Wheel! Of! FISH!

Black Cherry Purple Haze

2004-03-28 - 11:27 p.m.

The New Orleans sun groaned as it trickled down the brick streets and arched alleys like sweet orange marmalade, casting long sticky licorice shadows across the creaky architecture of the French Quarter.

All was quiet, save for the sleepy babblings of vagrants in the grip of delirium tremens as they thrashed on the festively-painted benches, and the clink of coffee mugs and the pained, exhausted grunts of early-rising footpads from the open-air lunch counter on the corner.

Mornings were hard on the Big Easy.

The hung-over dawn clutched its forehead and screamed in pain as the mullioned French window of a street-facing house exploded outwards in thousands of shards. A body hit the street and rolled over to fetch up against the iron gate of a tiny cemetery. A broad-shouldered fellow of rotting pallor in a long, decaying coat and tall plumed hat that had seen better decades strode through the shattered window, his swashed boots crunching on glass and strips of lead, a long rapier in his hand.

The man who had come through the window pulled himself to his feet with a grip on wrought black iron. A long gleaming coat printed in highball glasses and cocoanuts in many colors lapped at his ankles as he swirled to face the gran zombie. "Listen, Layfayette," Wheel importuned, spitting out a piece of glass, "I just came to talk."

"To TAL-fmmmrff ..." the zombie's jaw came loose. With a glare at this obvious pop-cultural interruption, it crunched it back into place. "To TALK? You think any of les morts marchant in Orlean will talk to YOU? To ANY of l'Université Invisible? You are l'ennemi! I will paint the earth with your blood, buffoon!" The black rapier came up as the zombie Lafayette took a smooth passo straordinario.

"Right." Wheel came to his feet, planting his purple and gold Converse and crossing his wrists as he reached into his coat. He pulled free a matched pair of long-barreled bronze six-shooters with lignum vitae grips. Growling, he dropped them. As the zombie shambled en garde across the road, the Psychedelic Illuminate reached into his coat once more, and brought forth two silver shortswords etched with hippogriffs. Those clanged against the iron railing as Wheel reached in again and again, pulling out a set of dragon-headed nunchaku, a couple of Tesla dartzips, a framed picture of Chuck Jones, and dual adamantite tonfas before the zombie was upon him. The tonfas clattered to the pile as Wheel rolled under a whistling allungo and came to his feet. He grinned as his mnemonic enhancers finally did their job, and snapped his fingers, twisting the ring on his third finger in a certain way. A long blackthorn cane popped out of nothingness and into Wheel's hand. Banded with silver inscribed with qabbalistic alephbeths and cored with solid-state neuroresponsive combat machinery, topped with a prismastic eye clutched in the tentacles of an ornate silver squid and tipped with a translucent purple spike, the cane gleamed in the dawn. The madman chuckled. "Oh, you're bloody in for it now, my fine feathered frog."

The zombie snarled. "Insolent dog," the late great French marquis spit, his plumed hat bobbing. His savage distesa was met neatly with a batte de nuit as Wheel dropped to one knee and thrust the tip of his cane through the dead man's rotting waistcoat. The Invisible flashed a bright grin. "Come now, Gilbert. I learned la canne from Jarnac ... you likely remember him as the one who told you that he couldn't teach a limp-wristed sot how to make a proper patinado." A furious howl rent the morning, and a clash and clatter filled the air as the two fenced back and forth, feet grating on the glittering glass. Wheel's laughter rang bright and savage as the sun gathered strength until with a final delicate *ting!*, he sent Lafayette's rapier spinning into the air. The undead noble grunted. Wheel flashed his winning smile as he neatly flipped his cane, caught the business end and gestured at the French zombie with the prismatic eye at the head. "In an ideal world, my dear Marquis, I would not be obligated to do this."

There was a semblance of a Gallic shrug from rotted shoulders. "In a perfect world, Mssr. Roue, I would not be toiling yet in this parody of a life, non?" Wheel inclined his head once in a neat acknowledgement of a well-made philosophical point before triggering the Weishaupt ray in the glittering eye of his cane, lacing into the zombie with an ascendant chorus of superharmonics and a rush of pure psychepyrotechnics. With a sigh from deep within, the great zombie sagged to the road, two centuries of decay rushing in like a river long dammed. The Marquis de Lafayette was dust and memory before his plumed hat fell to the ground.

