On the Subject of Pie
Created | Updated Jan 17, 2008
Quandary Phase - Episode Twenty-Two
As he stood up and looked around, John was met with rapturous applause from a crowd who had finished staring in awe at the porcine graveyard to their right and were now starting to make the link between John's arrival and the downfall of their evil king. As John went to say something, the opening of his mouth caused an eerie silence to fall upon the undulating hillsides which the thousands of figures dressed in ghostly white had gathered on. John had only one thing to say to them:
'Why can't life be simple, just for once? It's just not bloody fair!'
Having said that, he went to grab his feather, only to see that the king he had previously knocked down had already gone to do the same thing. John told him quite firmly to stop right where he was, but this only led Galen to turn on his heel and face John in a rather menacing manner only made worse by the presence of a rotting piece of boar between his teeth. He demanded to know just who John thought he was, to which John replied that he was John Pie, and that it was his feather, thank you very much. While the line had sounded good in John's head, it didn't seem to have the desired effect: Galen simply snarled that he was King Galen and that it was his feather now, and that was that.
John replied that if that was really the case, fine, but he just couldn't see why on Earth he wanted the feather so much.
Galen looked shocked for a moment as if John had said something completely unexpected, said a sarcastic 'thank you', grabbed the feather and then watched as it projected him many thousands of years backwards through the space-time continuum.
John was pretty sure that Galen wouldn't be coming back in a hurry, and thus delivered a rather caustic 'serves you right' to the space where Galen had just departed from and which now contained nothing but a levitating feather. Having finished his little performance, John turned around to find that the audience were applauding him again.
Emily watched as a couple walked along the riverbank while eating what smelled suspiciously like salmon sandwiches. Emily made a note of this as a possible source of food for later on, but the human side of her couldn't help but notice that something was wrong. The couple were young and looked normal enough, but their fashion sense was about twenty years behind. She watched for a while as the couple sat down at a conveniently-placed bench and finished their lunch, after which she quickly swam over and hopped up onto the riverside path to look for crumbs. Hearing more people coming, she quickly waddled back into the water only to see that the family of three which had disturbed her were also wearing some incredibly out-of-date clothes. Emily was just beginning to wonder what was going on when she looked straight at a young John Pie who was busy running along the riverside and generally having a good day.
Back in the bunker, Galen was busy plotting his revenge. He knew that his plan would have to involve getting to Earth in some way, and his little trick had caught a couple of passengers on the Cygnus to Earth portal. The only problem was that the portal didn't usually open for just any old reason, and when it did it could behave very oddly - a single feather in the mix had got him stuck here. He knew that in the far future, the Cygnians had taken control of the portals and built their peaceful empire around them, but Galen also knew that if he could just find a way of getting to the human before he managed to arrive on Cygnus for the first time, he could change the course of history and return to his rule over the entire world. Ok, so it would be one serious headache dealing with the paradox of preventing something which had already happened whilst being in the timeline created by it happening, but he'd muddle through anyway. That deserved a bit of maniacal laughter now, didn't it?
John was very nervous indeed. It was quickly becoming clear to him that he was standing in front of a large number of very impressionable people and had just banished a very ugly man from their world. He would just have to think carefully about what to do next – he didn't want to give them some bizarre guidelines that would shape their society in ways which would probably lead to it all ending in tears. While he was thinking about all this, someone from the crowd was busy picking their way through the field of charcoaled boars with the intention of retrieving the parcel that had previously appeared there. Unfortunately, the parcel was no more, and had been replaced by a series of large indentations which the envelope had somehow burnt into the ground, and which kept on tripping up the Cygnian who had previously been trying to get to the envelope. Fortunately, someone else had had the less obvious idea of climbing the slope on the other side of the valley, and their efforts were quickly rewarded.
'He has given us a message!' A voice boomed from the top of the hill in something decidedly duck-like and definitely different to English, telling the crowd of extremely impressionable people the sort of good news that would herald a new age of Enlightenment of the sort that usually involved the nailing of someone to a tree. Upon hearing these fateful words, the Cygnians reacted just as you might expect any fanatical crowd to and rushed straight towards John. Even if they did think he was a prophet of some sort, John wasn't particularly interested in being squashed, and so he retreated to the spot where the feather was still happily levitating. The feather took this as a sign that John wanted to travel somewhere more interesting and that he would like to do so rather soon, and so it responded by catapulting him to certain date in the future that corresponded almost exactly to the day on which it had first begun life as a feather.
The book was actually being rather helpful. As Galen flicked through the thin, yellowed pages, he found a host of embellishments giving away almost every secret about the Cygnians that he needed to know. It had been an incredible piece of luck that the book had just happened to be sitting in the sack on Pyrodaemon's back, but what was most peculiar was that it had somehow reorganized its contents at the very moment Galen had first touched it. There was obviously something very special about this book, as it seemed to be very excited to have ended up on the planet Cygnus and in the hands of a banished ex-king. In fact, the book was the only one of its kind, different from all the others which seemed to look just like it in a way which only the book itself knew. However, this detail wasn't particularly important to Galen, and so he eventually stopped letting the matter bother him, instead getting on with the preparations for a spell that would open the portal to Earth.
