HML Story Bored #044 "Twisted Mettle" *Crap, what -am- I going to do?*, Dino thought as he inched along, now more than halfway across the ultra-high security room. *I'm too small to do cause any damage like this, and if I return to normal size I'll set the alarms off.* Needless to say, Dino was getting a bit flustered at the odds against him. He was practially underneath Disney by now, and was thankful that there were no lasers present directly under the coffin. He stood up and looked at the giant (from his perspective) steel capsule above him and hooted softly. *Hundreds of reptilians are depending on me.*, Dino thought soberly, *I can't let them down.* Dino sat heavily on the floor, as heavily as a mosquito-sized parasaur could anyhow, and commited himself to thinking of a adequate strategy to both eliminate Disney and get himself out in one piece. After all, he was the Dinosorceror, and while he had a duty to save these enslaved species from oppression, he also had a quest for the Device of Ultimate Power to keep away from the forces of evil. *Well,*, Dino thought, trying to look on the meager bright side, *at least this has nothing to do with the Device.* ************************** The Turdis crew, save Dino, walked into the control room of the intergalactic port-o-potty with an air of annoyance around them. "Darwin.", Jerhevron said sharply as he sat down in front of the computer bank. "What is it now?", Darwin said, twirling a bit. "I'm on vacation too, ya know." "Not anymore. Dino's disappeared. I want you to start scanning the area for him." "So...'ol lizard boy went out and got lost, did he?" The stegosaur rolled his eyes. "Just do it, okay?" Darwin trilled, then started his scan. The rest of the group sat down at the confurence...uh, -conference- table and waited.... **************************** Dino furrowed his brow with concentration as the beam emminating from the Dark Lens continued to burow into the bottom of Walt Disney's cryo-coffin. He had been concentrating the beam on that spot for over five minutes, he figured that it wouldn't be much longer before... The sudden hiss of air met his ears, and he cut off the Lens beam. Dino smiled craftily as he listened to the air pressure in the coffin slowly equalize with the air in the room. He couldn't shrink the whole coffin when he was this small, but he figured that he could shrink a small area on the coffin, essentially drilling a hole through the steel casing. *Now all I have to do is wait.*, Dino thought. It was most likely that Disney had all sorts of sensors on his coffin to constantly keep tabs on the tempature. Letting warm air inside through the hole should set off an alarm. As if on cue, a loud klaxon sounded, and red lights began to flash all over the computer-laden walls. Dino watched the steel-plated door that led into the room, the only way in or out, and waited..... *************************** Down the hall from Disney's room, inside a security station filled with monitors overlooking the various high security areas, two guards sat. Under normal circumstances, they would constantly be watching the video links to the halls outside Disney's room. They would have noticed Dino, Ducky, Ka, and Figment approach the steel door at the control room, if they hadn't of been distracted. The two guards sat glued to one particular monitor, ignoring their security duties. They munched on corn chips and drank cheap beer while listening to the audio in their headphones. "*And there's the kickoff....Super Bowl XXXI is under way. Well, John, the Packers are the favored team here today and we can already see why, Reggie White has......*" A loud buzzer sounded from the control panel in front of them, a look of consternation spreading on their faces when they saw why. A digital display, showing the tempature in Disney's cryo-coffin, was steadily climbing. They immediately scrambeled to save their emperor.... ************************** Dino didn't have to wait long. He heard a commotion outside the steel door, and within a few seconds, the laser beams deactivated. Dino ran out from under the coffin just as the door opened with a short rush of air. Two technicians in white lab coats and two guards burst into the room and rushed for Disney's cryo-coffin, but stopped in the doorway in fear at what they saw. From their perspective, it looked as if an 8' tall parasaur shrouded in a field of energy grew up out from behind the coffin, and he did not look pleased. "Thanks for turning off the security system.", Dino said in the snidest voice he could muster. The two guards started to grab for their pistols. Dino quickly aimed the Dark Lens at the four humans and concentrated on shrinking them. Instantly, a quartet of 15' tall humans were slamming their heads into the steel doorframe above them, luckily for Dino, with enough force to knock themselves unconcious. Dino sighed once again at his mis-use of the Dark Lens, then reduced the four sleeping humans back to normal size. Dino walked around to the front of the coffin and stared through the glass front at Disney. He certainly didn't -look- evil. Dino again started to feel edgy about intentionally killing. The image of the black dragon from "Sleeping Beauty" jumped back into his mind. Weak, starving, and dying. Dino got a grim look on his snout. It had to be done. He raised the Lens and aimed it at the coffin. He tried to think of something fitting to say, but words failed him. He fired the blue beam at the coffin. Nothing happened. Dino furrowed his brow and continued to engulf the coffin in Lens energy. No effect whatsoever. "What