THE LIMINALS
#8: "Motivationquest part 3: Guilty Feet Ain't Got No Rhythm"
A boss fight by Jeanne Morningstar
Masterplan Lad, guardian of the narrative; Victoria Arden--Forsaken Lass, survivor of Limbo; Alice Ashdown--Net.Access, champion of crossovers; and Manga
Girl--Sakura Mangas, synthetic senshi of creativity! They are four young net.heroes who fight to understand themselves and the worlds they inhabit, moving between the heroism of the LNH and the uncanny strangeness of the Lunaverse--the Liminals!
Masterplan Lad took a deep breath. He remembered the "54321 "exercise, a classic
meditation exercise to clear his mind and reground himself in his body he'd learned from the Knights Temporal and discussed in therapy. You thought of five
things you could see, four you could touch, three you could hear, two you could
smell, and one you could taste.
He looked around and saw:
1. The burning bodies of the damned
2. Demons rejoicing and torturing the damned
3. Giant skulls and bones of unspeakably ancient beings that were scattered around
4. Creatures that it was hard to even describe what they were
5. A man who was half-buried head-down in the ground who had, for some reason,
sheet music tattooed on his posterior
The scenery wasn't helping his anxiety very much.
This wasn't making him feel any better at all, he had to admit. He thought about
the sense of taste. All he could taste was ash on his lips. But he remembered his therapist told him that if there was nothing he was tasting, he could think
about other things he'd tasted before. So he thought of:
1. The taste of Maria's lipstick.
That made him feel a little bit better.
"Yeah, it's a nice place to visit, but you wouldn't wanna live here," said Maria.
He pointed to something else coming their way: a shoe-shaped shadow. The shadow
was being cast by a shoe wearing a red cape, with small horns jutting out of its
tongue (the shoe part, not the actual tongue). "The March of Mephisto" by Kamelot was playing somewhere in the background (where it was coming from was not clear, possibly from the level of Hell above this, Loud Music Hell).
The Shoe Devil chuckled, ignoring her. "Hello again, Maria."
"Boy," said Maria, "I sure do end up in Hell a lot.
"Are you sure you want to fight me?" said the Shoe Devil. "Your Writer has been
responsible for so much pain and frustration in your lives. You can probably do
without them."
"Hey, don't talk about me like I'm not there!" said Jeanne.
"Yeah, you can skip the temptation speech," said Maria. "I already made that mistake once. You have nothing to offer me I could possibly want."
"Nothing?" said the Shoe Devil.
It was the soul of a dissolute, worn-down-looking middle aged man, screaming and
twisting in the flames. This was the Anonymous Trenchcoater.
"Dad?"
"I'm thinking," she said. She turned to the Shoe Devil. "All right. I'll make the deal."
Instead of a pen, she took out a small glass flask of water and threw it right
in the Shoe Devil's face. The Shoelike Satan screamed as flames flared up around
him. "I had a feeling I'd be dealing with you again, Calceus. So I came prepared. That's holy water prepared by the Discalced Carmelites. Your favorite."
:D
"Yeah, I was never gonna betray them," said Maria. "Not if you went after Vic.
Or even my Writer. See, I'd sell my grandmother for a candy bar--as long as it's
good candy bar--but I'll never let anyone hurt another trans girl on my watch."
"Yeah, well. You talk a good game, but you should be vulnerable now that that holy water cast a poison-type debuff on you," said Maria.
Net.Access, Forsaken Lass and Manga Girl smashed away the Shoe Devil while Masterplan Lad and Maria stood on the sidelines, healing their comrades and casting debuffs on the Shoe Devil. They seemed to make very little dent on the
demon lord, who laughed mockingly.
Jeanne pulled their chainsword out of... somewhere and pressed the button on the
side. The Spawn-esque magical girl costume flowed in around them. "CRY FOR THE
MOON!" they shouted as they swung their sword at the Shoe Devil.
Alice took a step back as Jeanne charged in. Flames burst out all around them.
