LNHY: Death of Trophy Wife #6

Adrian McClure mrfantastic7 at gmail.com
Tue Mar 3 12:18:29 PST 2015


THE DEATH OF TROPHY WIFE #6

"Ages of Ages"

by Adrian McClure


Somewhere in the forests near Net.ropolis, there is a decaying mansion
overgrown with vines, full of twisting corridors, where the lights are
constantly flickering and every door creaks. This is Arc.ham Asylum, built
as a place to help people who had traumatic encounters with forces beyond
human understanding. In practice, it is a prison, built to keep the
artifacts of the Old Ones—and the people marked by them—safely out of
sight. Forged by powers that existed millions of years ago, before
humankind was ever on the Earth, these artifacts are remnants of a history
that shouldn't exist. The world began, after all, when God created the
universe 6000 years ago. [in The Daily Super Paragraph #1—ed.] Most
Christian sects believe that they, like the dinosaur bones, were made by
God to test the faith of believers.


Two of the heavily armed guards who stood outside a cell blinked and shook
their heads as if they'd just appeared there.


"We made it!" said the female guard.


"A creepy asylum. Figures," said the man. "Okay, we extract the artifact
and then get out of here. Minimum collateral damage. That's the plan,
right?"


"Yeah, sure!" said the woman. She looked excitedly at the gun in her hand.
"Oooh, this is cool." The man sighed. "Don't worry," said the woman,
"stealing stuff is what I'm best at!"


Making sure no one was looking, the two of them unlocked the door and
stepped in. A haggard, disheveled black woman lay on the floor.


"Dr. Randi Carter? Is that you?"


"W—what do you want?" she groaned.


"We're here to help!" said the female guard.


"Ha. I've heard that before." Dr. Carter chuckled. "The best thing you
could do for me right now is leave me alone."


"We're not from here!" said the female guard. "Look."


"Oh." The two guards had been replaced by brightly colored teenagers who
looked as if they'd stepped off Deviantart. She looked closely at the boy.
"Are you a skeleton?"


"Yeah. Uh, hi, I'm Dead Boy."


"He takes some getting used to but he's really cool! I'm Shinigami Girl!"


"What do you want?" said Dr. Carter.


"The dress," said Shinigami Girl.


Dr. Carter laughed bitterly. "Good luck. It's the most heavily guarded
artifact in the Asylum."


"So what color did you see it as?"


"I thought it was white and gold the first time I saw it, then… then one
day I looked at it and it wasn't. And it kept going back and forth.
Everyone kept telling me I was wrong. I had a nervous breakdown—I'd had
problems with hallucinations and delusions before… I'm a psychic, but I
can't tell which of my visions are real and which aren't. I hoped they
could help me here, but then when they found out the dress was affecting
me, they locked me up."


"Don't worry," said Dead Boy. "You're not wrong. It really is both. You can
see it better than most people because you're a psychic."


"I know. But they don't." She smiled weakly. "Thank you for saying that,
though. I thought no one else thought that."


"We can help you get out!" said Shinigami Girl. "We've got in touch with
some people who can look after you. Here's a map for navigating the secret
passages." She handed the rolled up parchment to her. "So where are you
keeping the artifact?"


"Section 5, corridor 3," Dr. Carter said. "That's where it was when I
worked on it. But… Are you sure you can get past the security system and
take out all those guards."


"You bet!" said Shinigami Girl, a wicked glint in her eye.


"You'd probably better get out of here soon," said Dead Boy.


Dr Carter chuckles. "You don't have to tell me twice." She ran off into the
corridors, leaving them behind.


"All right!" whispered Shinigami Girl. "Now let's head to the Artifact Wing
and get that dress."


"It, uh," said Dead Boy. "It kind of might not be a good idea not to use
that gun, considering there are all kinds of artifacts that could destroy
the world in there…"


"Yeah… oh well. Might as well hang onto it. For good luck." She shoved it
into her hammerspace satchel.


The two of them then traveled through the dim corridors until they reached
a large door flanked by tapestries made of strange abstract fractal
patterns. "Memetic kill agents," she whispered. "But I'm a level-3
celestial being, that kind of thing's small potatoes." She stuck her tongue
out, opened the creaking door, and walked on past.


"Let me guess," said Dead Boy, "are we going to try and climb into the
ventilation systems?"


"Yep!" she said. She did a triple-vault into the air and knocked off the
ventilation grate, then reaching down and pulled Dead Boy after her.


"It sure was considerate of them to make these big enough to crawl around
in," said Dead Boy.


After a while, they reached the center of the Artifact Wing, where a
platoon of twenty guards stood on every side of a glass cage, shaped like a
pentagon with a pentagram engraved on top. "All right," said Dead Boy. "We
should scope out the room carefully, figure out what the best strategy is
for—"


"HAI!" screamed Shinigami Girl, diving down from the duct, doing a triple
flip, and shattering the glass case. Dead Boy dived after her. Insta-kill
spells lay suspended in the air, invisible to human eyes, but Shinigami
Girl cut them with her soul-blade, snatching the dress.


