8FOLD/HCC: Mighty Medley # 22, October 2015, by Brenton, Perron, Russell, and Russell

[Tom Russell]

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-------------- ISSUE # 22    OCT 2015 --------------
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-------------SAXON BRENTON--ANDREW PERRON-----------
--------------MARY RUSSELL--TOM RUSSELL-------------
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--------------- Editor, Tom Russell ----------------
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CONTENTS OF THIS ISSUE

"Docrates in Diamonds,
 Starring Docrates the Mighty Supragato and
 Extra-Special Agent Steve Shooter,
 With a Special Appearance by
 FBI Forensics Specialist Mandi Li"
 Part 2 of 2, by Mary Russell
The senses-shattering conclusion! The mystery solved! The answers
revealed! With practical advice with regards to the appropriate timing
of a flashback, and the perils of shopping online.

"Sonnet 87.363636: To the Admirer of a Dark Lady"
 by Andrew Perron
Seek you the beauty of the universe?

"Three Sheeps to the Wind" [HCC]
 by Tom Russell
Twelve sentences for which the editor sincerely apologizes.

"Beyond the Fields" Part 21
 by Saxon Brenton
In which our protagonists go to the library on New Year's Eve, and are
noticed because they're not being noticed. On the peculiar properties
of 1963.

"Seven 'Gainst Thebes" Part 20
 by Tom Russell
The long breakfast comes to a startling and violent end.


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---------------DOCRATES IN DIAMONDS-----------------
-----STARRING DOCRATES THE MIGHTY SUPRAGATO AND-----
---------EXTRA-SPECIAL AGENT STEVE SHOOTER----------
------------WITH A SPECIAL APPERANCE BY-------------
---------FBI FORENSICS SPECIALIST MANDI LI----------
-------------------Part 2 of 2----------------------
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------------Copyright 2015 Mary Russell-------------
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In last month's scintillating true-life Docrates adventure, a
Doc-udrama if you will, Doc was supposed to hit a baseball out of the
park. Instead, the Mighty Supragato sent the ball screaming towards
the bleachers, upon which were seated widows and orphans, each of whom
had adopted a kitten and/or iguana that morning at a special event
that Doc had emceed. They were probably Doc's biggest fans, but
really, everybody is Doc's biggest fan because he's Doc. Why has our
mighty hero done such a terrible thing? To find out, we need to do a
flashback.
   Six million years ago, no wait, that's too far back. A hundred
thousand years ago, no, still too far back. Tomorrow, whoops, wrong
way. Sixty seconds ago, Doc was heading for the plate for his at-bat.
   Doc was still just a kid, just a little guy. He was excited to be
at his first ball game. Steve had instructed him to hit the ball so it
would leave the stadium and the atmosphere and therefore cause minimal
damage and no loss of life, in theory. (Though it could hit a passing
alien. Sorry potential alien casualties!) And Doc had been so eager to
hit the ball out of the stadium once he had learned that that also
counted as a home run, which meant that he won the game (he thought).
Doc wins! Now he was alert. Every muscle was ready to react. But wait!
   He sensed something was wrong! He sniffed the air. He looked around
the stadium. His whiskers tingled. He could feel that something was
amiss in centerfield, in the general direction of those bleachers. He
looked at the crowd behind the plate. He focused on one person. Mandi
Li, his most-favorite tummy-scratcher, looked up from her laptop and
nodded. "I'm getting a weird heat signature from centerfield with my
FBI Heat and Evil Detector!" she said. "Wait, I'm detecting Evil as
well!" He thought as much!
   "Okay, buddy!" said Steve, who wasn't wearing his earpiece, so he
was unaware of either the heat or evil detection. "I'm going to throw
the pitch, and you're going to knock it out of the park like we
practiced! Remember what you're supposed to do!"
   Doc was sorry he had to disappoint Steve.
   Steve released the pitch. Doc immediately began calculating the
force that would be needed to propel the round projectile in the
direction it needed to go and at the speed that would be required.
Doc's tail did its duty. The ball headed straight for centerfield. For
the widows and the orphans and the kittens and iguanas!
   Doc lifted off immediately into the air. Steve was shouting
something at him. In his ear, Mandi was telling him it looked good.
The ball hit the invisible shield before Doc arrived, the splinters
like diamonds glittering in the sunlight. Doc was covered with them.
   The invisible floating object was invisible no more. Sparks flew
around the capsule and Red Fido, the reanimated Canine Communist
Corpse, glared savagely towards his hated enemy. Doc blinked then hit
the capsule with his paw. Red Fido's savage eyes widened and turned
surprised as the alien capsule he had bought on ebay crashed downwards
towards centerfield.
   Red Fido woke up to find Extra-Special Agent Steve Shooter, his ray
gun extended, the other Extras, ray guns also extended, and a local TV
crew, camera and microphone extended, surrounding him. The Hated
Enemy, Docrates, and some human female, well, probably female, all
humans looked alike to him, he was a dog after all, at least he had
been a dog before the whole zombie thing, were wrapping him in a
cocoon of some foil-like insulation they must have pulled out of the
wreckage. He pledged then and there to never again buy anything off of
ebay and furthermore never to buy sight unseen. As Docrates lifted him
off the ground probably to return him to super-puppy-prison he barked
in Russian Dog, "Foiled again. Curse you Docrates." Then he fell
unconscious. He had a wonderful dream about being a puppy again and
all bundled up in his person's arms.
   It's not easy being a Supragato. Busy all day long. Rarely able to
relax because there is always some batdoodoo insane super bad guy out
to ruin your day. Sometimes though you get a rest. On a boat. On a
lake. Where you can actually hover over the water and lap it up,
unlike the ocean, which upsets his tummy something awful. That's
really mean of the ocean. Speaking of tummies- aaahhh, it was so
wonderful to have Mandi on his r&r boat ride. She really knows how to
scratch his tummy. He couldn't see how all that gross mouth-pressing
Steve and Mandi were currently engaged in could possibly be pleasant.
Persons are weird. Oh, well, as long as she kept scratching his tummy
he was purrfectly happy.


