Even under the best of circumstances, crucifixion is never the sort of activity one chooses to engage in. Walk up to anyone on the street and ask, "What would you rather do, have an ice cream sundae or be crucified?". Ten times out of ten, you're going to get ice cream sundae enthusiasts--even if a few of them happen to be lactose intolerant.
The Scarecrow had never been particularly fond of ice cream--in sundae form or otherwise--but he was even less fond of crucifixion. When he woke with a start, pinned to a decidedly cross shaped wooden frame, his arms stretched to either side of him as far as they could go and his ankles strapped together with rope, he found he wasn't too proud to admit that maybe he was panicking just a little.
Well, maybe more than a little.
At first, when he was struggling out of slumber, he thought that he'd been captured by Batman. It wouldn't be the first time that he'd awakened to find various body parts lashed together, but as his addled mind cleared, he realized that no matter how many times he'd been caught by the 'good' guys, they'd never been so perversely ironic as to string him up--in full costume, no less--in the middle of a cornfield. The Joker had that kind of sense of humor, Batman and his caped cronies certainly did not.
After the realization that he was completely immobilized, Jonathan examined his surroundings as best he could. For starters, it was broad daylight--which meant he'd lost several hours between being in the laboratory with the girls and here--the sky was robin's egg blue, the clouds cotton ball-puffy and the corn that surrounded him was high and lush, obviously ready for the harvest. All in all, the scene was disgustingly picturesque and more like something out of the heartland than the cold, dank East Coast, right down to the yellow brick--
Oh.
Of course. Naturally. He hadn't been transported by some unknown force from the lab, he was in the damn book.
A flutter of wings close by his ear and a set of needle sharp talons digging into his shoulder made him yelp suddenly. He turned to glare at the empty eyed crow that decided to perch on him.
"Boo!" he exclaimed in his fiercest voice.
The crow just tipped its head to one side and looked at him.
He glared at it as nastily as he could, wishing he could bore holes in its head with the force of his gaze. "Go away."
The bird just waddled further up his shoulder so that it was near his ear and reached out, gently touching him with its beak. It tickled and Jonathan laughed involuntarily. The moment the chuckle was out, he growled, angry at his own loss of composure and shook his shoulder up and down as much as he possibly could.
The crow refused to be dislodged. Its tail feathers bobbed this way and that as it miraculously kept its balance despite the violent movements of its perch.
After a minute or two, Jonathan gave up and slumped as much as his bindings would allow. There was no point fighting a losing battle. The bird had the advantage: it had freedom of movement, he didn't.
The crow carefully walked down his arm, putting one foot in front of the other in a delicate balancing act until it was sitting on the ropes that held his left wrist. It leaned over in a movement that looked like it should've broken its neck and laid its head at the junction between his thumb and forefinger. Jonathan nearly burst out laughing at the ludicrousness of it all. It was begging to have its head scratched. The programmers of A Novel Idea certainly spared no expense when it came to detail.
An abrupt rustling came from somewhere to his right and Jonathan's head whipped around towards the source of the noise, the crow forgotten. The cornrows were parting in a very definite pattern as someone thrashed about in them, coming towards him. He couldn't see much, at first, but eventually a flash of hot rod red emerged from the green. It was swallowed up by it again for a moment and then the red blob popped out of the greenery completely, complaining under its breath.
Someone stood roughly nine feet below in a red cloak with an attached hood pulled low over their face. The cloak was littered with leaves from the struggle through the cornfield and Jonathan felt an immense rush of relief when the hood was peeled back and Techie's bushy head came into view.
She spat a few times, brushing leaves and grass out of her hair and looked up at him, shielding her eyes from the sun. "Jonathan?"
"Who else would it be?" he asked impatiently.
"Ray Bolger. How the hell should I know, do I have my glasses?"
He pursed his lips rather than admit she had a point. "Get me down from here."
"Oh, sure, I'll just spout wings and fly then, shall I?"
The crow squawked indignantly, as if she'd insulted it.