The power-armored guards raised their guns to blast at Shinigami Girl, but
she dodged between the bullets, and sliced into the guardswith her
soul-blade, sending them into unconsciousness. Dead Boy detached his skull
and threw it like a boomerang, knocking over a line of soldiers. But more
of them swarmed into the artifact room like ants. "This isn't good," said
Dead Boy. "I don't think we can take on all these people at once."


Shinigami Girl flipped over, landing on top of an urn, and held the dress
above her head. "I've got it!" she shouted. "The blue dress is mine! All
mine!"


"What are you talking about?" said one of the soldiers. "It's white and
gold!"


"No it isn't!" said another beside him, turning his gun on his fellow
guard. "Heretic!"


"Blasphemer!"


They started shooting each other, pulse-bolts whizzing through the air, and
Shinigami Girl dashed off with the dress under one arm and Dead Boy under
the other. Dodging several death traps, she burst thorough the building
into the moonlit night. "Whew'!" she said. "That was close. And we didn't
even blow anything up this time! See!" She pulled the gun out of her
satchel and looked it over. "This is kind of a crappy gun, bleah." She
threw it at a tree, which immediately burst into flames. Dead Boy groaned.
"It's just one tree!" said Shinigami Girl.


"I hope Dr. Carter's OK," said Dead Boy.


"Eh, those guys can deal with that." She pointed to MegaMetal BlastLord and
TJ [as seen in Saxon Brenton's now legendary run on Daily Super Short-Short
Story—ed], riding on a high-tech motorcycle with Kid Kicked-Out and
Exclamation!Missy! "They're the ones we called in, remember?"


"Wait a minute," said Dead Boy, "isn't Exclamation!Missy! part of the LNH?"


"Nah. This is the real one. The other one must be some kind of robot demon
duplicate or something. We'll take care of that later too. Right now, we've
gotta talk with Ted the Time Traveling Atheist."


"Oh yeah, right…"


And then they vanished, leaving behind two very confused guards.


"Hahaha," said the evil spirit who'd been imprisoned in the tree Shinigami
Girl had destroyed. "After ten thousand years, I'M FREE!" It was
immediately stomped on by a titanic ghost dinosaur who'd been trapped in an
urn that had been destroyed in the combat in the asylum. "Owww," said the
evil spirit.


****


Ted the Time Traveling Atheist sat alone in his reclining chair, smoking
his pipe. His reflections were rudely interrupted by a knock on the door.
He opened it and saw Shinigami Girl and Dead Boy. "Ah," he said. "More
superheroes."


"Do people still smoke pipes?" said Shinigami Girl. "Huh. I didn't know
that." She grabbed his hand and shook it vigorously. "Hi Ted! I'm Shinigami
Girl and this is Dead Boy!"


"Hello… er, what do you want, exactly?"


"Well, we're here to investigate the death of God," said Dead Boy.


"Oh." He narrowed his eyes. "You're angels, aren't you?"


"Not exactly," said Dead Boy. "We're... not from around here."


"We're Shinigami," said Shinigami Lass. "Duh! We've been sent to this
universe on a special investigation. We're not part of the whole Christian
cosmological paradigm."


"We work for the Elder Gods," said Dead Boy. "They don't really care about
this place either, We got thrown in here because we're disposable. They're
hoping this universe will just implode quietly and they can keep ignoring
it."


"But we won't let them!" said Shinigami Lass.


"All right." Ted the Time Traveling Atheist sat back down on his arm chair.
Shinigami Lass and Dead Boy sat on the couch across from him. "What do you
want with me?"


"Well, here's the thing," said Shinigami Lass. "We need to talk to the
Before God Guys. But they've left the present. They're hiding from the
Apocalypse in the Lost Time."


"The what?"


"Well the thing is, the history of the world you know? The one where God
created everything from scratch 6000 years ago? It's not the only history.
There was another one before. There were thousands—millions—of years before
that came about. That was the time of the Great Old Ones…"


"Who are not to be confused with the Elder Gods we work for," interjected
Dead Boy. "They're not from this universe. Even though they're both sort of
based on Lovecraft tropes. Of course, Lovecraft's cosmic beings weren't a
single unified thing either in spite of the retcons of later writers like
Derleth—"


"ANYWAY," interrupted Manga Girl, "God tried to erase all that history, but
there are lots of artifacts and things left over from then. Oh! And it was
also the time of the dinosaurs."


"The dinosaurs? You mean they—they were real?" Ted's jaw dropped.


