Chapter 2
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It was just another normal day in Random Snowy Location in Siberia. The snow was falling, the air was crisp – or rather, was cold enough to freeze the stoutest of hearts – and the sky was a dull grey.
In addition, mass murderers that were also human/badger hybrids with a leaning toward the career of an insurance salesman were roaming the frozen plains, searching gleefully for victims which they might first insure and then devour.
"Hey, hold on," Phil the Human/Badger Insurance Salesman requested, frowning as he came to a stop.
"What?" Anton the Human/Badger Insurance Salesman asked, somewhat annoyed at this delay.
"What are we doing here?"
"Whaddaya mean?"
Phil shrugged.
"Well, I just mean that Siberia isn't really overrun with human/badger insurance salesmen. It's not like it's some sort of biological imperative for us to be here. That's just an inaccurate bit of nonsense thrown out by an idiot who likes to pretend that she knows what she's talking about."
"You mean, kind of like the cliché that Siberia is always freezing and snowy, with skies of dingy gray?" Anton asked with a smirk.
Phil blinked, then nodded thoughtfully.
"I guess this Rhianwen kid is buying into a lot of stereotypes unquestioningly because it's easier than doing actual research."
"What're you gonna do?" Anton asked with the air of accepting the situation easily because it was the only possible option. Then, as a flurry of movement against the snow caught his eye, he grinned toothily. "Hey, look! It's a bunny!"
"Let's get it!" Phil suggested eagerly, and the two old friends set off together in hot pursuit of the bunny, whom they would first insure at exorbitant rates that the bunny wouldn't bother paying but would still for some reason be outraged about, and then devour.
However, as a very colorful, energetic, and loud speck on the horizon caught Phil's eye, he came to a dead stop and tugged at Anton's arm to get his attention.
"What do you think that is?"
Anton peered intently at the speck, which seemed to be approaching, getting larger, louder, more colorful, and more energetic as it did so.
"Well, it's not a bunny. That's for sure," he said airily and pointedly.
"You don't know that! It might be a really big bunny!"
Anton rolled his eyes.
"Fine. We'll wait for it," he said grudgingly.
And so the two human/badger hybrid insurance salesmen stood shoulder to shoulder, arms crossed intimidatingly, and watched the speck, which had somewhere along the way turned into an exceedingly hyper little blondish girl dragging a gigantic red chair and within that, a man with humungous shoulders, behind her.
"Weird," Anton noted.
"Uh, bud? It doesn't seem to be slowing down," Phil pointed out nervously.
And indeed, both girl and chair seemed to have no intention of slowing down, much less actually stopping."They'll stop," Anton assured him.
Phil wondered at the odd thoughts that popped into his mind at times like this. What possible relevance could the phrase, 'Famous last words' have right now?
As it so happened, this silent question was to be Phil's last thought, for as he was in the process of thinking it, the girl and the chair had sped over the snowy slopes, and had finally collided with Anton and Phil, the girl first trampling them to the ground, and then the massive chair acting much in the same manner as a steam roller might.
And so it was that the illustrious race of Human/Badger Insurance Salesmen native to Siberia died out entirely.
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"I wonder what that bump was," Excel murmured. "And where those two badger-lookin' guys that were waiting for us went."
"You'll want to head right when you reach the tree," Ilpalazzo called.
"Right!" Excel chirped enthusiastically, turning sharply to the right.
Ilpalazzo clung tightly to the arms of the chair as it swung in a quick, wobbly half-circle.
"Not now," he said, exasperated. "When we reach the tree! That's at least another hundred yards from here!"
"Oh, yeah," Excel laughed sheepishly, whirling back to the right.
Ilpalazzo grumbled to himself, fingers digging once more into the armrests, as the chair swung back the left.
"We're at the tree now!" the girl's excruciatingly cheerful shout drifted back to him. "So haaaaaaaaaaaaaaang on!"
With that, she reared back, shuffled slowly around until she was facing right, and then took off into a mad sprint.
"Running, running, running! I feel light and free like an inert gas in a salad mixer! Happy as a clam-digger on Fishstick Wednesday when I'm running, running, running!" Excel sang merrily, utterly unheeding of the man a few feet behind her, trying desperately to get her attention.
"EXCEL! STOP!" Ilpalazzo howled futilely, as the song continued, growing louder and more enthusiastic each second.
Oh, how desperately he wished he had his pit at a time like this! Well, one would have to make do with what one had.And so, with one last wistful look at his hand-held dating simulator, Ilpalazzo hurled it at the back of the runaway Excel's head.
Unfortunately, Excel was not the only one of the two with a shaky grasp of some of the laws of physics.
Ilpalazzo had thrown the game with all his might, but had failed to account for his own movement, and for Excel's. Thus, the game sailed ahead a few feet, before smacking him directly in the face as he caught up with it.
