Glossed Glory
A Demonata Parody
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"Here, pass me that duck wing," says Gret, her salad untouched.
"Nuh-uh," I reply, "Mom says not to have any meat until the greens are aaaaall finished!"
Mom growls and says, "Shut up and give her the duck."
I pout and skewer it with my fork to hand it over to Gret- but rather than pry it off with her own fork, she lunges forwards with her face and nearly rips a chunk off my hand! I emit a strangled cry and demand to know what the hell just happened. "You nearly killed me!"
"Oh, it's just one hand," simpers Gret, trying (and failing) to put on a cute face.
"Come on, Grubbs," says Mom jovially. "Be mature about it!"
Scowling, I look towards Dad's place on the table- but nope, no Dad there. He's probably still absorbed in his newspaper, even though Gret's probably replaced it with a 1970's copy of Playboy again half an hour ago. Unaware of my unhappiness, Mom asks me about my Math tournament.
I jump up as if a bolt of lightning has struck me, and quickly gabble, "Oh right I need to go right now whoops I'm late!"
Before anyone can raise any objections, I'm out the front door and dry, oblivious to Mom's cry of "What about your stuff?". I decide to go along with Gret's plan, at least to start with- I know a half-decent if slightly seedy motel downtown, and they won't ask any questions other than "how many girls?". Number's probably going to be zero tonight, though, unless I get lucky on the way. I decide to spend the night there, and come back home in the morning. Hopefully by then they'll have left to wherever it was, and I can spend the rest of their trip throwing parties and drinking at the pub.
The motel room is very bland, with bare walls, bare floors and a bare bulb- the bedsheets seem a little sweaty, but it'll do. I lie down on the harsh, unforgiving mattress for a while, considering my next heist- I'm planning a real, bona fide bank robbery complete with guns on Saturday- and realise that I'm going to have to use an airgun because I have no bloody idea where to find real ones. Those things can blind, I suppose, if I aim at the right spot...
My phone rings, which is funny because I didn't have my phone when I left home- but when I check my pocket, there it is, waiting to be answered. The number is LL... I'm reminded of my short conversation with the pedophile online.
"'Sup, this is Grubbs Grady, bane of pedophiles."
There's an uncertain silence at the other end, as if he's trying to understand by words. "What is a... pedophile?" he asks, after a couple of seconds. His voice is strangely melodious, and more than a little sad.
"You are," I quip, "So that's a bit of a hint."
I hear rustling, and when he next speaks he sounds angry. "I just checked the dictionary, and I don't like what I saw, Grubitsch."
A thought occurs to me. "Hey, are you, like one of my teachers?"
"Look," says the voice at the other end impatiently, "I just killed your entire family, I don't have to deal with this! Where are you?"
"Uh. If I... if you... um... well... I'm in Shanghai!"
"Where is that?" he demands.
"Austria. Flight 2033 at the San Francisco airport." Little does he realise that the Frisco is nine hundred hours away.
"Excellent. I await our meeting."
"Yeah, me too," I lie. What a tool.
()
After that stunning revelation, I decide to go down to McDonald's for a bite- I'm still hungry after leaving halfway through dinner. The motel clerk guy asks me if I want to borrow an umbrella as I leave, and I shrug him off.
Big mistake- it's pouring outside, and I'm soaked through in half a minute. I trudge back in and ask for an umbrella. He gives one to me, reminding me to give it back when I return. I shrug, and leave in search of food.
Twelve minutes later, I give up. In this driving rain, there's no hope of seeing anything, much less a bright yellow glowing curly 'M' on a red background. Once I even walked into one, but I...
"Oh for Christ's sake," I mutter out loud. I try to retrace my steps, even finding the green minivan that almost ran me over so that it could go past me again, but to no avail- this is an elusive McDonald's. In the end, I just head into a 7-11 and steal a chicken sandwich to sate my gnawing hunger. I'm just about to sink my teeth into the delicious, tender bread when a man wearing a dark orange hoodie walks up to me. He has a hood over his head- it looks like a garbage bag.
"You're supposed to take the wrapper off," he says. "Don't worry, I used to make that mistake a lot as well.
I start, and realise that I have forgotten to unwrap my sandwich. "Nice save, garbage bag head guy!"
"How- how do you he stutters, caught off-guard for some reason. "How do you know that it's a garbage bag?"
"Uh, dude, what else could it be? Some fail executioner hood thing?" Alarm bells start ringing in my head- I've heard this voice before. Maybe it's guy from school?
Apparently he thinks the same thing, because the next things he says is, "Hey, do I know you?"
"I think you might, actually," I admit. "Who are you?"
