//------------------------------// // Side A: ONE // Story: Recorded Sometimes // by RealityDowngrade //------------------------------// “Gah, you look like a clown,” Ron chuckled as his son angled himself, carefully, down on the seat opposite the small, faux-wooden table he sat at. “Fair enough,” Brian smiled back. True, he did look quite outrageous in his custom-ordered orange with yellow rectangle, wide-hooped clown trousers, white greasepaint caked liberally across his exposed flesh, and a black coat with similarly colored clawed gloves, but the infamous fictional-pirate Gekko Moria was genuinely white-skinned and obese. Rather, it was the pirate Buggy who was a true clown, and a more Aguste inspired one at that. Though, at that point he’d have to admit that Moria did give off a pretty classical Whiteface Clown vibe … but, he knew his dad simply didn’t have the same level of interest in those fields of entertainment that he did. The two-word reply was all that really needed to be said between them. It was quite the coincidence that both of them were able to be here together at all too. Brian in town for the anime convention, and Ron in town for another police conference, but they were both glad they were able to spend a little extra time together. In fact, that’s what Ron had come to the bustling convention center for: lunch. The massive complex housed a number of mid- to high-tier restaurants, so he knew he’d be able to buy them both a good meal before he left and was forced to attend more meetings. “Oh, and hey,” Brian said, fumbling through one of his jacket’s side pockets with his gloved hand, “check out what I found.” Carefully lifting his hand out, a white stick pinched between his fingers, he revealed a small, bite-sized black sphere with thin golden spirals running across its surface save the bottom half, which was covered with long, green icing-leaves which curled very slightly at their tips, and a small green stem at the very top, and all wrapped up in a clear, plastic wrapper. “And what’s that?” Ron asked, wincing a little as the phone in his shirt-pocket whirred distinctly, informing him of yet another email he would need to read though, hopefully, not have to reply to. “Ehhhh, suffice to say it’s a mock-up of the magic fruit that gives this,” Brian said, gesturing to himself, “guy his shadow super-powers. Like moving his own away from him, and even solidifying it. But it’s also a cake-pop. Bought it from a novelty dressed vendor. Kinda looked like the guy from the start of Aladin. The good one,” he grinned. “Thought about eating it myself, but, luckily, I checked the tag. It’s pecan Italian cream cheese, and, well, you know I don’t like nuts in my sweets. So, I thought I’d save it for you. The guy said they were made this morning so it’s fresh.” Holding it out across the table, Ron smiled, “Thanks son. But,” he paused, reaching for his phone with one hand while the other began to twist away at the wrapper with the other, “let me just check this email right quick and then we can get to lunch. Everyone needs-” “-the Chief.” They said, finishing the long-standing phrase together. Ron smiled, raising the treat to his mouth. He normally wouldn’t have indulged, being about to eat to a proper lunch, but it was only a single bite and his favorite flavor of cake to boot (and if it sucked, he could wash it out with a good meal). So, as his teeth bit through the hair-line, hard-sugar exterior, rather than the soft texture of cake he was expecting, he was, instead, met with the disturbing texture of an apple mixed with stale bread. Worse, it had an extremely bitter, unripe taste that was nothing like an apple at all. Beyond the growing urge to down the nearest dark draft he could get his hands on to wash the offending taste off his tongue, his eyes became suddenly heavy, and he thought he heard his son shouting at him from a great distance as his body went slack and the darkness fell completely over his eyes. With the stench of sulphur burning his nose and his back aching, Ron winced back into consciousness, the overwhelming and oppressive heat yet another confounding element keeping him from making any sudden movement. Rolling gingerly onto his right side, memories of sleeping on uneven terrain while camping from his childhood parted through his sleep clouded mind. He’d never liked it, even back then. Camping was great, mind you, but sleeping on anything besides an air-mattress out in nature was for fools and Buddhist monks as far as he was concerned. None of this strangeness was able to keep his police training from kicking in, dusty though some of it was, and immediately began taking stock of his surroundings and himself. He wasn’t chained down, since he had been able to roll over. Slowly rolling onto his back again, he raised his arms and slowly pulled them down his chest, concentrating on his sense of touch as his fingers ran over his shirt collar, phone, still in pocket, the gun strap beneath his tan button-down sailing-shirt, his dark, blue jean pants and the second, personal phone that he kept attached to his belt. It was all there, and the sensation of touch didn’t seem to be delayed or overstimulating. Wiggling his toes, they were still in his black cowboy boots, along with his dress socks. Sitting up, slowly, using his arms to help prop him up, grunting, he finally began to look down at himself. Nothing seemed to be out of place except for the sweat that had been dampening his good clothes. But the dim, ruddy light could still be hiding some things. Raising his hand in front of his face, he wiggled his fingers. No blur. He snapped his fingers. The sound seemed to come readily enough. His senses all seemed to be working fine. Standing up carefully, his lower back succinctly reminded him of the sixty-three years they had shared together. He was almost certain he wasn’t drugged, but the cavernous, rocky tunnel he now stood in suggested that that wasn’t entirely out of the realm of possibilities. In front of him he saw