The Wizard Of Hol
or
"What if…The Wizard Of Oz was done with Red Dwarf characters?"
For three million years, this story has given faithful service to the smegged in the head; and time has been powerless to put its smeggy philosophy out of fashion. ("Don't give me that sappy crap, it's too early in the morning!")
To those of you who have been faithful to it in return – you bunch of smegheads – we dedicate this story. The saga continuums…
Disclaimer: The Wizard Of Oz belongs to MGM. Red Dwarf belongs to Grant-Naylor. I own nothing, nothing!
Acknowledgements: In writing this, I referred greatly to The Wizard Of Oz script I found at The Daily Script, and also several Red Dwarf scripts from the Red Dwarf scripts archive.
Crono…chronno…where in time this smeg is set: This story is set in the second half of Series 7 of Red Dwarf, with a few elements of Series 6 and 8 in there.
Deep space…David Lister, the last human being alive (™), bolted into the cockpit of the Jupiter Mining Corporation mining vessel Starbug.
"What's up, guys?" he drawled in his Scouse accent. Beside him, the Cat looked up momentarily from his controls.
"It's a rogue simulant, Buddy! I think we pissed him off!"
Lister's brow crinkled. "How'd you do that?"
Kryten piped up from his seat at the science station. "Apparently, we've wandered into his hunting zone, sir!"
"It didn't help when he caught the Cat mooning out the port window at him, either!" Kristine Kochanski piped up from her position at the navigation console.
"Hey, how was I to know he'd take it personally?!" the Cat readily sprang to his own defence.
"Look, regardless of who started it, we've gotta get the smeg outta here!"
Lister twisted his navigational controls sharply to the left, and Starbug followed suit.
"It's no use!" Kochanski shook her head. "He's staying with us."
A sickly beep sounded from Kryten's console. "Incoming message!" he announced.
The simulant's face appeared on the monitor next to Kryten. He wasn't exactly the pinnacle of loveliness – not with the bits of metal poking through his flesh like pimples on the face of a McDonalds staffer. The Cat wrinkled up his nose, and had to keep himself from retching at the decidedly unattractive sight. Gunmetal grey with flesh-tones? What was the simulant thinking?!
"I've got a deal for you," the simulant rumbled in his deep, metallic voice. "Scanners report you've got two humans on board. Hand one over, and I'll let the rest of you go."
"Two words, man: 'smeg' and 'off'!" Lister crowed, silently giving thanks that Arnold Rimmer wasn't here to automatically surrender.
"Well said, Mister Lister, sir," Kryten said helpfully, "but it does not alter the fact that unless one of you humans surrenders yourself to the simulant, all of us are surely doomed!"
After a moment of thought, he turned to his left. "Care to volunteer, ma'am?"
"No way, Kryters," Lister broke in before Kochanski could come back with any suggestions as to what Kryten could do with his suggestion. "If anyone's goin', it's me."
Kryten jerked backwards slightly in surprise. "But sir, the simulant will surely tear you to pieces…or worse!"
"Only if he catches me, man," Lister replied resolutely. "Prep the escape pod."
* * *
Lister only vaguely remembered what happened next. He remembered getting into the escape pod, with Kryten begging him not to go, and offering himself as a substitute. He remembered launching it, and he remembered the simulant's ship coming around to receive the pod. He remembered loading the waste disposal unit with a thermos of nitro glycerine to make a high-impact garbage cannon, and firing it at the simulant ship, but beyond that, it was all a blur.
Lister staggered out of the wreckage of his crashed pod, bleary-eyed from the slight concussion he'd suffered. When his vision cleared, he couldn't believe his eyes.
He was back. Back on Earth. Or at least, that's how it seemed. Oh, it was a lot brighter than the Earth he remembered, but maybe he just remembered his home planet a lot darker than it really was.
