The Flying Deviants in A Tall Order

We get the call on a Wednesday morning. Mid-week, your brain’s always tired, and when you have the capacity of three, don’t think you get away without a triple strength headfuzz when you clamber out of bed. Freelancers like us are rarely prepared for early starts, as work is sporadic at best. So anyway, we get the call that Novagrinder is back.

Once again, he had somehow accumulated enough wealth to start rebuilding his tower; the tower that would allow him to reach through the atmosphere and harness the energy of the star-gas out there. I don’t know how many people he’s had to bribe or threaten each time for planning permission, but as monomaniacal schemes go, this one’s had some fair dedication put to it.

Why, you ask? Well, nobody really knows. Sometimes bad guys take “lusting for power” too literally. I think Novagrinder is one of them. My second mind has been compiling a list of potential weapons schemes, power surge sabotage efforts etc., while my third mind, in between cat musings, likes to believe Novagrinder has turned over a new leaf, and is trying to obtain fuel for everyone’s benefit. My third mind, needless to say, is slightly more decorative than functional. It’s a bit like childminding a bright but easily distracted twelve year old with a thing about bunnies.

So we rolled out, Spitfire, Shuriken, Moth, Gunfleet, Smuggler and myself, attracting no small amount of attention. Smuggler got a few requests for a striptease from the local lads. They must have recognised that she’d bought a lot of her gear from the fancy dress shop on the corner of Thurben Street and presumed she was drumming up business.

Fleety was in a very good mood, cracking jokes about Novagrinder having gas etc. He was laughing so much bullets sprayed from his nose, which prompted Shuriken, prickly as ever, to grab him by the collar and hold him at shardpoint after one narrowly missed her foot.

After we pried her off him, the next task was to actually find the tower. It wasn’t hard. The thing was already sixty feet high, smack bang in the middle of town, and the vain swine had painted “NOVAGRINDER – STAR FINDER” down the side in gold, which, even at his incredible speed, must have taken a hell of a long time.

The man himself was right at the top, and had seen us from across the square.

“Well, well, well, the cavalry arrive at last, rag-tag as ever. Think you’ll find the dole queue is in the other direction, Flopping Deviants!”

As puns on our name go, that had to be one of the worst. If his loony building project hadn’t convinced me to finish off Novagrinder, that had pretty much sealed the envelope.

We debated how best to attack. Fleety wanted to blast the guy off his tower, then shoot at the base of it. Shuriken nodded and sprouted a javelin from her shoulder. I argued that would cost a shedload to clear up, reminding them of our long-standing feuds with the council, and their faces fell. Spitfire's plot to bend the thing amounted to pretty much just that. We'd basically be left with a bendy version of what Novagrinder had before. Smuggler suggested she just swallow the tower in her cleavage, but that would involve actually uprooting the thing, something we weren't too hot on. Moth suggested a shrinking ray, armour-piercing laser pellets for Novagrinder, a megamagnet effect for the steel and finally fragmentation of the particles, until the entire mess was just dust, and could be swept up in a snap. I asked him how long this would take. He hummed and haared, calculated the exact fabric, shade and cut of the outfit required, and in the end concluded an estimated dressing time of about three days; he hadn’t yet alphabetised his cravats.

In the end we just chucked up a copy each of “A Brief History of Time”, “Superstring Theory For Dummies” and “The Junior Encyclopedia of Space”, to let him know his theory was guff. Whatever it was he wanted the gas of the stars for, he couldn’t have it, basically, not without being a magician. I’d never seen a villain blub before. I still haven’t. He just got irate, swooped down like a sweet wrapper and stomped off up the road.

Since that’s technically a submission, rather than a defeat, we didn’t even get paid. And guess who ended up having to dispatch that dirty great tower? You got it. Two of my minds have been bitching about the unfairness of it all day. The other one wants to know if you can get pink bunnies in this country.