On the Subject of Pie - Episode 17
Created | Updated Jul 26, 2007
Tertiary Phase - Episode Seventeen
The owl was starting to get bored. The whole world had gone dark, which would probably suit most people but, being nocturnal, the owl was starting to get just a little sleep-deprived. With the sleep deprivation came a headache, a slight sense of nausea, a definite lack of energy and a sort of wobbliness, but at least, the owl thought to itself, it hadn't started hallucinating.
Just then, a big, yellow and rather horrifically ugly tow truck carrying a minor blazing inferno sped past.
'But it's burning the back of my neck!'
'I don't care. Besides, we're nearly there.'
Stealing the towtruck from the now late, overweight middle-aged mechanic had turned out to be quite an incredibly smart thing to do, and Pyrodæmon congratulated himself on the move. If this was going to work, they'd have to move the entire pyre of logs and ashes all the way to the boathouse in the middle of the lake, something which would have taken more than just a stretch of the imagination with the old Vauxhall Astra Merit, which was still lying burnt out by the side of the road in such a way that suggested it was now part of the scenery and was being preserved by National Heritage.
Still, just because they had the tools for the job didn't mean it was an easy one — they'd managed to dump half of the truck's contents while going round a roundabout on the north circular, although thankfully nobody seemed to have noticed. Pyro had eventually realised that this was due to the fact that the world's population had been turned into rock-cake monsters, a fact which also explained why everyone had thoughtlessly left their cars in the middle of every road — and so Pyro had decided to take advantage of this fact and started to drive as fast as he could, using the truck's bumper to smash cars out of the way while doing 70mph in a 50 zone. Speed camera after speed camera had flashed as they made their way rapidly out of London, but Pyro had just smiled and pulled a series of sarcastic poses, laughing maniacally in the sort of way that most villains reserve for the moment between executing their plan and meeting a sticky end.
However, by the time they reached the lake, Pyrodæmon's laughter had all but stopped. He had forgotten the precise details of their first visit to the lake, which had involved completely and utterly destroying the boathouse — the same boathouse that they now needed to use in order to reverse the consequences of blowing it up in the first place. This whole thing was starting to give him a headache.
Having got the wincing Lluchmoor out of the truck, Pyrodæmon wandered over to where the boardwalk leading to the boathouse had been. Parts of it were still there, leading out into the water before stopping short, the last few yards having either been blown apart by the explosion or slowly burnt away by the fire that had resulted. He wandered out along the boardwalk, which as he had correctly recalled was a rather simple affair consisting of oak wood and chicken-wire, seemingly having been replaced in the last ten years but not checked up on since. As he stared at the calm, empty water, it occurred to him that no-one would ever turn up to check on it now that the world had more or less come to an end, and so there was little hope that the boathouse would just spring back up again while he was looking in the other direction. Despite this, Pyro tried looking in the other direction a couple of times just to see what happened, but for some bizarre reason this didn't work. However, as he looked around for a third time he realised that he had been too busy mucking around to notice that Lluchmoor had somehow managed to set himself on fire again, and was therefore in the process of sprinting off the end of the boardwalk and into the nice, cold water. Pyro used the split second before his brother knocked him tumbling into the water to mouth a couple of choice swear words, after which the water came up and knocked into him equally hard.
As Pyrodæmon emerged from the water a short way from the tow truck, he quickly discovered the means through which Lluchmoor had managed to set himself on fire again. Having previously sat quite happily on the flatbed of the truck, the pile of burning logs had decided that the moment shortly after Lluchmoor had started to muck around with them was in fact a very opportune moment to go tumbling off the truck and onto the muddy floor. While it had been enough to set Lluchmoor on fire, this sort of event had eventually proved too much for the fire which, by way of protest against the way it had been treated, had decided to go out. Pyro was about to get incredibly angry about this when he realised that he had dropped the swan's feather as he was knocked into the lake. He was thus about to get incredibly angry at himself instead when he turned around to look at the lake, and his mind was changed once more.
Although the world around it was still dark, the boathouse had decided to reappear in the middle of a light-filled bubble, complete with that funny sort of distortion haze that you'd expect to see around your average temporal distortion. A gentle breeze was blowing inside the bubble, wafting leaves around inside it, despite the fact that the dark water which surrounded it was dead still and intended to stay that way for the remainder of all eternity. Pyro found this odd until he reasoned that the bubble was centred on the point where the feather had touched the water, as if to suggest that the very down of the swan they were after had the power to restore the world to how it was before. Pyro rejected this thought as fanciful and simply decided that he was happy to have the boathouse back again, albeit at the cost of his only means of tracking the swan. He'd just have to wait and see if it turned up.
Meanwhile, John, Emily and Cedric are busy sleeping, although they won't be for much longer. In the meantime, however, it should be noted that all three of them are snoring.