light. A dull, red and orange glow, behind him, darkness. With only one sensible option before him, he moved gingerly towards the light, traces of ash and a small cocktail of foul-smelling gasses assaulting him as another heated sigh of wind swept by him. Eyes already adjusted to the dimness, he started noting the details in the rock around him. They were smooth … ish, and gently sloped downward. Suggesting that he was in a lava-tube, and one large enough you could have stored a small aircraft in. So, the chances of him utterly ruining his boots, or having his back already in shreds from fresh, jagged obsidian, wasn’t one of his current worries. Though, the fresh smells and light ahead of him didn’t leave him feeling any better about keeping himself or his lungs in one piece. None of this made any sense. Untucking his shirt and undershirt, he patted his back, cliché though it was, to see if his kidneys were still present. Not so much as a blemish across his back or front, besides his own beer-belly. “Shit. Fuck,” Ron coughed spinning on his heels, away from the wind and the ash that had just splashed across his eyes. Lifting his hands to his face quickly, he stopped just before they touched and, gritting his teeth at the discomfort but unwilling to risk potential shards of volcanic glass tearing into the flesh of his eyes and blind him, he waited, reaching for the handkerchief he kept in his back pocket and gently pressed it to his eyes, letting the tears flow and push out the offending material. After the stinging relented, he waited for another two minutes, counting the seconds out, just to be safe. Looking down at the handkerchief as he brought it away, he let out a grateful sigh. Not a single speck of red. Just the off-white of sweat and light grey of smeared ash. “Ugh, vermin.” Ron looked up at the deep, sudden voice that rumbled through him like the bass of some punk’s trunk speakers, paling as the growl that followed sounded closer to diesel tractor than anything made of flesh. What little light he’d had to begin with was now blocked by the silhouette of something large, and definitely reptilian, that took up almost half of the tunnel’s mouth. The great beast opened its maw, the snouted head splitting in two as a pale, yellow light began to grow in the back of its throat and illuminate the tunnel. Ron tensed as he saw the curved, hand-sized fangs reveal themselves, followed by the massive, black claws, each as long as his forearm, at the end of dark red forelimbs that would no doubt turn him coleslaw if he tried to run past the thing. The Beast. The Dragon. ‘Am I in hell?’ The thought thundered through him like lightning, only to be crowded out by the storm of all of the things he could have tried if this thing was merely some human thug with two hundred pounds of muscle on him. His pistol was useless. Even if it had the penetrating power to make it past the things scaly hide, it had too much bulk. Even if he could pull off some bullshit, Hollywood shot through its serving tray sized eye eye, because he was under no illusion it would do anything but ricochet if he aimed anywhere else, that didn’t even guarantee the right angle to reach the monster’s brain, let alone a part of it that was immediately lethal. There was nothing he could do. Even if he could run back far and fast enough to get out of the blast zone, even if the sudden heat didn’t fry or flatten his lungs from the sudden changes in heated air-pressure, even if their still remained enough oxygen in the tunnel to breathe, he was still at the entrance to the dragon’s lair. Running would accomplish nothing besides leaving him exhausted. The absolute best-case scenario was that the lava-tunnel was somehow connected to a dark, unexplored, greater cave system he could somehow get to that wasn’t connected in any way to any lava pools that would leave him chocking to death on their toxic gases long enough to not die of dehydration. He didn’t even have a lighter on him, having left it in his truck since the hotel had a no smoking policy. So, in truth, best case scenario was to fall blindly to his death in a pit. And even now, he hadn’t stopped sweating. Three days wouldn't be his limit without a drink to rehydrate. It would have been nothing short of a miracle to last that long with nothing else going against him. He didn’t even raise his arms. Why make the pain of his oncoming death last so much as a millisecond longer? The light grew further, and Ron pushed aside the queer feeling of his shadow lengthening out behind him as the last spurts of his adrenaline-fueled mind playing one last trick on his senses. ‘Please let this just be a nightmare, God.’ He silently prayed. His jaw too tight in terror to let a single sound passed it. Closing his eyes, it grew hotter still, and Ron waited for it all to be over. Sizzle blinked her inner eye-lids, displeased. The small, bright brown and deep blue creature, clearly a sign it was poisonous, was supposed to be a pile of ash, but she had watched as what looked like the thing’s shadow had peeled off of her cave-floor and wrapped around it like an egg. A few moments later it began to stretch back down, but, rather than fall back to the floor where a shadow belonged, it, instead, stood next to the thing, squashed down into the same height and shape. Things were supposed to burn when you breathed fire on them. Even rock would burn if you hit it enough times. So, undeterred, she began to inhale again. Apparently, it was going to take a few more blasts before she was going to get the rest she so deserved. It had been a rather busy day of lounging, and she needed her beauty sleep. But, just as the heat began to reach half-way up her gullet, she watched as the shadow-thing began to twist its shape again, thinning out and shooting at her like some long, extended pole. She almost screamed in pain as half of her sight blinked out, but fell onto the floor of her home instead as the lights in her maw and remaining eye winked out. Ron blinked