Zool 3 - Frankly a Retrograde Step Episode 6 by Penny Heal So, where were we? Beard was falling out of a 30th story window in Igor's body. Glamorous and Sidekick are still missing and meanwhile - in a seedy bar, this is happening: _"Well?" said both Men in Black, "Are you its mother?" They stared at each other, each suddenly realising how voluminous, shadowy and all-concealing the other's clothing was, wondering why the knew each other only by monosyllabic surnames, re-evaluating the parameters of their profoundly masculine relationship. A small be-cardiganed figure stepped from the shadows, "No I'm your mother and don't you forget it Gogromelgromoth." The figure shrank form its apparent height of eight foot to its more usual five foot one, clanking slightly as it did so. "Well you can have the Laser Cannons back," said the Dark Lord1, "I'm settling down with Abigail and starting work as a reinsurance technician on Monday_ and I'm changing my name to Tim." He cast the host of hideous weaponry on the floor and stalked out. "Strange," thought Mrs. Lord, "He's become so much butcher since he stopped being an evil necromancer king." "Hang on," said Clute form behind the bar, where he'd passed out after reading the bit about the lift door in Zool 3.5, "The Dark Lord may have escaped his sub-Pratchett reality by a spell but what the hell are you doing in this level of the fictional confection which makes up this mille-feuille of self-reference?" "Ye what?" replied Mrs. Lord, "I was just knitting a new cardigan and one of them new-fangled super-strings got tangled up in the wool and what with that and the complex 5-dimensional rotations required by the cable design in my Crones' Weekly pattern I suddenly finds myself here. Excuse me, I have a sudden urge to wreak a hideous vengeance." She stopped to stuff the ghastly arsenal into her cardigan and clunked off. Molin-Cax crawled from under the table to the Juke Box2, and selected a track. "Woooooa aaaaargh. Bahdyfahn. Bahdy faaaahnn for yoooooou!"3 squalled the jukebox. "Kickin!" murmured Molin-Cax, and passed out again, ______________________________________________________________________ ________ Meanwhile the Beard had fallen to the 29th floor4. She flailed around wildly, her movements somewhat curtailed by the massive hump which Igor had had transplanted when he took up his position as lab assistant to Lord Evil. She grabbed for anything to catch hold of that might possibly save her and caught a small piece of string. "Zoorg!"5 swore the Beard as the hump on her back opened to produce a huge pink parachute6. The Beard relaxed as she plummeted faster7 towards the fiendishly sharp revolving ears of the Silver Dog. ______________________________________________________________________ ________ So. Glamorous and Sidekick are still missing. Mrs. Lord is armed to the teeth and looking for an indeterminate, yet horrific vengeance. Gogromelgromoth The Dark Lord - now Tim - is working as a reinsurance technician, but this really doesn't mean that his life is over and nothing interesting will ever happen to him again8.The Beard is still in mid-air facing certain death and Molin-Cax is lying drunk under a table with the Penguin humming "Get busy with the fizzy." to himself, but Colin has requested that he should spontaneously combust fairly soon, since it's something he's always wanted to do himself. 11 Grandson of Zool may have implied that Aborfoasbasof was a low-tech world with no laser cannons but it didn't say so directly; `cos I checked. 22 Space-Opera purists may wish to insert any of the adjectives holophonic/4-d/interactive/teledildonic before this word if they really want. 33 Normally sick and unpleasant worlds use pop-songs as advertising themes. Only somewhere as depraved as Zool death planet where the intractable criminals of 10,000 worlds etc. could use advertising jingles as pop-songs. 44 There is an explanantion to this, honest. The transport of Mrs. Lord and Gogromelgromoth The Dark Lord from Aborfoasbasof to Zool carried with it a subtle contamination from their original genre - namely the outrageous physics which allowed the force of unusally dramatic situations to provoke a quasi-relativistic time-dilation effect. This also accounts for the Beard's earlier escape from the train. 55 New units and silly hard SF swearwords: you lucky people. 66 Limz R Us, prosthetic surgeons, suppliers of attractive and practical additions to the idle rich who wanted to look like street samurai. Most famous for the collagen lip implants which doubled as air-bags in a car crash. 77 Since she now had a parachute, the dramatic time extension effect had failed - causing her to fall much faster. 88 For those who have been paying enough attention to wonder what happened to the lush garden and the girl named Eve, the explanation is that The Dark Lord found himself transported to a cinema* on Zool during the adverts! Eve's next words were "and I never travel without my high security lip implants from Limz R Us. Security when it counts, where it counts." *holographic/4-d/teledildonic etc.