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Chapter Eight

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The vampire Lestat leaned catlike against the wall, inclining his head skeptically. "So…what did you say your name was again?"

The other vampire—if he could be called that—fidgeted, chagrining. "Er, Edward Cullen."

"Ah, I see," Lestat said. "You're the one generating all the fangirls, correct? A few confronted me the other day, claiming I didn't measure up to you as a vampire. They were absolutely delicious."

Edward grimaced, his Adonis-like face twisting with chagrin. "Don't remind me."

"Don't worry about it," the other reassured, casual again. "Vampires are natural fangirl attractors." He looked contemplative, chewing his lip. "Well, except Nosferatu. Not even eHarmony could help him." He shook his head sadly. "But, truly, such an honor to meet the most famous vampire of the decade. I just have to confirm one rumor, though…"

"Yes?" Edward said with chagrin.

Lestat leaned in. "Is it true…that you sparkle?"

Edward gritted his teeth, clearly chagrined. "Yes."

Immediately, Lestat burst into wild laughter, almost doubling over with the force of it. "I knew it!" he crowed, clutching his stomach. "Hey, Carmilla, Alucard! Come over here, it turns out he does sparkle!"

"Seriously?"

"No shit?"

"Yeah!"

"Hey!" Edward chagrined, stomping his foot. "My girlfriend thinks it's totally hot!"

Lestat was still snickering, completely incapable of stopping. "Right, girlfriend, heh, heh. I'm sorry, friend, but any man who sparkles has to be at least as gay as I am."

"Wait, what?"

"Hah, and they called me a fairy!"

Edward sputtered. "Well, you—"

"Ahem." Said ahem was accompanied by a dull thunk sound usually associated with heavy boots descending ominously to the ground.

The vampires—and vaguely vampiresque fairy—fell silent, muscles instinctually coiling to spring. Dark eyes swept the scene, surveying the vampires, sparkly fairy thing, and the subject they were supposedly guarding.

"Interesting." D's voice was both soft and reminiscent of impossibly sharp knives at the same time. "And here I thought you were supposed to be on guard duty."

No one made a sound. Aline hovered uncertainly behind D, wondering why Edward was in a tutu.

"What's going on here?"

"Edward was being lampooned," a blonde vampire of undefined nature volunteered.

An eyebrow quirked. "Really now. I wonder for what. Speaking of, why exactly is he…? You know what, never mind. Carry on." The vampires and sparkly fairy creature parted to reveal a looming cave mouth. D strode forward purposefully. Aline hesitated, glancing around the various bloodsucking monsters (plus Edward). She bit her lip, then turned to him.

"Um, dude?" she said, gesturing to the sequined, bright pink tutu. "Why are you wearing that thing?"

"What thing?" Edward asked blandly.

"Newbface!" a voice like icy razors yelled from the darkness of the cave. "Get your skinny teenage backside over here."

After a moment's pause, the girl traipsed after her into the cave, blinking in bemusement. Well, she supposed, it never actually said he wasn't wearing a tutu. Makes sense.

D was fiddling with her flamethrower. The flamethrower was quite a famous weapon, akin to other such renown instruments of destruction like Death's Scythe, Excalibur, or the Super Hyper Ultra Shark Launcher, and aptly named device that launched sharks at the target—super hyper ultra sharks, in fact. It had a long and bloody history, reducing great monuments to ash, setting great cities aflame, the screams of the countless burning thousands still engraved in its memory. It was known by many names, among them the Ash Giver, the Bringer of a Thousand Screams, the Burninator, the Unquenchable Flame, Everlasting Tormentor and most recently, Jeremy. It was said that it had a mind of its own, traveling from owner to owner, leaving each one aflame as it left them. And sometimes, if you listened carefully, you could almost hear laughter, strange, crackly laughter like a campfire on a quiet night.

D knew none of this. It spewed fire, it had done so reliably for the past several decades, and that was good enough for her.

Dials snapped into place and the numbers on its side reconfigured. The cave, a dreary, damp, and overall uninteresting place, lit up with warm orange light.

"It's been modified," D said to Aline. "Nice, eh?"

Aline examined it dubiously. It was rather battered looking, your average flamethrower apart from the dials, one of which was currently set to Torch, but could also be set to Candle, Campfire, Bonfire, Forest Fire and I Want To Watch The World Burn. She didn't trust it. It seemed to be looking at her…

"It's a bit…underwhelming," Aline admitted.