Turning around to gauge the damage to the escape pod, Lister got the fright of his life when he saw something that looked suspiciously like a tarantula crawling out from beneath the debris. Thankfully, it wasn't a tarantula, just a mechanical hand that was twitching on the end of its wiry wrist. The hand had wicked talons on the tips of each finger – it had definitely belonged to a simulant.
Had he brought down an entire simulant ship with just a garbage cannon? Had he, Dave Lister, taken out a killer robot's vessel with nothing more than banana peels and foil vindaloo trays?
In-smegging-credible.
A noise from behind caused him to spin around, aiming his bazookoid threateningly at whatever it was. It wasn't another simulant, just a very beautiful woman clad in a red PVC outfit, who coincidentally looked a lot like Kristine Kochanski…
"Are you a simulant, or a mechanoid?" she asked. Lister responded in a most profound and insightful manner.
"Eh?"
"Are you a simulant, or a mechanoid?" the beautiful woman repeated herself.
"Neither – I'm 'uman!" Lister answered with more than a hint of indignation in his voice. Simulant or mechanoid indeed!
"Oh," the beautiful woman said. "Yes, I see that now. It's just that the Munchkins told me that someone had dropped an escape pod on the Sinister Simulant of the Space Sector. There's the escape pod," she pointed at the remains of the pod, "and here you are."
Lister nodded. Hard to argue with logic like that.
"So what the Munchkins want to know is, are you good or evil?" the woman finished.
"I told you – I'm 'uman! I suppose you're a simulant too, then?"
A high-pitched giggling sounded from all around. Lister spun around warily with his bazookoid.
"What the smeg was that?!"
"The Munchkins," the beautiful woman answered. "They're laughing because I'm human – just like you! My name is Kristine. The Munchkins are happy because you've freed them from the tyranny of the Sinister Simulant."
"Brutal," was all Lister could think of to say. "So who're these 'Munchkins', then?"
"The little people who live in this land," said the beautiful woman. "This is Munchkin-Land, and you've just become their national hero."
She turned away from Lister for a moment and called out to seemingly nothing. "It's okay. You can come out now."
Suddenly, everywhere seemed to come alive. Little men and women – curiously, all wearing the same weaselly-looking face – poured out from every hiding place imaginable. They popped up from inside houses, from trees, from under rocks. Some even appeared from beneath manholes, and leapt out of outhouses.
In case you haven't worked it out, these are the Rimmer Munchkins from the Rimmer Munchkin Song in 'Blue' – TFG
Before Lister's astonished eyes, Hammond organ music began to play from nowhere, and the Munchkins began to dance and sing.
"Ding Dong! The Sim is dead. Which old Sim? The Sinister Sim! Ding Dong! The Sinister Sim is dead. Wake up, you smeghead. Rub your eyes. Get out of bed. Wake up, the Sinister Sim is dead!"
Lister immediately loaded his bazookoid and let off a volley up in the air. It was enough to send the Munchkins scattering, their song abruptly interrupted.
"I cannot stand singin' midgets!" Lister growled.
Slowly, the Munchkins reassembled, though much more warily than before. A Munchkin clad in a resplendent red uniform approached Lister.
"As the Mayor of the Munchkin City, in the County of the Land of Hol," he said, perhaps a little too rhythmically, "I welcome you most regally."
"But we have to verify it legally!" another Munchkin, this one dressed in gallant green, piped up.
"To see if the simulant is morally, ethically, spiritually, physically…"
"Oh, shut the smeg up and get to the point!" Lister snarled. He wasn't usually this stroppy, but leprechauns who looked an awful lot like Rimmer tended to get him in a bad mood.
"…dead." The green-clad Munchkin finished, sneering at Lister for good effect.
A Munchkin clothed in blustering blue returned from the crash site. After seeing Lister's warning glare, he stopped himself from singing, and delivered the coroner's report in as few words as he could.
"He's dead, alright. Dead as a can of SPAM."
A great cheer went up from all the Munchkins.
"Then this is a day of independence, for all the Munchkins and their descendants!" the red-clad Mayor crowed triumphantly. This, of course, set off all the other Munchkins, who immediately broke into song again.
