Chapter 3
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Within the Great Hall of ACROSS, all was still and silent.
The lights were dimmed even more than was standard.The massive room was empty, save for the dark-haired girl sprawled out across the cold tile.
Gradually, she began to stir, and then sat up dizzily.
"Senior Excel?" she called tentatively, glancing about. "Lord Ilpalazzo?"
Her gaze drifted to the front of the room, where it seemed that something important was missing.
"Wasn't there a very big chair up there before? I feel sure that there must have been, because Lord Ilpalazzo sat there all the time. I wonder where Lord Ilpalazzo is, anyway. And I wonder what has become of Senior Excel. I wonder," she concluded, already beginning to feel faint and overwhelmed with the grueling business of living, "if I've missed anything important…"
With that, she collapsed back to the ground in a heap.
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"Excel is beginning to wonder if something is wrong," a completely different, much more lively girl in a different part of the world mused to herself as she came to a stop to better ponder exactly what was giving her this vague, uneasy sense. She gave the reigns fastened around her wrists and waist an experimental tug. Then she shook her head. "The combined weight of the glorious Lord Ilpalazzo and his glorious chair is not nearly as much of a task to pull as it should be! For almost an hour now, things have seemed way too easy. Excel knows that a matter of mind over matter can do wonders to help a devoted and loving girl such as her cope with grueling and impossible adversity, but surely she should still feel a little tiny bit weighed down by her deliciously sexy Lord Ilpalazzo and his half-tonne chair! Not only that," she finished a tiny bit more slowly as she swung the reigns around in front of her and thus made a horrifying discovery, "but Excel is certain that Lord Ilpalazzo and his chair should still be attached to the reigns. Although this clears up the mystery of why they've been so abnormally easy to pull along, this also means that EXCEL HAS LOST HER LORD ILPALAZZO SOMEWHERE ALONG THE WAY!"
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And somewhere, somehow, for reasons utterly unrelated, although the timing was almost uncanny, Pedro threw back his head and let loose an anguished howl.
"NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!"
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Across the still, pristinely white landscape shot a faintly reddish-blonde streak, rambling madly to itself as it went. Every now and again, a word or phrase could be distinguished, such as "must save Lord Ilpalazzo!", or "it's the pit for me!", or "a gingerbread house would be really good right about now", or "I wonder which of the Three Stooges had the biggest feet".
Finally, as the blur caught sight of a jagged hole in a sheet of ice…it shot past, unheeding.
However, five minutes later, it came to a dead stop.
"I wonder if that was important," Excel said, scratching her head thoughtfully.
She leapt back into motion, this time shooting across the snow in a reddish-blonde blur, backwards.
Once she reached the hole punched through the ice, she stopped and stared in horror as something colorful and woolen lying next to it.
"That's one of the mittens that Excel bought especially for Lord Ilapalazzo for this trip! He was a little mad that I got pink and purple stripey ones with little kitties on them, but they matched the toque really, really well! The pink is just the right color to match the pom-pom on the top! Of course, Excel doesn't recall seeing Lord Ilpalazzo wearing his toque at all. I wonder how come."
By now hopelessly off-track, Excel took a moment to collect her thoughts and recall exactly where she had been going with all this. Finally…
"Wait a minute…if Lord Ilpalazzo's glove is here, then either Lord Ilpalazzo is somewhere nearby, or else his hand is really, really cold! Don't worry, Lord Ilpalazzo! Your faithful Excel will hold onto your mitten for you!"
As she crept carefully across the ice to retrieve the small scrap of wool, she noticed something more horrifying still: a flash of red gleamed up at her through the dark waters beneath the ice. Seconds later, a very large shoulder pad floated to the surface.
Slowly but surely, the pieces of the situation began to piece themselves together in Excel's mind. The missing Ilpalazzo, the equally missing chair, the stray mitten, the strange amount of red fabric-type stuff in the water in this part of the world that Excel was fairly certain wasn't mentioned in the travel brochures, the stray shoulder pad. If there was one thing Excel knew about Lord Ilpalazzo, it was that he was a sexy, sexy man that she would like to spend some quality time between the covers with, mrowr.
