Chapter 4
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"'This is no longer a blank page'," Misaki read slowly from the otherwise empty page, before shutting the book with a snap. "I hate modernist poetry…"
"You're the one who dragged me to this…this…place," Iwata pointed out sulkily.
"Bookstore," Misaki said, exasperated. "Say it with me, slowly. "Book…store."
"There are no pictures! Nowhere! There's not a picture in this whole place! What kind of books have no pictures? None! See? Look at this book," he wailed, grabbing the nearest book and shoving it at her. "No pictures!"
As she read the title, a smirk crossed Misaki's lips.
"Look again," she suggested, flipping the book around and pointing to the title, and a caption under it in smaller letters.
"One-hundred and One Favourite Positions," he read slowly. "Comprehensive Diagrams Included."
He shrugged, clearly not understanding.
She flipped the book open to a random page, and Iwata's eyes grew enormous, his nose beginning to leak a slow trickle of blood.
"This we should buy it?" he asked eagerly.
Misaki looked at him sharply.
[Caution: Violent scene deleted for your protection]
"OR MAYBE NOT!" Iwata called, words drifting away as he sauntered from the bookstore through a newly-made gaping hole in the ceiling and sped off, totally against his will, somewhere in the vicinity of Siberia.
Left alone in the considerably draftier bookstore, Misaki regarded the large, hard-cover volume Iwata had left on the floor. Then, with a small smile, she snatched it up and headed for the cash register.
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"Hey, what was that?" Excel wondered aloud, turning hastily in the direction of the distinctly male-sounding howl of fear and the thump that followed soon after.
As she whirled about quickly, the still-unconscious Ilpalazzo's head slammed directly into the side of the cabin.
Excel shrugged, turning back and giving her unlucky boss a matching bump on the other side of his head.
"Whatever it was, it landed all the way over there, and Excel has much importanter matters to worry about, if importanter is a real word, which Excel doesn't think it is, but she doesn't have her dictionary right now, and if she hasn't got time to check out mysterious noises that could be vicious creatures waiting to devour us whole, she really hasn't got time for matters of wordityness!"
Thus deciding, she returned her attention to the matter at hand.
"Hmm…Excel has been looking at this mysteriously-appearing cabin for some time now. Four hours, to be exact, because the extreme temperatures, not to mention the lack of food has made Excel extremely weak," she concluded sadly.
Then, straightening, she continued resolutely.
"Still, when a girl is lost in a snowy wilderness with a man that she wants desperately to screw until even porn stars look on in admiration at her stamina, who has long ago lost consciousness and needs to be warmed up somehow, and she mysteriously happens upon a cottage that may have blankets or a fireplace or both, it can only mean one thing!"
The trees, the hills, the mountains, and Iwata from several hundred meters away listened expectantly.
"It means," Excel began calmly, carefully setting Ilpalazzo down in the snow, "THAT THE CABIN IS REALLY A MONSTER BENT ON THE DESTRUCTION OF THE WORLD STARTING WITH US AND NOT INCLUDING PARTS OF MUNSI, INDIANA!!!"
With that, she leapt at the cabin, joyously beating it with a severity that one might expect from Excel if the victim were inanimate.
Mere minutes later, the young woman stood, grinning and victorious, before a pile of scrap-wood formerly known as a cabin.
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"Darnit!" Rhianwen exclaimed. "She messed everything up again!"
"I'll let you get yourself out of this, Ms. Plot Device," the Great Will of the Macrocosm groaned before flopping to the ground in a fudge-induced coma.
"Fine," Rhianwen grumbled, pulling out a laptop from nowhere.
After a few seconds of rapidly clicking keys, the author shoved her laptop back into hammerspace, finding it nowhere as easy as she had found pulling the laptop out.
"It's just like packing a suitcase," she noted curiously.
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"Ack!" Excel yelped in surprise as another cabin descended from the heavens…only to land directly on Ilpalazzo.