Wheel twisted his cane, vanishing it into thick air. He raised an eyebrow as he peered around at the now-deserted street, blazing with morning light. "Rather warmer than it was when I got here," he muttered, and shook his arms, his long coat sleeves crawling towards his shoulders as his hem folded upwards until he was clad once again in a simple aloha shirt. The shirt rippled and burbled as it changed into a more daylight-suitable pattern of neon pink palm trees and golden pirate cutlasses on an electric green background. As he knelt down by the crackling brown skull which was the sum of the earthly remains of the Marquis de Lafayette, there was a slow volley of sardonic claps from the shaded awning of a shuttered fruit stall behind him. He half-turned, slipping a pencil-sized sonic disrupter from his pocket. A grinning ghost in a pale grey raincoat stepped forward. "Not quite dramatic enough. If I were you I'd see if I couldn't squeeze in a car chase and a few explosions," he chuckled with a hint of chitter in his voice.

The disrupter slipped away again as Wheel got to his feet, ostentatiously brushing powdered Frenchman from his hands. "Some of us are fated to entertain, sirrah. If you think I'm bad, you should follow Actionhero when he goes to the store to get pork cutlets some time. I once saw Yellow Mountain ninji under the hypnotic mastery of a cybershogun use the Thousand-Folding Crane technique to secrete themselves in a bottle of cream and an egg carton to get the jump on the 'Hero in aisle 9."

An old stage partner, the grey man knew his line. "What happened then, Wheel?"

Wheel waved a dismissive hand.

"Ah, they were whipped and beaten."

They paused for the applause and groans of an invisible audience. Three phase shifts over, the joke slaughtered a thousand helpless crystalline beings.

The moment ended, and the man in the raincoat gestured. "Step into my office, my good fellow." The two strolled trippingly through chiaroscuro shadeways to a crumbling marble pier on the mighty Mississip', where a tall fog-silver riverboat floated in stately silence. The man in the raincoat moved his left hand in a strange, crawling gesture, and a lace of silvery webs materialized between the deck and the dock.

Wheel's host: Weaver Black, a consulting detective of unparalleled intuition and a harder boiling than any other investigator on the market, and also a shaman of Anasazi, the spider. Gaunt and lethal, with a long slim grey coat latticed with silver filigree webs hung from wide shoulders over a blurcloth black suit, topped by a trim grey fedora accented with a neat red hourglass band, Weaver was a man Wheel had trusted to cover his back across multiple dimensions, timelines and extended dream sequences. Weaver Black had pulled Wheel out of the grip of the Buckingham Hive's changed guard, and Wheel had held the door against a horde of ravening ghouls in black coats and sunglasses while Black drove a stake of holly through the shrivelled heart of the vampyr lord Nixon in '72. Good times.

They passed through Black's outer office, where a luscious and towering brunette secretary by the unlikely name of Zulma looked up with hungry eyes as they passed into the Weaver's inner sanctum. The Anasazi shaman hung his coat and hat with precision on a coat rack in the corner and then carefully took a seat, crooking his chair back just so and propping his neat patent loafters on the edge of the wide desk. Wheel waited patiently, knowing the ritual well, and took the moment to carefully light a slim rum-soaked black cherry and Wonderland grass cigarillo in a long gold holder. He plopped into the client's chair with a grin just as the precise detective lit a heavy Meerschaum pipe, blowing a ring of blue smoke up to meet the golden haze from Wheel's cigarillo. They both raised eyebrows and grinned simultaneously, each scenting the distinctive tang of the other's preferred psychotomimetics in the smoke. Weaver Black shook his head with a chuckle as he pushed a slender manila envelope across the ash desk.

"Best I could dig up for the moment. I cast a wide net, but you're after some tricksy fish."

"I eat fish for breakfast," Wheel murmured, glancing at the envelope, weighing it in his hands for a moment before popping the wax seal with his thumb and sliding a small sheaf of glossy photographs captured from satellites and security cameras and a slim bundle of notes in a neat, creeping hand. "My, my, my ... 'Hero has always run in the most interesting circles. Who are these lovelies?" Wheel fanned out two head-shots of varying degrees of blurriness and intrapixeled reconstruction. Black tapped one with a long, slender finger. "The gal in the flak jacket with the dangerous attitude and the lethal weaponry runs under the unlikely handle of 'Teacher's Pet'."

