Long time no update! Uni work has been major stress, lately, as has my personal life… blegh. But hey, I'm better now, and back to updating! Don't forget, I have twitter and tumblr (look for VikkieTheMimm) and I'm always happy to chat.
(-*-)
"AAARGH…" managed Dean, as the air whipped past his ears at what felt like a shockingly fast speed.
"GAAHHH…" Gabriel agreed, his arms flailing in a valiant, if futile, attempt to slow his descent.
"Well, this is it," Sam droned, his voice circuits running at maximum volume over the roaring wind. "We're going to die."
And, though no one wanted to admit it, it looked very much as though Sam's brain-the-size-of-a-small-moon had stumbled onto the only possible outcome of their current situation, hurtling as they were at an ever increasing pace towards what must logically be the ground.
"TULIPS!" Castiel yelled, grabbing wildly at Dean and Balthazar's sleeves.
"WHAT?" Balthazar yelled back, perplexed and annoyed.
"TULIPS! While I was on Earth, I think they were my favourites!"
There as a stunned pause in everyone's terrified screaming.
"What?"
"I only mention it…" Castiel yelled again, trying to steer Balthazar towards Gabriel so they would all be falling at the same pace, "Because I remember being in a similar situation on Santriginus 5, and I suddenly saw a rare flower growing out of the cliff face."
There was another pause, as everyone stared at him.
"AND?" Gabriel screeched, having his patience sorely, sorely tested.
"I was so shocked by the sight, I guess I kind of forgot to keep falling. I sort of… flew."
"Seriously?" Dean said, his hands dropping the wrists he'd been clinging on to, out of shock.
"Dean!" Balthazar and Cas gasped, as Dean suddenly stopped falling, and hovered in the air above them.
Gabriel then said something in Betelgeusian for which there is no literal translation, but for which Dean's babel fish supplied the words "go forth and fornicate into a bucket whilst a goat shits in your hair".
Everyone else was so shocked at hearing this word that they too hit a sort of air brake. Gabriel plummeted on for a bit, realised everyone else was hovering unaided, and hit something of an air wall.
(-*-)
The Bloody Invaluable Book has this to say on the subject of flying:
"Flying is a neat trick, if you can do it. It relies on achieving a near critical free-falling velocity, and then suddenly being so distracted by something other than the impending ground, that gravity quite happily looks the other way, presuming you are following along as you should be. It is, on a larger scale, the same phenomenon that allows people to have entire conversations during which the second party has gotten distracted and wandered off, without either noticing the other's absence."
"Once you have achieved the initial break from gravity, it is most important that you remain unobserved. Not for the sake of secrecy or tactical advantage, but merely because the most likely thing any observer would say at that point is "you can't possibly be flying". And if you listen to them, odds are that they will almost instantly become right."
(-*-)
"We can't possibly be flying…" Balthazar gasped, staring at the inky dark void of their surroundings.
"No shit…" Dean looked form one stunned face to another. "This is… impossible."
Everyone lurched downwards again.
"AAAHHhh how many sevens in fifty six?" Castiel shouted, his eyes screwed shut.
Stumped by the sudden brainteaser, the group of intrepid heroes were yet again hovering in the air.
"Ok." Gabriel swallowed both his hearts back into place. "Now what?"
"We drift." Castiel supplied, gripping the hands of Dean and Balthazar. "Slowly, we ride the air currents down to… wherever this tunnel ends."
It seemed like a plan. Gabriel held on to Balthazar, who held on to Cas, who held on to Dean. Sam drifted down alongside them.
"Wait, I get what we're doing." Gabriel glared at Sam. "How are you flying?"
"Anti-grav turbos in my feet." Sam sighed. "They told me they'd be useful, one day. It's so annoying that they were right."
"So what was all that 'we're going to die' crap?"
Sam shrugged.
"It seemed like the right thing to say."
Gabriel rolled his eyes and continued gingerly pushing his way through the air.
When they eventually touched down, they were none the wiser as to where they actually were. They appeared to be at the bottom of some sort of well or shaft, wide enough across to have the five of them stand in a row. The walls were slick with some sort of grime, and the floor was a hard surface that clanged metallically whenever someone took a step.
"Alright," Gabriel was not far from lying on the floor and screaming, "So we just fell out of one world and into another, who knows how far down a greasy pit with nothing on the bottom worth falling for. Who's the wise guy?"
"Wise guy?" A familiar, disembodied voice chirruped. "Well, the wisest man in our offices would be Mr Zarniwoop. His office is on the fifteenth floor."
"Balthazar?" Gabriel spoke slowly, through gritted teeth.
"Um… yes?"
"Does that or does that not sound to you like the hideously smug elevator we were stuck with in the Hitchhiker's guide offices?"
"Um… yes. Yes, it does."
"That's most likely because I am." The elevator hummed. "So glad to see you met up with your friends, and survived that nasty building take-over. I'll get you to Zarniwoop's office straight away. Going up!"
They felt the elevator they were standing on glide back up the way they had come.
Gabriel swore some more.
(-*-)
When they reached the fifteenth floor, the elevator stopped just high enough to open the door and let the weary group off. Dean was suffering from a version of altitude sickness that was less from going up and down, and more from being tired of feeling like he lived in someone's pocket.
