From: dino@voicenet.com (Dinosorceror) Date: 4/20/96 2:02PM Subject: SBO23: Wake Up...Time To Lie Address: To: Herpetophile Mailing List With a squeak and a startle, Dino awoke again from another horrid dream. He saw a raptor muzzle bearing down on him, and thought to himself momentarily, "Wow, it was all a dream." That's until he realized the breadth of the raptor nuzzle was twice as long as he, and he blinked. "Oh, crud...I really did screw up everything for a cheap yiff." Jenn looked down at him. "I'm afraid you did. Even _my_ Dinosorceror wouldn't have been that dim, foolish, careless..." Dino paused for a moment, then spoke. "Shut up." They had all just slept on or near the beach blanket that night, not knowing what to do about the diminutive TURDIS or anything else for that matter. The silence pervading the beach was broken a few moments later. "I can't believe it...you actually did it, Orelious!" spoke the eye-patched Jerhevon, who had turned out to be almost as nice as _their_ Jerhevon...apparently, he had just acted mean in fear of the nega-Dinosorceror. Orelious beamed, the nearly assembled Device before hir. Jenn strode over to Orelious slowly, carrying the tiny Dino in her right clawhand. "What's this?" she asked. "It's the Device!" Red chirped as he settled on Jenn's shoulder, grinning evilly down at Dino, who swallowed roughly. Orelious was ecstatic. "We've been up all night assssembling it!" said the snake head. "And once we get back both of the 4-D Lenses, it'll be aaaall set, riiight Dino?" said the goat. Dino's gaze broke from the apparently hungry Red to the Device at Orelious' paws. He looked at it briefly, then closed his eyes tighter and tighter. "I don't believe this," he muttered. Orelious' lion head's joy began to fade. "What? What's wrong?" it roared softly. Jenn slowly approached Orelious and the Device, and set Dino on the beach in front of it. It was a toaster oven. "It's a TOASTER OVEN!" Dino shouted, and as the other crew members of the TURDIS gathered around him and the oven. Dino walked around it, fuming, and read from a small warning label on the back. "This *device* not to be operated by children," he said, and then fell on his belly to the sand. "Oh, no!" Red cried from Jenn's shoulder. "I guess we had to be more specific to that summoning contraption..." Dino got up and kicked the back of the oven with his lil' clawfoot, and it sparked for a moment. "Hey, this thing isn't plugged in, is it?" he cried, falling on his lil' butt. The oven began to glow slightly, and spoke. "Hey, I am not an it. Want some toast? Some nice, hot, crisp, brown, buttered toast?" Jenn replied, "No." "How about a muffin?" the toaster insisted. Dino looked at the toaster oven, wide-eyed. "DESTROY IT, NOW!" With those words from Dino, one of Orelious' big paws came down on top of it and smashed the toaster oven into its components again, just as it was about to inquire about pancakes, flapjacks, and bagels. Dino skittered back from the descending paw and flying pieces, and Jenn picked him up again. "So NOW what?" Dino whined and whimpered. "We can't summon anything anymore. Both the 4-D Lenses are down in Redneckville on Earth somewhere. X and Jerhevon are still trapped in that parallel dimension on Pollux, getting who knows what done to them by that evil counterpart of mine. And I'm the only one who's big enough to fit inside the TURDIS to go anywhere." Just then, Stormfront Swordbearer strode out of the jungle and onto the beach, hir sword unsheathed, sounding very irritated and looking very tired. "Alright! I've been wandering through that jungle for what seems like an eternity looking for the idiots who swiped me out of my reality in a dream sequence! I want some food and answers _now!_" shi shouted in a masculine voice. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- "This had better work, you little twerp," X scolded the tiny evilDino who stood on a control panel inside the Fortress. In a few seconds, what looked like a glass shield-bubble surrounded X, Jerhevon, and the evilDino and the control panel they were standing around...and they disappeared, much to the dismay of all of the evilDino's henchasaurs held at bay by the threat to their master's life. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Stormfront had been pacified with a few fish shi caught in the ocean, and they were all sitting around explaining their predicament to hir, when a flash of light exploded around the tiny TURDIS to their side. They all stood momentarily to gawk at it...but it had grown! It was it's normal size again...and had taken the form of a large boulder to blend in with the surroundings. No sooner had they all taken in this fact, then none other but Jerhevon and X had sprung from the doorway in anticipation of a fight, with X's gun set on "thunder lizard stew." "X! Jerhevon!" several on the beach cried. A warm nuzzling session ensued, with Jerhevon meeting his eyepatched self, X in disbelief at the meek Jenn raptor, Stormfront meeting the somewhat newcomers, X nuzzling the little Dino...and then she remembered. "Shards! That little evil Dinosorceror is still inside the TURDIS!" X cried, and re-readied her gun. They all ran inside the TURDIS to the control room, and the small control panel inside that had been transported from the Fortress...but...no evilDino. "Damn," cursed Orelious' snake head. "If that little fool getssss into anything, we could be in big trouble!" "Absolutely right," X agreed. "Let's split up and find the twerp...he couldn't have gone far." As X and Jerhevon explained what had happened, and why the evil Dinosorceror was also so small, Jenn set Dino down on top of the control panel, where everyone agreed he would be safe until they found his evil counterpart. They slowly looked around, and spread out through the many rooms that make up the TURDIS, leaving Dino to sigh somewhat happily at the recent turn of events alone on the control panel... ...until the evil Dinosorceror grabbed his ankle, and dragged him inside it. Dino oofed as he hit a bank of cables deep inside the control panel, the evilDino standing beside him, wielding a sharp shard of metal he must have torn from the innards of the panel. "Alright, you fool...where is my Lens?" the evilDino demanded harshly. "I'm not telling you _dick!_" Dino retorted. The evilDino bent over, pricking the scales of Dino's neck with the shard, drizzling a small drop of blood on the neck of Dino's white toga. "You'll tell me, or I won't hesitate to kill you now," evilDino sneered. Dino swallowed, and sighed, figuring he had better just tell this idiot what he wanted to know so he could live that much longer to figure out something. "Alright, alright!" he winced. "It's in Texas, on Earth somewhere!" evilDino grinned. "Good. That's all I needed to know." With more threatening and prodding, evilDino switched his black toga for Dino's white one. "They'll know you're not me! You'll never get away with this!" Dino spat. "My dear, dear, foolish counterpart...I already have." With those words, evilDino tied up Dino with the cables around him tightly, and placed a few inside his muzzle to gag him. He dusted off his white tunic, then cut a nearby cable in two, and it sparked with high voltage. He let it hang above the tied Dino, and slowly it began to bend down closer and closer to him with gravity. As the electric death approached Dino slowly, evilDino gave him one final sneer before climbing back out of the panel. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- X was the first to hear the little Dino cry out, and came running back into the control room, alerting the others. Dino was standing on the very corner of the control panel, because the center was sparking and in flames. "Dino! What happened?" chirped Red as he flew in with the others. Stormfront picked Dino up nimbly before X could grab a fire extinguisher and put out the flames. Dino panted, trembling. "It was him! My counterpart! He was still inside the control panel! I...*swallow*...I fought with him, and he fell on a bank of wires, and it exploded!" X didn't wait for the extinguisher foam to fully dissipate, and jumped up, ripping the panel open down the middle with her right sickle claw. Jerhevon pulled it apart muscularly, and they all gathered to see a tiny tattered and charred black tunic tangled in a bunch of wires. X huffed, spraying bits of foam on everyone's muzzles. "Good...I really hated that twerp," she sneered. Dino regained his strength, and started hopping in Stormfront's paw. "C'mon! We've got to get to Texas before something happens to the Lenses!" -- -=+ From the Dinosorceror of Lava Dome III +=- Herpetophile - Macrophile http://www.voicenet.com/~dino dino@voicenet.com "I had to patch the bottom of my dino-feet slippers. They're version 1.1 now."