Pulling herself out of the roses, she looked around. She was in a tall square room. There were no doors. But along one wall she saw three circular holes, the mouths of large pipes or small tunnels. Over each opening was a name. Rex, Fido, and Vinnie. Getting down on her hands and knees she began to crawl down the pipe named Rex. Luckily for Dabbler, she wasn't freaked out by tight spaces. Otherwise, what happened next might have been her undoing. From behind her she heard the sound of metal scraping on stone. In her mind's eye she could picture exactly what had just happened - some hidden section of the pipe wall had slid open. The question now was, what was going to come chasing her?
The sound of a snarling dog and madly racing paws slapping against the inside of the pipe answered that question in a jiffy.
There was no room and no way for Dabbler to out-race the rabid canine. Unless she used her powers. So, with a simple unspoken command, a blanket of mana materialized beneath her and she began to slide down the tunnel like a toboggan on ice. The dog didn't stand a chance of catching up with her. And then the tunnel ended and Dabbler flew out and almost went splat against a wall. Looking around she saw that she'd come to a dead-end. It was easy to tell, the words "DEAD END" were spray painted on the walls. But before she could even think of retracing her steps, the sound of mad howling reminded her that she still had a dog to worry about. But Dabbler was not an unkind person and had no wish to harm the creature. So she decided to stun the little bastard. Raising her hands toward the tunnel mouth, a wall of mana began to shimmer into existence. Unfortunately for Dabbler, she hadn't realized how close the dog was. Unfortunately for the dog, when it hit that half-formed wall of pure Authorial power it was dissected into twenty-seven slices of pure dead Rotweiler.
"Oops," Dabbler mumbled. But she didn't have time to get too sentimental. She immediately went back into the pipe and returned to the rose-petal room.
Fido's tunnel was the next one she crawled into, and what happened next was pretty much exactly what had happened the first time round. Crawling on hands and knees; a dog let loose to chase after her; sliding her way into a dead-end; and one more dead canine. Although to be fair to Dabbler, it wasn't her fault that the German Shepard caught fire. It was a totally honest mistake.
So she went back one more time and took the last tunnel, the one marked Vinnie. Once again there was the crawling on the hands and the knees, and also once again there was the loosing of the rampaging dog, this was followed by yet another mana blankey tunnel ride, and after that was the flying swoosh into the dead-end room of doggy death. Except that this time, a) the room wasn't a dead-end, b) the dog didn't die a terrible death, and c) Vinnie is a really stupid name for a Saint Bernard.
But that's not important. What is important is that Dabbler had found a dead-end that wasn't a dead-end. In front of her was a large door. And on the other side of the door was a large warehouse kind of place. And it was filled up with boxes and crates and long rows of clothing mannekins.
Suspicious, Dabbler walked over to the mannekins and checked them out. She'd seen enough scifi movies and Twilight Zone episodes to know that mannekins are almost as bad to have around as clowns and ventriloquist dummies are. To her surprise though, the danger did not come from the mannekins.
Go back - Go to the parent episode.
Tue Jun 06 23:16:41 2006