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-----------------SONNET 87.363636-------------------
-----------TO THE ADMIRER OF A DARK LADY------------
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-----------Copyright 2015 Andrew Perron-------------
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Seek you the beauty of the universe
An expanse too wide to perceive in whole?
Even a god of eleventh degree
Cannot all describe, tho it were their role.
Topless towers, where clouds midwife new suns
The busy burning of empty black void
Dread hungry gears on which galaxies run
Unguessable flows 'round your planetoid
And countless souls living mortal lives
Spinning 'bout stars, leaving the dance too soon
Each equal within to broad trackless skies
Admired, in turn, by quasar and moon.
  So know, gazer on the starstuff above
  You are linked, heaven and earth, by love.


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--------------THREE SHEEPS TO THE WIND--------------
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-------------Copyright 2015 Tom Russell-------------
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If ewe want to understand what's been happening the last two days, the
first thing ewe need to understand is how Linguistic Diseases work,
and the broader class of Conceptual Diseases in general. Languages
aren't really living things: they have no organs, no tissue, no
biological processes, no physical form at all. Because of this, they
never wool be infected by a virus or bacterium. Conceptual Viruses and
Conceptual Bacteria infect the IDEA of something, not the thing
itself, which doesn't itself exist. "This is an important
distinction," says Doctor Ronald Shepherd, Director of the Center for
Conceptual Disease Control (CCDC). "People mutton't get the idea that
the language itself is under attack. That's just baad science."
    Linguistic infections-- or rather, infections of our concept of
language, especially of the punning variety-- tend to be more
inconvenient than anything else. Shepherd lambasts the fear-mongers
working overtime on the twenty-four hour news networks, and cautions
that recent events are nothing for ewe to wooly about. "There was, for
example, a particularly rambunctious mathematical virus that
invalidated the relationship between the surface area of a sphere and
the volume of a cylinder as proven by Archimedes, which nearly ended
three-dimensional geography as we know it. This was four years ago,
before the CCDC was adequately funded. It was a close shave, and
people finally understood that when something like this hits, you
can't afford to be asheep at the wheel."


