On the Subject of Pie - Episode 13
Created | Updated May 3, 2007
Tertiary Phase - Episode Thirteen
The concluding episode of the Secondary Phase can be found here.
Nothing much happened. Or at least that would have been the case if we were to simply ignore the near-catastrophic consequences of what had just happened. But since it's already happened it's now a matter of the past, and so for some reason we have already begun to consider the prospect of what will come directly after this not-much-happening as being far more interesting than the rock cake-related events that came before it. And so we shall continue with the story.
Everywhere had become rather dark all of a sudden, to the point that John decided that he was finding it hard to see anything whatsoever. He'd never seen an eclipse before, but a nagging thought at the back of his mind kindly pointed out that he must be absolutely bloody stupid if he thought that this was an eclipse, what with it having become incredibly dark and very quiet in such a short space of time. There hadn't been anything about this in the morning papers, unless you counted the forecast of light showers, which had of course turned out to be a slight under-exaggeration of the situation right up until the moment when all the rain had simply stopped. It was so eerily quiet now that he actually wished the rain would come back — where exactly had it gone? Had aliens taken it? Was it a sign of a coming apocalypse? Was it just another consequence of global warming?
More importantly, John wondered if he had anything left in his fridge at home — the shops would probably be closed due to the prevailing circumstances and he was starting to feel just a tad hungry. The secondary consideration of how he was to get home seemed simple enough: he just needed to find the torch he'd put in his pocket about a year ago and hadn't used since. However, some fool had decided to remove the torch some time ago and replace it with a single feather, and John had a funny feeling that the fool in question was him. Luckily enough, the feather now glowed in the dark, so John decided to use it instead.
As he walked through Somers Town, John remarked to himself how quiet it was, but then put this down to it being a residential area. Everyone was probably at home watching the news — after all, it seemed as if the end of the world was on the way, and the coverage of that sort of thing ought to be reasonably thorough. Then again, all they'd really be able to do would be to report every couple of minutes on the fact that it was indeed still dark, and that the air was indeed still filled with a smell similar to that of freshly-baked rock cakes. Then they'd skip to the weather, which would solve the entire mystery by explaining that it was just getting a bit cloudy again, and that a strong westerly wind was blowing in from Bakeryland.
John continued to let his mind wander and wasn't paying much attention to his surroundings until he reached the back streets of Camden. He hoped that there would be someone around, but for some reason he couldn't hear anyone, hadn't passed anyone in the street yet and was starting to get just a little nervous. John decided to quicken his pace, reckoning that this was the best thing he could do to avoid a confrontation with whatever form of evil was currently mucking up his afternoon, and in doing so walked straight into a very large baked-goods monster.
Emily was getting her fair share of unconsciousness, dreaming of the days during her childhood when her mother would take her to the baker's and buy her a freshly-baked gingerbread man. A smile was just starting to form on her careworn face when she regained consciousness thanks to the efforts of a large white swan who was getting fed up of being used as a pillow, and drooled upon to boot. Emily's embarrassment at having passed out for seemingly no reason was soon replaced by a sense of confusion, with the now-visible swan's glowing feathers almost blinding her as she tried to regain her bearings. However, instead of spending the next few minutes pursuing an internal soliloquy as to what was going on, Emily quickly took off her coat and wrapped it around the body of the swan, smothering Cedric's overly-bright down and allowing her to see the interior of the taxi cab. They'd stopped, and Emily was about to lean forward to ask the driver what was going on when a more or less self-explanatory noise came drifting rearwards from the front seat.
Urrggggghhhhh...
Emily had had her fair share of strange cab rides in her time, but none of them had involved the driver being replaced by a huge rock cake. Emily sat paralysed for a few seconds, but soon realised that the worst had probably already happened and started to think properly again. Now was probably a good time to leave, and Emily did so as quickly as she could, pausing only to hand the rock-cake monster a tenner. He could keep the change.
'Pyro? Where are you? Did it work?'
The fire had started to die out quite quickly, and now Lluchmoor found himself just a little scared by the way it had gone almost completely dark. Having spent several minutes looking around him and worrying about the strange moaning noises wafting in on what seemed like a cold breeze, he finally made a decision that he reasoned might just save his life. He shut his eyes and stood very, very still.
Five minutes later, Pyrodaemon arrived in the garden, using the very obvious technique of casting a small flame to provide a means of seeing, and therefore not walking into, every single solid object on the way out of the house.
'Lluchmoor!? What on earth are you doing?'
'Huh? How could you see me? I had my eyes closed!'
Pyro sighed. It was pretty obvious who was responsible for this mess, but it would be an exercise in futility trying to explain to Lluchmoor just how incredibly stupid he was, and so Pyro just sat down on the singed grass and moped. As he did so, he noticed that a sort of miniature jelly baby massacre had occurred close to where he was sitting — it seemed that Lluchmoor hadn't realised that the things weren't heat-resistant and had sat them down on the floor near the fire to watch while he played around with the diesel. While he wasn't a man of science, he was certainly a man of fire, and Pyrodæmon therefore took a minor degree of interest in the way in which the jelly babies nearest the fire had been more or less completely obliterated, while those further back had suffered slightly less damage. However, the really interesting bit was that, out of the thirteen jelly babies lying on the grass, one had survived. Pyro noticed that the jelly baby was shielded from the fire by a small rock. This seemed fair enough, except for the fact that at some stage in the past, the small rock had been carefully carved to make it look uncannily like a swan.
