"Can we help in some way?" D.J. asked. "After all, we have had some success in making our way through the Ring incognito, and--" She stopped as Bizarro raised his hand.
"You forget," the Lord of Sanctuary reminded her. "That was in peace-time -- now, with the fragile truce between the Supers and Peripheral broken, the effectiveness of your cover story has evaporated. But in fact, the difficulty isn't in getting you to Peripheral, but into it. With all the stragglers passing through my sector to join the army arranging new disguises and covers for you should be little problem. At the front, however, conditions will be different."
"Still, said Dabbler, "if we had some idea of what to expect--"
"It is not my intention to keep you in ignorance," Bizarro said. "You will be briefed on that before you go, and be provided with an escort to smooth over any trouble you may encounter. In the meantime, you will perhaps forgive me for indulging my craving for news of my old stamping grounds on the Outside."
There was no effective rejoinder to that but to indulge him, and for a time thereafter Bizarro asked most of the questions, on which D.J., Dabbler and JigSaw were somewhat hard-pressed for answers. Having moved in vastly different circles of the Concourse hierarchy, they were able to give him little word of former cronies. But JigSaw knew a few of them, notably Meiou Bunny, whom Bizarro had been acquainted with through Toon Avatars Anonymous, and D.J. had a few details on others who were perennial petty nuisances by way of the Backstage Security police blotter.
In return for such intelligence, Bizarro did his best to satisfy the travelers' curiosity on the Bizarro Backstage. Its circular layout had its origin in Bizarro's impulse to do things contrary to the norm. In his home universe that had meant constructing a cube-shaped planet in contrast to the run-of-the-mill spherical ones; here it had prompted him to go in the other direction, since other sectors were box-like. His guests quickly learned that it was indeed tesseract engineering that was responsible for the apparent rotundity of the sector, as Sendulo had speculated, Resculpting the Ringwalls with their embedded Barriers had been beyond Bizarro's capabilities (or anyone else's, perhaps, save those of the Four).
The sector's unusual architecture made use of the same technology. The style of crazy angles had been set by the sector's original, mostly Bizarro, population, in nostalgia for the fashion in which they had build on their home world. With the influx of misfit immigrants from all over the Antipodes ring, not to mention the improvement of the Bizarros' own mentalities, more practical considerations had taken hold. Hence building interiors had been warped back into rational lines their outward appearances would seem to forbid. This was less costly in mana than one might think. Most of the remodeling had been done back in times of relative mana abundance, and tesseract generation and engineering didn't really require much in the mutable reality of the AddVenture. It also helped that once space was rescaled it tended to remain in that state unless purposefully reengineered at a later date. In the current drought, of course, such large-scale projects had become unthinkable. But matters had not always been thus.
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Mon Oct 27 23:43:57 2003
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