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-----------------BEYOND THE FIELDS------------------
---------------------Part 21------------------------
-----------Copyright 2015 Saxon Brenton-------------
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In Berlin the two women went to a library. There weren't any open on
New Year's Eve, but that didn't present any particular problem. Only
once did they encounter a security guard, and Joan simply made him
forget that they were there and then sent him away. Otherwise they hid
themselves away in a reading room on the upper floors. Then, shortly
before midnight and after a several hours of research Deidre yawned
and stretched.
   Joan looked up from where she was skimming through a physics text.
"Tired?" she asked.
   "Yes," Deidre admitted. "But more hungry than anything else." She
glanced down onto the street below. "How do you feel about getting a
late night snack before the crowds disperse and the shops close?"
   Joan put down the book. "I'm not particularly hungry, but then I
don't have a human biology." They walked down the stairs and with a
deft pick of a lock on a rear service entrance exited the building as
easily as they had broken in. On the way down Deidre yawned twice
more, prompting the angel to add, "Although I think you'll need some
sleep more than you need food."
   Deidre grinned ruefully. "I'm not going to disagree with that," she
said as they wended their way across the street to a shop selling
bratwurst and coffee - and in the process passing Marcus Oustler who
had decided to indulge in sentimentality and enjoy one last evening
among other happy people before his trip to Rastenburg on the morrow.
   Oustler had caught a few hours rest at hotel room booked under an
assumed name, and now feeling refreshed he was up for the New Year's
Eve festivities. He wasn't actually putting his self-imposed duties
out of mind, but he had managed to lighten his own mood. Now his brief
dalliance with the pretense of normality came to a screeching halt.
   Those two again! What...? Were they following him?
   Well, they didn't seem to be. However they were still wrapped in
that aura of unnoticeability, so clearly they were up to something.
Was this in any way a potential threat to him? Well, Marcus didn't
have anything more urgent to do right now. Lightly wrapping himself in
shadow to create his own aura, he followed.
   "Have you found anything interesting?" asked Joan.
   "Depends on what you call interesting," said Deidre. "The
historical record isn't exactly what you'd call coherent. I've found
references to multiple Chancellors, all of who supposedly ruled at the
same time." They collected their food and drink and walked back out
onto the street. "If it wasn't for your discovery that this place is
falling to pieces I'd suspect something like Orwell's 1984, where the
Ministry of Truth keeps rewriting history, and guess that in this case
someone got very sloppy about keeping the documentation consistent."
She sighed tiredly. "But now..."
   "But now?"
   Deidre poked out her tongue and made an indelicate noise. "A world
where the Americas don't exist, but that's still where the chocolate
comes from? Maybe I'm just overly tired, but I've stopped being
surprised by any of this nonsense anymore." She looked around at the
thronging New Year's Eve crowds with an expression that mixed
weariness, irritation and sadness. "They're all going to die, aren't
they?"
   Joan's instincts were calibrated to interacting with mortals whose
knowledge about the Manichean war between good and evil had been
acquired at least one step removed from front line battle. Under other
circumstances she may have simply tried to keep spirits buoyed with
some platitude: 'We mustn't give up hope'. Or even: 'We don't know
that for certain.' But Deidre was not clueless, even if her take on
the matter was limited. "Yes. Yes, they are," she admitted.
   Deidre nodded, bit into her bratwurst, then asked, carefully, "Am I
correct in hoping that they'll at least get an afterlife?"
   Joan looked at her in surprise. Deidre explained, "This place may
be breaking up and dissolving, but some of it's slipping out to infect
our world, so it's obviously not some sort of sticky dimensional trap.
But you've already indicated that the Akashic Record is growing fuzzy,
so it might not necessarily be just their physical world that dies."
   "I... hadn't thought of that angle, actually."
   Deidre gave her a droll look and said, "Ms Smith, you have been
insufficiently paranoid." This elicited a chuckle, which was
interrupted as the crowds around them began to count down to midnight.
   "Well, goodbye 1963," said Joan.
   The Berlin clock towers tolled midnight, and a renewed frenzy of
celebration erupted. "Happy 1963!" people called. Deidre was briefly
bemused but quickly got a sinking sensation. She reached into her bag
for the newspaper that she had kept, the one with the article about
the zombie plague, and together the human and the angel took note of
the fact that the date had quietly rearranged itself to read 1962.
   "Hmm," went Joan. "A world where history doesn't work turns out to
be literally a world without history."
   "Makes a dreadful type of sense," agreed Deidre. "How long do you
think they've been reliving 1963 over and over?"
   Joan didn't get a chance to answer, because it was at that moment
that the ravening monster that Lee Ardock has been transmogrified into
leapt through the crowd and attacked.


