Disclaimer: I don't own The Rocky Horror Picture Show, it's unfilmed sequel (Revenge of the Old Queen), or the 'Three Laws of Robotics' (that belongs to Isaac Asimov).
A/N: Some of this will be in 3rd person, some in first... and none in 'diary format'. Hopefully that's okay.
When we drove up to the place, nobody spoke. The entrance was apparently in a dark, unpleasant alley. And the whole building happened to be in a less-than-savory area of town.
"I have a bad feeling about this," I muttered under my breath, as Mr. Bradshaw parked the van.
"It'll be fine. Marcus is an old friend," Mr. Bradshaw replied nervously.
It almost sounded like he was reassuring himself. I decided not to dwell on that. Just following the others into the building seemed a better idea. At least I would be less nervous.
The door we entered through was more like a metal trapdoor in the sidewalk than anything. A mostly empty dumpster hid it quite well.
I began to wonder what Marcus actually does for a living. Hopefully nothing too bad, since we're already in enough trouble with the government of Transsexual, Transylvanian. Though the room we then stood in made me worry...
The walls seemed to be made of heavy cinderblock- though many other materials were attached to it. Here and there were blinking consoles or button-covered panels. Sleek metal covered the floor in most places, but I also noticed patches of darker material. Like a patchwork quilt of technology!
"It's like somethin' out of a science fiction picture…" Eddie muttered in awe.
"Hello, my old friend!" said a smooth voice.
We all spun around (at varying rates) to see a sleekly dressed man standing in a doorway that had just appeared out of nowhere. He smiled a sly smile at us and walked toward us. A robot of some sort followed him closely.
"What the hell is that?" Granny asked, gesturing at the robot with her pistol.
"I am NonHAL-Asimov-42. You may call me Robby, if you wish to," it replied it's electronic voice. "You may lower your weapons, since I can not harm you."
Mister Guildenstern put his gun back in his coat and Winslow folded up his switchblade. Granny, of course, didn't put away her weapon.
"Hmm! How do I know that's true?" she said, glaring.
Her beady eyes somehow didn't unsettle Robby or his human master. Wow.
"His programming requires him to follow the Three Laws," Marcus explained, rolling his eyes.
"What laws?" I asked.
"A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
"A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
"A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws," he recited cheerfully.
"Fine," Granny muttered, though she still didn't put her pistol away.
"You'll let us borrow your tech- and maybe even help us fight- Lord Dominus de Lordy?" Mr. Bradshaw asked.
"I'm really sorry, old friend," Marcus whispered.
Then, four different Transylvanian soldiers appeared out of four different floor panels wielding pitchfork-like guns.
"Aw, shit!" Granny shrieked. "We're screwed!"
"Indeed…" drawled a snobby, aristocratic voice.
Again, the five of us turned around to see someone we expected. There stood a middle-aged man in a outfit that didn't suit him. At all. If only Lord de Lordy had a sense of style, like Marcus!
He wore fishnet stocking that completely covered his chubby legs. The black corset top he wore really didn't flatter him. And what fashion crimes happened to be on top of that monstrosity? Very short black shorts trimmed with sequins; this unbuttoned strange, black and red, tailcoat-jacket-thingy; and glitter-covered, fake leather high-heel boots that nearly went up to his thighs.
Ew.
"What do you want?" I asked, crossing my arms over my chest.
He laughed maniacally. "I want what the Queen wants. That is, I want your head- and your stupid boyfriend's head- on a platter to hand to her. But I might not want not kill you right away. My darling girl… what fun I might have with you! I really do see why Cousin Frankie kept you at his castle. You'll make a delightful little pet."
"That's not nice, sirsssss!" Mister Guildenstern said darkly.
"You!" De Lordy shouted.
Apparently he hadn't noticed his ex-employee standing there. Now that he did, he seemed quite furious.
Though his soldiers hadn't fired yet, I knew they would soon. Just one more wrong move and we'd all be dead. The person who made that fatal blunder wasn't who'd I expected. And it wasn't even something any of us could've predicted.
"Do I get all that stuff you promise, now?" Marcus asked.
At that, Lord de Lordy laughed even more wildly. "Ha! You really thought I meant that? You really believed I'd stay true to my word? Foolish earthling!"
Still laughing, de Lordy turned his back to Marcus. That's when Marcus pulled a gun out of his pocket. A dangerous gun that looked like something out of a Sci-fi picture.
Oh dear. Poor de Lordy sure had underestimated a certain 'foolish earthling'.
Quietly, Marcus pulled the trigger on his weapon… and a laser ray of some kind stunned Lord de Lordy.
And then… all hell broke loose.
A few more Transylvanian military people appeared out of floor hatches. Now it was the six of us against the eight of them. So, Marcus quickly handed all of us earthlings a laser gun. With a few clicks of his fingers on a keyboard, doorways to three different corridors were opened.
We six earthlings all ran into different halls. Thankfully, at least some of us stuck together.
Granny and Marcus went one way… Eddie and Mr. Bradshaw another… Winslow and I ended up together… Mister Guildenstern alone…
"Take that, ya damn space-men!" Granny screeched, managing to shoot one of the Transylvanians in the stomach.
He wasn't going to survive that wound. And he was the second enemy soldier Granny had killed in very little time.
Boy, wasn't the old woman good at killing people. That's one reason she's rarely invited to play bridge with her neighbors, of course.
At least the two 'space-men' who'd chased after them now happened to be dead.
"I'd say these guys are what some people call 'laser gun fodder'," Marcus said with an awkward chuckle.
"You're right about that," Granny replied gleefully.