again. He’d been doing that a lot in the last few seconds, and not just because of the ash from earlier. Though there was now a steady intake of air into the super-heated tunnel sucked in the cool, relatively, air from outside, and, with a quick glance down, he looked like he had just come out of a pool for how drenched in sweat he now was. The dragon, for what else could it have been, that had been seconds away from turning him to ash was now dead. And it was all thanks to his shadow, which he really could feel, like a different set of gravity or pull from a magnet, and could shift itself into other shapes far beyond any hand-puppetry, and could even give itself a physical presence that no ordinary shadow could ever possibly have. “A magic shadow. He can shape it, and even make it … solid.” He mouthed the half-remembered words. He’d wanted to not die by fire, prepared though he was. And the shadow had responded to him, wrapping around him like an armored bowling ball. He’d wanted to kill the murderous dragon, and it had extended like a baton, skewing its brain through its eyeball. And that gave him pause. It had spoken to him. It was at least feasible it might have been reasoned with. Though, if this was really Hell, then the thing was either a fallen angel, and therefore incapable of doing anything but evil no matter what bargain might have been reached, or else, maybe, some other damned soul that had been twisted by its time so far from God’s Grace. If he wasn’t still so sore from laying there on the stone, he’d have wanted a chair, and while he was making wishes, maybe the chair could fly him up and away from all of this demonic shit. And with his desire formed, he felt and, turning, watched as his shadow morphed, flattening onto the ground and then stretched out into a square, each side as long as he was tall. It then ballooned up around him in a cube with a small space hollowing out half-way down for him to sit upon. If he still wasn’t ninety … eighty percent sure he was still in hell, he’d have let more than just a quiet sigh hush passed his lips. Ok, he had lift, but did he have forward motion? The black square just sat there, floating. Ron frowned. “Forward,” he commanded, and was pleased to see his chair move further down the tunnel and towards the light he’d initially aimed for. It was time to take the lay of the land. “Slow,” he said in a hushed tone as they came up to the cavemouth, just past the limp, pointed tip of the dragon’s tail. “Stop.” Still within cover of the cave’s darkness he peered out onto the landscape, and nearly sprung from his seat in shock, his hands clenching down onto their rectangular armrests to keep himself steady. For the second time today, Ron felt his heart drop into his stomach. A blanket of smoke blotted out the sky entirely with occasional drifts of ash spiraling down. This cover was supplied by a truly massive composite volcano. From its red, glowing side vents he could see the small silhouetted forms of others dragons lounging beside and even in that lava streams that oozed forth from them. And, if he didn’t miss his mark, the volcano was nearly a mile off, so the dragons were, at least some multiple times as large as the one he’d already slain. The surrounding land was no better. Lava streams gathered and became molten rivers that flowed across a brown, ashy, rocky ground that was almost entirely flat but for the spikes of vicious, obsidian shards that gleamed an evil red in small groves, and stood anywhere from his own size to large enough to shade one of those monsters where they lounged. What room was left was then either filled with craters, small, puckered hills of cooling lava, or what looked like the makings of a shield volcano, but given he saw a dragon crawl out from its opening at the top, that would make it a burrow as well. And while he wasn’t certain if it was just a trick of the light and the shards, he would almost swear he could make out a handful of blackened, leafless trees spotted out across the land as well. In short, it was a true hellscape. Ron wiped his brow again, noticing the action only because it left him with more sweat stinging into his eyes than before thanks to his sodden, hairy arm. He wasn’t going to last much longer without some kind of water, that was more self-evident than ever. But was it? Could he really die of dehydration in Hell? He certainly didn’t want to test it. And to top it all off, now he had super powers. Genuine, comic book, Marvel movie super powers. And that changed everything. “Forward,” he commanded, the chill in his stomach growing. The shadow, his shadow, leapt, flying through the heated air. Ron’s sweaty back squelched as he was forced back into a full, seated position at the sudden acceleration. Thinking on it now, with so many other thoughts vying for attention, he focused. There had been no sign. No warning. No announcement of his many sins. He was just here. In a place of literal fire and brimstone. With super powers. Even if the thought of spending eternity in a place for those of unrepentant evil, which he was ver … at least pretty certain he himself wasn’t, made his skin crawl and his heart clench in a frozen terror so deep it felt like his chest might shatter. He was, at least, sure of one thing: of all of his faults, being a bad cop was not one of them. So, if no one was going to announce his judgement, then the least he could do was man up and announce it himself. “Towards the dragon,” he said, and his chaired shadow obeyed. Bringing itself to a slow, the chair began to arc down towards the ground, and towards the nearest dragon Ron had managed to spy. “Stop,” he whispered, his chair coming to a halt a few dozen feet above the head of long, green, serpent-bodied dragon below him, one of its chameleon eyes already fixating upon him. Then, gathering his courage, in a louder voice, he said, “Dragon, I’ve come to report the death of one of your kind, and to summarily turn myself in to whatever authorities your laws deem I should.”