a grin. A yellow lightning bolt gleamed from the glittering red bottom of the shoe. "Converses fit with the latest Garrick Impulsive Model 4 soles, old man. Keep up with the latest advan-ZOUNDS!"

The tube-bred cyborg, Operative 112263, lunged expertly at Wheel from behind, as it had been bred to do, a monomolecular bayonet popping from its forearm. Wheel's garish crane-and-mango themed Kamehameha shirt flared out and lunged of its own accord like a living thing, gleaming steely for a moment as it caught the assassin's blade and turned it aside in a hail of blue sparks. Wheel turned to face the clanking thing with a flurrying snap of his shirt. He raised an eyebrow, eyes cold behind his luminous spectacles.

"Bad form," quoth the maven. From his shirt pocket he pulled an ancient derringer given to him by a German baron in 1789.

The cyborg crouched and sprang, lethal and precise as a Whitechapel scalpel.

Wheel depressed the trigger, and a ninety-pound Jolly Jack cannonball fired from the two-inch pistol with a shattering roar, leaving behind a pair of smoking metal jackboots with shattered, blackened femurs laced with scorched promethium protruding from them.

Saatano finally blasted free of the tiny tangletree with a screaming chorus of two-chord cantrips, and struggled to his feet, foaming and snarling, his pure black eyes contorted with rage, his long white dreadlocks cluttered with leaves and sap. Wheel grinned and pulled from inside his shirt a bright yellow tin canister of Kabuki-Man™-brand chopsticks, and popped the lid just as the Finnish death metal bard got to his feet and began roaring out a rough Lapp spell. Hundreds of ornately painted chopsticks spewed from the round mouth of the tin, shattering against Paskiainen, driving through leather and T-shirt and fetish and dried scalp and clove cigarette case, through flesh and bone, leaving the Finn sprawled, bleeding, impaled dozens of times over. He groaned and tried to roll to his side, crackling chopsticks against his ribs.

"Hmmm, now how to ... ah, yes. The classics work best, I suppose." Wheel whistled a long piping double note, and a red-capped bearded dwarf shook off a layer of dust and nodded, silently striding to the small wild garden and yanking up a white iron cross twined with rosary pea vines. The lawn gnome tossed the cross to Wheel, who caught it with both hands, and turned to face the prone mage. A slick, chill rain drifted out of the night sky.

The Finn stared up at the Invisible, his eyes hidden behind the cool psychedelic hues of his spectacles, his shirt gleaming and chittering as the pattern shifted, mouth shifted in a lopsided grin. Wheel hoisted the cross high, the rosary peas swinging in the storm wind that was kicking up.

"Wh ... who ARE you?" the tool of the conspiracy managed to spit.

Wheel chuckled.

"You know me, chumley. I'm the funny one."

Lightning crashed as the cruciform stake drove straight down into the rich black soil with a wet, wrenching crack.

...

Wheel took a long, slow breath and dusted his hands on his shirt, which gurgled happily as it drank at the rain. The long piping whistle was repeated, and more gnomes came to life. Wheel made a short sweeping gesture with his left hand, and the gnomes, with spade and rake, set to work clearing the lawn. Wheel looked back at the slouching, meandering facade of the House. "Too nice a night to spend it indoors," Wheel mused. "Might be time to head out on the highway, looking for adventure, and so on and so forth." A light tap on a recessed stud set into his left wrist, and a low thrum filled the chill night as Wheel's low-slung prism-wheel cycle rolled onto the lawn. The pop maven settled into the Architeuthis-leather seat, and kicked on the map system. His spectacles shifted to dark purple shades in the harsh electric glow.

"It's 709.22 miles to New Orleans. I've got a full dilithium charge, a half a pack of Devil Dogs, it's dark, and my spectacles have temporarily shifted into a sunglass configuration. And Dr. Curare takes his evening stroll to the Black Jesuit Mass at midnight ..." He pulled out a neatly folded shopping list from his shirt pocket, and consulted it, "... and I'll still have time to pick up some baguettes."

Wheel kicked the bike into life, and was gone in a roar of white sound.