Episode 89: Excerpt from THE BOOK OF IRYIEN

THE BOOK OF IRYIEN CHAPTER 37

1. Then, there, in front of Her Radiance was assembled the Great Crag. It was defended mightily by a number of Harlots arrayed all in leather and steel. And some brass, mostly fashioned into polearms of acute pointiness. And rather strappy boots. 

2. Here She paused for a moment, to have constructed in front of Her great presence a wall. Stacked like cordwood, a dozen dozen fighters lay onto one another, creating a defensive shield and protecting Her most Holy personage. And her Chosen Dancer, the Xoe.

3. On Her right flank, Iryien saw the Mad Martigan toiling with a pair of tubular weapons designed to discharge projectiles. And while he had difficulty exhorting one of them to discharge it's payload, the other he discharged repeatedly into the left flank of the enemy.

4. This annoyed them greatly.

5. Three of the enemy's greatest warriors issued forth from yon Crag with intentions of divesting Mad Martigan of his weapons. Mad Martigan attempted to keep them at bay with his Device for Generating a Hot Cube of Steam, Radius 5' - but he was slow to get it up and soon was entertaining one of the warrior maidens at the base of his pole.

6. Meanwhile, directly in front of Her Radiance, the monk known as Kobayashi was riding on the back of a fish characterized by a cartilaginous skeleton, five to seven gill slits on the side of its head, and pectoral fins that are not fused to the head. The monk tried to divest one of the warrior maidens of her brass polearm, but found himself roughly dismounted instead.

7. Taking no heed of his injurious unseating, Kobayashi attempted to get back on the fish characterized by a cartilaginous skeleton, five to seven gill slits on the side of its head, and pectoral fins that are not fused to the head that threw him by polearm vaulting onto its back.

8. Only he missed.

9. And instead the monk flew ever on, over the fish, etc. and towards a young flaming boy who, at this particular moment, was puffing himself up something fierce.

10. The boy had, in fact, just been instructed to self-immolate by his parental unit, Xeno.

11. You see, having sent his only-begotten son, rolling and on fire, into the Crag, Xeno thought it would be a great idea to explode his son to breach the Harlots' defenses.

12. And, to some extent, it was. Only now, Kobayashi was about to land on the exploding child.

13. Luckily for Kobayashi, all of his vital organs had already been seared off and replaced with metal by an Xixchil surgeon on the Hammer of Grapthar, so the monk fell through the rapidly expanding fireball and took little notice. He landed, alone, on the hot sands of the Crag. He was surrounded by a ring of the enemy. He tried to escape...

14. On Her left flank, Iryien saw Takemiya make his way, quietly and with great stealth, to the mouth of the Crag. With great skill he approached undetected, and as he did so, he watched his acolyte struggle with shark riding, pole vaulting and sand digging, all in the same minute. Takemiya blinked at the blinding flash of light that was Troy, rejoiced to see his acolyte had survived, and winced at Kobayashi's  attempt to polevault out of trouble. Takemiya reached out and swiped a brass polearm from a passing Harlot and waded into the fray to save his flailing friend.

15. Xeno, by this time, had decided that animating a couple Harlots would be a great idea.

16. He managed to rescind the soul recall of two poor girls and had them shamble out to greet him. Looking only moderately worse for wear, the two girls escorted him through enemy lines and unto the House of Billy.

17. Delivered thusly, Xeno had the girls do a stiffening striptease, drawing out and distracting the chambermaids and allowing Xeno to penetrate the penthouse, never to be heard from again.

18. Iryien, seeing how easily the mortal gnome perpetrated the ruse, attempted the same.

19. She was not so lucky.

20. Sometimes, even a Goddess stumbles, and it was for some higher reason that Iryien, in an attempt to slide through the Harlots as one of their own, was discovered.

21. Five pairs of eyes turned and regarded Iryien's divine form. Five knives were drawn. Five bosoms heaved. Five warriors circled in, looking to eradicate the divine interloper.

22. "I am so out of here."

23. At that moment Iryien rose up above the fray and looking down, she saw the chaos wrought by her dearest friends and followers.

24. Xeno had gained entrance to Billy's penthouse.

25. Madmartigan had boiled two Harlots alive and was dissecting another.

26. Takemiya was armed, virtually invisible and watching Kobayashi...

26. Takamiya put his hand to his mouth.

27. He looked stricken, horrified.

28. He started to retch.

29. What was Kobayashi doing?

30. He was on top of a Harlot, backwards.

31. OMIGOD WAT IS HE DOING TO HER LEGS OMG HE RIPPED THEM OFF AND IS SWINGING THEM AROUND LIKE LEG MACES WHAT THE FUCK?!?!?

INTERLUDE: The Rise of Billy

Billy stared at the rectangular wall-mounted scrying device with a growing sense of agitation and distress. The confrontation on the beach was not turning out as he had planned, and he was damned if he was going to let this ragtag group of misfits barge into his realm and undo literally years of... weeks of, wait... days...

