Tales of the Parodyverse

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champagne
Thu Jul 05, 2007 at 05:01:21 pm EDT
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Champagne and the Dia de los Muertos
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    Champagne and Ebony got out of the taxi as close as it could get them to the grand plaza, then pushed their way through the dancing crowds to get into the actual Plaza Vasco de Quiroga. The whole of the city of Pátzcuaro was seething with people tonight, locals and tourists alike celebrating the Day of the Dead.

    “I love the Dia de los Muertos,” confessed Ebony, the dark-skinned dar-haired priestess of the Shoggoth cult. “It’s nice to see people being so cheerful about the afterlife.”

    Strawberry-blonde Champagne was busy with one of the sugar skulls she’d bought from a nearby stall. The confectionary of chocolate and amaranto was absolutely delicious. “I love it too,” she agreed. “Especially the calorie-free food. The locals believe that the spirits of the dead absorb all the value out of it. We just get what’s left.”

    Ebony smiled. “The voodoo-plan diet. Somebody should market that. I’d better not mention it to the Shoggoth.”

    All around them people were enjoying the carnival atomosphere. It was still early in the evening so the dancing had some coherence. The musicians were all still playing more or less the same tunes. As people returned from taking flowers and presents to the cemetaries the noise would rise and the drinking would increase.

    “That must be the place,” Champagne called over the tumult, pointing to the old colonial mansion that was now the Hotel Cempasuchil, the reason the international jewel thief had travelled half the globe to the high Michoacán mountains. “That’s where Xander said it went.”

    Ebony nodded and threaded a course for them past the little food stalls selling candied pumpkin, atole, and pan de muerto. “You know that Xander could only trace where the teleportation spell took your missing ledger, don’t you? He couldn’t find where it is now. That suggests it might be warded from scrying.”

    “I need that book,” Champagne said. “That book convicts a nasty villain called Lucius van Druden, which in turn stops his organisation spending considerable efforts to kill me for crossing him. I tracked it down before but he’d cheated by getting some kind of magic put on it to make it disappear. That hotel’s where it vanished to. That’s where my next clues are.”

    “I could just ask the Shoggoth to visit this van Druden guy,” said Ebony. “He is usually very good at convincing people to stop doing bad things.”

    “By sucking their heads off?” asked Champagne.

    “That sucking their heads off thing is just a rumor put about by people who it happened to,” the priestess said with a little grin.

    “Well, thanks for the offer but no thanks. I’ll deal with van Druden in my own way. It’s no fun at all if I get a loathsome elder monster to fix things for me. But I’m glad Xander suggested you to accompany me here in case there is some nasty magician or evil high priest cultist or something lurking in wait at the Hotel Cempasuchil.”

    “I like to travel the world and meet people,” Ebony said. “Especially evil high priest cultists. It’s my hobby. Come on.”

    It was getting a bit crowded. Stopping only to pick up pasta nieve, the famous local ice-cream from a booth between a Blessed Virgin Mary shop and a mezcal stand, the women slipped into the cooler quieter surroundings of the hotel lobby.

    A quick check of the guest list for the date of the teleportation nine days ago showed that only four visitors had been booked in. Pátzcuaro was packed with tourists for the Day of the Dead, come to see the Dance of the Old Men and for the butterfly fishermen and the other attractions, but two weeks previously it had been its usual quiet moutain town.

    “Two of the visitors were regulars,” Champagne reported after she’d bought a few rounds for the regulars in the Hemingway Bar and done some chatting. “Travelling salesmen who do the rounds of the high cities every few weeks on a circuit. One was a journalist for El Economista doing a story on the local laquered tray industry. They crush insects into the laquer to get the color.”

    “Remind me to buy one for the Shoggoth before we leave,” said Ebony. “Do they do them with anime characters on them?”

    “But one visitor was a stranger,” Champagne revealed. “And he’s still signed in now. He’s still here.”

    “Sounds like our first port of call. Did you get a room number?”

    Champagne glanced back into the smoky bar. “I got plenty of room numbers. And some keys offered. And the wallet of some sleaze who tried to grope me. But yeah, Senor Cadaveros is in room 213.”

    Ebony snorted. “Senor Cadaveros? I could have told you he was the bad guy just by looking at the guest book. Nobody who’s not an evil necromancer calls themselves Senor Cadaveros. It’s only one step up from Dr Villainous.”

    “Or Peter von Doom.”

    “Exactly.”

    The two women were in such perfect accord that neither noticed the lights going out beyond the windows until it was too late. It was the icy mist pouring through the doorway to the bar that really triggered the alarm bells.

    “Uh oh,” said Ebony. She peered outside but couldn’t see anything in the stygian night.

    “Did I mention I hate magic?” asked Champagne. “It’s so cheating.”

    The regulars in the bar had realised that the rest of Pátzcuaro wasn’t out there any more either. “What the hell is happening?” demanded a scrubby-bearded local, spilling his beer from his trembling hand.

    “Where did all the outside go?” asked a nervous bargirl.

    “The dead!” screamed another customer, pointing a trembling finger out of the window. “The dead are walking! They’re coming here!”

    Champagne and Ebony looked where he was pointing. It was true. Shambling bodies were moving out of the darkness, attracted by the warm lights and warm bodies of the inhabitants of the Hotel Cempasuchil.