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"Well, I guess I can't blame Excel for this one," Rhianwen grumbled as she once again withdrew her laptop and typed madly.
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"I'm starting to think I'm the Wicked Witch," Excel noted as she frantically dove at Ilpalazzo, dragging him out of the path of the cabin currently approaching at a dizzying rate. "Well, Excel will just have to defeat this cabin-shaped monster, too!"
"Excel, what on earth are you doing?"
At this question, asked in a weak, weary voice, Excel stopped abruptly and turned slowly, an expression of supreme joy on her face.
"Lord Ilpalazzo! You're awake! Excel has managed to keep you warm enough to be alive!"
"Well, it seems that you've managed to find shelter," he noted in vague surprise. "Very good."
Excel blinked rapidly, then looked at the cabin. Then she looked back at Ilpalazzo, who had begun to burrow into the snow and doze off.
"Your Excel doesn't see the shelter that you refer to," she admitted sadly.
Grumbling about nearly everything under the sun as he did so, Ilpalazzo struggled to his feet.
"Do you see the cabin, Excel?"
"Yes, Excel sees the cabin…"
"Then you see the shelter that I refer to."
Excel's expression grew horrified.
"But we can't go in there!"
"The sign above the door says differently," Ilpalazzo said, gesturing to the blinking neon sign above the door: Enter here, all ye weary travelers. Excel, this means you!
"I guess it does look pretty convenient," Excel admitted, eyes glued to the sign. Damn those demon houses, how did they know her name?! "But don't you think it's a little too convenient?"
"Excel," Ilpalazzo began in a clipped, barely controlled voice. "We have been outside in a blizzard for nearly a week. We have eaten nothing, since you threw all our rations at the dolphins that you claim tried to 'attack' us on our way across the ocean. My head is pounding, and I've developed these mysterious lumps on either side."
Here, Excel pretended to be very engrossed in her mitten in order to hide her guilty expression.
"Nothing in the world would be 'too convenient' at the moment," the conqueror continued. "So get in there right now before I pick you up and throw you!"
"Right away, Lord Ilpalazzo," Excel agreed with surprisingly subdued meekness, shuffling through the door. 'I wonder why it's unlocked like this. Well, they say you shouldn't look a gift-horse in the mouth!'
With a nod of satisfaction, Ilpalazzo followed her.
However, just as he was crossing the doorstep, a strange thing happened.
The neon sign, which as far as anyone knew had been held together in the very picture of solid construction, began to sag a little, and then, with a soft crack, dropped from the doorway and directly onto the tall man's head.
"Ouch," he commented laconically before dropping to the ground, unconscious once more.
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"Hmph!" Rhianwen hmphed, crossing her arms and looking smug. "That'll teach him to come to life and spoil my horribly contrived plot twists!"
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Excel, meanwhile, was behaving in a decidedly Excelish manner, having grabbed Ilpalazzo by one limp arm and begun galloping around in the snow, hoping that this might warm him up. And if that didn't do it, she decided, talking to him would.
"Please wake up, Lord Ilpalazzo! You were doin' so good at it for a minute there! Oh, cruel, cruel Fate! Why couldn't Excel be taken by the wrath of the pond instead of this beautifully arrogant and idealistic man?! Excel would have sacrificed herself gladly to the Pond Gods if doing so would have spared him! And I'll bet the little munchkins that show up to ask about the witch we've killed won't help us at all! They probably won't even give us any food, those cheap little bastards! Reminds me of the summers I spent with Grandma in Mississippi; she didn't feed me for the whole two weeks! That must be where I got my amazing ability to be absurdly energetic on absurdly little nourishment. Grandma, here's to you!"
Excel threw off a snappy salute in the direction that she assumed to be west, but which was in fact somewhere between south and east. Southeast, if you will.
Whichever direction it was, the process of saluting added one too many tasks for Excel to simultaneously complete, and thus she tripped over her own foot and landed face-first in the snow.