He pulls off his garbage bag, revealing a horrifying face. It looks like lumpy pink dough, and cuts ribbon over it- whenever he moves, more wounds open, but he doesn't seem to mind. "Whoa."
"My name," he intones, "is Lord Loss. Who are you?"
I suddenly realise that he's the LL guy who just said that he killed my family. "But I sent you to Shanghai!" I cry, then clap my hands over my mouth.
"What? Are you Grubitsch?" Lord Loss roars angrily, and six weird bulges appear beneath his jacket. Moments later, there's this giant ripping sound and I see why- he's got eight arms, like a spider or that cliché Spiderman villain guy. "That was a nasty trick you tried to play on me! This Austria place is far from San Francisco." I briefly wonder how an idiot like him ever managed to kill anybody, but he grabs me by the throat before anything else can happen.
"Good thing that Vein thought to track you down by scent first, although if I hadn't met you here, the rain would've washed away your scent completely." Stupid rain. Stupid 7-11. Stupid stomach. "And now I'll kill you, the last surviving member of the Grady clan."
I try to make a witty retort to throw into his face, but my speech is curtailed by the bony finger in the middle of my throat. "Ghrrk gllp."
"Prepare to d He's interrupted by a metal baton, spinning through the air in a terrifying blur of chrome and silver. It smashes into his butt-ugly skull, and I swear I hear his bones break. He releases me, and I drop to the floor, gasping for breath.
"Hey, Lord Loser!" calls a loud voice that for some reason reminds me of Dad's, except infinitely cooler. "You forgot to count me!"
Lord Whatsisname rises from the ground- and I mean rises. He's hovering almost twelve feet off the street now, high enough that he's above the lightbulbs. A pained snarl tears from his lips, and he swivels to face his new aggressor. "You!"
"Yeah!" shouts a greying man five or six feet away from me, on the asphalt of the road. He doesn't need to fear a car running over him- no-one's going to be driving in this weather at this time of night- and he's swinging a pair of aluminium baseball bats linked by a length of chain over his head. "Remember when we graffiti'd your stupid castle with pictures of dicks and our names?"
"It took years for the paint to get out," sighs Lord Whatsisname mournfully.
"And remember when we punched you in the face to save the baby?" the man ploughs on.
"'The baby' was one of my demonic familiars, you fool."
Having regained some ability to speak, I immediately join in the fray. "Must have been a pretty ugly baby if it was workin' for you!" The man laughs and agrees, while the monster scowls.
"Why am I still trading insults?" he says to us. "I just killed your family He gestures to me with one of his arms"and your brother!" He indicates the man.
"Quadruple homicide?" I gasp, jaw dropping.
The old man nods grimly. "Oh, he has a bit of a track record for this kind of thing." He hurls his baseball-bat-chain-thing at the hovering monster, knocking him from the sky. "So you're going down, Loser!"
Clutching his stomach- which is where one of the baseball bats struck, by the way- the eight-armed freak hisses like a cat and gestures imperiously at me with two of his mangled arms. Controlled by some unseen force, my arms and legs jerkily begin to move themselves towards the monster, taking me with them. "The hell?"
"Dervish Grady!" he howls, and I'm caught by surprise. Who'd have thought that the old man would have the same last name as me? "I will kill everyone you love, so help me Ss Akc'uf, Demon Overlord of Death!"
"Let the kid go," demands the man- Dervish- his face and voice hard.
"Look here, mortal," deadpans Lord Whatsisname as he snakes an arm around my throat again. "I am, in human vernacular, best described as 'the biggest douche alive'. What makes you think that I'll be any different this time?"
"I. Have. A nunchuck."
"Demonic-cow crap," hisses the monster.
Cocking an eyebrow, he raises his arm- another baseball-bat-chain-thing dangles from his wrist, glinting in the light from the lamp-post.
"That hardly counts," says Lord Whatsisname, although his tone is whiny. "I don't even- that's not- is that even Japanese?"
"I am the goddamn hero of the prophecy, and you are going DOWN!" Dervish leaps into the air- far higher than anyone I've seen jump before- and swings the nunchuck around the top of an advertisement for Victoria's Secret. He performs an acrobatic fricking pirouette to propel himself even further, and he lands on top of the monster, breaking his grip on me and conveniently knocking me into a shelf in the 7-11. The shopkeeper complains about how he's going to have to deal with that, and launches into a full-on tirade condemning my foul actions as I watch the fight, entranced.