    “Okay. Now’s the time to introduce a Shoggoth to the plot,” said Ebony. She reached for her pendant where a tiny glob of the elder monster usually slept – but her pendant wasn’t there! “Damn! When the Hotel got shifted to the realm of the dead my pendant didn’t make the jump. The magics weren’t able to transport the Shoggoth. We’re on our own!”

    “The realm of the dead?” Champagne asked. “Hernando, Florida?”

    “The realm of the soon-to-be-dead, if we don’t do something,” Ebony worried. She hurriedly threw some salted peanuts across the threshold. Salt held back zombies for a while.

    “Is it too big a stretch to imagine that Senor Cadaveros knows we’re looking for him?” said Champagne.

    “I’ll go check his room,” Ebony said. “You see if there’s any more salt about. Or nails. Or bits of Shoggoth.”

    “Be careful. If he knows you’re coming there might be traps!”

    Champagne watched Ebony carefully slip up the stairs pausing occasionally to peer at things that Champagne couldn’t see and do things with feathers on threads that she couldn’t understand.

    “Stick to what you know,” Champagne advised herself. “Leave the scary voodoo to Ebony. See what you can figure out the old fashioned way. Like… how did Cadaveros know we were coming? Magic? Or…”

    She looked at the twenty or so people clustered in the besieged bar. They all looked shocked and frightened. “Tell me about local legend,” she asked them. “What does Day of the Dead tradition have to say about actual dead men walking.”

    “That it’s a bad thing?” suggested the beer spiller.

    “The salt idea is good,” offered the bar girl. “I’ve never heard of stopping zombies with peanuts though. Killer monkeys, maybe.”

    “That the dead have to be called,” added the finger-pointer. “And that they have to be propitiated.”

    Champagne pushed Finger-Pointer away from the window. “Probably best if we don’t actually help the zombies work out that there are non-peanuted ways into the bar,” she said.

    “Hey!” Beer-spiller had an idea. “Maybe if we throw the foreign dame to them? It’s probably because of her that they came here.”

    “Harsh,” the bar girl said. “But better than me being eaten.”

    “There’s no way she could resist us if we all grabbed her and tied her up,” Finger-pointer said.

    “Or,” suggested Champagne, “we could get the person responsible to go out there and deal with it. You know, Senor Cadaveros, who’s right here in this bar.”

    “In this bar? Right with us?” said Beer-Spiller.

    “Senor Cadaveros? The creepy guy from 213 who never tips?” said the bar girl.

    “Who cares about him? Let’s grab the girl,” said Finger-pointer.

    “I care about him,” Champagne told them. “I’ve come a long way to find him, and his spooky zombie traps aren’t going to stop me. At least not if magic goes by any kind of rules at all. Once I knew which of you was Cadaveros it was easy to figure out a way out of this.”

    She pointed at Finger-pointer. “I’m talking about you, mister. You said it yourself: the dead have to be called. And just when this all started you pointed out of the window and said ‘The dead are walking! They’re coming here!’”

    Finger-pointer laughed. It wasn’t a nice laugh. It was as big a give away as calling yourself Senor Cadaveros. “So you spotted me. Big deal. Spotting me and stopping my army of undead are two very different things. Nothing can stop the march of the zombies.”

    “What about Ebony?” suggested Champagne.

    “She’s walking into an even biger trap,” laughed Cadaveros.

    “What about your control amulet, then?” asked Champagne. “Can you stop the zombies tearing you apart without it? I only ask because I palmed if off you when I pushed you away from the window earlier.” She held up the chain of bones and beads and smiled wickedly.

    “Give me that!” demanded Cadaveros. “Or by the pits of the inferno…”

    “Oh, not the pits of the inferno speech!” said Ebony, coming back downstairs scowling because zombie ichor is really hard to get off linen. “By the way, you need to work on some better death traps, Bogdan.”

    Champagne realised she was going to need a Parodyverse footnote.

    “Bogdan Vladivock,” Ebony supplied. “Also known as the Necromancer General. Also known as He Who Is In Deep Trouble Now He’s Summoned An Undead Army But Lost His Control Necklace.”

    The Necromancer General dropped his Finger-pointing Man disguise and his Senor Cadaveros disguise and scowled at the young women. “Alright,” he said. “What do you want?”

    “I want you to send those dead things back to their graves,” Ebony said. “I want you to return this Hotel to its proper dimension so I can get my amulet back. I want a full sincere apology. I want you to pay for a new blouse that doesn’t have zombie ichor on it. Then I want you to go away and stop being a pain in the ass.”

    “And I want to know exactly where that ledger you did a teleport spell on for Lucius van Druden went to,” added Champagne. “Oh, and I want say a hundred thousand dollars. Just because.”

    “Why should I give you all that?” demanded Vladivock.

    “Because it’s cheaper than being ripped apart by your own zombies?”

    Champagne was feeling pretty happy about the way it all turned out as she watched the Necromancer General pack his bags while Ebony glowered at him and fingered her newly-restored Shoggoth amulet. She was feeling fine right up to the point where Vladivock told her the ledger had been sent.

    “Isla Peligro,” Champagne repeated. “The Caribbean island entirely owned by the supervillain scientists of B.A.L.D. One of the most secure bad guy enclaves on the planet.”

    Then she grinned. “Okay.”

    



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