"So who's Zarniwoop?" He said, feeling that his comments about wanting a cold beer and a prime rib steak would not help the situation.
"Some guy Gabriel told himself he needed to go see, even though he's never heard of him before." Balthazar summarized, shaking his head at Dean's raised eyebrow. "You had to be there."
"And here…" Gabriel rounded the corner of the spotless corridor which had, the last time he'd seen it, been almost entirely reduced to rubble, "it his office."
With a noticeable air of trepidation, he pushed open the door.
The office was sleek, sparse and executive.
The office was large, with a hyper-aware LCD display covering the entirety of one wall, in which spun the generated graphic of an artificial universe.
The office, much to the group's dismay, was empty.
"Another lead up to nothing." Dean sniffed. "Seems to be something of a pattern in my life lately."
"Better not be including me in that." Cas muttered, before smirking at Dean's blush.
Gabriel prowled around the desk, examining the pieces of paper that were scattered across it.
"Hey, I know this guy…" He held up a picture of a man with a mullet and a less than sober smile. "He's my braincare specialist."
"Yeah, I went to university with him." Cas stared at the picture. "Ash Bahdass… Why is his picture…"
"BECAUSE…" Boomed a voice from a speaker in the middle of the desk, "HE IS THE ONE WHO ORDERED THE DEMOLITION OF THE PLANET EARTH, AND OBSCURED THE QUESTION THAT YOU HAVE ALL BEEN SENT IN SEARCH OF."
"Ok, one, ow." Dean began, turning the volume on the speakers down to a much more manageable level, "and two, can you come in here and talk to us properly? I'm getting real tired of all this mystery crap."
"I'm afraid I can't be there in person." The voice sighed. "Very important meeting, can't get out of it."
"Nothing to do with the building magically returning itself to a pre-kidnap state, huh?" Gabriel scowled.
"Ah, yes… that was… unfortunate, admittedly, but we had to make sure you were ready. Strong enough…"
"It was a set up?" Balthazar slumped into one of the sleek, executive chairs near the desk.
"A simulation. Once you left the elevator, everything you experienced was clever simulation."
"Zarniwoop?" Gabriel sat behind the desk, staring at the speaker.
"Yes."
"Why do I want to talk to you?"
"Because you want to remember why you became prime minister."
"I… what?"
"This whole experience… the battle over the Ultimate Question, between the Mice, and the…"
"Men?" Dean supplied, officially giving up.
"Brain care specialists." Zarniwoop sighed. "He and the entire Union of Brain care and Maintenance Specialists have been lobbying to make sure that the Ultimate Question is never found out."
"Why?" Balthazar was dangerously close to joining Dean in camp Don'tgiveafuck.
"Job security." Cas said, before Zarniwoop could answer. "Their job relies on people not knowing how to handle their lives. They must want people to remain uncertain."
"Exactly."
"So, what, you're with the Mice?" Gabriel pressed his palms over his eyes. "You want to buy the monkey-man's brain?"
"No, nothing so primitive. I'm with a third party. The people who want to know something bigger, something bolder…" There was a brief pause. "Throughout the ages, life has only survived through trying to answer its own questions, 'why, how, what'… but this is inverted, you see? We raced ahead of ourselves, and found an answer we had no question for. Our third party believes something, somewhere, went horribly wrong. Further back in the mists of time than anyone dare go… Our third party wants to ask…."
"No. Ok, no." Castiel threw his arms up in the air. "Whatever it is you're about to ask us to do, we refuse. All I wanted to do was get out of my research job designing ship drives, and go have some fun on the party planets. We have been thrown about, torn apart, put who-knows-where and who-knows-when, we found the question, by the way, or a bastardisation of it, and all it proved was that the joke is quite literally on us. We've fallen out, fallen in love, done just about every damn thing we could do to stay alive and out of prison, and I refuse to be fate's pawn any more. I refuse to be dragged through one improbable situation after another. So you know what I am doing?"
Castiel shoved Gabriel away from the desk, found a small control panel, and worked the keys like a concert pianist. The display behind him fluttered and flashed, to several ignored complaints from the voice of Zarniwoop.
"Dean, what's your favourite colour?"
"Blue? Or green, I guess."
"Imaginative. I am currently password protecting our own virtual reality. Our planet will be called "Fuck You, Assbutt", and it will have blue skies and green grass. The sea, however, will be purple. Dean?" Cas grinned at him, his eyes flashing like the sun on ice. "Are you coming?"
Dean looked around the assorted group, who were all staring back at him, nonplussed.
"Yeah. If you guys are coming too."
"And I'm taking this with me." Cas wrenched the controls from their sockets, earning a scream and a hiss from the speaker on the desk.
"You… you probably shouldn't have done that…" Zarniwoop's warning was too late, as even now blinding light was filling the room, the screen cracking in two as the universe inside spun, shone and grew too quickly for it to calculate. There was a horrible warping, stretching feeling, and Dean was sickeningly reminded of his first attempt at travelling through hyperspace on that Daemon streamlining ship, what felt like years ago.
There was a high pitched, whining, electronic scream.
There was light, and noise.
Then, there was nothing.