Happy new year to you all! Great to get so many reviews off new people, not sure what one or two of them were trying to say but anyway, it's the thought that counts. I got a copy of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy fro Christmas so as soon as I pry it off my sister and finish this book my English teacher wants me to read I'll be able to find out exactly how much I've been unintentionally copying it.

We have a brand new chapter waiting to see the light of day and I'm rather pleased with it myself. Hope the end doesn't bother anyone; let me know what you think.

On with the show!

Chapter 4, In Which Our Hero Descends into the Depths of Chibis and a Sinister Spy is Revealed.

Continuing on his journey beyond the carcass of the Uber-Cycow which was already swarming with confused bondals to whom the beast's rock skin was proving its worth, Salami Amok shortly arrived at another shrine dedicated to the Bozo goddess of Beef, Elvera, on which sat a wide metal object with a big E printed on it, surprisingly enough in a human language, and not the federation language either but an actual ancient language of Earth, and a bowl of fungus which may have once contained meat of some kind (possibly veal). After a few seconds though, Salami Amok gently removed the bowl from the altar and picked up the metal object which immediately disappeared as a message flashed across his visor:

"Energy tank obtained, Energy Capacity refilled and increased."

Singing happily to himself, ("We've been sent, to a lost and lonely part of town…") Salami trotted down the corridor and through the energy door at the end.

Salami Amok found himself standing near the bottom of yet another long, vertical shaft, with a pack of neevils looking up at him and licking mandibles, slobbering over each other and generally making other actions often observed by psychologists to be reactions to seeing an easy and naïve meal standing nearby oblivious to being targeted as lunch or possibly breakfast or dinner. Or afternoon tea.

For what the bright-as-a-burnt-out-black-light bounty hunter didn't recognise was that these were no ordinary neevils. These were nature's hand-selected, state of the art, cream of the crop, top of the food-chain wall climbing super athletic master neevils.

Already a pack of them were lowering themselves from their hiding places above towards the oblivious hunter in order to chase him down to the family waiting below.

Seconds before they pulled off the attack, Salami Amok leapt up towards a door a few metres above him past the swarm of hunter-shoe eaters, shot a Moosile at the door in question and disappeared.

The neevils below shouted angrily at the neevils above for being too slow, who in turn shouted at the neevils below about not giving the signal early enough. This carried on for several minutes before a particularly old, wise and well-travelled neevil called a halt to the argument and pointed out that the only way out of the room the meal had entered was back the way it had come. Sniggering and laughing menacingly, a large number of neevils below climbed up, along with the hunters, and formed a short arched passage around the door with a living portcullis at either side, ready and waiting to drop down as soon as the meal returned.

VVVVVV

As the neevils plotted his doom outside, Salami Amok found himself in a room with the statue of an elderly Bozo on a raised platform with a swarm of bondals bouncing about below it. The statue was holding out its hand which contained another wrapped object. As Salami gazed at it in awe, a deep, ancient voice echoed in his head ((Congratulations, you are the 10,000th visitor to this room. Please collect your prize.))

With the look of one who has no idea what was going on, Salami Amok stepped forwards and tenderly picked the gift-wrapped item out of the statue's hand. As he pulled it open the jingle once again played in his ears.

"Moth Bombs have been integrated. Place in Mothball form to protect your clothes and fabrics from pests."

As the Bounty Hunter thought that one over, the statues voice once again echoed throughout his head, ((Well done Fledgling. Now it is time for you to prove your worth. These bondals have been bothering me for years. They never touch me but they won't stop squeaking and every so often they lead the neevils in here and they are a problem…))

To the bounty hunter slaughtering bondals was hardly what he saw as a constructive use of time (what he saw as a constructive use of time is undeterminable) and he wasn't sure he liked this particular chronologically gifted bozo, so he said timidly, "S-sorry, but I'm in a-a bit a, uh, a hurry, and-"

( (DO IT, IMPUDENT BRAT!) )For an unmoving statue the bozo did a pretty good job of looming and being threatening. To really purvey the power behind that single statement I would have to set the page on fire and draw a big explosion around it. It may also be necessary to print those few words in white with a black background and we might almost make the impact. Some of those Spanish upside down exclamation marks might come in handy too.

The bounty hunter seemed to gape like a fish out of water (an impressive feat when your face was shielded by a green visor) and quickly curled into the Mothball.