Wheel snorted. "Right. I'll be sure to tell 'Actionhero' and 'Heph' about her hilarious nickname. What's she, the muscle?" Weaver Black nodded, puffing on his pipe. "She breaks legs, thumbs, and hearts. Lethally quick. Classically trained. Unpredictable. And she handles a motorcycle quite adeptly, so I'd rate her as at least a 7.2 on the Norris scale." Wheel nodded, peering through the spinning silvery teacups at the edge of his vision at the picture of a svelte woman in the midst of powerful magicks, a corona forming around her. "And this one?"

A grin. "Circe." Wheel rolled his eyes. "Spectacular. A feminist who can make a really CONVINCING argument that all men are pigs. Is this one the original article or just someone who likes the name?" The spider man shrugged. "I asked Anasazi himself, and only got in return a very unhelpful riddle about boxes that fit within themselves. The full text of that discussion is in the notes." Wheel nodded, and thumbed through the papers.

"I can't believe Doc bloody Oblivion is merc'ing out to these anarchofeminist reprobates ... that's going to be a flaming pain. I hate dealing with shadowtech. It's so blunt and straightforward. That's why I like actualized vaporware ... it's got an air of the nonsensical that I ... ?!" Black raised an eyebrow, but Wheel, apoplectic, was clearly going to be absorbed in choking on his rage for a few more seconds before he could spit it out. Weaver nodded. "Ah, yes. The trans-aethereal tulpaic realizer. I was wondering when you would get to that part." "#$(%*@%^!", remarked Wheel, causing a ripple in the hazy air of the room which travelled outwards and killed every fish within a dozen yards. "Where did these harlots get my trans-aethereal tulpaic realizer? I just took delivery on that bloody thing! I hadn't even gotten the bubble wrap off! And I know they didn't shop from the same friggin' catalogue, since I bought it off a chronautical merchant vessel from a timeline that no longer exists! GAH! GAHHHH!"

The consulting detective patted Wheel's shoulder, and chittered with laughter. "How many times have I told you to upgrade the security at the House? Certainly, it's sufficient to hold off a small wyrm, or a platoon of armored Fedayeen, but it's still vulnerable to a properly-stealthed intruder ... as I myself have demonstrated on more than one occasion." The Psychedelic Illuminate sighed, nodding slightly. He muttered under his breath as he continued flipping through documents, "I should just bloody cut my losses and go back now ... Curare ghosts through this stinking city, no one's heard anything, I keep getting attacked by zombies, someone stole my damned trans-aethereal tulpaic ... qua?" His head snapped up. "Is this footnote on page 11 correct?"

Weaver Black grinned. "Is anything I give you ever otherwise?"

And so it was that fourteen minutes later, Wheel found himself entering the kitchen of the Napoleon Bar through a service entrance, a small hypo-spray in his hand. He dosed one cook from behind, catching him before he fell as he came back to get tomatoes from the crisper, and then caught the other as he bent over the bread oven. Both sleeping men were comfortably stored in the pastry cabinet, and Wheel secreted himself by the door, taking a surly waiter at the back of the neck as he came in from the bar. The waiter he simply left slumped on the floor, snoring in a cranky fashion, as Wheel snapped his cane back into being, and slipped into the restaurant proper, vaulting the bar neatly and padding up behind the lone Estro in the courtyard, who looked up with a welcoming smile that crumbled like stucco in a flood. Wheel flashed his widest grin, and as he came around the table to face her, kept the eye of his cane focused on her as it rested nonchalantly across his shoulders.

"A pleasure, my dear ... 'Pet, I believe? My name is Wheel, and you killed my father. Prepare to die."

He chuckled.

"No, no. I kid. But, if I could be serious for a moment ... " He rested his left hand on the table and leaned down to peer over the rims of his psychedelic spectacles ... "What have you witches done with the Actionhero, and where's my thought form generator?"

Egad! A shocking cliffhanger of an ending! Only a dog of French descent would dare to miss the next thrilling installment of our serial farce!