Copyright William Read 1998 - -Send email if you like or dislike something to:
email: wrezzzad@ucsd.edu - -(BUT remove the zzz in the address!)The Aimless Quest of Bungston Shag
Chapter 1. Chapter 2. Chapter 3. Chapter 4. Chapter 5. Chapter 6. Chapter 7. Chapter 8. Chapter 9. Chapter 10. Chapter 11. Chapter 12. Chapter 13. Chapter 14. Chapter 15. Chapter 16. Chapter 17. Chapter 18. Chapter 19. Chapter 20. Epilogue.Chapter 15
Fortunately for the intrepid adventurers, the dragon did not appear to be quick enough to close with the coil. It maintained its distance behind them, tail lashing furiously. "We could just tire it out," offered Irn. "Switch off driving. It's so big and it must be going full out; I can't believe it's going this fast in the first place. It can't keep it up forever."
Bungston tugged on his upper lip, pulling it down to cover his lower. He was encouraged by the fact that the dragon couldn't catch up, as opposed to the shoggoth which had had no trouble in that department. "Yeah Irn, but endurance contests are no fun. What if it keeps it up for a week? We'd be bored stiff in here. Plus there's no toilet." His compatriots gave him disparaging looks. "Jeez, lighten up you guys. You'd think it had chomped a chunk of you already. OK, we'll can try to wear it out as a last resort. But here's my plan. We'll head home but turn north, and see if we can get it to go into Russian territorial waters. Its so big that if a sub catches it with some sonar, it'll shoot torpedoes at it for sure. There's no way it can hold up against an armor-piercing torpedo. And maybe we can even keep its head for a trophy. Not bad, eh?"
"Why don't you just summon up a torpedo, or a bomb or something and blow it up?" asked Napoleon. "We could just go home."
"If a certain dildo mutant hadn't wrecked my tactical nuke pistol we'd have nothing to worry about," retorted Bungston. "Plus I already tried dynamite and it was immune."
Irn was pressing against the force field which kept them within the coil. "That toilet thing you said got me thinking. Is there any way to jettison stuff? I know a fluorinated aromatic that would really make a mess in this water; if it's a water breather it would bogue that beast bad,"
"Nope, probably not. The force field's pretty sturdy, at least underwater." The wrapped carriage started to level out and Bungston reached back for Irn's hopped up power light. The leaping flare picked out the long row of paired arches on the sea floor, tiny below them, and Bungston pointed them out. "Here are the time gates I told you about. I should really mark the important ones; after I have to give back this machine I'll never be able to tell which is which."
Irn looked back at the dragon, several football fields behind them, and then back at the row of arches. "We're going mighty quick. You're not going to clip your arch on the way through?"
Bungston shook his head. "Nope. I mean yep, we're not. This carriage has a `rude intelligence', and it does most of the steering itself."
"Well, that dragon is sure going to have to put on the brakes. It might be too fat to fit anyway."
The wrapped coil skimmed along the bottom and zipped neatly under one of a pair of arches. As they made the transition the dragon behind them abruptly winked out, leaving the water empty. "I guess we'd better find out if it's too fat or not. We all know how dangerous assumptions can be." Bungston shook his multi-knuckled ring finger to drive home the sagacity of his point, then returned to the control statue and slowed down a safe distance away. He noticed several gaudy pink and orange ribbons lying around in the mud near the arches.
"Say, boys," said Irn. "What's that paper clip looking thing over there?" The object to which she referred did look like a big paper clip, unbent and refolded in that certain way so it would bounce high into the air when triggered. It was resting on the bottom.
"I didn't see that when we were here before," rasped Napoleon. The mutant's rheumy eyes grew wide. "Bung, Bung, the ribbons are all on the ground. That means the shoggoth got away!" It was too late; as Napoleon frantically shook his master the pseudo-paper clip bounced up into the water, stirring up a cloud of mud where it had been. The protoplasm shifted as the creature flattened its body from a wiry cylinder into a flattened manta ray with three black oval eyes. It glided directly along Irn's spotlight beam toward the humming golden coil.
"Damn, Bungston! That's a shoggoth! We're really up shit creek now!"
"Yeah, I know its a shoggoth," yelled Bungston, trying to see straight after Napoleon's frantic shaking. "He's our old bud, right Nap?" Napoleon said nothing; he was busy drooling in horror at the approaching creature. The wizard gritted his teeth and hammered the control statue to turn the coil sharply around and head back for the transporter arches. Irn had been keeping the light on the pursuing shoggoth in the rear. She redirected it to the fore of the carriage, and revealed the great blunt head of the tar dragon as it emerged from one arch ahead of them. The dragon was walking along the bottom, its flanks gently scraping both sides of the arch. It suddenly realized that its quarry was less than fifty feet away and the armored jaws opened to spew out a bubbling glob of tar. The advancing coil plowed right into it. "We're OK, we're all OK!" shouted Bungston.
