THE ANGRY GRAY PLANET

"I landed in a place the gods forgot: New Jersey."

--Hercules, The Mighty Thor #356

...The Greeks had a word for it, you know.

Oh, you do know? Yep, that's it. Hubris.

I mean...there isn't any excuse at all. You guys didn't have any way of knowing that your gate might open onto someplace that unpleasant, but I can't claim that I had no idea something like that could happen, because it already had, the last time we tried this...no, I've been digressing enough as is, maybe I'll go into that sordid story later. Granted at the time Great-Granddad blamed it on the demon-summoning, and he was probably at least partly right, but... I knew the possibility was there, and I knew just how horribly wrong the last attempt had gone, but I was just so damn sure that I had it down cold and nothing could possibly go wrong...

Right. There I was, blasted clear out of the Earth-plane, having just triggered what had to be the biggest earthquake to hit central-coast California since 1904, not feeling too good about it as you can imagine. The sky was almost as black as my mood.

As I struggled back to some semblance of consciousness, way too many sensations were jockeying for position: massive guilt was rapidly being overtaken by immediate survival instincts, with intellectual curiosity and stark terror fighting it out in the background, and mage-sight hammering on the door yelling something about utterly ludicrous amounts of mana and would I please start paying attention?

Everything suddenly slammed into place:

I was lying in a dimly-lit swamp, surrounded by towering mushrooms, puffballs and less readily identifiable fungoids, being closely inspected by a truly alarming number of truly alarming insectish critters.

Alarming insectish critters?

Now, I'm not particularly phobic (got enough mental problems already thankyouverymuch), but when a ten-legged six-winged inch-long mosquitoid is staring you right in your left eye with all three of its own and thoughtfully cleaning its raspy pointy hypodermic proboscis, let's see YOU not panic.

I won't say I retained enough presence of mind to act rationally, but my instincts must have been running overtime because when things got clear again I was standing on a big flat rock with an Amulet Against Pests and Plague hanging around my neck. It must be working, I decided, as all those possibly-bloodthirsty little varmints were now studiously ignoring me.

If the Amulet worked on alien life-forms as well as it did back home, I shouldn't have to worry about anything smaller than a Chihuahua trying to feed off, infect, parasitize, or otherwise inconvenience me. That might give me a fighting chance. Might. Visions of sf deathworlds zipped through my head: Pyrrus, Alaspin, Chtorr...

...come to think of it, this place looked a hell of a lot like a Miyazaki painting. No, if this was the Sea of Corruption I'd have been drowning in my own blood before I even woke up; granted the place stank to high heaven, but it was no Miasma.

Where the Abyss was I, anyway?

It was just about then that I finally settled down enough to notice what my mage-sight had been trying to get across since splashdown: that being, the power.

The POWER!

Jerran's blood and bones, this place was flooded with mana! If I was any judge, it made Tôkyô look like a desert--surely it must be more mystic force than Earth should have, if all the wells were unsealed--

Okay. Things were looking up. I was reasonably safe from the wildlife, and there was enough mana just lying around the place to open a Door back to Earth with ease.

...If only I had any idea HOW to open one...

It's times like this that being a specialist bites. I'd been trained all my life as a magical safecracker--breaking the Seals was everything that mattered, anything beyond that was candy. The family hadn't had much traffic with otherworlds or interstellar gates for decades, not since... well, you know since what, you found the same damn thing.

Could I be in some known otherworld? I sat down, brushing the mud off as best I could, and went over the options.

I dismissed the faerie realm as unlikely. Most accounts claimed that world had a starlit night sky, not the absolute black void I was trying very hard to ignore; and although any descriptions were suspect (the Sidhe and their kin being notorious liars), a place like this surely would be Unseileghe territory, and there was no way Argent wouldn't have noticed my entrance, in which case he should be here by now with a bone to pick, probably mine.

Argent? Oh, he's an Unseleighe Sidhe--you'd call him an ankoku no yôsei or some such--who really hates humans, and happens to be the best damn teleporter known to man or elf. No, we've never met, but he's crossed paths with a few of my ancestors. Some of them even lived.

There was, of course, that...certain other world, a mere twenty or so light-years away...but again, it just couldn't be. You know why--if I'd been so cursed, I'd already be worse than dead, every scrap of goodness and light ripped out of my soul and gone to feed...It.

My great-uncle went that way. They had to keep him chained up the rest of his life--there wasn't anything left in him but madness and hatred.

Yeah, I hope so too. If you and Yûkô are back to normal, then...

ANYway.

It certainly wasn't the Realm of Pure Elements, not unless Alan Moore was in charge of definitions. As long as we were contemplating nonphysical planes, let's rule out the Abyss and the Heart of Time, and the Alch--

--no, wait, this could easily be Alcheringa. In which case it was a simple matter of finding Helios and petitioning him to return me to Earth. Experimentally, I concentrated on the sky, mentally commanding it to turn blue.

No such luck. This was real, not the Dreamtime. And that finished off the list of otherworlds known to or suspected by the Mazael family...

So. I was stranded on some unknown alien world--in some unknown alien universe, more than likely--with nothing but the spells in my head and the (muddy) clothes on my back--

Yeah, it was about then that it hit me too. Where had that Amulet come from?

I put out a hand, concentrated, and was now holding an ice-cold bottle of Anchor Steam.

All RIGHT! Wherever the hell I was, the pocketspace ring still worked--I had easy access to all kinds of amusing stuff. There was food in there, weapons, camping equipment, the Warsark--stranded I might be, but it was more Mysterious Island than Robinson Crusoe. Maybe I'd make it out of here after all.

[decides to head downstream in search of civilization. While slogging thru swamp, ponders situation...]

