Dabbler would not meet Deja Voodoo’s gaze. Nor would he speak for a time, until his host’s sudden wrath had in some measure abated. It was then that he said “The DibbImp and the man who just saved my skin are the same then, I take it. How did that come about? The imp was not even human.”
“Again,” Deja Voodoo replied, returning to his chair with a sigh, “that is untrue. The imp was the offspring of two human beings, albeit one of them an Author and the other a Character. Due to the circumstances of its conception it was without gender, and because of its heritage of power it exuded a foul, form-altering gaseous substance. A substance to which it was no more immune at first than any other person proved thereafter. The being you initially encountered had already been terribly altered and twisted from its gestation in the midst of its own waste product. Yet it was, I assure you, fully a human being.”
“And how did you discover these things?” Dabbler queried in a dull voice. “What prompted your interference?”
“Was it not I who first conceived and constructed the Vault? And was it not intended to be a repository for hazardous waste disposal, not a prison? I was aware of a living creature having been placed there from the moment you set it down. How could I not investigate? And well it was that I did. The crystal sheath in which the creature had been encased was cracked, and the noxious vapors it excreted were escaping to rapidly fill and pressurize the Vault, building up to explosive potential. You are aware of what that vapor was capable of. The whole Service Sector was threatened, possibly the whole Backstage.”
“But you stopped that,” Dabbler said.
“I did. Moreover, I sealed the crack, removed the imp to a reality in which it could do no harm, and assayed the experiment of reasoning with it.”
The Barefoot One’s face turned incredulous. “And you succeeded?” he demanded.
Deja Voodoo’s thin smile reiterated itself. “It required a certain amount of patience,” he conceded. “It helped that, although certifiably insane, the creature was born possessed of a keen if untutored intelligence. Too, the venue chosen for our negotiation was one in which most extranormal phenomena are nonfunctional. In point of fact, I held all the cards, as it gradually came to realize. Hence, having literally no other option, it was willing to listen.” Here Dabbler’s host became reflective. “It is not a pleasant recollection, that in order to bring the imp around to any possibility of redemption I was forced to leave it with no alternative but to comply with my will,” he said. “It smacked too much, to my mind, of your own catch-and-dump tactic. Yet, while the choice I offered it was severely limited, I did proffer it one.”
“And that was?”
“To exist, in the empty world of our negotiation, alone and powerless forever. Or to take up a new existence in a world of my choosing, its previous life expunged from its mind, there to live and grow as a normal human being, ignorance of its past until it achieved adulthood, whereupon I would return for it, restore its memories and abilities, and allow it henceforward to determine its own fate.”
“Risky,” said Dabbler.
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