"Just get me down," he groused, ignoring the tickle of feathers on his hand where the crow had taken up residence.
She let out a sigh and untied the cord that held her cloak around her neck. It dropped to the ground and the ridiculous dress beneath--sour apple green, puffy sleeved and with a stark white pinafore over it--nearly made him guffaw. The bird on his hand didn't have as much restraint as he did and did a fair approximation of a cackle.
Techie didn't say anything, just hitched up her skirt and shimmied up the post behind him as best she could in a pair of patent leather Mary Janes--which is to say, she shimmied very, very badly. Still, with a lot of effort and a fair bit of grunting, she managed to free his feet and then fought her way up until she was able to work on the ropes around his wrists. She had to bat the crow away when she untied his left hand (the bird decided to perch in her hair after being so rudely dislodged from its perch) but the right hand went much easier.
Only when she was undoing the last of the knots that secured his right hand did Jonathan realize--
"No! Wait!"
THUMP!
A cloud of dust kicked up as Jonathan hit the ground face first and he heard her call down, "Sorry!"
He rolled over, brushing the dirt from his mouth with his sleeve and sat up. Techie slid down the post he'd been tied to and gracelessly landed on her rump. She sucked in air through her teeth and rubbed her backside as she got up and offered him a hand. He refused it and got up himself, hopping a little as he realized he'd landed on his ankle wrong in the fall. The pain was only momentary, though, and before Techie could rush to him and offer to be a crutch, he put his weight down gingerly and found that it didn't hurt at all.
"That should have broken my ankle," he said with wonder, shaking his foot a little.
"It's all virtual," she replied as the crow left her head and returned to perch on his.
"But it hurt for a second."
She tapped her forehead. "Your brain was anticipating from experience that it would hurt, so it did before the program could catch up and block the sensation. I think how this thing works is that the 'book' infects you with nanobots that cause…er…controlled hallucinations. They all send signals back and forth to each other between the infected. That's why we're experiencing this environment together."
"No one in their right mind is going to consent to being infected with nanobots," he said rationally, dusting himself off. "One never knows what they might be programmed to do…or who might hijack their signal and then program them."
"The bots have a limited lifespan," she said with a shrug. "They only last as long as the 'adventure' does and then they start to deteriorate."
"Joy, then we'll have degraded hallucinatory technology floating around in our bloodstreams. So much the better." He waved the crow off his head. It flew upwards a few feet and then came right back to nest in his hair. Jonathan sighed but didn't bother trying to force the bird away again. "You're so full of theories, how do we get out of here?"
"That might be the tricky part." She chewed on her lip. "When I first woke up, I was presented with a list of objectives to complete, like a video game. Several were optional, and I guess are meant to enrich the experience for people who want to live the story to the fullest, but the last one was mandatory: defeat the bad guy."
"I assume you succeeded."
"Well, yeah. But the thing is, the program draws on aspects from you to create the environment and the story. At least, that's the only explanation I can come up with for why the wolf was played by a devilish rogue in thigh high boots and sang."
Jonathan quirked a brow. "Continue."
"I always thought the woodsman was the bad guy…and let me tell you, the guy with a sadistic sense of humor and the axe is a lot scarier than the singing wolf. The second I managed to keep from being chopped to bits and got rid of him, half the world kinda just…fell away, like a hole in reality. It led here. My storyline was over, but yours isn't."
The crow yanked on a beak full of Jonathan's hair and he winced, swatting at the massive beast on his head. "I didn't get any list of objectives," he said angrily, trying to talk and get rid of the crow at the same time. "I just woke up hanging in the middle of a cornfield."
"Oh." She frowned, her brow furrowing for a second. Then her face lit up and she turned her attention heavenward. "Computer, please present program's list of objectives."
Nothing happened.
"Computer?"
Still nothing.
She looked at him apologetically. "It worked on Star Trek."