This might not be all bad. I mean, here I was thrown into an alien world, someplace that (presumably) no human had ever set foot on...it was a situation right out of a thousand classic pulp sf tales.

Now there was an intriguing thought. That fortune..."meet your one true love within three months"...?

Sometimes, magic's patterns take the form of stories. You have some experience there--you folks were trying to take advantage of the Tôkyô Law of Dramatic Coincidence, but got tripped up by Irony...maybe this was a world governed by the principles laid down by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

If that was the case, somewhere around here would be a lost city in need of leadership, and an incomparably beautiful princess-type in distress...

Heh. I could be the next John Carter, David Innes, or Dray Prescot...

...but not, and let's make this perfectly clear, NOT Tarl Cabot.

But would I fit the niche properly? Dashing heroes transported to alien worlds are usually, well, dashing heroes. Musclebound charismatic swordsmen, the lot of 'em. Me...well, sure, I keep myself fit, but...how many Burroughsian heroes do you know of who're built like professional basketball players? I'm six-foot-seven and so damn scrawny I could pass for Tars Tarkas in poor light.

Those guys are all WASPish too--heck, Carter was a Virginia gentleman and on the wrong side of the Civil War to boot! Whereas I--well, y'don't get skin color like this following some half-baked notion of racial purity. Twelve thousand years of world travel and mixed marriages, that's what got me my brown-gold complexion, green eyes, exotic looks, and a chin the size of Gibraltar...

...and if you handed me rulership of some decadent city-state or empire, I wouldn't take it--I'd be too busy teaching 'em to get along without rulers.

And, finally, swordsman I ain't. Gunslinger yes, but that's hardly a well-respected profession on Barsoom or Kregen. And wizards are almost universally cast as the villains...

...okay, let's hope this isn't one of those worlds...

...except for the beautiful princess part.

[Tries to cast light spell, overloads and briefly blinds 'im. Not a good sign. Existing magic artifacts still work though--let's just put the 'sark on for safety's sake. Unfortunately the place smells much worse with enhanced senses.]

[The local wildlife puts in an appearance...]

Big beetle.

VERY big beetle. %$#*ing HUGE beetle! It had to be at least twenty feet high and wide, mottled midnight blue and optic orange in ways that did bad things to the eye, its shell covered with the most amazing variety of saw-edged spikes, blades, needles...

It lifted its head from the ravaged remnants of an eighty-foot-tall treeshroom, mandibles dripping bug spit, and focused its trio of eyes my way.

Okay, let's be rational about this--it's an herbivore and I'm way too small and puny to be a threat to it, just stay real still and Moby Bug should lose interest--

With an earsplitting screech and what I'm guessing was a look of pure hate, the megabeetle charged. So much for rational thought.

Now you're expecting this to be the part where I bravely and expertly defend myself against the alien monster, and either kill it handily or win its eternal loyalty, right?

Heck with that. No way was I tough enough to take that thing on hand-to-hand, and bullets, even Black Talons, might just make it mad. I ran for it.

In wolf-form I'm about three times as fast as your average Olympic sprinter, with added stamina to boot. And Moby must have weighed two or three tons. So you'd think I could outrun it easily, right?

Wrong again.

That critter was ludicrously fast. Maybe the ten legs had something to do with it. And, I realized, I had to keep ducking and weaving through the undergrowth and around treeshrooms, while Moby treated anything in its way as a kind of inconvenient fog. It was in fact gaining slowly.

I had to find enough open space to really pour on the speed--that, or kill the damn thing. And if I stopped to fire I wouldn't get a second shot off.

The jungle just wouldn't let up, though--

Up!

Somewhere around here there must be--got it, a clearing up ahead, some fallen jungle giant now the source of new growth. Gathering my strength, I leapt to the top of a young twenty-foot 'shroom and kept going, bounding upwards to the jungle canopy like a lycanthropic Mario brother.

[manages to kill zuggernaut, barely]

[discovers ancient ruins (a moldering khr'vorll structure); major evil vibes]

It wasn't concrete exactly; something like plastic, something like chitin. Poured into place and quick-drying, I'd guess, and by someone who hadn't had an alien sense of aesthetics--because it had never even heard of the concept. Functional-and-sloppy was the order of the day here.

Whoever had lived here hadn't been human, probably not particularly humanoid. The doors were around five feet high and four wide; I had to shift to human form even to crawl around in there. Windows were few, near the ceilings and narrow.

And the taint of dark magic was everywhere, sunk deeply into the misshapen walls. Whatever this place was built of, sapients had been murdered to create it. Ancient unhuman pain lingered here...

[finally finds town (Churgaville), reconnaissance from distance-- waitaminute, how come I can READ all those signs? Oh crap, it's Arcadian...]

NOTES FROM DEEP LEFT FIELD

"Alcheringa" is the Australian Aborigine word translated as "Dreamtime". Mike is of course referring to Helcion (or,if you prefer, Elysium or Illusion).

Credit Department:

-Argent the Dark Sidhe warpsmith was created by Andy Combs and appears in SME Dark War.

-Dray Prescot and the planet Kregen are from Alan Burt Akers' Scorpio/ Antares/Kregen adventure novels, beginning with "Transit to Scorpio" and continuing for at least thirty volumes. If you like Burroughs, give these a try.

(For some ERBian adventure with a non-WASP hero, check out Philip Jose Farmer's "Hadon of Ancient Opar". You'll probably have to hit the used- book stores, but it's worth the effort.)

-Tarl Cabot and the planet Gor are found in John Norman's novels. Don't read them. Ever. I cannot emphasize this highly enough. Burn 'em if you think you can get away with it. The man is sick, sick, SICK...

--Sam

"Sanity is a one-trick pony!"