D shot her a look. She liked Jeremy just fine. In response, she cranked the dial and squeezed the trigger. The resultant firestorm filled the space with roaring blue flames, blasting down the passageway like angry dragon's breath. Aline lurched backwards, landing firmly on her behind, arms raised to protect her face.

D returned it to torch form, filling the cave with much friendlier light. "Shall we go on or do you want to change your underwear first?" she snapped. No one insulted her Jeremy.

Aline attempted to get up, only to have her knees buckle. "I think I'll just lie here and hyperventilate instead, thank you," she said tremulously. D snorted, and Aline found herself for the second time in so many hours being half-dragged half-led across a cavern by a lunatic.

"Remind me why I agreed to this?" Aline asked, wiggling out of D's iron grip.

"Because the plot said so, that's why."

"Aha!" Aline cried. "Now, normally, I would ask what you meant by that, but now I know better! If I say anything, something will explode or knock me out or worse. So I won't! So…hah, hah!"

"That's nice," D said.

Several seconds passed in silence. In the presence of Aline, a few seconds was the most you were likely to get.

"I still don't know what we're doing here," Aline griped.

D sighed and gritted her teeth. "Look, if you're going to—"

"All I'm saying," Aline interrupted, putting her hands up defensively, "is that if you're going to drag me into a cave against my will, I should at least know why."

"It's dramatic storytelling," D said exasperatedly. "Just go with it. And anyway, you're you. So just shut up and keep walking. We're here to test a theory, alright?"

Aline's pout was so pronounced you could almost hear it. "You," she said, "are not very nice."

"Yeah, well, you spend five thousand years or so existing for the purpose of being carefully ignored and we'll see how nice you turn out," D muttered darkly.

"Wait—five thousand—what now?"

D stopped. As per the laws of comedic physics, Aline bumped into her from behind. "Damn. I said that out loud, didn't I?" D said. She glared at the ceiling. "This is the part where I tell my origin story, isn't it? Oh, bugger. I knew this was coming." She spun around, pointing an accusing finger at the nearest solid body, which was Aline. "Well, I'm not having any truck with it! I've got better things to do than tell my personal business to backwater dimension girls who don't even deserve the title of main character!"

"Like hanging around in caves for some vaguely specified plot-related reason?" Aline asked.

"Yeah, like that!"

"But that's so unconventional," Aline blurted in a rare moment of canniness. She found that the more she thought of her life as a fictional story, the easier it was to get along. "You always tell the origin story. That's how it goes. The book said so." She flaunted the Cliché Compendium, which had continued to withstand all forms of abuse and absentmindedness.

D waved a hand impatiently. "I wrote the damn thing, or most of it. If anybody knows how full of bullshit I am, it's me."

Aline looked at the Cliché Compendium. Then she looked at D. She looked back at the Cliché Compendium. She looked at the page which designated the author as one Deborah Rutherford. She looked back at D.

The idea of D having a name did not mesh at all with Aline's idea of D.

"So if you wrote it," she said slowly, "then the others are—"

"In the dedication? The Four Horsemen of Uncomfortable Truths."

"Uh?"

"The Four Horsemen, or Horsepersons if you want to be all new age and junk, of Uncomfortable Truths. That was us. Riding forth on our steeds of very strongly worded memos, wielding flaming baseball bats, bringing forth that sinking feeling, that doomed acknowledgement, that horrible realization of reality…!" D sighed, reminiscing. "The good old days. All alone now, though. Everybody else buggered off in one way or another. Creative differences, they said. Wanted to form a barbershop quartet, they said. Absolutely no commitment to the cause. Bloody disgraceful, it was." She made a tch sound. "Idiotic, too. Everybody knows you need four people for a barbershop quartet."

"…," said Aline

"But I stayed," D said forcefully, angry in a vague way. Her eyes were a million miles away. "Somebody had to do the job. Not the original job, of course; we needed four for that. I think I'll call it the Barbershop Principal, ought to add that to the newest edition. But Uncomfortable Truths in general, sure. Frank appraisals, crazy old relatives, skeletons in closets, weaknesses, things we'd rather forget and would if not for me…somebody had to, you see," she said matter-of-factly. "No point in life otherwise. It'd get dull with everybody running around being content with their lives and random bouts of misfortune being the only thing balancing things out. Dreadfully dull. Cosmic importance and all. Yes. Something like that. That's what they told me."