How long have I been here?

That wasn't important. What WAS important is that he had a good thing going here - booze, girls, fame... and he wasn't going to let this ungrateful group of misadventurers fuck it up.

Billy walked over to the bar, his robe flapping openly in the Automagic Air Coolination System. The chill reminded him of his start here in Billsylvania. Naked and unafraid he'd entered the dark gray realm... naked, unafraid and - quite frankly - tripping balls. The next few hours were pretty much a blur of hot sex, hot liquids and horses, for some reason. He had vague recollections of one or more girls crying, and of himself apologizing profusely through a mouth stuffed with cake.

But that was the past. The present was about what he had, what he earned... A few acres he could call his own. A penthouse in the sky. An elite army of battle-ready strippers willing to die for the lord of their realm. And while he wasn't quite sure he'd secured an heir to his red leather throne, he was certain there would be more than enough opportunity to bugger that bridge when he came to it.

He was just going to have to deal with these interlopers first...

He walked over to the tea table and picked up a tiny black box. He pointed it at the scrying device on the wall...

He pushed a button.

Episode 88: 299

A number of things had gone wrong. 

Xeno was not in his right frame of mind, certainly, after licking the epidermis of his very own Beanstalk of Urine. And he was probably still smarting a bit from the blow to the peripherals by the Rapidly Accelerating Dildo of Doom. And, well, when Mr. Pointy Hat meets up with Mrs. Tubular Weapon Or Other Device Designed To Discharge Projectiles Or Other Material, bad things tend to happen...

But at least Xeno had an iron hat, metallic skin and the warm, loving embrace of Chaos to fall back on.

So when a number of tiny explosions occurred within a small area ad combined forces to create one BIG explosion, the hat and the skin combined to prevent his head from being blown clean off. 

Chaos, it turns out, hung back until Kobayashi showed up.

For as soon as Xeno's limp, nearly lifeless body slumped to the ground, Kobayashi sprung into action. He reached out with his Jade Hand and felt under the now-flattened hat. Nose? Hmmm, nope. Mouth? Nope. Jaw? Oh, that's probably it over there on the linoleum. And this feels like what I imagine what a cerebral cortex feels like...

There was nothing for it. He would have to summon some Chaos to help.

"I summon forth... some Chaos... to help!"

There was a sickly flicker of yellow/green light. Kobayashi could feel things moving beneath his hand. Synapses were being restitched, sinews restretched, muscles and skin regrew at an enhanced rate. And, oddly enough, Xeno's head was almost perfectly restructered, with only a few, moderate side effects*.

And all the while this took place, Madmartigan looted the corpses.

Xeno snapped back to consciousness with a start and immediately regretted it. His skin was now a damp, smelly mess;  his codpiece had a permanent sag; he was hated and reviled by every squirrel and fawn; and he now had a dirty child by the name of Troy to look after. Death looked like an improvement.

So it was with self-loathing in his heart that he attempted to fling himself into the abyss of the coliseum. As he squelched past Iryien, however, his progress was halted by the 'mailled goddess. With a wave of her hand, Iryien stopped his suicidal attempt and refocused him. "Kill Billy," she whispered in her bedroom voice (if her bedroom contained a rack, a full set of graduated manacles and about a thousand whips). She then gently tossed (read, hurled) Xeno towards the sound stage door where Billy had last been seen. She also conjured up a mighty wind that gathered up Takemiya, Kobayashi, Saladin and Madmartigan and hurled (read, hurled really fast) them down the runway and out through the sound stage door behind Xeno. They were all carried with a swirling cry down, up and out the tunnel until they were spat out the other end...

...on a gray and desolate beach.

Away to the left, a cold, rolling sea brimming with dorsal fins. To the right, a high, impenetrable cliff. Ahead, a deep, mysterious crag, from where the occasional glint of gold (or was it brass?) could be seen. And from behind, the shuffling, cursing, broken-bottle-wielding mob led by Iryien and Xoe. 

Xeno, still adrift in a melancholy sea of self-loathing, tried to use his one really useful new power to change himself into something useful. His self-loathing, unfortunately, got in the way.

He rolled a mud bat.

Kobayashi, again trying to seize control of his life, attempted to summon an animal helper to assist the party in it's hour of need. His inability to seize control of anything, unfortunately, got in the way.

He rolled a mud bat.

Her name was Evelyn, and she had just been circulocuting a banza tree in the depths of the jungles of Gleg. It was mating season on Gleg, and her little mud bat flaps were flipping out, trying to find a mate...

She had just spotted a weak-willed specimen, perfect for dominating in the ancient rite of fFlarGha'a'aa when POOF! she was suddenly transported away from the lush jungles of Gleg and into a dark, gray land utterly devoid of hope and reason.

But there, flapping erratically before her very sonaculars, was an even weaker, more morally pliable specimen of the mud bat species. It looked like fFlarGha'a'aa would happen this day after all...

