Nevertheless, Alex smiled. It felt good to be out on a mission again where he would have the opportunity to fight something. For each of the last few days, he had woken up to his shoes lying haphazardly in the hallway, their insides wet and musty. Someone had obviously been removing them from the device in which he placed them each evening when he retired to his cabin, this device being a glass disinfectant unit that lay embedded in the hallway wall outside of his cabin door.
Alex knew exactly who this someone was, and just the thought of the cur deflated the smile on Alex’s face. The shoe-wetness indicated the phase of this time-loop marked by Arthur’s urine strike. During the last repetition of this time-loop, Alex had been the Chief Security Officer—Bagoo’s position now—and because of that position’s duties aboard the ship, he’d had no opportunity to leave the ship when Arthur began urinating all over everything.
The directive from the B.T.T. Governing Council during the last few repetitions through this time-loop was that the crew was not to prevent Arthur from performing his urine strike and was not to punish him for it in any way. This directive had not changed. Thus, Alex was thankful that he had been promoted in the intervening period. Though First Officer status came with a multitude of additional stresses, every additional moment of stress was worth it to be able to escape Arthur’s wake of chaos, if even for a little while. Alex planned to embark on Landing Crew missions such as this one as often as his duties would allow, passing as much time as possible off the ship and away from Arthur’s stench until Arthur and his companions recovered sufficiently from their past ordeals to be ready for their upcoming mission.
Alex shook his head, hoping to shake loose the thoughts of Arthur so that he might concentrate on his mission. He glanced around the Long Hall, which was a gigantic wooden building similar in construction to many other realities’ versions of Viking architecture that Alex had encountered during his years of B.T.T. service. At the far end of the Long Hall, he noticed a pair of the broccoli-men tossing a throwing axe back and forth. The action was so playful that had Alex not already been informed in his briefing dossier that axe tossing was one of the most popular children’s games in this reality, he would have come to that exact conclusion on his own. Occasionally, one of the broccoli-men would flub a catch and the axe would slice through a finger. Green blood would spray on the ground, but within a few minutes, the wound would seal, the finger would begin regrowing, and the broccoli-men would resume their playful throwing of the weapon.
Alex sat at the place of honor on the high table, which was positioned on a dais seven-feet tall against the north wall of the Long Hall. He squatted on a wooden bench that stretched the length of the table. Before him on the wooden table sat a meal that he had not touched. The meal consisted of a wooden bowl filled with dark brown sludge that resembled soft serve ice cream but smelled like cow manure.
To Alex’s left, the king of the broccoli-people leaned down over his own bowl, sticking his green tongue down into the mushy brown pile. A bulbous stomach grew from the king’s center so big it would have been twice as large as Alex if Alex curled into a fetal position. The king wore a crown of leaves and a cloak striped green and brown. Hung on the wall behind him were the king’s great sword—twice as tall as Alex—and the king’s wooden buckler.
Four gigantic fire pits were dug into the ground, spaced evenly across the expanse of the Long Hall. The fires that blazed within these pits were large enough that their tops licked the wooden rafters, darkening them with black soot. Gathered at the tables below the dais were the king’s subjects, a warrior clan that consisted of hundreds of broccoli-men with unkempt leaves growing from their faces in the shape of beards. According to Alex’s briefing, this band was a group of reavers known as the Brikings, who sailed along the coastlines and rivers of this earth, pillaging and conquering anyone into whom they could sink their blades. Alex respected their warrior prowess, but he disapproved of their lack of discipline and their utter nonchalance about the suffering they caused to their surrounding peoples.
Unfortunately for the Brikings, a foul beast named Grundelflower had begun terrorizing them. According to the briefing dossier, Grundelflower crashed through the door to the Long Hall every evening, killed as many warriors as it could kill, and then disappeared with their bodies, which it reanimated as albino ghouls that returned nightly with the beast to terrorize and murder the survivors.