He was right; the black ooze spread over the force field, merely obscuring the vision of the passengers. Bungston took the wrapped carriage into a steep climb, narrowly missing the top of the arch. As the tar solidified and flaked away in the freezing abyssal waters, the adventurers were treated to a most unusual scene.
The shoggoth had discontinued its chase and rested quiescent on the ocean floor. It was now a barely shifting blob replete with eyes and more mysterious sensory organs, all of which were fixed upon the enormous dragon. The dragon stood its ground and likewise watched the shoggoth.
Napoleon was transfixed, staring at the shifting shoggoth in the pool of light below them. "I sure do hate that blob," he growled passionately. "I hope the dragon rips it to shreds and eats the shreds."
"Bungston, do you think that they will do battle? The shoggoth is very aggressive; perhaps it will attack."
The wizard watched the scene below with growing dismay. "Yeah, but we know its no dummy," he replied over his shoulder to Robigus. "Like you said, that's a big dragon. Maybe they're calculating odds. Sizing each other up." The shoggoth made no move to attack. It slowly began to assume a new form. A long tail sprouted from the rear and four stumpy legs pushed out below it, raising the main bulk off the ground. The shifting mass elongated. Finally a blunted head took shape at the front, complete with whiskery barbs and two multi-lidded white eyes that were perfect replicas of the tar dragon's own.
"That's not bad," said Irn as the ersatz dragon's flanks rippled and became scaly. "I give it an 8." Napoleon made a grab for the control statue. "Look what it did! They're going to team up! We've got to get out of here, Bung!"
Robigus restrained the mutant. "You will lead both of these enemies to your house. It is better to remain and watch."
The real dragon remained still, watching what had become a smaller scale model of itself. Now the shoggoth extruded a tentacle from a hind limb. The tentacle wrapped into a springlike shape as it grew, until finally there was a simulacrum of the wrapped carriage floating beside the gelatinous dragon. "It looks like the shoggoth is talking about us," said Irn.
Bungston bit his nutmeg in half. "We can't have that. UNCTION OINTMENT GREASY TREATMENT CAN'T BE BEAT BUT MUFFLE SHUFFLE SMELLY FEET! MEET EM TREAT EM LEAD EM READ EM FEED EM EAT EM MY ADVICE CAN'T JOIN EM BEAT EM!" A fifty-gallon drum appeared in a cloud of bubbles several feet above the dragon's head. It immediately imploded from the tremendous water pressure, and as the drum collapsed it squirted a cheesy orange substance into the water around it. The stuff completely covered the dragon's head, congealing onto the cold metal plates. The great beast reared back, tossing from side to side and jetting forth beachball-sized lumps of napalm. One of these collided with the coiled shoggoth tentacle and stuck fast.
"Jovarillo, Bung! What was that stuff, acid?"
"Cheese, it looks like. Artificial cheese spread, maybe, since I can't summon food. OK, OK, this is what we came to see." The part of the tentacle adhering to the lump of tar broke away and fell inert to the sea floor. The shoggoth quickly withdrew the remainder of its damaged tentacle into the body of the dragon simulacrum. Then its reptilian form split and folded into two flaps, and the draconian head lost its features and became a wicked spike. The flaps swung together, propelling the shoggoth at high speed over the short distance to the dragon. Still shaking the sticky cheese off of its head, the dragon was completely unaware of the creature bearing down on it.
The advancing spike struck just below the left shoulder of the dragon. It stopped dead. Now aware of its attacker, the dragon reached up with a hind leg and batted the shoggoth down into the mud. A swipe of one of the massive foreclaws ripped deep into the blubber, which stuck to the claw. The dragon extended its foreleg and shoggoth in front of its jaws, which opened in preparation for a withering asphalt blast.
Spidery arms sprouted in a ring from the shoggoth, sticking to the dragon behind the head. The protean creature fluidly assumed a donut shape and flowed out along its new arms, wrapping the dragon in a translucent collar. The tremendous beast tried in vain to dislodge the shoggoth, but it had lodged behind the great plates of the head and the dragon's powerful foreclaws could not get a purchase on the clinging horror.
The adventurers watched this epic battle in silence. "Bung, can't you help it?" asked Napoleon. "That shoggoth is going to win." Bungston shushed him. The living collar sprouted turbine blades and started to spin as the dragon tried ineffectually to scrape its attacker off against one of the transporter arches. Saw blades emerged on the inside of the spinning shoggoth, and the water around it grew cloudy with a sparkling haze of metallic dust.