He teetered erratically towards the preoccupied bondals and rolled into the middle of their bunch. A couple touched the powdery sides of the ball and leapt away writhing and inexplicably burning up into a few specs of ash which drifted away on a non-existent breeze. The rest of the bondals, being rather intelligent beings (if anything just to make up for the Bozos' short-fallings) seemed to get the message and scattered away from the unsteady ball.

Salami Amok trundled around, trying in vain to run himself into the panicky bondals, all the while feeling suspiciously that the statue was laughing at him. Well, he'd show him!

With renewed vigour, Salami resumed his attack on the insects with dismal results. Eventually, after watching his struggles for at least 12 minutes and beginning to radiate an oppressive sense of boredom around the room and onto the hunter-neevils outside the door, the statue spoke up. ((Use the bombs you idiot.))

Salami Amok would have liked to have told him he didn't need his help. He would have liked to have ignored his advice and conquered anyway. He would have liked to have thought up his own master plan and defeated the bondals on his own terms, preferably with a very long speech about freedom and the greater good. He would have liked to have been sitting in an armchair in a house on some sparsely populated world with his feet up, reading his glossary of mushrooms and surrounded by lumps of exotic cheese.

Still, we can't have everything in life so the bounty hunter glared at the statue (not that it noticed when Salami was in Mothball form) and began rolling around, planting bombs everywhere which sprayed the brown powder around the room when they exploded and with 29 seconds the bondals were finished. Ashes to ashes.

Despite not being able to move, the statue looked smug. ((There, that wasn't so hard was it?)) Salami Amok snorted and headed towards the door. As an afterthought the statue called after him, ((Oh, and before you go and get yourself lost, if you head to the room where you first collected your Moosiles you will find that now you have the Moth Bombs the way onwards will be opened to you.))

Had Salami's upbringing not been so sheltered, his response would have left his grandma turning in her grave. As it was he did his best to look like he was ignoring the statue and decided that, even if he had to go the way suggested, he would take his time doing that. That'd show the statue.

VVVVVV

The neevils had been lying around gossiping and drinking tea when they heard the hatch open. Within seconds they were back in position, forming a living tunnel around the door, ready to swing down and trap the meal as he left. By this point he had already passed them and was about to leave their tunnel altogether and the neevils down below were hissing at them angrily. As one, the tunnel leapt, crashing towards the meal with a war cry that would have scared Lord Ridley were he not in an alternative world where bounty hunters were competent and statues didn't talk.

Salami Amok had been idly charging his beam as he'd entered the room, trying to stall for time. As he heard the cry he spun round and managed not to trip over this time. As instinct he raised his beam and fired wildly, missing the neevils out of habit and sending a white and blue and green burst from the weapon crashing against the opposite wall with a rustling sound.

Before the bounty hunter could react he was swarming with neevils who were desperately tugging at his feet until anyone watching would have applauded the resilience of his ankles. Suddenly, a young and easily bored neevil on the outside of the bunch turned round and yelled in surprise, "Hey, look at that!"

As one the body of neevils turned from Salami Amok to follow the youngster's gaze. Heaped against the far wall where Salami's beam had struck and fluttering slowly to the ground was a mass of bank notes. As the neevils leapt greedily to grab the falling pounds, dollars, credits, yen, euros, francs, denarii, so on and so forth, Salami climbed to his feet and gazed in wonder at the bizarre ways of the Charge Beam and its Bozo creators. As he left the room and the fighting neevils behind him, he wondered deeply where such a large amount of money had appeared from.

VVVVVV

Many miles away Gen. Eric Bloke of the galactic police was surprised and very angry to find that 4500 galactic credits had mysteriously disappeared from his bank account.

It turned out, some days later, that this in fact had nothing to do with the quest of Salami Amok or the Charge Beam but that General Eric's son had crashed his father's space ship while joy riding it with some friends around the asteroid belt and had tactlessly used his father's credit card to replace it and had even left the price label on the windscreen. Therefore the only reason I've added this cautionary tale onto the story is to warn people: trust no one… except me, obviously.