Alex’s briefing dossier from the B.T.T. Governing Council made it clear that if he did not put an end to Grundelflower, the king of the broccoli-people would be abducted and turned into one of these soulless ghouls three nights hence. The B.T.T. was intervening because the king happened to be such a world-class warrior that the soulless-ghoul-version of him would eventually conquer this planet for Grundelflower. This circumstance itself would not normally cause the B.T.T. to interfere within a timestream, but if the B.T.T. did not act, then the ghoul-version of this king would eventually discover the means of both interdimensional travel and time travel through a highly illogical, random encounter with a wayward interdimensional time-cruise ship that would accidentally sail into this reality centuries in the future. The cruise ship would be boarded and conquered by Grundelflower and the ghoul-king, at which point the ghoulish plague of Grundelflower would spread across multiple timestreams and countless realities.
Rather than interfere in the cruise line’s business and distress its passengers by defending the ship at the moment when the incursion event was destined to occur, the B.T.T. Governing Council had decided that Grundelflower was the common denominator that should be eliminated in order to save septillions of lives and quintillions of dollars in time-cruise line profits.
The king finished slurping his meal and turned to Alex. The king smiled, a gesture that was rather off-putting, since the mouths of these broccoli-people consisted of a jagged gash that stretched across the center of their stalks. The king waved down at the dozen Purple Shirts who had accompanied Alex on this mission. The Purple Shirts were sitting at a table on the floor of the Long Hall, intermingling with the broccoli-people. Then the king nodded toward Alex before he called out across the great hall, “Raise your goblets, my Brikings. These thirteen brave warriors have come to fulfill our prophecy:
When thirteen outlanders gather,
once more Grundelflower slathers.
When the beast does attack,
these thirteen shall strike back.
Twelve brave soldiers shall fall
To bring peace to this hall,
but from these purple trav’lers doomed,
we’ll see bountiful spoils bloomed.”
Cheers rose from the crowd of walking, talking broccoli stalks. Many unsheathed their daggers and showed their approval by beating the tops of the wooden tables with their hilts. Alex smirked and glanced down at the dozen Purple Shirts. Most sat looking impatient or bored, but a few of them seemed to comprehend the king’s prophecy. These sat shaking in fright.
The king continued, “Tonight, my Brikings, we feast as always. Eat your meals, procreate with your florets, and when Grundelflower comes, do not engage. Our guests have requested that honor this eve.”
Cheers erupted ever louder, and then grew louder still when dozens of slender broccoli-peoples wearing leather thongs and bras entered the Long Hall. These had a paler color to their skin and narrower facial features than the Briking warriors. They danced in between the tables where the hundreds of Brikings feasted. Occasionally, these new entrants would lock eyes with a warrior and smile before displaying a vine that ended in a multicolored flower with petals of pink and yellow and turquoise. The warrior would then stand, bite the flower off the vine, chew it up, dig a hole in the ground a few inches deep, spit the chewed flower into the hole, and bury it.
Alex leaned over to the king and asked, “What are they doing?”
The king grinned. “Mating, of course. Come morning, each of those buried flowers will have grown into a newborn baby warrior. As guests of h
onor, you have the privilege to mate with every single female in our clan, and we shall raise your offspring as princes within our clan. Believe me, ugly traveler, when the flowers of these beauties enter your mouth, you shall experience pleasure as you have never known.”
Alex frowned. “I must concentrate on my mission right now. I shall focus on the mating afterward,” he replied.
The king shrugged. “After the battle, then,” he muttered.
But then the king grinned and snatched a couple females as they danced past. He bit the flowers from their stalks and moaned with pleasure. He said, “I shall not wait, for you never know what perils a night here may bring.”
As the night wore on, the females accosted Alex and his Landing Crew over and over and over. None acquiesced, for B.T.T. bylaws prevented them from undertaking mating rituals until a mission was complete. Eventually, the fires in the great hall burned down to cinders and the native people began preparing for sleep, which they did by digging into the soft soil and burying themselves until only their faces and the tops of their stalks stood erect above the ground.