the hell....", he muttered. Dino almost jumped out of his scales when Disney's eyes suddenly snapped open. The founder of possibly the largest corporate empire on the planet and the enslaver of countless species stared through the glass at the parasaur. Dino had no time to react when a predatory smile suddenly spread across Disney's face, mostly because the door to the cryo-coffin blew off its hinges, as if a bomb had been detonated inside of it. Dino was flung across the room, he slammed into the far wall and fell to the floor, coughing and gasping in the smoke. He looked up to see a figure moving through the smoke towards him. Walt Disney, apparently none the worse for wear after the explosion, walked towards Dino, clutching a gem in his left hand that was emmiting a dull red light. Dino knew instinctivly what it was. He didn't know whether to be happy, scared, or completely disgusted. It was a segment of the Device. **************************** Darwin had found Dino's presence underneath Cinderella's Castle, and (what was left of) the Turdis crew set out to find their leader. Jerhevron carried a portable tracker that told them of Dino's location. "Something is wrong here.", Matt commented as they walked up Main Street U.S.A. towards Cinderella's Castle. Something, indeed. The entire park seemed deserted. They had not seen one single tourist since they left the Turdis. "Downright spooky is what it is.", Benjamin said, adjusting his dark glasses. They cautiously made their way up the street and began crossing the large open square in front of the Castle. Jerhevron suddenly stopped. "This doesn't make sense. The tracker says Dino's ten feet in front of us, but he's not here." Everyone looked ahead at the empty space in front of them, squinting real hard just to make sure Dino wasn't hiding behind himself or something. Jerhevron shook the little device and slapped it into his palm a few times. The plastic casing broke open and half a dozen parts fell out. "Piece of junk. I could build better stuff with my head up my..." A tremor shook the ground, throwing the adventurers off balance and shaking plaster off of the nearby buildings. The quake quickly stopped and two plumes of red fire abruptly shot out of the middle of the ground, rising fifty feet into the air. The flame pillars dissapated, leaving a battered Dinosorceror and an old human standing on the scorched sections of ground. The old man laughed. "It's so nice to be out of that stuffy room. Now I can have a breath of fresh air while I sear your flesh right off your body!" Matt, being an Earth native, knew who the human was, but almost couldn't believe it. "Disney?!" Disney whirled around on the new voices and scowled. "I don't think he's as friendly as he was on TV.", Matt commented as the small group threw themselves out of the way of a red energy blast. They scrambled back to their feet and re-grouped next to Dino. "Ahh....", Jerhevron said, eyeing the old man, "Dino, what's the deal here?" "I'll explain later." Disney chuckled at them. "Your friends have come to die with you. How sweet." Orelious the lion eyed the gem in Disney's hand. "That's not what I think it is, is it?" Dino nodded soberly. "Yeah, that's a segment." Disney rolled his eyes. "Enough! You partisans are all alike, so damn chatty! I hope you're prepared to die..." Matt raised his head up. "Hey....where did you get the segment?" "That's none of your business!", Disney snapped. Matt stepped forward, shaking his head and frowning. "No! You can't say that!" Disney was shocked. A lowly reptilian peon was challenging the great almighty Disney?! "What? Why not?" "Because," Matt explained, "the -wonderful- author of this chapter has left a hole in the plot the size of the national debt. You have to explain where you got your segment from to avoid Reality Collapse(tm)." Disney sneered at the apatosaur, tossing the segment from hand to hand. "Nonsense! I don't have to explain anything to you or anybody! And I'll blow you into the next world to prove it!" Disney paused. "Well, then again, I've never been one to do my own dirty work." He motioned to something behind the Turdis crew. "I'll let them do it for me!" Everyone spun around to see what Disney was talking to, and all jaws dropped when they saw what it was. "You've got to be pulling my tail....", Dino muttered. Disney employees, dressed in the costumes of different non-scaly characters, Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and a score of others, new and old, stood stone still behind Dino and his friends. "Behold! While I've had living reptiles running around to entertain the tourists, I had the small problem of these other characters. Humans wearing costumes just didn't look real enough, so I built these robots, who handle the job nicely, I might add. Aside from entertainment value, they are also handy for squashing upstarts such as yourselves." Everyone glanced warily at each other. They were outnumbered at least two to one, and they also had a segment-wielding Disney at their backs. Disney yelled to his cybernetic lackeys. "Destroy them!" The robots charged forward, intent on destruction from their master's command. Dino and his friends tensed themselves for the fight, for the first time feeling that they really wouldn't come out of this one in one peice. A shadow suddenly appeared around the group of robots, rapidly growing in size. The 'bots, Disney, and the Turdis crew, all momentarily bewildered by the source of the shadow, looked up in time to see a white dragon decending on the cyber-toons. Red Dragon landed in the middle of