Discworld: I Just Spent Six Months in a Leaky Boat...

Unending BE - episode 146988

Words anywhere are powerful. Just ask anybody who has studied history. Words can create religious fanatics, wars, and great disasters, although some philosophers think that the above three things are actually all the same. Spells, however, are Words of quite a different kind. Magic words don't act quite the same as normal ones. They don't just suffer themselves to be read. While you're looking at them, _they_ are almost certain to be looking at _you_...
Even the most minor spell for keeping ones' toes warm on a winter night can turn into a deadly inferno in the hands of an untrained spellcaster.
And as for the really powerful Spells, the ones dealing with demons and other dimensions...? What happens when _they_ get loose, or are said improperly?
They tend to take on a life of their own...

In the Agatean Empire, Mr. Sing happily bustled over a table laden with exotic foods. An entire sashimi dinner with hot green mustard, extra seaweed, and eggroll, for twelve. This meal was going to make his restaurant quite a bit of money.
Without warning, all the food suddenly disappeared straight off the plates.

In the frozen barbarian wastlands near the Hub, Hrunsson the Hero was quite astonished--and suddenly quite cold in the buttocks region--when his horse disappeared straight out from under him.
"Buggrit." he grumbled, brushing snow off his derrier. "That horse cost me a whole plundered golden statue!"

"Get your finger out of my eye!" said a crotchety voice.
"I will, if you will get your foot out of my nose, Archchancellor." said a reproachful voice.
"Will somebody PLEASE get off of my damn foot?!" yelled another.
"That's YOU standing on your foot, Dean," sighed a fourth. A match struck against the darkness.
The senior wizards of Unseen University found themselves all stuffed rather closely together behind a stack of crates in a basement. Not the basement of Unseen University, that much was obvious from the start. For one thing, there was nowhere near enough smells of baking sausage drifting from upstairs.
"Here, wot do you think yer doin', eh?" snapped an angry female voice. The door to the basement opened, and a heavyset, middle-aged woman with her iron-grey hair in an iron-hard bun stood there framed against the light, glaring down at them. "Wot 're you lot doin' in my cellar, then?"
"Ah." said Archchancellor Ridcully, as he finally untangled himself from the mess of cursing wizards. He brushed off his robe as well as he could and took off his hat, offering proper respect to a lady. "I am terribly sorry, it seems there's been some magical accident..."
"Yeah! Damn wizards!" she cursed, spitting on the floor. "Never did trust you lot. Always prancin' around with your dresses on, an' yer funny hats, pretendin' ta be better than the rest o' us..."
"I am so terribly sorry for inconveniencing you, Mrs...?"
"It's Miss." she snapped. "Miss Getrude Worchester."
"Miss. Perhaps we can come to some arrangement?" The other wizards had by now sorted themselves out and stood behind Ridcully like a clump of nervous schoolboys in front of the headmaster, who know they have done SOMETHING wrong but aren't sure what, and fear the punishment even worse for being unnamed.
"I don't know wot you lot can do about THIS!" she fumed. She stomped up the stairs, and the wizards tenatively followed her. "Just look!"
She opened the curtain on her dingy window. As Ridcully peered out--the others jumping up and down trying to see over his shoulder, and jostling for position, he could see what looked like a perfectly ordinary city block in Ankh-Morpork.
And absolutely nothing else.
The whole _universe_ seemed to just...end, beyond that block. There was a wall of...nothing. It couldn't be seen properly because there wasn't anything TO see. It wasn't black void. It was simply the end of reality.
"Oh, dear." said Ridcully.
"And look at this!" snapped Miss Worchester, pointing at her carpet. "Some daft sod dumped a whole pile of raw fish! And green stuff! Right on my carpet! It'll take WEEKS to clean that up!"
"Of course, you may have this dance, your majesty." said the Bursar, bowing gracefully to some figure only he could see.
Ridcully glanced over at him. "Somebody get him his dried frog pills, please." He turned back to the woman. "Well, we'll try to find a way out of here, right now." He marched out of her door, walked up to the edge of the city block, and faced the nothingness with a look of grim purpose on his face.
"Um, what exactly are you going to do, Archchancellor?" said the Lecturer in Recent Runes, nervously.
The Archchancellor pulled out his favourite crossbow from the depths of his robes. "First I'm gonna see if we ain't been shrunk down and put under a glass dome, like what happened when the Dean's spell to make a Hogswatch ornament misfired last week." He glared at the hapless Dean.
"But I--that wasn't--"
"Oh, yes, the wine at this party is exquisite." exclaimed the Bursar. "More caviar, Lady Crumplestick?"
"Here goes." Ridcully fired his crossbow into the nothingness.
There wasn't a crack and shattering of glass.
The bolt didn't ricochet back and almost hit someone with comic results, either.
Instead, all that happened was a dull, hollow, somehow..._wooden_....thunk.
"Looks like we're stuck here for a while, then." said the Dean, clapping the Archchancellor on the shoulder. "But cheer up. At least young Mister Stibbons is still free. I'm sure that wherever he is, he's trying something to get us out of this."
"Yes." muttered Ridcully, staring down at his crossbow. "That's exactly what I'm afraid of..."