VVVVVV

A slow, self-absorbed trudge later brought Salami Amok to the shrine where he had retrieved his first Moosile tank. Beyond was a narrow tunnel blocked half way along by a block of something or other that went flying everywhere with a sticky splat when a Moth Bomb went off beside it. Salami continued onwards over pits of familiar brown acid and other rancid-smelling blocks that splattered everywhere at the blast of a Moth Bomb. Salami eventually grew tired of blowing them up and, deciding by now he was past the point that the statue had directed him to, decided to get on with it and stood up and made his way onwards. A quick blast of the Pwoar Beam to get through a hatch, Salami Amok found himself standing at the top of a long, deep lift leading into the vast bowels of the planet. The bounty hunter paused for effect, drew a deep breath from his oxygen recycler for the same reason, and stepped onto the lift, pressed the button for down and was carried dramatically down into the planet as he tried desperately to keep his balance on the jerky lift.

VVVVVV

The image of Salami Amok reflected off the pupil of an eye so deep black that it felt like a hole one could fall into and descend for miles into nothingness. The eye blinked and narrowed, and blinked again.

"This is boooring!" Trilled a high pitched voice. "Can't we switch to a film or something?"

The Space Parrot sitting before the huge form of the mother lung on a platform barely suspended above the bubbling green acid below sighed exasperatedly. Guns waved erratically but without firing above his head, security probes clattered down rails on the ceiling and other over-exuberant security mechanisms buzzed, winked or popped down at him. Several rows of TV screens were stacked on top of each other against a wall to the side of both the parrot and the evil over-lady.

This wasn't what he'd envisaged when he said he wanted to work with computers. "It's a security camera! It's not supposed to be interesting!" He'd wondered what everyone had been sniggering about.

"It was earlier, like when he thought that bull thing, and when the neevils were going for him by the vending machines!" Row upon row of TV screens now all showed the same image of the bounty hunter standing reasonably still as he descended on a lift. "Can't we rewind to the bit with the bondals by the statue?"

Knowing better than to growl, the parrot sighed. "We're supposed to be following his current movement, not going back to watch the highlights!"

Apart from the bases like to one where he and the Mother Lung now stood, the huge network of caves had only been explored once by the parrots that went to set up the security camera system. As most of them hadn't come back there were few volunteers to go out again. A few nights later someone stole a transport vessel and when they tried to make contact, all they heard was gleeful laughing and jeering replies to their messages until the ship went out of range. After that the only other expeditions into the caves had been to put Mother Lung's generals in place.

"But nothing's happening! What's he going to do in a lift?"

"Mom-"

"Don't you 'Mom' me you ungrateful boy! Every day I'm out slaving my ass off for you," The Parrot noted bluntly that Mother Lung didn't, and never had had an ass to slave off. "Then I get back and all I do is, 'Mom, do this' and 'Mom, do that'! Well I've had enough! You try doing the work for a change. Get lost!"

"And where am I meant to go?"

"I don't know and frankly I don't care! Go check the power core or something."

"But you are the power core!"

"Then go watch the surveillance monitors! I don't care; just get out of my sight!"

With a sigh, the space parrot left. Mother Lung eyed him carefully until he left (all Cyclopes eyed people). Once the hatch had closed behind him she waited a few seconds to make sure he wasn't coming back and reached, with a short, flexible tentacle, to the top of her tank where she pressed a button. The blue liquid in the tank slowly drained and a square panel in the front lifted outwards and then up. The huge organ reached down to the bottom of her tank with a tentacle where she reached under it and felt around until her tentacle found what she was looking for. It drew out a large cardboard box with the words 'Marlboro Strong' printed across the front with the words 'Warning, smoking kills' in unobtrusive letters below.

Mother Lung slowly and luxuriantly drew out an enormous, long white and brown cylinder of paper and poked the end between the 'lips' of the short tube that was generously referred to as her mouth. Slowly are carefully so as not to have it touch the acid, she slipped the box back under her tank and then pulled out a huge red plastic lighter, flicked it into life and lit the end of the enormous cigarette. Within seconds she'd turned an odd green colour and was coughing and choking like she was trying to force a train down her tube. Eventually the coughing subsided and she took a long draw from the nicotine-laden tube and released a blissful sigh as tar clogged up her insides.

This was the life. All she needed now were a few slaves fussing aimlessly and a nice, tortured sacrifice to be shot down screaming before her. She glanced at the surveillance screens which were now at the bottom of the lift. The bounty hunter was coming closer by the minute. And as for the slaves…

Lot of fun, that one. Tell me what you think!

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