Legal mumbo-jumbo: Terry Pratchett owns Discworld. Blizzard owns Diablo. There, I said it, happy?
Word count: 381
Author: (Insert penname)
Date Finished: 13th December 2006
Type: Fanfiction (Discworld/Diablo)
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The Eighth Spell: Prologue
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Sanctuary- or so the world was called by its inhabitants- was round. This, in of itself, was not particularly unusual. What was unusual was the fact that that it was round and quite magical You see, magic- a most interesting word by the way- does not like round things. In fact, it abhors them. Round things are architecturally strong, structurally sound and worse of all…
They're damnably hard to draw.
And as any good theologician knows, it's the lazy god that lets Magic do the explaining. Like why the sky is blue, the stars pictograms or the horizon a shade hazier than they should be... And besides, as everyone else knows making their world round is an attribute of the obsessed and the neurotic and the not-so-magically inclined. Not that that's ever been confirmed. Diviners who were paid substantial sums of gold to question a particular deity as to why such and such a world was shaped in such and such a way usually got blasted into smithereens for their efforts.
Not that any of that would interest any of the several million humans on the planet at the moment. In fact, due to a recent invasion of demonic forces (they were called the Sin forces by the more remote observers who had the temerity to term themselves the Virtuous Ones), even the most learned of wizards was more interested in the things that went 'boom!' rather than the things that went… well, round.
But it wouldn't explain the giant metal fish, nor its occupants whose current career seemed to be centered on falling towards the small blue planet. Nor would it explain its current the tourist by the name of Twoflower and a wizzard by the name of Rincewind. Nor would it explain the complete collapse and destruction of their home world- the Discworld- by some unfortunate string of coincidences that had to do with the gods, a lawnmower, a missing spell and a very irate turtle who was termed the great A'Tuin by his (or her) inhabitants.
What would explain all these string of odd and disconcerting facts would be nothing less than the fact that the Discworld that these frumps hailed from was as flat as a pancake.
And they had fallen right off the edge.
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Author's notes:
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Y'know, sometime ago I swore to put Diablo to rest forever. No matter how I looked at it, I'd just spawn a new hack-and-slash type fanfiction with the entire tired cast of heroes. I had thought up a few clever variations- y'know, an anti-hero mercenary/torturer/thug/prostitute type turned hero (obviously not all three at once), Vash the Stampede popping into existence in Sanctuary… but it wasn't meaningful. It wasn't funny. It wasn't anything I wanted it to be (Course' me muse is saying au contraire about the Vash one).
And then I met Rincewind. And then it all made sense.