The five had found their target, a simple, easy-to-steer fishing boat that was small enough to be fast, but big and strongly made enough to hold Detritus. At least, they hoped.
"I go and talk some sense into dem." said Detritus, and ambled forwards to meet the captain and crew of the fishing boat. "Hello. My name Detritus and me need very bad to go to Ramtop Mountains."
The Captain looked up from repairing a net and sneered. His chain-mail underwear clinked as he turned around, for he was a Dwarf, and that kind of fashion sense was normal for his race. "Trolls! Ptah!" he spat. "We don't want none o' your kind around here. Stupid rocks. Scat!"
"Let me try," said Ponder. "Excuse me." He pushed his way past Detritus, who was still trying to work the insult through his brain and figure out what it meant, "Kind sirs, we are wizards in dire need of help. We need to get across the sea in order to rescue our comrades."
The dwarf captain sneered. "Oooh, wizards!" he chuckled, slapping himself on the knee. The crew, behind him--or possibly _her_, it was always hard to tell with dwarfs--joined in the sniggering. He pulled a piece of paper out from under a seat, rolled it into a crude cone-shape, and stuck it on his head. "Ooh, look at ME, I'm a big WIZARD!" he mocked, sending the crew, which did not exactly have the world's most sophisticated senses of humour, into a fit of laughter. "I'm gonna MAGIC you! Ooh--RIBBIT."
"Right." Ponder set the small frog down gently on the floor of the boat, and turned to face the other dwarfs. He wouldn't even THINK of setting it free in the Ankh. That'd be cruel. The poor thing would suffocate. "Who's next?"
One of the crewmembers, a rather smarter one than the others, had been quietly sneaking around behind the suspicious-looking group all this time. He leapt forwards suddenly and grabbed Ponder from behind, putting a rusty knife to his throat. "I knows ya magic-throwers can't spell someone right after you've done another spell!" he growled. "So give me one good reason why I shouldn't toss the lot of yez troll-lovin' bastards right into the bloody Ankh."
Ponder turned even paler than normal. It was true. He had never been a very powerful wizard to begin with and he'd been using magic more often than he usually did, all day today. He _was_ pretty much drained until he could have at least a good night's sleep. "Um..."
"Brraaaap." said the Captain.
"Excuse me for a moment, will you, gentlemen?" said Angua in a deadly honeyed tone. She stared casually shucking her clothes off. Jim stared in disbelief, but Detritus made him turn around just before things got truly interesting.
There was a sudden feeling of a _twist_ in the immediate reality and then a deep, ferocious, growling sound. A tear of fabric. And then the sound of dwarfs screaming for their lives.
"It's okay." said Angua, hiding behind the sail of the boat to put her clothes back on. "You can look now." She came out from behind the sail, brushing a drop of blood from the corner of her mouth absentmindedly. "I gave them their reason. Several, in fact."
Jim was amazed. "You're a WEREWOLF?" he gasped. "A real, live, werewolf?"
Angua glared at him. "I don't like to talk about it so openly--"
"COOL!"

"Well, we're almost to the Ramtops," said Ponder, studying a map. Rincewind had been made the main helmsman, since in his adventures, he'd been forced to learn a little bit of EVERYTHING--usually very, very fast. "We just need one more day of smooth sailing and we'll be done with this leg of the journey."
"Good. We've been out here for weeks." said Angua, looking as yellow as her hair. It seemed that sea travel didn't exactly agree with her. "I'm so bloody sick of this bloody boat and these bloody waves. Up, and down, and up, and down..."
Suddenly, Jim felt rather....strange. "Um, guys? I think...there's something...wrong..."
A wave of dizziness.
And he blacked out.
When he came to, presumably only a few minutes later, there was a wild storm building up all around the boat. A wild storm--where just minutes before, there had been completely calm, sunny, blue sky. "We can't outrun it!" yelled Angua. "It's going to tip this tiny boat straight over!"
"Trolls no swim!" said Detritus, worried. "I no want this boat to tip over!"
The huge black storm clouds closed in further. Ponder brought out his thaumometer. It sizzled in his hand, and a miniature bolt of lighting turned it into a useless piece of red-hot slag. He dropped it just in time. "This storm's magical!" he cried out. "It's not natural! Jim, I think it's your uncontrolled magic acting out again!"
"What are you, a bloody SOURCEROR?!" snapped Rincewind, above the wind. "Here it comes! Batten down the hatches!"
"We haven't got any hatches!" said Angua.
"Batten down Detritus, then!"
But the storm, also due to its magical nature, wasn't _acting_ normal either. It didn't throw them all over and try to drown them or hit them with thunderbolts, like a normal storm. Instead, from the black clouds came a very strong, sudden, directed beam of pure _wind_. It didn't harm them, but it kicked the boat into speeds that it had never been meant for!
"Hold on!" yelled Angua. "This thing's outta control!"
"I think it's kinda fun, actually!" yelled Jim over the roar of the spray. "Reminds me of those speed-boats I used to race by the Florida Keys back home!"
"Where the hell are we going?" yelled Rincewind.
"According to this," Ponder cautiously took another device out of his pocket, hoping it wouldn't also catch on fire or anything, "It seems we're heading straight for..."

...the frozen wastelands of the Hub!"
...the tropical civilisations of the Rim!"
...the kingdom of Klatch!"
...the Counterweight Continent!"
...XXXX!"
*...I have no idea, this bloody thing's broken!"
Go back - Go to the parent episode.

Magrat, who apologises for the bloody italics.
Fri May 25 01:28:22 2001