There was a pause. The fog in D's eyes lifted, and she blinked. Then, "Oh, I see what you did there!" she yelled at the ceiling in her normal tone of voice. "Trying to shanghai me into it, are you?"

"Er—"

"Not you," D said irritably. "Her. Thinks she can make me demean my character, does she? To hell with that. This stops now! No more origin stories! Author or not, I refuse!"

"Who the hell are you—"

"Well this is just bloody great. Now I'll have people running around sympathizing with me and junk. Just fan-fucking-tastic."

"If it's any consolation," Aline said. "I still think you're a rude, pushy, paranoid and generally unlikable individual."

D glanced at her out of the corner of her eye. "Do you mean that?"

"Yeah," Aline said sincerely.

"Good. And don't you forget it."

They squinted into the gloom. The darkness ahead of them wasn't normal darkness. The light didn't pierce it, just slid off of it to the side where there wasn't anything interesting to look at. Tendrils of pure ominium writhed in the shadows, twisting and snatching at their ankles. (Ominium is a substance the Cliché Compendium described thusly: An element of pure ominousness. It is the color of blindness and smells exactly like fear. And we mean real fear, not that panicky, sweaty, diluted fear you get nowadays. Natural ominium deposits are found in bat-infested caverns, old abandoned warehouses, paintings with eyes that follow you around the room, high schools, and in the general vicinity of any bald man wearing a suit and dark glasses. Ominium is valued by evil overlords and Republicans for the paving and embellishment of their Evil Fortresses of Evil, and when woven into long dark trench coats causes them to billow out dramatically even if there's no wind. Ominium is highly reactive and attracts mysterious old men in gray cloaks.)

"Are you afraid of the dark?" D asked.

"No," Aline said. "But I am afraid of things that hide in it."

"Then you won't like this next part." D extinguished the flamethrower, plunging the room into darkness. Aline knew that somewhere far behind them there was the natural—well, as natural as you got on the Hub—light flooding into the cave entrance, but at the moment she was having some difficulty believing that light actually existed and was not merely a fanciful myth invented by the foolishly optimistic.

D kept walking.

Hmm. Alone in the dark or alone in the dark with D?

"Come on!"

D it was.

On the other side of the suffocating wall of darkness was a much less impenetrable sort of darkness, along with what looked like a Perfectly Ordinary wooden chest. It was a very normal looking chest. It was made of wood, had hinges, a lock, and a lid. It was time-worn, the wood smooth and faded, the brass embellishments having taken on a patina of age. A Perfectly Ordinary wooden chest.

Which was why it was difficult to explain why it was the most menacing thing Aline had ever seen.

The ominium clustering around it didn't help.

Seemingly out of nowhere, a hooded grey figure emerged.

"Who dares trespass into the lair of the accursed? Who dares presume on the hospitality of The Keeper?" it rasped.

"Me," said D. "And this fine specimen of the human race here is Alice. Allison. One of those."

"And what," it said, "is your business here?"

D tapped a foot impatiently. "We're here to meet George Clooney, why do you think? The Writer's Blocks, you overdramatic twit."

"That's George Clooney?" Aline asked, puzzled.

"Foolish fools!" The grey-clad figure cackled, stooping as his ragged-nailed fingers curled. "Have you no knowledge of the forces you trifle with? For your impudence, the darkness shall devour your immortal souls, leaving you as nothing but husks, your spirits sent screaming into a dimension of infinite pain, the—"

D sighed. "Fred, knock it off. You're not fooling anybody."

A moment's pause. Then, "Very well," the figure said huffily, straightening and throwing back its hood. As it turned out, the person inside the cloak was not, in fact, a crazy old man, but rather a graying forty-something. His eyes were not, as it had appeared, burning with madness, but a serious pale grey. His beard was not long and unkempt, but neatly trimmed.

He coughed politely.

"So, you're here for the Writer's Blocks?" Fred said, abandoning the eldritch rasp for a clipped, businesslike tone. "I was under the impression that they were useless here."