"Ow," he groaned, rubbing his sore nose gingerly.
Then, once the pain had faded a little, he decided with a shake of his head that there was really only one more option. Reaching into his cape, he withdrew an object that he had on instinct packed for just such an emergency as this. Or for a completely different, much more fun situation.
Uncurling the long cord from its handle, he brandished the whip and swung it forward. Through sheer luck, he managed to catch Excel's ankle on the first try.
Through sheer stupidity, he yanked the whip back, causing her to trip and stumble, and then to roll along the ground, tangling the reigns about her.
This, in a startling display of utter disregard for the laws of physics, caused the chair to sail directly up into the air, flip over, and come back down again.
With an irritated sigh, Ilpalazzo leapt from the chair and into a snow bank.
Once the dust (or snow, rather) had settled following the resulting crash, Excel sat up dizzily.
"Did you say something, Lord Ilpalazzo?" she called back to him.
"Nothing terribly important, Excel. Only that we just turned right to get off the main path while I checked the map. We don't want to be a traffic obstruction, after all."
Excel was surprisingly quiet as this sank in.
"How far does Lord Ilpalazzo believe we've gone out of our way and thus delayed the completion of our mission for the glory of ACROSS?"
"It depends how quickly you can run," he replied with a tiny smile.
The young woman leapt eagerly to her feet.
"You know the speed we were doing just now? Double it, add fifteen, carry the six, find the square root, divide that by pi, and then multiply the whole thing by fifteen thousand nine hundred and twenty-six!"
Although a part of his mind – the part that never had become used to daily conversation with Excel – was trying to make sense of all this and uncover the logic behind it, the rest of his mind prompted him to paraphrase, very simply,
"Ah. Very quickly, then."
"Yes!" Excel yelped, striking a heroic pose for all of four seconds before flinging herself about the landscape at a dizzying rate. "Fuelled by her love and loyalty for the glorious Lord Ilpalazzo, inspired by the grand mission that we as members of ACROSS must complete for the good of humanity, Excel will run and run and run until her legs fall off, and her eyes grow hazy, and her ears bleed, and her butt gets really nice and firm from all the exercise!"
"Very good, but not today. Why don't we find a place to stay the night, and continue on tomorrow?" Ilpalazzo suggested uneasily. After all, he had barely managed to keep his grip on his chair during that mad ride through Hell frozen over. With a newly re-energized Excel dragging him, there was no way he would manage it this time.
"But where are we going to find a place to stay, all the way out here?"
"Oh, come now, Excel," Ilpalazzo scoffed. "Siberia can't be a completely unsettled wasteland."
"Well, we are working with a cliché version of it presented by an author who isn't big on research," Excel reminded him seriously before snapping back into character and chasing snowflakes.
"But you forget: I have a map," Ilpalazzo announced grandly, withdrawing a tiny folded square of paper from his cape and shaking it out as triumphant music played in the background. He turned around slowly and glared at the trumpeters that had apparently been following them around. "Will you kindly go away?"
"I don't think I ever knew that," Excel commented to the fourth wall in wonderment, scratching her head.
"It doesn't matter now," Ilpalazzo said, annoyed. "What matters is that we use this map to find our way to shelter before another snowstorm that may or may not be characteristic of this part of Siberia at this time of year!"
"O-kay!" Excel exclaimed, leaping to her feet and seizing the reigns before bolting into motion.
"NOT THAT WAY!" Ilpalazzo said in very calm capital letters, the statement growing gradually softer as he was dragged away.
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"Excel regrets to inform Lord Ilpalazzo that we are hopelessly, completely, and entirely lost," Excel regretfully informed Ilpalazzo a grueling three hours later as she pulled her furry coat more tightly around her and plunked down to sit cross-legged in the snow.
Ilpalazzo glared poisonously at her from his throne-thingy.
"If I had my magic cord right now, you would be so plummeting downward into tentacle hell," he said heatedly before snapping back into character…or not. "We are not lost. I know exactly where we are."
"We should ask for directions," Excel said mildly.
"There is absolutely no need of that," Ilpalazzo insisted. "I told you, I know exactly where we are. And that aside, Excel, just who would we ask?"
He swept a hand about to indicate the utter lack of anything that would both know the area and be able to give them directions in any human language under the sun.
"Excel understands Lord Ilpalazzo's point, but maybe we could check the map again?" Excel asked hopefully.
"No; that would serve only to waste time that we do not have. We will continue this moment, to avoid prolonged exposure to the cold."
Presented with one of her favorite things in all the world, Lord Ilpalazzo using long words (some of the others being Lord Ilpalazzo using short words, Lord Ilpalazzo using made-up words, Lord Ilpalazzo using hyphenated words, and Lord Ilpalazzo using no words), Excel quickly forgot what her Very Good Arguments for double-checking the map had been. Instead, shooting her hand up into the air, she barked out an enthusiastic,
"Hail Ilpalazzo!"