"In case you haven't noticed, life is not like Star Trek," he said irritably, stalking forward and grabbing her by the arm, hauling her through the corn. He tried to ignore the talons digging into his scalp as he did so.
"Well, it should be!" she replied, pulling her arm out of his grip. She grabbed up her cloak and followed after him.
It took several minutes but they managed to get out of the field and onto the yellow brick road. It stretched in either direction and there were no signs to be found.
He turned to her. "Little Red Riding Hood was about defeating the bad guy, what's the theme of The Wizard of Oz?"
"Technically, the theme of Little Red Riding Hood is--"
He glared at her. The effect was lessened greatly by the bird on his head, but she switched tracks anyway.
"Er…never mind. Wizard of Oz? Wanting to go home."
"If that were the objective, I'd have fulfilled it by now," he remarked.
She looked thoughtful. "Maybe it's character specific? I mean, if you were Dorothy, then you'd have to want to go home…but since you're the Scarecrow, maybe you need a brain."
"In that case, I'll just bash the crow's skull in and scoop out whatever mush is inside. That should fulfill the requirements quite neatly."
Immediately, the animal in question leapt away from Jonathan and went to perch on a fencepost. Both it and Techie screeched at him angrily, one a little more coherently than the other.
"Jonathan! That's terrible!"
"Your point being?" he asked dispassionately. "It isn't as if that thing is real."
"I don't care, you aren't going to hurt any helpless animals, virtual or not. Besides, that's not what I meant by needing a brain!"
"Then what, pray tell, would you suggest?"
"We go to see the Wizard in the emerald city," she said in a matter-of-fact tone of voice. "That might not be the biggest objective in the story, but it's one of them."
"Or maybe I should just click my heels together--" he did so in a mocking fashion, "and say 'there's no place like home'?!"
In an instant, a hole seemingly opened in midair, about seven feet by three feet to his left. He jumped back and then peered into it. The world beyond was hazy and unclear but it was definitely a different environment from the one they were currently in.
"That was easy," he said, turning to look at Techie.
He let out a startled sound. The cornfield, the blue sky and the yellow brick road behind her was starting to wave and melt as if the universe was collapsing. He grabbed her by the hand and stumbled through the hole in space.
For a moment, he was weightless, floating in nothing. It was almost like swimming, except he didn't need to make any effort to stay afloat. The feeling lasted for a few seconds and then ended suddenly as he landed at the top of a grassy hill and started to roll down it in a tangle of confused limbs.
He heard Techie somewhere--he'd lost his grip on her as they'd floating through the wibbly-wobbly stuff between universes--also thumping her way down the hill but he was too concerned with finding a way to stop his forward momentum to wonder whether she was okay or not.
At last, the hill leveled out and he rolled just a few times more, landing flat on his back. He stared up at the sky, waiting for the world to stop spinning and when it finally did, he found a shock of carrot red hair above him. A young boy, at the outside thirteen or so, dressed in leaves and covered in cobwebs was leaning over him, studying him from narrowed blue eyes. He didn't offer the man in the grass his hand, or say a word.
Instead, he let out a cockcrow, even as a pair of small hands with a rock in them came barreling towards Jonathan's face.
Everything went black.
-
Quick A/N: First, this chapter was originally going to end differently, but then I had this brilliant flash of inspiration. I hope it results in squees all around--I know the last chapter will, I just don't know how Captain's 'storyline' will be recieved.
Secondly, if you've never seen Cannon Movie Tales' Red Riding Hood, you should. That was my first exposure to the story of Little Red Riding Hood as a child and it did indeed change how I looked at the Wolf. (He does wear thigh high boots...when I showed the movie to Captain, her reaction was along the lines of--"I don't see what the big deal--HE SINGS! -glomp-") The whole movie is on YouTube.
Finally, the science fiction fan in me did indeed run amok in this chapter (no, the science isn't quite sound). If you don't like it, you may bite me...because the original explaination I had mapped out for the 'A Novel Idea' technology was technobabbling to the nth degree. Be thankful you escaped such torture.