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--------------SEVEN 'GAINST THEBES------------------
---------------------Part 20------------------------
------------Copyright 2015 Tom Russell--------------
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   "I see your point, Mr. Adams, in that specific case," said Ned,
"but this ain't the middle ages, and no one's talking about you going
back-and-forth."
   "True, but who's to say that once one goes back, they don't also go
forth?" said Adams. "It could be a thing that one grows accustomed to,
becoming easier every time. Like eating radishes, or killing a man.
And I am nothing if not a creature of habit. I already eat far too
many radishes, and have killed far too many men. I don't know if Saint
Peter, et al, would look too kindly on me if I added side-switching to
my list of indiscretions."
   "Look upon it this way, sir. Suppose you came across a man that was
beating another man to death. Would you intervene?"
   "It depends if I like the man or not."
   "Which man?"
   "Either man, or both," said Adams with a shrug.
   "Let's suppose both men are strangers to you. White men, if that
makes a difference. Would you stop one from murdering the other?"
   "All other things being equal, I reckon I would. Least I hope I would."
   "Now, if you were to discover that the man being beaten had killed
the other man's son, and threw that poor child down a well, what
then?"
   "I might not be in such a hurry to intervene," said Adams.
   "So, when you receive new information, you switch sides," said
Strife, smiling. "And that's the naturalest thing in the world, sir.
If I didn't think you were capable of that, I wouldn't be trying to
talk sense into you."
   "I haven't the slightest what we're talking about, anymore," said
Peake, irritated. "Once Mr. Adams starts talking, it's hard to follow
the thread."
   "Well, Jack," said Ned Strife, "I aim to hire him."
   "You can't be serious," said Peake. Strife glowered, and Jack
shrunk away from him, like a dog what was about to get a beating.
"What I mean, Ned, is that I don't rightly see what he can do that I
can't do better and faster."
   "Better company, for one," said Adams. "And I'm better at killing."
   "Micah Jenkins surely thought so," said Peake.
   "Lucky I don't have a gun for this bullet you gave me," snarled Adams.
   "Thought you didn't need one to kill me with it," said Peake.
   "Enough," said Strife. "You're like a couple of old women. Jack, he
ain't no threat to your position here. I've never doubted your
competency."
   "Well, you should," said Adams. "After all, your brother's still alive."
   Strife's eyes darted furiously at Peake.
   "He's lying," said Peake. "I shot poor Paul full of holes."
   "You shot someone who looked like poor Paul full of holes. An injun
skin-walker hired by your brother to take his place. Just like the one
sitting at your table now. You think Pinkerton has the money to find
someone with your exact face? (Apparently Mr. Peake did.) It's redskin
magic. Your brother had sent us to infiltrate your ranch, and Jack
here was kind enough to give us the guided tour. Way I see it, either
he's doing some double-dealing of his own, or he's too stupid to see a
trap when it's a-coming."
   Peake lunged across the table. "Lies!"
   "Sit down," barked Strife. (Peake sat.) "Have you any proof of this?"
   "I'm afraid so," said Adams. "The injun has a locket what belongs
to Hank. Intended to show it to the oriental." Peake became a blur,
and when he sat down again, Hank's locket sat opened in the middle of
the table. "I guess this is me switching sides, then. Has a peculiar
feel to it. I'm sorry about this, injun. We never had a chance,
anyway, and he got my dander up, talking about Micah Jenkins like
that, and one fool thing led to another. You know how we Southerners
are."
   "I know," said Skin of Snake quietly.
   "You was a good man to ride with," said Adams. "But now that's
over. Mr. Strife? I'd like to do it, if you don't mind." Strife handed
Adams a gun.
   "Guess this bullet ain't for you after all, Jack," lied Adams. Then
he put it in the injun's head.


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-----------------SEE YOU NEXT MONTH-----------------
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