As the Long Hall drifted closer to total darkness, Alex checked his chronometer. He nodded, stood, and donned his armor. He retrieved his metal cylinder from his holster. He switched the pair of settings to short range and permanent devolution, and then he stared at the end of the device as the laser erupted from it. The solid light formed a forward-curving blade that was two-feet long—a perfect semblance of the Kopis that Alex had utilized in his army for slashing and lopping off limbs back in his earth’s timestream. The most astute of the Purple Shirts noticed his actions, so these nudged their fellows and began preparing themselves for battle. They placed helmets on their heads and unholstered their Time-Phasers.
Alex stuck out his tongue and used it to press a button in his helm that allowed him to speak into his crew’s helmet receptors. He said, “E.T.A. of two minutes until tonight’s attack. Switch Time-Phasers to permanent devolution and activate your Laser-Eyes. Good luck. Listen for formations as I call them and try not to die.”
Alex listened to the sighs of the Purple Shirts as he toggled on his laser lenses. A faint buzz hummed in his ears as the laser lenses appeared in the eye-slits of his helm. The dark hall lit up as though the sun itself had waxed within the confines of the walls. He walked over to his Gravitron Saddle and prepared it for the upcoming skirmish. Though the battle was to take place inside the Long Hall where one would expect infantry-style combat, Alex was a cavalryman at heart, so he would be using Boukephalas II to fly about the place and provide flanking support to his troops from the air.
Something suddenly smashed against the gigantic wooden door to the Long Hall. The door was at least twenty-feet tall and twenty-feet wide and opened in the middle. The only thing that prevented it from crashing open from the force of the blow was a wooden plank that lay wedged into clasps extending from the wall on either side of the door, barring the door from opening.
Two of the Purple Shirts gasped in surprise when the smashing against the door repeated. Alex would have made a mental note to reprimand them later, but the king’s prophecy made it quite clear that there would only be one member of the Landing Crew returning home to experience a later, and Alex had a rather good idea of whom that would be.
The wooden shutters around the Long Hall began rattling. The king opened his eyes and frowned. He did not dig himself out from the ground. “Good luck,” he called to Alex. “I’ll be watching from here. And none of my Brikings shall intervene, just as our prophecy demands.”
Alex nodded. The crash sounded once more against the wooden door. The door cracked at the top, but it held. The shutters on the window rattled again, and then another crash slammed into the door. Alex stared at his chronometer as the pattern repeated. Got it, he thought with a nod. He pointed at two of the Purple Shirts who were standing rigid with fright. “You two, go to the door and unbar it immediately after the next crash. Then open it on my mark.”
Purpose seemed to drive their fright away. The two Purple Shirts nodded and sprinted to obey Alex. Alex continued, “The rest of you, Lambda Formation in front of the door.”
The remaining Purple Shirts formed the shape of an upper-case Lamba in front of the door, with the point of the letter in the position farthest away from the door. This would create a scenario where Grundelflower would bumble through the open door and into the center of the group so that the group could attack it from all sides.
Meanwhile, Alex mounted Boukephalas II. He changed the setting on his Pulsar Boots to Saddle Ready, and then flew upon his mount up to the rafters of the Long Hall. He intended to fly forward and attack Grundelflower from above when it was engaged with the Landing Crew’s Lambda Formation.
The crash rang out against the door once more. The buried broccoli-people gasped. The windows rattled. The two Purple Shirts to whom Alex had given the order removed the wooden plank barring the door. Alex counted to five. “Open the door, now,” he barked.
The two Purple Shirts began pulling open the door—one on each side because it opened in the middle—but they did not move fast enough. Alex sighed. Before the door was completely ajar, a gigantic beast crashed into it with its shoulder. The door swung the rest of the way open with such ferocity that the pair of Purple Shirts who were opening it were flattened against the wall. Blood sprayed from them like they had been transformed into a pair of grapes that had been smashed beneath the wheel of an oxcart. They died before they even had time to scream in surprise.
