Standing up again was painful, but looking at the full extent of the damage was doubly so. Nothing was left of the boathouse that Pyrodaemon and Emily had gone rushing into just a few seconds earlier, and in John's mind that meant only one thing. His heart sank as low as it could possibly go, and then decided to sink just a little lower for good measure. All that remained was a section of boardwalk sticking out over the water, its end charred and ruptured by an intensely unhappy past. John spent a few minutes standing at the end of the boardwalk, staring up at the dark clouds and deciding to mope about just how badly things had gone. Next came the assumption that it was all his fault, followed by the need to feel guilty for having decided to come back to the lakeside in the first place. After having moped for some time, he turned around to see that a rather putrid fellow was standing a few feet behind him, having been spending his time in a not dissimilar fashion.

He could have sworn he'd seen the putrid bloke in question running into the boathouse with Cedric in his arms, and so John immediately took a step back and waited for the worst to happen. It didn't. Instead, a putrid tongue started to force some less-than-putrid words past an excessively putrid pair of lips.

'Pyro was in there...' the demon whimpered.

'Oh.' This was the last thing John had expected to happen. He watched as Lluchmoor broke into tears, covering his face with a pair of putrid hands. After a few seconds, John decided he'd have to say something.

'Who's Pyro?'

'My...brother,' Lluchmoor managed to interject between sobs.

'Are you...' John stopped to think of the right expression, but then gave up and went for the more obvious wording. 'Are you the bad guys, then?'

'Yes... but... but he only wanted to be happy...' Lluchmoor bawled, trying rather unsuccessfully to defend his brother's actions.

'Oh. I'm sorry.' John wasn't sure whether to feel angry or sympathetic, but he ultimately chose the latter. Whoever this guy was, he certainly wasn't the evil genius.

This sort of thing wasn't meant to happen to evil geniuses. Somehow, he'd managed to only just escape being killed by an explosion that he himself had caused several days in the past, only to find himself stuck in the middle of nowhere and very much empty-handed - the swan he'd been carrying when he had entered the portal had now mysteriously disappeared, as had the girl who'd been chasing after him. Pyrodaemon looked around. The place he'd just arrived in didn't look terribly hospitable, consisting simply of a dismal, sweeping landscape dotted with trees, rocks, hillocks and various other objects of little interest.

This would have been an acceptable enough place to be stranded had it not been for the forked lightning on the horizon and the pack of oddly-mutated boars roaming on the opposite side of the valley. Worse still, it seemed that every now and again, one of the boars would inadvertently stumble across some kind of dangerous phenomenon which would sweep it up into the air by one leg, swing it around and send it hurtling quite a distance through the cold, dank air before it hit the ground. Meanwhile, others ended up experiencing regular problems with distorted patches of space-time that seemed to try to burst as they passed, knocking the poor creatures out of kilter. In all his days as a demon, Pyro had never seen anything quite like this, and his fear of the unknown was enough to make him think twice about his prospects of ever finding a way out of his new surroundings.

Turning around, he noticed an old, badly-made sign that didn't particularly endeavour to allay his fears:

Welcome to the Wastelands

Pyrodaemon took this as an indication that his placement in this predicament was deliberate, and thus decided to sit down and think for a while. He really had tried hard not to end up in this sort of situation — he'd failed in his attempt to destroy the Earth and thus gain immortality, and now he'd ended up stranded in the middle of nowhere and playing by someone else's rules. Damn. What would his father think if he could see him now? For the first time in the while, Pyrodaemon began to lose his evil edge, only to find that it was simply there to cover over the depression he felt from having ended up stuck on a random backwater planet with only his halfwit brother for company. Pyro still remembered the good old days back on their home planet — they'd spend the day doing completely pointless but nonetheless enjoyable things such as chasing after boars only slightly less ugly that the ones Pyro could see now, after which they'd return home to find that their father had cooked them the ever-predictable yet delicious honey roast boar for dinner. Then one day they'd come back to find that their father had just vanished into thin air, never to return. Desperate to find him, the pair had re-enacted the events which had led to his disappearance, only to end up stuck on planet Earth, a place full of people who had neither the time nor the roast boar for demons like him.