the robot's midst and began to smash, shatter, crush, crack, bash, pound, and batter the twenty robots to peices. After the whirlwind of claws stopped, Red sat frowning among the robotic wreckage. "Aww....that took thirteen seconds. My record is nine." Disney stood, mouth agape at the destruction of his robots. His expression quickly morphed from that of surprise to that of fury. He raised his segment up and aimed it at Red, shouting, "You bastard! I'll blow your head off for that!" A voice behind Disney interupted him. "I don't think so." Disney whirled around to look at the two dragons behind him, one fully robotic and the other holding a mean looking glowing sword. Disney fired a blast at WolfWings and Stormfront. They threw themselves out of the way, rolling once and landing back on their claws. With no time for hello's at the moment, the re-united crew of the Turdis surrounded Disney, closing in slowly. "Surrender. It's over.", Dino said, keeping the Lens trained on the overlord. "Never!", Disney yelled, raising his segment and firing wildly at anyone who got too close. For ten minutes they tried to bring down the overlord, but the powerful blasts kept them at bay. Dino fired his own segment, Disney absorbing the beams into the gem. It was obvious Disney was starting to tire, he wasn't moving as fast as before and his shots were more and more off-target. Jerhevron and Matt double-teamed Disney, one running in on each side. Disney spun and fired at Jerhevron. He hardly had to dodge, the blast was so off target, but it left Matt wide open for the take down. Matt ran straight at Disney and, in the same fashion he had seen in NFL football games, dove low to tackle the human. Disney whirled around and projected a force sheild in front of him to try and stop his attacker, but in his weakened state he couldn't stop the half ton of flying apatosaur. Matt felt a resistence when he hit the sheild, but passed through it, slamming into Disney's midriff. The small human was thrown ten yards, but more importantly, he lost his grip on his segment, the gem skittering away across the ground, finally falling down through a water grate into the storm sewer. Disney wobbily got to his feet, an achievement for someone having just been slammed as hard as he had. Everyone closed in around him, forming a circle. Yet Disney refused to admit defeat. "You just wait!", he yelled at the herps around him, "I'll be back! You will all perish before my wrath!" Dino looked at the ranting human disgustedly. He brought the Lens up to bear on the human, engulfing him in its energy. Disney began to shrink, still yelling all the way down. "I can not be defeated! I will come back and enslave you all! You will regret the day that....." Disney had shrunk enough so that the human was too small to be heard. Even after Disney had diminished to the point of disappearing from sight, Dino continued to focus the beam on were Disney had stood for another good minute. Dino stopped the beam, then let his segment hang at his neck. "Now...", Jerhevron said, clearing his throat, "Will somebody please tell me what is going on?" Dino told them about Disney enslaving all the scalies for his movies and such, and about all that happened right up to his arriving in the square. "Hey....", Matt said, "What about the segment?" "Eh?...Oh, yeah." He walked over to the grate where the gem was stuck. He bent over and picked it up, pausing to gaze at the smooth cut facets of the EVIL segment before placing it in a pocket. "Well...", WolfWings asked, "What about Ducky and Figment and all the others?" Dino was about to say "Good question" when somebody interupted him. "Oh, don't worry. I took care of them." Dino spun on his heel to face the source of the very familliar voice. Dino was quite bothered by the familiar dragon before him. "Selsun!", Dino exclaimed at the blue dragon bobbing in the air before him. "That's right! I was just in the neighborhood and wanted to congradulate you..." "On our victory over Disney?", Red cut in. Selsun rolled her eyes. "No, on keeping me entertained. This confrontation was ten times better than anything on cable." Dino shook his head. "Wait a minute. What do you mean you 'took care of' Ducky and the others?" "Oh, I transported them back to the times, places, and dimensions they had originally came from. No biggy." Dino was both amazed and furious at the shampoo-dragon. "No....biggy?!", Dino seethed, "You mean you could have done that at any time?!" The gaseous dragon nodded a bit. "Yeah, but that would just be too boring. It's just so much _fun_ watching you running all over the place gett...." "Fun? FUN?!", Dino yelled, waving his arms around for emphasis, "What the hell kind of sick being are you?!" Selsun narrowed her eyes. "All powerful, actually." "We almost got scorched just so you could have something to watch?! You bitch, how could you do this?!" Selsun's normal blue color was slowly turning to red and her merry expression was starting to turn into a scowling frown. "You ungrateful little shit, I did you a massive favor transporting them for you. It would have taken you months to transport all of them back!" Jerhevron leaned over and elbowed Dino in the ribs. "Hey, you don't want to piss her off..." Dino twisted away and contiued to rave. "No! I've had it with being pushed around! I've been deceived by that friggin' raptor X, the damn Patriarch has been using me as his puppet, I've been attacked by my evil self, a crazy mega-theme park founder, a bible banging looney, pneumonia dragons, Cera and a half zillion coelosaurs, and Slobbering Kelp