If there were two things Excel knew about Lord Ilpalazzo, it was that he was a sexy, sexy man that she would like to spend some quality time between the covers with, mrowr, and that he rarely went anywhere without his shoulder armor thingies. Thus, it became utterly inconceivable that he should have simply left one in a frozen-over pond after his refreshing swim.
As the pieces finally congealed together in Excel's mind to create one horrifying whole, she uttered a horrified shriek.
"Lord Ilpalazzo! Don't worry! Your Excel will rescue you from the clutches of the demon pond!"
With that, she leapt boldly through the hole in the ice, continuing her speech as she sunk out of sight.
And all was stillness once more.
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"Oh, boy," Rhianwen sighed. "I think I'd better go back and revise some things."
"Well, you know, I could help you out," a nearby voice drawled. "But you'd have to make it worth my while first."
"Who's there?" Rhianwen demanded, leaping into a defensive pose and trying to look intimidating.
"Over here," the voice called, amused.
Rhianwen stared oddly at the armed – and legged – cluster of stars that had sidled up next to her. Then, as a light seemed to break over her face, she gave a joyous squeal.
"You're the Great Will of the Macrocosm!"
"My reputation precedes me," the star cluster chuckled.
"So," Rhianwen began, returning to the businesslike cool that she had experienced by now all of twice in her life, "did you just say that you'd be able to help me out here?"
"If you could make it worth my while," the Great Will of the Macrocosm reiterated.
Rhianwen's face took on a canny smile.
"How would this here box of fudge do?"
The Great Will was silent for a moment.
"Peanut butter fudge?"
"Walnut," Rhianwen replied.
"Ooh! Let's talk," the Great Will said charmingly, looping her arm through Rhianwen's and leading her toward the pond that had just claimed the lives of the two main characters of the story.
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Excel was puzzled. Even more so than usual. She was fairly certain that she had remembered, rather recently in fact, being very, very cold. Now she was quite pleasantly warm, if a little disoriented from flying through space.
She struggled to pry her eyes open just a bit.
"Excel…" a crooning voice called distantly.
"Yeah?" she called back weakly.
"Excel…"
"Yeah?" she called again, a little less weakly.
"Excel…"
"What?!" she demanded, exasperated.
"Sorry," the voice chirped. "Hold on tight; universe reset commencing!"
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SPLASH!
Excel struggled vainly against the shocking cold of the water, seeping into her clothes and dragging her inevitably downwards.
"That…didn't…work," she gasped, each word punctuated by an unhealthy glubbing sound as she struggled to get above water again. "Rose…bud…"
And with that, she sank once again out of sight.
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"Darnit!" Rhianwen exclaimed, angry tears forming in her eyes. "If this happens again, I'm giving up!"
"I think we need to take the reset a little farther back," the Great Will of the Macrocosm said thoughtfully, munching on the last of the fudge in the box. "If, that is, you give me a good reason…"
With a sigh, Rhianwen reached into hammerspace and withdrew another box of fudge.
"Thank-you," the Great Will sang cheerfully. "So, shall we go back to the point before Excel reached the pond and simply direct her away from it?"
"No!" Rhianwen replied proudly. "We go back to the point just after Ilpalazzo fell through the ice, but before Excel unwittingly left him to die, or jumped in after him."
The Great Will of the Macrocosm may have looked at her oddly, but no one could tell.
"What? Why on earth don't we just go back further and avoid the pond altogether?"
Rhianwen's eyes shifted nervously from side to side.
"I have my reasons," she replied carefully.
The Great Will of the Macrocosm sweatdropped.
"Ah. A plot device."
"Yup," Rhianwen beamed. "Let's go!"
With that, each of them scurried to one side of the screen, grasped the bottom, and flipped it over.
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"Oh, no!" Excel yelped as the massive red chair, bearing the caped man, disappeared through a newly formed jagged hole in the ice. "The demon pond has dragged down and entrapped Excel's fabulously lovely and wonderful Lord Ilpalazzo! Excel must do something!"
Leaping to her feet, Excel struck a heroic pose and prepared to leap into the pond. Then she stopped and put a hand to her chin.
"Hold on; something tells me that jumping in after him isn't the best way to handle this. I might end up kinda dead or somethin', and Excel has the distinct feeling that she's already carked it several times today."
"Four times," Rhianwen called laconically from somewhere off-camera.