Hungry and in a state of reasonable despair, Pyro checked his pockets to find only a packet of jelly babies and a piece of fluff. Deciding he wasn't in the mood for either, he simply sat and watched as the boars tried with varying levels of success to sweep majestically across the undulating plains.

Meanwhile, Emily was standing on more or less the same spot, give or take a few thousand years and the odd metre or two. What had once been an expansive wilderness had now been replaced by something else entirely, but for the moment Emily was aware of neither her surroundings nor their history. She could see four walls, a floor and a ceiling — all white — and that was it. No doors, no windows, and no apparent source for the harsh light which served only to make the room seem emptier. Even more bizarrely, it was utterly quiet save for the sound of Emily's footsteps, which nonetheless failed to produce an echo as she paced around the room. Emily was just starting to think how incredibly impersonal the room was when a booming voice announced:

'E_MILY M_ASHAM.'

Emily stood shocked for a second, but then her mind told her to reply and so she uttered a rather perturbed 'Yes?'

Y_{OU ARE} C_{HARGED WITH} A_{BETTING THE} A_TTEMPTED E_{SCAPE OF A} C_ONVICTED C_{RIMINAL FROM THE PLANET} E_{ARTH. SINCE YOU ARE NOT A} C_{YGNIAN AND DUE TO THE} S_{EVERITY OF YOUR} C_{RIME, YOU HAVE NO RIGHT TO A} T_{RIAL UNDER THE} F_OREIGN P_LANETS J_URISDICTION A_{CT. YOU ARE THEREFORE} S_{ENTENCED TO} I_NDEFINITE A_{MNESIA AND} D_{ISGUISAL; HOWEVER, DUE TO YOUR SPECIES BEING} I_{NCOMPATIBLE WITH THE} A_{MNESIA PROCESS, THIS PART OF THE} C_{HARGE WILL BE} W_{AIVED. DO YOU HAVE ANY} Q_{UESTIONS RELATING TO THE} C_{HARGE OR THE} D_{ISGUISAL PROCESS?}

'But I didn't help any criminal try to escape!'

I _AM A_{FRAID YOU DID.} W_E I_{NTERCEPTED YOU PASSING THROUGH A} P_{ORTAL — YOUR ONLY} C_{OMPANION WAS ONE} C_EDRIC V_ESALIUS, C_{ONVICTED TWENTY YEARS AGO AND} S_{ENTENCED TO TWENTY-FIVE YEARS ON YOUR HOME PLANET.}

Cedric the swan: a criminal? It didn't make sense, but Emily would still have to start thinking straight if she was going to avoid whatever it was these people were going to do to her.

'No. You've got it wrong. Someone else was travelling with Cedric — I had to follow them through to escape certain death.'

T_{HAT SEEMS} U_{NLIKELY, MS} M_{ASHAM — WE WOULD HAVE} K_{NOWN IF THERE WAS SOMEONE ELSE TRAVELLING THROUGH THE} P_ORTAL. B_{ESIDES, YOUR} S_{ENTENCE HAS ALREADY BEEN} P_{ASSED, AND IT WOULD SEEM THAT YOU ARE JUST} W_ASTING T_{IME. BEGIN THE PROCESS}.

'Please! I'm innocent...' Emily cried, but the voice had gone. A few seconds later, so had hers. Without warning, Emily's clothes melted away, being replaced by a thick down of feathers, and the ground suddenly became a lot closer than it had been. Even more confusingly, her nose and mouth began to turn a rather unusual shade of yellowy-orange and grew outwards into what might almost be described as a beak. By the time she had realised what was happening, it was all over — Emily was now a perfectly normal swan.

On the Subject of Pie Archive

AlexAshman

15.11.07 Front Page

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