Since the pair of Purple Shirts had done half their job right, the door did not slow the beast’s momentum as the beast had expected it to, and it tripped and tumbled end over end. The creature rolled forward until it lay sprawled in the middle of the Lambda Formation. Grundelflower began to sit up. It was a gigantic humanoid cauliflower nearly the size of an Indian elephant. Its hands were larger than Alex was tall, its eyes were the pale color of snow, and out of its mouth grew gigantic fangs larger than Alex’s laser-Kopis. It stared at the buried broccoli-people with hate. Then it noticed the Purple Shirts and grew confused. “What you?” it muttered in broken language.
“Attack,” ordered Alex. All the Purple Shirts responded by firing their Time-Phasers into the thick body of the creature. It shrieked and melted into white goop. The Purple Shirts cheered. Alex smiled. They had defied the king’s prophecy by killing Grundelflower with nearly the entire group intact.
The king—still buried up to his face at the back of the hall—cleared his throat over and over until the Purple Shirts stopped cheering and looked over at him. He said, “Not to be the bearer of bad news, but that beast was actually but one of Grundelflower’s children.”
Alex frowned. Grundelflower’s children had not been mentioned in the briefing dossier. The Purple Shirts seemed to metaphorically provide an exclamation point to Alex’s confusion when they let out a collective, “Huh?”
The king frowned. He said, “You just killed Seedflower. He’s a bit of an over-excitable oaf, but he’s mostly harmless. Grundelflower generally uses him to announce her coming and lay out her terms. The terms are always the same: if we agree to sacrifice one of our own without putting up a fight, they simply leave with the one victim and allow the rest of us to live another day. Unless we’re excessively drunk, we usually do that, since Grundelflower is much bigger and scarier than Seedflower.”
As if on cue, a gigantic albino face appeared in the doorway. The face was so large that it took up the entire threshold. It had facial features similar to Seedflower, but its eyes were wider set and its skin was even more ghastly white.
“Yoo-hoo! I’m ready for my sacrifi-” Grundelflower began to say, but it cut itself off when it noticed the gooey corpse of its son.
Grundelflower screamed in rage. Its face disappeared from the doorway. White hands the size of oxcarts reached into the doorway, gripped the wall, and jerked upward. The roof of the Long Hall ripped off, revealing the starry sky and a hundred-foot tall angry c
auliflower. Grundelflower tossed the roof aside, and the wood went flying away into the distance.
Grundelflower howled. Then it opened its mouth even wider, and its fangs shot from its maw like dozens of bolts loosing from a ballista that had somehow been enchanted to shoot multiple bolts at once. The jagged fangs crashed into the heads of many of the buried broccoli-people. The victims lost their green color, fading to the white hue of a cauliflower. Then they withered and became ghouls with ghastly fangs and pale white eyes.
They ripped themselves from the ground and screamed, “Feed!”
Then they leapt onto Purple Shirts and living broccoli-people alike, chomping into them and devouring them bite by bite. Eight of the remaining Purple Shirts fell under the onslaught of these ghoulish undead broccoli-people, while the last two found themselves smashed beneath Grundelflower’s mammoth heel as the beast stomped its foot down upon them.
Alex scowled. Though the king had prophesied the deaths of the Purple Shirts, and though the B.T.T. Governing Council had seen fit to send Alex on this mission with exactly the number of crew to fulfill the king’s prophecy, Alex had given himself a glimmer of hope that at least a couple of the Purple Shirts might return with him. With that now out of the equation, he sighed and sprang into action, jerking hard on the throttle of his Gravitron Saddle.
Alex flew higher into the air. The giant cauliflower-creature swiped at him. He dodged the blow, and then he took evasive action as the beast launched another barrage of daggerlike teeth from its mouth. Most missed, though one scratched its way across Alex’s breastplate before it caromed harmlessly away.
Alex zoomed round and round the creature in wide circles. It spun to follow him. He sped up, and soon he was flying in a circle so fast that the creature grew dizzy, tripped, and fell. Alex used this opportunity to leap from Boukephalas II and plunge his laser-Kopis into the beast’s heart, or at least where he assumed the heart would be in such a foul creature. It screamed in pain and rage.
And Now, Time Travel Page 11