Suddenly, Mr. Bradshaw stopped running. After a moment Eddie did, too. They both stood there and leaned against the wall, catching their breath.
"What's wrong, Mr. Bradshaw?" Eddie asked.
"I've got a story to tell you."
"WHAT? We're trapped in a basement, soon to be killed by crazy aliens... and you want to tell me a story?"
"You'll thank me once you've heard it all. It all began 21 years ago...
"A few friends of mine decided to go backpacking through Europe in '53. We'd be going to university in a year or so, you see. And those days everyone believed that the nuclear fallout would happen next week. So, we thought, why not?
"We started out in London. That's where I met that darling girl who called herself Sally Ross. I knew that it couldn't have been her actual name, since she was clearly German. But I never bothered to learn her name.
"My buddies went on the adventure we'd planned, but I stayed in London with Sally. We fell in love, you see. What fools we were! Never thinking about what might happen in a few years. Or what might happen tomorrow, even. Though such a state was normal in those days, as I've said.
"But, when Sally found out she was pregnant, we began to think about it. I said I'd marry her if it were the last thing I did. Of course, she had an older brother. I'd never even heard of her older brother until he came looking for me. He was that kind of German. Even though he worked for the US government by then, he was still pretty scary. The fact that he'd flown all the way to London just to come after me sure said something.
"So he took her home. The only clue I had to find her was a note she'd left behind. It just said 'Scott' on it. That didn't really do me much good, though. But I never could bring myself to forget Sally Ross- or the note. I kept the latter in a box that I still own.
"A few years later I overheard somebody talking about a 'crazy Nazi bastard' called 'Scott' teaching at the local college. Though decades had passed, it was definitely the guy who'd threatened to kill me for what I'd done to his sister.
"So I pretended to be an old friend of his. It didn't take to much effort, of course. There were lots of shady people he'd known in Germany all those years ago. Anyway, I'd spent most of my life pretending to be someone I wasn't. Keeping in character for a few years was worth it, though. And, though she didn't remember who I was, I got to see Sally before she died. If she hadn't been sick I probably would've said something.
"Your uncle never recognized me. God, how I wanted to tell you everything! Yet I never had the courage to stand up to him."
"So... you're my Dad?" Eddie asked, after a moment.
"Yeah, I'm pretty sure I am."
For a while they stood there in silence. To Mr. Bradshaw's shock, the young man grinned. Eddie had always wondered what sort of person his father was. Now he knew that the man wasn't a noble hero! It would be easier to live up to this scoundrel. And now Eddie knew where he'd got his more rebellious side.
Now he wanted to ask all sorts of questions about his father's teenage years. Had he ridden a motorbike through school hallways in junior year? Or blasted rock n' roll music in the car speakers just outside a church? Did they even have rock n' roll in those days?
But an apparent inaccuracy in the story kept Eddie from mentioning any of that.
"Wait... Ma always said that my father was an American soldier she met during the war! Not a civilian she met years later."
"Kid, do the math. It's 1974, right? And you're 20. And 1974 minus 20 is...?"
"1954."
"Right! So you can do basic addition. History is the problem, then... the war ended in 1944. She lied, kid. I'm not a soldier. Too cowardly, I suppose…"
"You aren't cowardly, Dad," his son said quietly.
"Hmm?"
"You aren't cowardly. I'm twenty years old, and I've never flown across the ocean on a plane. In fact, I've never left the town I was born in until a few days ago! Just because you haven't fought in any war doesn't mean you're a coward. Anyway, the war ended when you were a teenager, right? So it's not like you could've even been drafted!" Eddie replied.
His father smiled at that.
Columbia and Winslow were not very good at fighting. Well, the latter was good with a switchblade knife. But the only one he'd had with him happened to be stuck in the leg of the only soldiers they'd managed to stun.
Suddenly, Columbia collapsed for reasons unknown to them both at the time.
Just as a soldier was about to shoot her, a giant metal arm moved her out of the way. The robot informally known as 'Robby' ad saved her life.
Winslow used this diversion to fatally shoot the soldier who'd tried to kill Columbia… and then shot another.
Half their foes now were dead.
Mister Guildenstern was good at killing bad people.
Now, for the first time, he wasn't sure if that was good or bad. Nice old Mister Rosencrantz always knew what to do. What to do, what to say, what was good, what was bad…
But Mister Rosencrantz was dead.
So he didn't mind when the alien last soldier shot him with an Evil Laser Gun of Death. At least Mister Rosencrantz might be waiting in the afterlife. As he died, he smiled at the thought of seeing his friend.
A moment later, his killer's gun backfired. Maybe the Gods did exist. Maybe they thought that nameless alien soldier deserved to die because he'd killed a 'secretly nice' person like Mister Guildenstern.
Slowly, Lord Dominus de Lordy returned to consciousness. The first thing he noticed was that everyone else had left the room. That- and the ominous silence- worried him.
After slowly standing up he walked over to a device he knew to be a special sort of Transylvanian technology often used to watch other rooms.
"They've killed all my soldiers!" he whispered in horror.
Maybe humans aren't as stupid as they seem, de Lordy realized.
This chapter had quite a few Sci-Fi references. Yet it doesn't really matter if you, the reader, 'gets' them. I just added them for fun. The main one is NonHAL-Asimov-42 (aka 'Robby'):
HAL 9000 is the evil 'AI [Artificial Intelligence] gone wrong' from 2001: A Space Odyssey
Isaac Asimov is, of course, the author who wrote lots of significant literature about AI.
42 is the 'answer to the ultimate question' (nobody know the question itself, though) in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Robby the Robot, like Anne Francis, stars in Forbidden Planet.
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