Then both combatants suddenly disappeared in a turbid black cloud. Buoyed up by their own heat, globules of tar seperated from the inky mass and rose past the four adventurers in their circling carriage, disappearing in the lightless water above. The adventurers could see the mortally wounded dragon staggering erratically along the bottom; its head completely hidden in the gouts of liquid tar gushing from its gashed neck. It paused, then collapsed on the bottom and lay still.
Bungston took the wrapped carriage away from the scene and headed for home, their faithful satellite in tow. "That was impressive," he said. "But I've got to admit, guys. I felt bad when the dragon died. Even though I fed it dynamite before." He cleared his throat and rolled the two nutmeg halves around in his mouth.
Irn was quite surprised at this admission, so Napoleon explained to her about Bungston's aversion to unhappy endings. "Cheating slimebomb," growled the mutant. "The dragon would have whupped on it if that greasy scumsack hadn't cheated. At least it got boiled alive."
The humming golden coil emerged on a typically beautful sunny day on the Black Sea coast. It landed and disappeared into the sand, and the adventurers disembarked.Bungston surveyed the damaged cabana. The storm door was lying on the beach in flinders, a rear window was broken, and the green brick circle had two cracked furrows in it from the shoggoth's claws. Inside, things were worse. A tribe of crabs had taken advantage of the open door and moved in. They had disassembled everything they could lay their filthy claws on. Bungston could not tell whether the shoggoth or the crabs had reduced the couch to its sorry state; maybe they had worked together on it in some unholy union. Confetti that had been Napoleon's magazine collection lay strewn about, making the cabana look like a hamster cage. Bungston shook his head sadly. "Alright guys," he said. "Quest's not over until we clean all of this up."
Actually, it looked like most of the damage was attributable to crabs. The shoggoth had got the stereo, the fire-extinguisher, the refrigerator, and the salad shooter, and it looked like it had started in on the acoustical tile on the altar, but had quit. Bungston guessed that the disgusting blob had cut short its destructive activities when it chased them into the ocean. The crab crew had then taken over - raiding the damaged refrigerator, chewing on the beds, pulling down the posters and tapestries, disassembling the throw rugs, and probably carting off lots of the choice items in Bungston's motley assemblage of good stuff. They had even worked on Napoleon's rawhide chew toy, but it could withstand a lot of abuse. At least they hadn't bothered his petrified watermelon collection, but there were a lot of great things he had acquired during his travels that would never be the same. The clawed culprits were still present, although they had mostly scuttled under the ravaged couch to avoid Bungston's wrath. "Guys, lets do something about these crabs." He picked up a lacrosse stick and began to scoop them up and chuck them out the door, then thought better of it and chucked the vandalizing crustaceans into his big cooking pot instead. Robigus yelled something from the bathroom.
After a few seconds Napoleon poked his head into the main room. "Bung, come take a look at this."
The bathtub was filled with a knot of oily black fangworms, which Robigus was dispatching with his shortsword. They were hideous and eel-like, bristling with hollow red fangs. "These creatures came from under the toilet, I would guess," announced the mildew god between chops. "It might be prudent to shut the hatches now."
Bungston had to agree. He checked for hidden fangworms, then tugged the Cossack sabre loose from its position between the hatches. The sabre was unusually shiny in some places, black and blasted looking in others; Bungston attributed this to the fact that the shoggoth must have flowed around it when the creature emerged from the toilet. The sword was still serviceable, though, so Bungston mustered up his guts and started spearing wriggling bits of slimy bloody fangworm with the sabre and depositing them in the toilet. He did not find out until it was too late that the fangworms had slimed all the toilet paper and towels.
It took the rest of the day to clear unwanted animals out of the cabana and block off the doors so no more could get in. Dog and god crashed at sundown. After duct taping the storm door back together Bungston massaged an eyebag and tried to figure out what to do about Irn, who had helped with the cleanup and was equally tired. "I don't know where you're going to sleep, Irn. The couch is out." After the crustacean attentions it had received, the couch was definitely out. Robigus was already on the spare futon.
Irn patted the puffy altar, which at the moment was silent. "This looks comfy. I'll crash on here."
Bungston shook his head and took her by the arm. "Just the idea gives me the willies," he said. "Tell you what, sleep in my bed. I'm not in any romping mood." He pointed at an eyebag for evidence. Irn thought it sounded OK and the wizard stumbled after her to bed, where he dreamt of cold fangworms with candelabras crawling under the covers and nuzzling up to him.
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