Monger's! I've been shot at, clawed, burned, stabbed, stomped..." Dino trailed off. "Well, stomping isn't so bad. But we've had to deal with all of them, and then there's you jerking us around with that whole "The Prisoner" thing! I know you can smote me with a thought, I really don't care. Just go away. We can handle this just fine without you poking your snout in!" Selsun was bright red by now, and looked more than a little angry. "You want me gone? Fine! But know this..." She raised a claw and made a motion. Three crystaline rocks appeared in front of her, hovering about in the air. "...these are the remaining three segments you have not collected yet. I was going to give them to you to hurry things along, but now I'm going to give them to someone who will appreciate it!" Selsun made another motion, this time herself and the three segments disappearing. After a few shocked silent moments, the Snake looked accusingly at Dino. "Oh, great! Now she's gone and given three more segments to the Patriarch!" "No, I haven't." It was Selsun's voice, it seemed to radiate from all directions. "The Patriarch is about to have his own troubles over the seven segments he's got. These three are going to someone else." Silence. WolfWings sighed. "Well, _now_ what?" Dino had that annoyed "things aren't going my way" look. "Well, I guess we should get back to the Turdis and get to work on finding the segments. We need to find out who Selsun gave them to." The crew of the Turdis, their spirits not as high as they could be, walked back through the abandoned theme park towards their ship. ***************************** Several high-ranking men from the National Security Agency, agents from the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Secratary of Defence sat in the Oval Office of the White House, meeting with President Clinton. Clinton wasn't feeling too chipper. He had given the State of the Union address earlier in the evening, and after talking with all the senators he had come back to deal with this most pressing problem late at night. One of the CIA agents showed Clinton several photographs. "Now this one, sir, was taken by a Finneus T. Hogswaller at Paluxy River, Texas in 1980." It was a Polaroid picture of Orelious, X, Ben, Livingston, Red, Stormfront, and Dino. The agent continued. "We tried to get some information out of him, but he was a bit senile, kept babbeling about dandruff shampoo. He kept calling this one the 'Dinosorceror', though. We think he's their leader." The agent pointed to Dino on the photo. "Now, these ones were taken not too long ago by a dashboard mounted camera on a police car in Sandpoint, Idaho." He handed Clinton a small bunch of photos from when Matt first joined up with Dino's quest. "The reports were that the robotic one here assaulted an officer, then they tore up a street. Also, they apparently speak English. The police combed the whole town and all surrounding areas, but they couldn't be found." A National Security agent got up with his own bundle of photos. "Now, these photos were salvaged out of the wreckage of the Mall of the Americas. He handed Clinton a picture of Dino in his black cat suit raiding a magazine rack. "And we recieved these photos from Disney World..." He handed the president a photo of Dino, Orelious, Matt, Ben, Livinstone, and Jerhevron standing on Main Street U.S.A. that was taken by a tourist when they first arrived at the park. "...today. New reports are that a major fight took place there, we don't know the extent of the damage yet." Clinton furrowed his brow. The nature of these visits were getting quite hostile, and it was the same group of creatures, some were present in some photos and others weren't, but the "Dinosorceror" was always there. He reclined back in his leather chair behind his antique oak desk and rubbed his temples. He felt a headache coming on. "Gentelmen, what are your theories about this?" The Secratary of Defence leaned forward in his chair. "Well, sir, we don't really know what to make of it. They appear seventeen years ago in Texas and hang around for half and hour with an old kook, suddenly appear recently in a small town two thousand miles away and attack police, blow up a major shopping mall shortly after that, then terrorize the most popular amusment park in the world. There's no patterns, no purpose or reason we can find for doing these things." They all glanced warily at each other. "We just don't know what to make of it." "I do." They all looked around the room for the source of the new voice. "Who's there?", Clinton asked. "Me. I'm right here." They turned around and saw something that wasn't there a few seconds before. A white shampoo bottle stood on the floor, a cloud on blue smoke coming out of it, forming into a blue dragon. They felt their scalps tingle as the smoke wisped around the room. Needless to say, they were shocked beyond words. "Now, don't go off and start screaming and spazzing out. I'm here to tell you all you need to know about the Dinosorceror, his pals, his quest, and everything else. Oh..." The dragon grinned toothily and held out a claw, showing off three odd looking gems. "...you may be interested in these..." (And at this point I turn the HMLSB over to the flattened parasuar!) ****************************************** Matt Walsh, Anthro Apatosaur of Sand-Ida Inland Empire Herp, light-duty artist, & beginner MUCKer. Matthew_Walsh@pcn.sandpoint.net "There is no question that there is an unseen world. The problem is, how far is it from midtown and how late is it open?" -Woody Allen ******************************************