Xeno had just come to grips with the basic functionality of flying when he was hit from behind by a damp, flapping assailant. Claws, teeth, and some rather invasive appendages made Xeno's head and new body spin as he and the stranger would plummet, rise and plummet again in what would always be remembered by the somewhat flummoxed onlookers as 'the Mud Bat Dance of Love'.

Madmartigan, trying to seize control of reality, decided it would be prudent to see what was awaiting them in the distant crag. Cube-tipped polearm at the ready, he lurched across the gray sand, readying himself for whatever terrors the crag held. He could see one, two, a dozen shining shafts of reflected light standing tall in row upon row of... spears. 

Brass, stripper pole spears. And under the spears, hundreds of grim-visaged strippers were eyeing him, death in their kohl-lined eyes. One stripper, larger and more buxom than the rest, was pacing back and forth in front of the undulant legienne, shouting curses and taunts at Madmartigan, and raising heady jeers from the girls behind her.

Madmartigan turned on his heels and ran.

Iryien stood on the beach, devoid of 98% of her clothing, in front of thousands of drunken, leering men.

And she'd never felt better.

"Must be the sea elf in me being actually useful, for once," she thought. She had the men in her thrall. She could feel them behind her, their eyes boring into her like lasers. "And I am the diamond," she thought, "the diamond that will focus these drunken lasers into a force mightier than the armies of Alexander, an army greater than the hordes of Ghengis Khan, a horde fiercer than- whoa. Is that Xeno?"

Iryien bent over the broken and discarded body of a mud bat. It was heaving and sighing in a mix of agony and ecstasy.  Iryien could see the poor thing had suffered a number of broken bones, had severe dehydration, and on top of it all had contracted gonorrhea. She took pity on the poor, mad gnome and reached out her dainty hand to heal him...

Xeno sat up with a start. His skin had returned to normal. HE had returned to normal. And his has was a little pointier than it had previously been. Now only the dirty kid with the lollipop remained.

By now Madmartigan had returned and informed the party of what lay in wait for them in the crag. The party huddled together to strategize. The conversation went something like this:

"How many warriors await us in yon crag?"

"About 299, Iryien."

"Surely my army of thousands can dislodge such a puny force?"

"The mathematics lay squarely on your side, to be certain."

"I'm gonna summon another animal helper."

"Try to get one that actually helps and isn't a rapist this time."

"Oh, look! A shark jumped out of the water and landed right next to me! I think it wants me to ride it!"

"You got any tricks up your sleeve, kid?'
"I kin turna balla fire."

"Let me see."

WOOF

"Whoa. Cool. Think you can roll yourself into that crag over there?"

It was then that the charge was blown, and the battle was joined. Behind a rolling, flaming child rode a half-android monk riding a shark who decided to even things up a bit by casting a three-foot-high fog into the crag. The smell of burning hair extensions was only drowned out by the high-pitched screams of strippers who could not see the shark that was tearing through them to impale it with their stripper-pole spears.

It then, if you can believe it, got weirder.

Madmartigan now found himself caught between two different, but no less imminent, certain deaths - the mad, panicking strippers on one hand, and the horny, bloodlusting drunks on the other. So he did what only Madmartigan can do and attempted an Improbable Escape. (MM's subterranean life and penchant for fungus has allowed him to 'see', at certain times, a highly-improbably path out of almost any predicament.) Madmartigan relaxed, opened his third eye, and looked around to see a way out of this mess.

When he looked down, what he saw he looked an awful lot like Roseanne Arnold.

The charging mass of drunks in his immediate vicinity stopped dead in their tracks. Many of them fell over themselves to get away from him. Some were even heard to start crying. The strippers, seeing a large segment of the charge stop charging, stopped to take stock of the situation. Most of them were quite confused. 

But SOME of the strippers, mostly the ones who didn't take exotic stage names like Tiffini or Starrlyte - the ones who actually kept their given names, like Gretchen or Trudy - some of them stepped to the fore and sashayed over to the new girl, lust glistening brightly in their kohlless eyes. 

A couple licked their lips. A few made rude licking gestures. And one, a strapping six-foot specimen named Gert, brandished a hairy-knuckled fist that was as big as a canned ham.

Madmartigan blenched. A quart of blood dropped out of his body. And in the flash of panicked inspiration that occurs when your life (and your cherry) is on the line, he clicked his heels together three times and whispered to himself "There's no one like me, there's no one like me, there's no one like me..."

Slowly, inexorably, the succulent mound of flesh that was Roseanne morphed back into the hulking, man-beast that was Madmartigan. The aggressive strippers, whose object of lust now had  far more hair and far fewer wattles, grew repulsed, and ceased their advances.

Everyone breathed a sigh of relief. Well, everyone except the few dozen strippers who were being actively mauled by a land shark as it cut a swath through the fogy crag.

Iryien smiled as she looked over the violent and chaotic scene.

"It has been a good day," she said proudly to herself. "A good day indeed."