She looked the ostrich, who was warily surveying the battle, in the eye."Look,"
said Alice to the ostrich. "I know we don't trust each other yet. But right now,
your help."
The ostrich chirped affirmatively.
She shifted into Transformer form, and Fastball Specialed the ostrich right at
the Shoe Devil.
The Shoe Devil began to glow, charging itself up, and slammed down directly onto
Jeanne, tossing the others aside, stamping up and down on them repeatedly, grinding them into nothing...
Jeanne groaned, pressed deep into the ground of Hell by the Shoe Devil's attack.
With the lack of motivation they were finding it harder to fight, move, harder
even to breathe.
"Jeanne!" heard a rather familiar, very cute voice in the distance.
"Drew?"
"Yeah, I know. I can't help you directly, but I can give you a boon. See?" They
waved their Knitting Needles of Continuity and intoned "Boon, boon, booooooon!"
A glowing boon symbol appeared in the shape of the rainbow UCX icon Drew uses on
all social media.
Jeanne touched it and was infused with holy ununnilic
power!
"I get it now," said Jeanne. "I may not have enough motivation on my own, but I
don't have to be on my own! I have Drew, I have other friends and people I rely
on, and we can draw on each other! Everyone who writes or comments is helping!"
Jeanne resolved to give Drew some nectar the next time they saw them, or maybe
some comics.
They leaped up into the air, spun around, shifted their weapon back into swordmode, slashed at the Shoe Devil with their sword, and kicked it in the face. "HELLFIRE KICK!" they shouted. A burst of pink fire shot out of their feet
as their kick landed.
With their burning chain they traced the shape of a heart
bound by a crown of thorns with a flame above it--the Sacred Heart--in the air.
"HELLBOUND HEART!" The heart burst in and struck the Shoe Devil right in the face. "LOVELY!" it screamed.
Jeanne made a triumphant pose, and then keeled
right over. Having made their finishing move, they were finished. The Shoe Devil
was still there, though its flames were starting to sputter.
"You are nothing more than insects," said the Shoe Devil. "And I am the shoe which will crush you to oblivion!"
"Yeah, well, I'm going to leave a nasty stain that will take forever to clean off!" said Manga Girl.
"I'll finish you before it takes too long. I have to make some trade negotiations with Net.phisto at four, and well, frankly I'm hoping I can skip that, but I'm getting bored enough with this fight i'd rather be at a meeting."
The others were all holding back now. They were worn down, but Manga Girl only
seemed to be growing stronger and stronger. The divine creative energy that had
been held inside her was rushing out all at once. No one else could keep up with
her, not even Net.Access--in her magical girl form, she wielded divine power, but Manga Girl *was* divine power.
Her body began
to expand, her muscles growing larger and more powerful, her flesh began to twist and bubble and shift. When she was doens, he was a towering, muscular, satyr-like figure with hairy on her legs and back. Goat-like horns jutted out of
her head. There was a huge, unblinking eye on her chest and others on her arms
"Hahahahaha! Fool! You have unleashed the true depths of my power! I am--DEVIL
MANGA!"
"Uh," said the Shoe Devil. For the first time, his smarmy confidence had been dented just a little.
She was mutating. As the fight went on, her body was stretching out more, drawn
with scratchier lines and there were progressively more and more eyes on it. Everyone knew that the battle was now between the two of them, and the others would be lucky if they survived, whoever won.
He knew he could not
shift the plot or move out of it; this was something that had been built into his character arc for a long time. He could picture the moment before it happened, and even as he was fighting against it with all his might he knew it
was no more possible to move out of the way than to stop the rising of the sun.
"Wait just a minute," said the Shoe Devil, as he gazed into the layers of the narrative. "So... you're fighting me and you're fighting in the LNHQ *at the same time*... in an issue that was actually posted a while ago... and it's not
even clear where on the timeline it takes place? That does it. Get out of here.
And you can have your motivation back, I don't care."
As they shot up from Hell, the hellfire burned away at them like a space craft
in reentry. Jeanne held out a force bubble to shield them from it, shivering and
screaming, holding it together even as the hellfire caught ahold of them and they started burning.