"Ding Dong! The Sim is dead. Which old Sim? The Sinister Sim! Ding Dong! The Sinister Sim is dead!!"
Lister reloaded his bazookoid, but this time, he didn't fire it off into the air. He fired it into the crowd, nearly hitting several Munchkins and reducing them to charcoal.
"I told you, I can't stand singin' midgets!" he growled with as much venom as he had ever put into one sentence.
Suddenly, there was an explosion, and the Munchkins scattered, all trying to find the best place to hide. Even Kristine jumped a little.
As the smoke cleared, the figure responsible for the explosion was revealed. It was another simulant, this one bigger and uglier than the last one. This is the simulant from 'Beyond A Joke' – TFG
"'Oo killed 'im, then?" he growled. "'Oo killed me bruvver?"
"Sorry, matey," Lister apologised. "I wasn't exactly lookin' to kill 'im – it just happened!"
"Didn't mean it, eh? Accident, eh?" the simulant snickered. "Well, my fine fellow, I can cause accidents, too – and this is how I do it!"
Just as the Sinister Simulant of the Other Space Sector was raising his own bazookoid, Kristine piped up.
"Aren't you forgetting something?"
The Simulant stopped, thought for a moment, then lowered his gun.
"Of course! The golden guitar!" the Simulant said in a hushed voice, as if the object he spoke of was too holy to speak of too loudly.
The Simulant ran towards the wreckage and began ferreting through it.
"It's gone!" he howled. "The golden guitar!"
Lister felt a sudden weight around his neck. Looking down, he discovered a golden guitar hanging from its splendid strap.
"Oi!" the Simulant yelled. "Give that back or else!"
"It's too late," Kristine said smugly. "There it is, and there it'll stay."
"I'm the only one wot knows 'ow to use it! Ain't no use t' you!" the Simulant snarled.
"Keep hold of that guitar at all times," Kristine cautioned Lister. "It must be very powerful for him to want it so badly."
"You keep out of this, woman!" the Simulant warned her.
"Oh, smeg off!" she retorted. "You have no power here! Be gone, before someone shoots you with a garbage cannon!"
"Yeah, you heard her," Lister chipped in. "On your space-bike."
"Awroight," the Simulant conceded. "I'll bide me time… You just try an' stay out o' my way, just try! I'll be 'aving roast 'uman wiv mint sauce before long!"
A cloud of smoke billowed up, completely concealing the Simulant. When the smog cleared, the simulant was gone.
"It's okay," Kristine was saying. "You can come out now. He's gone."
As the Munchkins cautiously made their way out, making sure that nothing else was going to go up in smoke any time soon, Lister turned to Kristine.
"Look, it's real nice 'ere and all, but I'd just as soon get back to my ship. Any way I can do that? Coz I don't think I'll be leavin' the same way I came in…"
"No, that's true…" Kristine mused. "That's a little beyond my power. The only person who could help you with that is the great and powerful Wizard of Hol."
"'Wizard of Hol'?" Lister repeated incredulously. "Alright, then. Which way to this 'Wizard of Hol'?"
Kristine gestured in front of her. "He lives in the Crimson City, and that's a long journey from here. Just follow the Red Brick Road."
"Red Brick Road, eh?" Lister took a cautious step, just in case it was going to explode or something. Then another, and another, and another. Before long, he was halfway down the path.
Then the Munchkins exploded into song again.
"Follow the Red Brick Road. Follow the Red Brick Road. Follow, follow, follow, follow, follow the Red Brick Road. Follow the Red Brick, follow the..."
The Munchkins scattered again after a warning volley from Lister's bazookoid.
"What did I say about singin' midgets?"
And with that, Lister started off down the Red Brick Road, pumping out a bass beat with his cheeks and lips.
"I didn't come here lookin' for trouble, I just came to do the Red Brick Road shuffle…" he sung. This is to the tune of the 'Red Dwarf Shuffle' song briefly featured in 'Backwards' – TFG.