"It's true," D agreed, "that Writer's Blocks are the most volatile substances on this world, causing instant cessation of existence in creatures of imagination and severe sickness, nosebleeds, and occasional spontaneous combustion in their facilitators. It's true," she continued, "that shadowy figures in distant underground chambers make prophecies concerning them. It's also true that they are annoyingly heavy to carry around." She paused to allow the readers to digest the exposition. "But I've looked into it, and am about sixty-seven percent sure that Aline could utilize them without spontaneously combusting."

"Um. About that spontaneous combustion part," Aline began. "I can't say I'm too keen on it."

Fred turned his piercing eyes to her. "And you're a writer, are you?"

D snorted. "Her? A writer? Certainly not. Writers write, and she's been neglecting that particular part of authorship. Still, only creators survive here, and she wasn't atomized immediately upon arrival. If anything, Writer's Blocks would have an inverse effect on her." The confidence in her voice faded slightly. "But then again, main character or not, I could be totally wrong and she'd just suffer the gruesome death and/or nosebleed upon contact. You never know, especially since those who've abandoned the art rarely come here. But that is a risk we'll just have to take."

"I can't say I'm looking forward to the gruesome death, either," Aline said, her voice suddenly an octave higher than normal.

Fred stroked his beard thoughtfully. "Well, let's see." He kicked the trunk. It banged open, revealing a trove of small, dense cubes of matter. Their aura made Aline want to run away very, very quickly, at the same time rooted her to the spot, their hypnotic dark glow trapping her.

"Y—you can't possibly expect me to—" she stuttered.

"Well, we do, and the plot says so. Right here in the script, see? So go on. Pick one up." Arguing with D was much like trying to push back a slow-moving locomotive—you were welcome to try, but eventually it was going to get its way.

Aline picked one up. It was small. It was cube shaped. It was slightly shiny. It was also disproportionately heavy, impossible dark, and would have been literally leeching joy and love from the surrounding area if it had been even slightly more malignant.

"Nothing overtly horrible is happening," Fred noted. "That's a good sign."

"I would make a snarky comment about that statement, O Mighty Fred, but I feel as though it would be too easy. Well, newbface? How about it?"

Aline's pupils had narrowed to pinpricks. She looked paler than usual and beads of sweat were standing out on her forehead, but she knew none of this. Reality bent away from her. She was standing still, but felt as though she was hurtling through space at the speed of light.

The first thing she said was, "Guh."

She second thing she said was, "I feel like my liver ate my stomach and my lungs are taking turns beating each other up while my heart is trying to escape through my esophagus."

D blinked. "That's an interesting description."

Aline, however, was not finished. She sunk to the floor, still babbling vivid prose. It was probably a description of a sunset, though you could hardly tell due to the fact that she insisted on describing it in terms of gemstones and flowers.

"Interesting." D scribbled herself a note about the next edition of the Compendium. "On the bright side, we now have a sizable advantage over the enemy in terms of heavy weaponry. On the other hand, Newbface here will have to be trained in their use and shown how not to end up killing everyone, by people who can't actually do it themselves. Fantastic." She massaged her forehead with her knuckles.

"Well?" Fred said. "Will you be taking it or not?"

D nodded. "Will you want the trunk back later?" she asked, dragging Aline to her feet. The Writer's Block slid from her fingers, landing with a dull, flat thud, and the bouts of creative metaphor receded.

Aline's head was still ringing with the aftereffects. D's eyes weren't black, she thought, they were abyssal pools of pure obsidian, and the cave wasn't dark and damp, it was a subterranean crevice of shadowy corners and dripping liquids, Fred wasn't slightly creepy, he was—

"He'll find his way back when he's needed," Fred replied. "He's yours for now." He bent to the trunk, laying a hand on it.

"Now, Trunkie," he told it. "Go with them, and remember to only maim when necessary. They're our friends."

This man is completely insane, was what Aline was going to think. Well, the translation of what she was going to think—what she actually was about to think was rather longer and dressier. She got as far as this manwhen the trunk lifted and closed its lid in what could only be taken as a gesture of affirmation, grew hundreds of little legs, and—for lack of a better word—sauntered to D in the same exact way trunks normally didn't.

"Guh?" said Aline.

"Wonderful place, the Discworld," D commented. "Great souvenirs. Now come on, we've got ass to kick."

"I'm not sure if my mother wants me kicking ass" was the translated version of what Aline said. "But alright."