"Yes, thank-you, Excel, as thoroughly unhelpful as that was," Ilpalazzo murmured, rubbing his forehead wearily. "Well, let us be off."
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"Hey, hold on!" Rhianwen protested, watching as Excel began to drag the big red chair off into the distance. "You two were supposed to wait for me!"
Both brave, or simply foolish, adventurers turned slowly and glared at the exceedingly tardy author.
"Do you realize that you left us sitting there for eighteen hours?" Ilpalazzo asked conversationally. "Eighteen hours. During which we became covered with snow, chilled to the bone, died twice after being discovered by wolves and being too cold to move – thank-you, by the way, to the Great Will of the Macrocosm, wherever you are," he concluded.
"No problem," the cluster of stars called cheerfully as she scurried across the bottom of the screen.
"Being brought back to life aside, Rhianwen, and even though my lap stayed comfortably warm, even if I did lose all feeling in my legs from the circulation being cut off, you can't honestly expect your characters to simply wait, under conditions like those, for eighteen hours."
"Yeah," Excel agreed. "Eighteen hours bent over someone's lap gets boring, even if it is Lord Ilpalazzo."
"But…but…but…you can't just continue the story without the author!" Rhianwen wailed, causing widespread avalanches throughout the mountains that everyone was fairly certain had not been there before, and had been introduced simply for the purposes of the gag.
Ilpalazzo surveyed her coolly.
"We seem to have done reasonably well."
"Oh, yeah?" Rhianwen demanded heatedly. "Well, just try this!"
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"Whoa! Why did everything just go all dark and kinda non-existing, but kinda dotty at the same time?" Excel exclaimed as the world reappeared and the ellipses vanished.
"Very well," Ilpalazzo huffed. "You make your point. Now, if you please, some of us would like to get out of this snow and back to F-City."
"Snow, snow, snow! Dancing in the snow! We're so happy when we're dancing in the snow and freezing to the bone and developing hypo-hypo-hypothermiaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!" Excel sang merrily as she skipped about before dropping to the ground to roll around in the soft white drifts.
"Well, then," Ilpalazzo amended. "One of us would like to get out of this snow and back to F-City."
"Okay, fine," Rhianwen said briskly, business-like for the first and last time ever. "Then you two get going, and I'll get back to directing the action from above, like some sadistic madman."
"Yeah! Whoo!" Excel cheered.
"Oh, my head hurts," Ilpalazzo groaned. "Why didn't I just let her go by herself and perish?"
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"Whew!" Excel gasped. "Getting…tired. Arms…and…legs…getting…heavy. This must…be…how…Hyatt…feels…all the…time…except…for when she…doesn't."
"Excel, why have you begun to speak like William Shatner?" Ilpalazzo called sleepily.
At the heartening sound of her utterly one-sided true love's voice, Excel Excel experienced a rush of energy unlike anything she had experienced since the previous week, when she finished off the extra four gallons of espresso that the three hummingbirds had failed to drink. This, however, played much less havoc with her digestive system, and didn't leave nasty stains on her teeth.
"Don't worry about a thing, Lord Ilpalazzo! Your Excel was feeling weary and heavy-hearted from the four days that we have been lost in a snowstorm, but the inspiring sound of your marvelous voice has worked miracles and I feel once more on top of the world!"
Ilpalazzo nodded absently.
"Very good, Excel," he yawned before returning to his nap.
With that, Excel marched bravely and energetically forward, so engrossed in being renewed and rejuvenated that she utterly failed to notice when, barely half an hour later, the texture of the ground had changed a little.
Rather than the hard-packed snow on top of frozen earth they had been crossing for most of their journey, this had a very slick consistency beneath the snow. Even more worrisome to anyone with an attention span and any eye for detail whatsoever would have been the fishy eyes and fins visible through the ground.
However, Excel being Excel, she did not notice any of this, and thus, when she heard a sickening and prolonged crack, she wondered idly if she was going to see a real, live thunder-snowstorm.
Shortly after, she stopped short.
"Excel has truly done an exceptional job of rising above her grueling situation! The weight pulling me down seems to have nearly vanished!"
And so she continued her trek through the icy wastelands of a cliché and unresearched version of Siberia, as behind her, a large red chair bearing a sleeping man with shoulders that widened the hole by a good four feet, sank quickly out of sight through a jagged hole in the ice.
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End Notes: Well, it's the closest Rhianwen will ever come to a really gripping and dramatic cliffhanger.
And by the way, I'm sorry for all the fourth-wall-breakage cracks about my lack of research. There are very few things that I will not put a little research effort into, but this stands proudly as one of those few things. And, for that matter, I apologize for showing up so often in the story myself thus far. It can only get worse…