Lord Loser's thrown Dervish into a window in the opposite side of the street, and has used this respite to pluck a lamp-post from the sidewalk- despite his spindly arms, he carries it like a toothpick. Dervish leaps from the wreckage of the shop, tears a pair of knickers from the back of his shirt, and flings a pair of metal coins at his foe. Before I can call him an idiot for not pocketing them, however, they suddenly mutate into human-sized blocks of lava and Lord Loser is engulfed in flame. I haven't learnt from my mistake, though, and cheer loudly- but then the blob of lava ripples, and it explodes spectacularly. A clod of lava makes its way into the 7-11, hitting the still-ranting shopkeeper in the nuts. I chuckle, and turn back to the battle.
Loser shrouds himself in a strange flickering glow that extends to his improvised weapon, and uses the streetlight to easily sweep Dervish off his feet. Pressing his advantage, he forges onwards, the lamp-post slowly morphing into some kind of sword. A word in some other language'kfptphkng', I think- leaves the fallen Dervish's mouth, and suddenly a swarm of women's undergarments tumbles out of the store behind him and blasts Loser with full force. Dervish leaps to his feet and rushes over to me.
"Quick, get into the employee's room!"
"The door's locked," I warn him. "I could pick it, given time, but-"
"No time," he says tersely, "but not to worry." With another mysterious word, to fast for me to fathom, he gestures at the door. It bulges in the middle, and then explodes, showering us with wood and paint flakes. The groaning storekeeper, lying on the floor, mutters something about hooligan vandals.
"Cool."
We bundle into the room and find a staircase leading upstairs, probably to the storage room- without hesitating, Dervish barrels up it and wordlessly beckons me up as well. Just as I clear the last step, he waves his hand one last time, and this time the air above the staircase solidifies into concrete, blocking all access.
I can't ask him how this is going to stop a magical eight-armed guy who can carry twelve-foot-tall metal poles with ease- he falls asleep almost as soon as I open my mouth.
()
QUACK QUACK QU-
"Argh what the hell is going on?" I demand, eyes snapping open and adrenaline flooding my system.
The man from last night jumps and screams in fright. "Ow- heart-"
"Oh, uh, sorry," I mutter apologetically. "I just heard this quacking-"
"That was me!" he says brightly, immediately shifting in demeanour from a rattled old man to a punkass kid who likes playing pranks. "Great alarm clock, huh?"
"I hate you," I say tonelessly.
"It's a little telepathic spell," he grins, totally unashamed.
Remembering last night's events, I say, "So that was magic you did last night?"
"Yeah- but I didn't expect you to hear the music from our horizontal tango!"
I shake my head in a silent rejection of his terrible joke. "Can you turn another coin into lava?" I ask, fishing for a dollar in my pockets.
"No, no, no," he says firmly, shaking the head. "I'd love to, but there's not enough magic in the air for that."
My initial reaction is "umwhut" without any capitals, punctuation or regard to normal spelling conventions whatsoever. I don't actually say that, of course, but you can imagine my beautiful face contorting into an expression of confusion, right?
Seeing this, he says, "Well, Grubitsch, I-"
"How do you know my name?" I demand.
"I guessed. After Lord Loss said that he'd killed your family and my brother, I remembered that he had a son who was as ginger as the-"
"If this is going to turn into a joke about my hair, I will punch you," I threatened.
He raises his arms placatingly and changes tack. "Alright, alright, so you're Cal's son."
"And you're his brother? My uncle?"
"Yep," he says, thumping me on the back good-naturedly. I was going to talk about how Dad had never talked about him with us, but then I realised that Dad never talked with us about anything except to tell me to get the phone. Yeah, even when he caught me painting the school hamster purple in third grade, all he did was say "I don't think that's a good idea.". Not even a proper telling-off.
"Cool," I say. "Where are we? Why didn't Lord Whatsisname kill us in our sleep?"
"Simple demonomagicals, my young friend! Lord Loss doesn't belong in this universe- he comes from another realm entirely. The only way he can enter here is by using a transdemonical hole, or 'window', between universes, which saturates the area in magic and lets him enter without imploding from magiclessness. Windows can only last for so long, though- soon they collapse back into photomagicons and disperse. Lord Loss was on borrowed temporological magical ions when he started tracking you."
"Are any of those real words?"
"Of course!" cries Dervish, affronted. "The study of magicodemonism is a highly specialised field! It's split into four areas- transdemonicology, alternamagicology, biodemonology and- the most important- necrodemonismology. Those areas are then split into several subsections- transdemonicology is divided into photomagicology, the study of photomagicons, and nebuparticology, or the study of nebuloparticles. Alternamagicology is three part- temporologics, demonoshiftology and realmomagicology. It deals with..."
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You'll be pleased to hear that none of those 'areas of magicodemonism' are, in fact, real words at all. Sorry for the low of funny here, just need to get some plot things out.