Tales of the Parodyverse

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CrazySugarFreakBoy!
Sun Jan 29, 2006 at 02:05:09 pm EST
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A Dreamcatcher in the Dreamtime (Tie-In to Untold Tales of the Lair Legion #253: Living Hell)
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A Dreamcatcher in the Dreamtime (Tie-In to Untold Tales of the Lair Legion #253: Living Hell)

“You’re going to have to make a choice,” Doctor Xeno Phobia, the Extraterrestrial Enigma, informed Dreamcatcher Kokopelli Foxglove, CrazySugarFreakBoy!, as they seemed to stroll through a kaleidoscopic mix of swirling colors together. “You’re going to die soon.”

“So … wait, what?” Dream struggled to sort through Phobia’s brief statement, as the surreal setting flowed around them. “I have to make the right choice, or else I’ll die?”

“No, you’re going to die regardless,” Phobia dismissed. “The choice is how you’ll die.”

“So, why am I going to die?” Dream wondered, somewhat surprised by how calmly and casually he was taking this prediction. For a moment, the disorienting lack of a fixed landscape surrounding him made him suspect he was merely dreaming all of this, except his skin was its ordinary human hue of Caucasian beige, and he could somehow sense his eyes were a faded shade of jade and his hair was an autumn tint of auburn. In his current subconscious, he always imagined himself with fluorescent orange hair, neon green eyes and day-glo yellow skin, just like he had whenever he wore his Impossibilitium Silly Suit.

“That Silly Suit is a big part of it, for starters,” Phobia explained, almost as though he could follow the stream of Dream’s thoughts. “You’ve been drawing an awful lot off the Creative Chaos powers of your Impossibilitium, not just in the number of times you’ve completely healed yourself, but also in your continued maintenance of that Schrödinger’s Cat manifestation of will and energy who appears in the form of your ex-girlfriend.”

“Wait … Izzy?” Dream checked. “You’re saying that I’ve been making Izzy real?”

“This is where we nudge up against the limits of the human definitions of terms such as ‘real,’” Phobia sighed as he waddled forward wearily on his three squat legs. “I’ll try to couch these concepts in paradigms that you can comprehend. The version of Isabel Shapiro whom you and so many others have seen, heard and talked with, after the death of her biological counterpart, is every bit as ‘real’ as, say, the version of Cylon Number Six who interacts with Gaius Baltar on Battlestar Galactica. She could represent the genuine spiritual essence of the human being whom you knew, or she could simply be an elaborate hallucination that’s being manufactured by your own mind. Either way, whether you’re willing to acknowledge it or not, you’re making it so that you and others around you can register her presence as ‘real,’ and you’re expending a great deal of effort to do so, especially since the ways in which you’re doing so make it almost impossible to prove conclusively whether she’s ‘real’ or not, by your own definitions of the term.”

Dream shook his head. “Okay, stop. Other than the stuff you just said, since I’m not sure I’m willing to buy off on any of it, what else am I doing that’s going to kill me?”

Phobia shrugged the round shoulders of his three stubby arms in resignation. “Nothing, really, because the rest of it doesn’t have much to do with you directly. Even if you hadn’t been consuming Creative Chaos at such a reckless rate, the ascension of the Parody Master through the Resolution Prophecy has been forcing any number of narrative threads toward their conclusions, whether natural or otherwise, and there’s a better-than-average chance that your tale would have wound up getting wrapped up anyway. As it stands now, your impending departure from this plane of existence is nearly inevitable. To quote another work of science fiction which I don’t doubt you have memorized, the candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long, and you have burned so very, very brightly.”

Dream blinked numbly, before mustering a half-hearted chuckle. “Well, hell, what’s my choice, then? Are we talking, like, Barry Allen in Crisis On Infinite Earths, or what?”

Phobia nodded curtly. “It’s as apt an analogy as any, I suppose. Here’s what I can tell you. You’ll reach a decision gate. Don’t worry; you’ll know when it is, or rather, you’ll feel when it is. You’ll feel yourself being pulled in two different directions. As an Agent of Chaos, not only do you need to be connected to the source of Chaos itself, so that its will and insights might inform your instincts and empower your efforts, but you also need to be grounded by a degree of humanity, to employ conveniently species-centric language, so that you might accomplish the aims of Chaos in this reality.”

“I’m choosing between my connection to Chaos and my own humanity,” Dream realized. “I mean, that’s what this is about, isn’t it? This isn’t the Flash merging with the Speed Force; this is J. Michael Straczynski’s ‘The Other’ crossover on the Spider-Man titles.”

Phobia rolled his three oval eyes in exasperation. “It still amazes me how you can get on the right track and go off the rails all at once. Nonetheless, you’re not far wrong. The side of you that stubbornly persists in identifying itself as human has never let go of who you believe you used to be, while the wellspring of Chaos from which you’ve drunk so deeply has already begun calling out to you, to dive into its waters. And that’s the conflict in your duality, the war between the perpetual college student, who still hangs out with the same post-adolescent friends and has yet to settle on any one major of study long enough to earn his undergraduate degree, versus the Agent of Chaos, who is himself continually changed by the act of continually changing the worlds he leaves in his wake.”

“Maybe I’m wrong, but it doesn’t sound like there’s a right answer to this question,” Dream challenged. “From what you’ve said so far, I might as well flip a coin, because whether it lands heads or tails, you’d still be asking me to deny a part of myself.”

“If you choose to embrace Chaos and relinquish your humanity, not only will you be absorbed into the source of Chaos itself, but you’ll also be forced to leave behind and let go of everyone and everything that you’ve ever loved, cared about or even known,” Phobia observed with a tone of deliberate neutrality, ticking off the options on the three thick fingers on one of his wide-palmed hands. “If you choose to reject Chaos in order to retain your humanity, you will be stripped of all your powers as an Agent of Chaos, most likely in the midst of precisely the type of situation that no human being without superhuman powers could hope to survive through anyway. Both your own humanity and your connection to Chaos will compel you to choose one at the expense of the other.”

“I’ve never been a big believer in either/or binary options,” Dream frowned sourly.

“Neither have I,” Phobia admitted, as his face betrayed the barest hints of a smile. “This is your test. It’s the most important one to date. I can prepare you for it, as I’ve tried to do, but you’re the one who has to take it, and pass or fail on your own.”

“Is that why you haven’t been around as much anymore?” Dream cocked his head curiously.

“For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction,” Phobia noted clinically. “Considering the severe natures and serious resources of the other forces that factor into this equation, I’d prefer not to ponder the consequences, if I provoked equal and opposite reactions from them by adopting any sort of active role in the events to come. That’s why I went through the precaution of conducting this conversation through your REM sleep state. It’s remarkable how much of your conceptions of yourself you’ve already come to associate automatically with your calling as an Agent of Chaos, so I temporarily manipulated the patterns of your perceptive processes, such as they are, to remind you that you are still human, at least for now, when you’re not wearing your Silly Suit.”

“A touch of Identity Crisis, on top of everything else,” Dream muttered to himself.

“Listen to me,” Phobia lowered his voice urgently, causing Dream to turn toward the neon green-skinned, fluorescent orange-eyed Exu of the Janus, and meet his intensely focused stare directly. “And make no mistake that this will be your crucible, but as you face it, never forget that I wouldn’t even bother with you if I didn’t think – if I didn’t know – you were up to it. Chaos has already chosen your successor, but you have the potential, in your choice, to surpass every single one of your predecessors and successors as an Agent of Chaos. In the meantime,” Phobia tapped Dream once on the forehead, “Wake up.”


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