"Hnng. I'm never doing that again," said Jeanne, pulling themself up off the sidewalk. They looked like a gnarly Todd McFarlane-style revenant, a walking corpse barely held together by force of authorial will, with patches of hellfire
bursting out of their body. But they were, more or less, alive.
But Manga GIrl was still transforming. "Please..." she growl/whimpered "...help
me. I can't stop."
Masterplan Lad stood up, swaying on his feet, and touched his Plot Device to her. He knew that in the other story thread the Plot Device had already been destroyed. He knew that if he didn't try to exert his Plot Device, there was a
chance he could still hold it together, but if he used it to draw away her excess creative energy, it would shatter to pieces.
He didn't even hesitate.
"No," said Maria. "No."
The violet energy left Manga Girl's body and was drawn into the Plot Device like
lightning. It silently crumbled away into dust. Masterplan Lad fell to the ground. He was pale and tired, only inches away from death.
"Of course." Jeanne let out a deep sigh. "Now I have to deal with being a fictional character on top of everything else."
This was the
cosmic authorial aspect of Jeanne, who everyone immediately thought of as "The
Morningstar." Like a certain other cosmic entity of that name, they resembled David Bowie a bit, but more the Ziggy Stardust/Aladdin Sane version than the Thin White Duke one.
"I can," said the Morningstar, "but there's a cost."
"You don't have to give me that cornball speech about magic and narrative cost,"
said character!Jeanne. "I remember. I wrote it." [Hungry, Hungry Sabertooths #6]
The Morningstar nodded. "To save MPL, you will have to give up your own authorial power. You will be completely separated from me and exist as a character in the story."
"Well, it beats dealing with the academic job market." Jeanne laughed.
"Well, I got a motorcycle out of the deal. That's something, I guess... wait, why is my symbiote suit PINK?"
"Well," said the Mornignstar, "Drew's costume as Writer's Block Person is purple, so since they're purple you have to be pink, by the laws of anime lesbianism."
"But Drew is much more the pink girl in personality terms and I'm more the purple girl."
"I know, I know," said the Morningstar, "you'll have to ask WBP why they're purple when you meet them, OK." And with that, they were gone.
:3 <3 <3 <3
Then they heard the chittering of kiwis. A patrol of power armored kiwis marched
in toward them. After Alice tried to explain the situation but really couldn't,
they performed first aid and got the bodies of MPL and Manga GIrl on stretchers.
The kiwis bore them into the LNHQ, with the two net.heroines, the ex-writer, the
trenchcoater and the ostrich following silently after.
Sheet music: the legendary "butt song from Hell" from Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden
of Earthly Delights. [https://news.artnet.com/art-world/bosch-butt-song-from-hell-309732]
"Capacious pockets": a phrase often used to describe the Fourth Doctor's pockets
in Terrance Dicks's novelizations.
The Discalced Carmelites: an order of Catholic nuns that is a branch of the Carmelite order, following its' founders original vow of poverty, including not
wearing shoes. "Discalced" is Latin for "without shoes."
Next: The battle with the Shoe Devil is over. Who will survive, and what will they become?
"Jeanne!" heard a rather familiar, very cute voice in the distance.
"Drew?" They rubbed their eyes and before them was the Ununnilium
Stranger. "What are you doing here? This isn't the right universe--"
"Yeah, I know. I can't help you directly, but I can give you a boon.
See?" They waved their Knitting Needles of Continuity and intoned "Boon, boon, booooooon!"
A glowing boon symbol appeared in the shape of the rainbow UCX icon Drew
uses on all social media. [Real World Jeanne has been playing a lot of
Hades, have you noticed?--Footnote Girl] Jeanne touched it and was
infused with holy ununnilic power! Their attack was increased and
charged with positive emotional energy!
"I get it now," said Jeanne. "I may not have enough motivation on my
own, but I don't have to be on my own! I have Drew, I have other friends
and people I rely on, and we can draw on each other! Everyone who writes
or comments is helping!"
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