"Yep! In fact, that's part of why we wanted to see you. I guess we'll have
to show you." Shinigami Girl pulled a film projected out of her satchel.
"Here's this security cam footage we recovered from Heaven…"


****


65 MILLION YEARS AGO


Ted the Time Traveling Atheist stood in a plain that would not be inhabited
by human beings for millions of years. A lone tyrannosaurus was stalking a
herd of stegosauruses through the grass.


"Hey look at this!" says God. "You think you're so great but you can't make
a dinosaur, can you?"


"Actually..." said Ted the Time Traveling Atheist.


"Oh Me, not this shit again," said God.


"Actually, these dinosaurs aren't scientifically accurate." He grabbed a
velociraptor which nipped at his fingers. "See! They don't have feathers."


"Feathers? Feathers? You think those things are supposed to have feathers?
Like little birds? You think a tyrannosaurs rex would be going "Cheep cheep
cheep! Cheep Cheep Cheep! when he's eating your alive?"


"Actually, birds evolved from dinosaurs. Also, since this is the late
Cretaceous period, stegosauri should be extinct at this point…"


"Oh fuck you! I'm done with this." God's hand reached out into the depths
of space and He grabbed a meteor out of the sky and threw it at the Earth
with all His might. The dinosaurs were consumed in a mighty blaze…


****


"But that isn't possible!" said Ted the Time Travelling Atheist. "It didn't
happen that way! I was THERE!"


"Yeah," said Shinigami Girl, "but you were *there* too, I guess. And that's
*one* way it happened. Or could have happened. It's complicated."


"So that… that was what God meant when He called me last week…"


"Huh?" said Dead Boy.


"Well…"


****


Ted the Time Traveling Atheist had been writing his fortieth letter to the
editor that week about how religion poisoned everything when God called him
on the phone.


Ted picked up the phone. "Yes, hello?" he said irritably.


"Are you there, Ted? It's me, God," said God.


"What is it? I don't want to get baptized, and I'm not letting you borrow
my starship. What do you even need with a—"


"Listen, Ted, I need your help, man. I need to talk with you. Alone. Things
are getting really heavy and—"


"What's this about?"


"It's not a gay thing, man! It's not a date. Really. It isn't. Although you
are pretty hot but—"


"God, are you all right? Have you been drinking?"


"No! Well, maybe. The thing is—this is some really heavy shit. I'm in way
over my head. Everything's going wrong—I need to talk to you alone. You're
the only one who'll understand. it's about the dinosaurs, man. The
dinosaurs—" The phone hung up.


"Hello? Hello?"


****


"That was a week ago," said Ted. "And now He's dead. I can scarcely believe
it. I'm a little bit sad, in a way." He sipped on his now cold tea. "So
much of my life revolved around hating God, I can scarcely picture a world
without Him. And—well, I thought that when God died, everything would be
all right and we would be free. But people are still killing and oppressing
each other. Nothing seems to have changed at all."


"Well, it's probably gonna take a while for people to notice what
happened," said Shinigami Lass, "and a lot of them won't believe it when
they find out."


"And that's the thing," said Dead Boy. "The idea of God doesn't exist in
isolation. Some people use religion to oppress, some people use it to help
fight oppression, especially people who come from less privileged
backgrounds. Part of the process of making the world better is examining
your own prejudices and—"


"Nonsense! My prejudices are objectively verified by science!" said Ted the
Time Traveling Atheist.


"Well okay then!" said Shinigami Girl.


"You know," said Ted, stroking his chin. "I've considered this idea
before—the fact that there might be a hidden level of history. But I've
never figured out how to access it."


"Well, that's where the dress comes in," said Shinigami Girl.


"The dress?"


"The Alchemical Wedding Dress!" Shinigami Girl pulled out the dress and
unrolled it with a flourish. "One of the artifacts of the Old Ones."


"My god, it's—" Ted's eyes bulged. "What is that thing? What color is it?
That's impossible!"


"It exists on a narrative fault line between two different versions of
history," said Dead Boy. "One where it's blue and black and one where it's
white and gold. Wearing it gives you the power to shift between different
histories."


"So that means…" Ted narrowed his eyes at the dress.


"You're gonna have to put it on. Yep." Shinigami Girl beamed.


"I… I… oh all right." Ted took the dress and walked off into the bathroom,
grumbling. He hesitantly stepped out, then examined himself in a full
length mirror, putting his pipe in his mouth and breathing in the smoke
contemplatively. "I… I look rather pretty."


"Yeah!" said Shinigami Girl. "You're super cute! OK, let's get going. Next
stop, Jurassic Period!"


Shinigami Girl and Dead Boy each took one of Ted's hands. In a moment, they
were gone, just before the ghost dinosaur smashed Ted's house.


NEXT: Maybe something to do with Trophy Wife? Who even knows.


I am still working on Looniverse Y #14 and I didn't want to post things out
of order but I had this idea out and wanted it posted while it's still
topical.
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