Thread: Passing Strange

21

Alex

MaryTheMare: Well that's nice - I'm a man-hating castrating feminazi, and then I died right away? What the fuck. Seriously.

Waitwut - I saw you torn to bits right before my eyes! How are you..

MaryTheMare: Oh come on! I was trying to tolerate this sexist garbage, but you've set the women's movement back a good 50 years! You're lucky I don't know where you live asshole - I'm sitting here playing with a pair of pruning shears right now..

Wait - I'm sorry - you're fading out. I'm drifting away from the computer screen..

MaryTheMare: Oh. Ok. Whatever..

I'm drifting away from the computer screen. And I'm back in a very familiar room - the small Canadian apartment that apparently belongs to Alex (whoever that is). He must be the small man in lederhosen drooped so sullenly on the sofa, head in hands as if he's crying.

Nothing has changed. Well basically. Their positions might be slightly different - the man's anyway - the tall busty Nordic woman in the Valkyrie helmet and the Oktoberfest bierhalle girl costume seems to be seated exactly as she was in my previous vision. And the scattered remnants of a huge German knockwurst and sauerkraut feast still litter the apartment.

The biggest change is that it's daylight outside the window now - no aurora coruscating across the sky. Just harsh sunlight glaring off snow and ice.

Suddenly a shadow moves across that glare - something outside the window. It drops from above and smashes directly through the glass, lands inside. Its a man dressed in a black ninja costume, including the balaclava head covering that only reveals eyes and bridge of the nose. He whips off the balaclava and throws it on the floor, revealing short reddish-brown hair. It's Nunya, the ferryboat pilot.

"Alex!" He shouts angrily.

The small sad man on the sofa lifts his head - rather slowly I think, all things considered. His eyes are red-rimmed, tear-streaked.

"Oh god Ninja.. " he blubbers, with the air of a man confessing to a terrible murder. "I didn't.. I couldn't.. You can't possibly understand - she was.. "

Instantly the woman sitting at the laptop computer in the kitchen goes into action. She moves silently to the counter. Flows would be the right word I think - her grace and stealth are uncanny - and pulls a butcher knife from the wooden block, takes aim to throw it at the intruder.

But he's quicker. He has something already in his hand that he points toward her and she freezes. It's a small remote control, sleek and grey, arrayed with lots of colorful buttons.

And its now that I see the woman has not been sitting in a chair - she was crouching there behind the table - unmoving - apparently for many hours - possibly days.

* * *

I'm in a different room. A spacious apartment that must be located in Castle Neener. It's a living room space. Standing in the center of it is SaffronAxe, resplendent in her Gypsy dress and holding both hands against her bosom.

In her upturned palms crawl three large spiders - about the size of tarantulas. These aren't the same as the ones I witnessed in the other vision - the horrifying one where spiders merged with severed human torsos - those were black whereas these are grey and patterned with black markings like tiger stripes.

They're moving rapidly in her cupped hands - crawling and tumbling over each other - as if they're playing. And she's smiling down upon them - for all the world like a proud mother.

One crawls up onto her dress - into her long black hair which is bound into two thick braids - and then I begin to see the others. In her hair - on her dress - her arms, her shoulders - just about covering every available inch of her body in fact. Crawling all over each other.

One falls off onto the floor - and then I notice they're covering the floor as well. Nearly every inch of it. And the furniture too. The entire room is writhing with them.

And they're growing.

Suddenly, moving almost as one - they begin to disperse - to move outward - flowing up and out through open windows and open doors into the Castle proper..

* * *

"My life has been so horrible - " Alex blubbers, his entire face wet "I missed the Motherland so much - you can't understand!!"

Nunya steps to the frozen woman, knocks off the Valkyrie helmet with disgust and lifts off the blonde wig to reveal short brown hair beneath it.

"For a displaced German Canada is a hell! Moosehead - hockey - the ridiculous accent!! I so badly miss the Alps - the quaint little villages - the FOOD!"

Nunya fiddles briefly with the buttons on his remote and the woman's eyes change from blue to brown.

"And the beer! The dopplebocks and lagers... Canadian beer is scheisse!!"

Another few buttons pressed in sequence and the woman's immense cleavage deflates considerably.

"And then she showed up. I had no idea who she was... I've never seen Ninjabot before, you know that. At first I thought I was dreaming. Her accent - and she spricht perfekt Deutsch.. "

Nunya shoots him a pained look, jabs a few more times at the remote presumably to re-adjust her accent.

"And she had cartons and cartons of beer, and sausages - and sauerkraut - and CDs... "

"What did you do?" Nunya hisses. ".. what did you do.. "

The little man closes his eyes for a long moment - unable to face the harsh truth he must now reveal. But then he swallows hard, walks to the kitchen table, pulls up the chair which was pushed into the corner, and sits before the laptop computer.

"It was just a game she said - a fun game. Everybody would have such a great laugh."

Nunya (or is it Ninja?) puches in another combination of keystrokes, looks perplexed when nothing happens, and then grasps Nunyabot's (Ninjabot's?) thick floor-length skirt and yanks it off in one jerk. Both men stare, shocked at what is revealed. Not a pair of well-engineered robotic legs covered with silicone skin to match the rest of her body, but eight spindly and obviously mechanical ones.

".. a spiderbot.. " he breathes.

He lifts up the edge of her peasant blouse to reveal crude welds where the lower half was joined to the torso. The silicone flesh of her human half is raggedly torn and partially melted and blackened below the waist.

Nunya drops to a knee, rubs a hand over the damage in disbelief and shock.

"Nunyabot!!! What's been done to you!?? Who did this??!!"

Also staring in disbelief but determined to finish his confession, Alex continues:

"She.. she made me change the names. All of them. One by one. We had such fun coming up with new ones that sound similar. Everyone will love it she promised - and she massaged my aching shoulders while I did it. It took all night. We didn't bother with inactive members, just the current ones."

"What else?" Nunya demands, staring icily at him. "There has to be more. It isn't just the names."

"No - at first that's all it was - I swear! But by that time I was getting really drunk. And she put Wagner on!! Flight of the Valkyrie!! And then Polka - we danced... oh it was vunderbar!"

".. And?"

"And.. then she took over. I was getting woozy anyway - she helped me onto the couch. But I saw her pull the chair back and then - sit - somehow. I didn't understand - it must be because of the spider legs. But she never touched the keyboard. Just looked at the screen. Silent and motionless like a - a machine."

"Yeah, she doesn't need to use keys." Nunya cuts in. "Her hands are outfitted with retractable USB connections - she just lays them on the table beside it and jacks right in, gets complete access at a programming level."

"Yes - I realized it must be something like that at one point when I got up and staggered in here to talk to her - but she just ignored me. She was just staring at the screen and - things were happening there - really fast. I couldn't understand what she was doing. I tried to stop her - but nothing worked. And then the look she gave me - the terrible threats!"

"I'll tell you what she was doing." Ninja turns and fixes him with a hard stare. "She was hacking into the database. Re-writing the code.. "

"She was re-programming DV.

"Now come on - we got our work cut out for us. We need to fix it."