"After four emotional death scenes already in the last three chapters, Excel is ready to try something that might not make her so dead-as-Hyatt," the young woman continued, giving no indication that she had heard the annoyingly persistent author.
With that, Excel flung herself down on her stomach on the ice and slid carefully toward the hole.
"Lord Ilpalazzo!" she called gratingly into the water. "Grab my hand!"
With an annoyed grumble, Ilpalazzo wrapped his hand tightly around Excel's wrist and began trying to drag himself from the water.
After five minutes of desperate struggle against nature doing what nature does best in bad, overly dramatic fiction and thwarting the heroes at every turn, Excel began to wonder dimly if something was wrong.
"I think you have to leave your cape behind," she said between gasps for air. "It's getting too heavy with all the water, and we can't fit the shoulder guards out of the hole."
Ilpalazzo's eyes narrowed.
"Never! I would sooner die myself."
"Now, I'd let him drop at that point, myself," Rhianwen commented idly to the Great Will of the Macrocosm from the sidelines where both were watching intently and gorging on fudge.
Excel leapt to her feet and wheeled furiously on them.
"Blasphemy!" she shrieked.
"Excel!" Ilpalazzo called in a voice remarkably close to a whine as he began to sink again. "I've changed my mind! I'll leave the cape! Just get me out of here before one of us dies again. I get horribly nauseous during Universal Reset," he finished.
"Right away, Lord Ilpalazzo!" Excel exclaimed, flinging herself back down onto her stomach and seizing him by the hair.
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Several more grueling and painful minutes later, during which Ilpalazzo lost no more hair than one would expect after being dragged out of a pond by it – which was a good deal of it, actually, although anime laws dictated that he would naturally have enough left over that no one would ever notice a difference – saw the two bold, adventurous, and very, very went and cold members of ACROSS continuing once again across the snowy plain. With one difference.
The chair having been sacrificed to the Frozen-Over Pond Gods, there was no vehicle for Excel to drag Ilpalazzo in. Thus, she improvised by slinging him over her shoulder – much easier to do, with the shoulder armor having gone the way of the chair – and half-carrying, half-dragging him thus.
To his own credit, this is not a situation that Ilpalazzo would have chosen, had he been in any position to choose. Indeed, at first, he had been content to actually walk for himself.
This had been before he had collapsed to the ground and lay, unmoving.
Although Excel was by no means the "brightest tool in the drawer", as the quaint mixed metaphor colloquialism went, she did know enough to realize that, after her own exposure to the water, she was "pretty damn cold". From here, it was a small leap in reasoning to the assumption that Lord Ilpalazzo, who had been entirely immersed, would be even colder. Thus, it seemed to Excel a foolish decision to try to revive him while outside. And who knew? Maybe if she moved around a lot, it would warm him up or somethin'.
And so, hoisting the would-be city conqueror over her shoulder, she trudged a little wearily, but at the same time with a great sense of satisfaction brought on by the closeness of the soaking-wet-and-unconscious object of her affections, across the plains.
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"Watch carefully," Rhianwen whispered to the Great Will of the Macrocosm, by now a little jittery from all the sugary fudge she had consumed. "This is where the plot kicks in!"
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"Ack!" Excel shrieked, leaping back and dragging Ilpalazzo from harm's way as a little cottage plummeted from the heavens and landed before them with a tremendous crash. "Is this some sort of Wizard of Oz thing? Is Excel going to go inside and discover hundreds of tiny, singing people who will give her candy and hail her as a goddess for inadvertently killing the evil witch who has been oppressing them for years and years and years? Is Excel going to travel for countless days and nights to reach the Emerald City, where a wizard who really isn't a wizard will fail to send her home, after which the Good Witch of the North or somethin' will have to tell her how to use the ruby slippers that Excel forgot to mention she was gonna get from the pancakey witch she squished with her house, thus proving that women are goddesses and men are ineffectual idiots?"
As her exceedingly fast stream of chatter echoed through the landscape and eventually died away, the overlord-laden girl considered the point carefully.
"Probably not. Although the candy would be cool! Excel is so hungry…"
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End Notes: [Happy sigh] This universe is truly a wonderful thing. I feel so…unrestrained with my author insertness! It actually FITS for once! [Rhianwen hands everyone a bunny and some fudge and then dances away, singing]