Once still for a moment, Excel's brain caught up with the rest of her, and to good purpose. She climbed to her feet and stared consideringly at the cabin.
"Hmm…Excel seems to remember that Lord Ilpalazzo mentioned that we should use this place to our advantage. Could it be…that this is the answer to our problems regarding where to take shelter?"
"Yes!" a severely annoyed voice replied immediately.
Excel grinned up at the sky so adorably that Rhianwen was hard-pressed to remain angry, and was more inclined to pop back into the story long enough to thoroughly huggle Lord Ilpalazzo's most faithful follower.
"Excel Excel would like to thank you for that prompt answer, and will now comply!"
With that, she marched triumphantly into the cabin, pausing only briefly to hoist Ilpalazzo more securely up onto he shoulder.
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"Well!" Rhianwen chirped, looking smug. "I guess sometimes you just have to be more direct with these characters."
"It won't be that easy," the Great Will of the Macrocosm informed her in a tone both sympathetic and amused.
Rhianwen crossed her arms defensively and turned to watch the action unfold.
"We'll just see, now, won't we?"
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"Now that Excel has figured out all by herself that this mysteriously appearing cabin is somehow important to keeping Lord Ilpalazzo warm," Excel began, gazing about her curiously, "she must decipher the rest of this puzzle."
She put one hand to her chin and crossed her other arm in a thoughtful pose that sent Ilpalazzo abruptly to the stylishly rustic rough wooden floorboards.
"But what use could a fireplace, a lot of wood, one nice, soft, warm wool blanket, and a bearskin rug possibly be to a lost adventurer and her ridiculously sexy, unconscious-from-exposure-to-cold boss? I wonder…"
The young woman's stream of chatter trailed off into a gasp.
"Hold on; Excel remembers something. It happened a long time ago…way back on the second volume of the series. Excel and Hatchan were in the mountains panning for gold in a river never thought to have any – gold, that is – and working for a big, burly, mean, badass boss who nonetheless had a soft spot for cute little emergency food supplies like Menchi. I wonder why that stereotype is so popular. There must be big, tough, burly men out there who don't like puppies. There must be some who prefer kitties, or bunnies, or gophers, or squirrels, or pigeons, or ferrets, or badgers, or mushrooms, or something. Anyway, that has nothing to do with Excel's memory of how she and Hatchan got lost in the snow and Hatchan got frozen solid in a big block of ice and Excel somehow ended up with a bad, bad case of frostbite on various unmentionable parts! Could this oddly-appearing memory possibly have something to do with how Excel will bring Lord Ilpalazzo back to consciousness?"
She pondered this very carefully for a moment, carefully settling Ilpalazzo down onto the rug and then plopping down onto it herself and noting wickedly that this would be a really nice place to get naked with that special someone.
"No! Excel must not be distracted by her own deliciously sordid fantasies right now! She must concentrate everything she has on how she is to help Lord Ilpalazzo regain consciousness!"
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"So close," Rhianwen wept from that indefinable place where mysterious forces that secretly direct the action like to hang out. "She was so close! She almost had it for a second! What the hell happened?!"
The Great Will of the Macrocosm patted her consolingly on the shoulder.
"With Excel, dear, sometimes it's safer not to ask. She's a wonderful girl, but she has her own way of looking at the world."
"Well, then," Rhianwen said menacingly, standing up and pushing her sleeves up to her elbows, a dangerous fire in her eyes. "I guess I'll just have to do something about it."
"Oh, what now?" the Great Will of the Macrocosm sighed. "And rest assured, I'd be rolling my eyes right now if I could."
"I mean, I'm goin' down there!"
Will-chan, as she will hitherto be known within the context of this story, as the chronicler has become tired of typing out 'The Great Will of the Macrocosm' over and over, although ironically that explanation required even more effort to type out, scratched the Will-chan equivalent of her head.
"Again?"
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End Notes: Whee! It just keeps gettin' stupider and stupider! Luckily, it was intentional this time.