Journey West 14: Jim's Dilemma

    The Thing Named Jim, a moment ago he was having a conversation, if it can be called that, with something unusual that hurt his heads with thoughts he’s still having trouble compiling in his cranium the next he’s dumped in this weird city. He levitates in the air as he looks out over it, taking in the whole thing. Looking over the edge of the building he is on he see a large clear tube, four lanes wide, going from the building to the edge of the dome. He puts his hands over his eyes like binoculars and actually zooms in his vision; a building is there part in the doom, part outside the dome. Something else though catches his attention as he floats up. Large chains connecting to tops of some nearby buildings, chains that shimmer, a shimmering that tells him they are invisible to others. Behind him there is another chain, but it goes straight up while the other chains angle to something…above…his…head.

    “Woah.” says Jim as he looks up and sees what appears to be the underside of a mountain floating in the air.

    “Halt intruder!” this harsh voiced command comes from a very unusual source, as flying up from below Jim sees a pair of man sized anthropomorphic vampire bats, bat wings, bat heads, humanoid muscular legs, humanoid torso, weird hybrid feet, and wearing blue vests with police badges.

     They rasp at him in their harsh voices, “You are intruding in the private building complex of Litmet.”

     “Who?” asks Jim as a fuzzy thought comes back, a thought from just moments ago, as though his mind were starting to clear from a haze, a thought of “Litmet…I heard that name, not long ago.”

    “Who?” says one of the police bats, “Litmet the goddess of all vampires, ruler of this the city of Las Angeles, capital of the Vampiric Empire; that’s who!”

   “Forget this idiot,” hisses the other man-bat, “lets just grab him and take him in”

  As the two bats circle around him, climbing in altitude Jim sticks his finger into the air.

  “Ha!” he yells, “I am The Thing Named Jim, I shall shred reality its self and send torrents of lightning in all directions!”

   He pokes his finger through the air, as though poking a hole…or rather he dents the air, gets a confused look and then presses harder to poke a hole in the air. Blue cracks appear in the very air in all directions from this spot, causing the two man-bats to fly backwards. Showers of sparks shoot from the cracks forcing the man-bats to shield their faces with one wing. With only one wing flapping they are forced to land.

   Jim takes his finger from the hole, the cracks vanish as reality heals its self quickly. He looks at his finger in disbelief. Before he can say or do anything more a woman’s voice comes from above him; a voice sounding like a cross between that of a woman and a cat saying just one word, “Interesting.”

    The source of this voice is a most unusual creature, a giant woman no less than nine feet tall as best as Jim can estimate covered in black fur and sporting a lion like tail. Her feet are those of a cat, if a cat only had three toes and what looks to be an almost bird like spur behind the heel. Where a woman’s head should is instead the head of a panther with long black hair. Instead of arms she has the wings of a bat, the membrane connecting along her side and upper thigh.

    “Human creature,” she says, “I do not know by what method you teleported past my dome; but you have made the grivious mistake of doing so directly beneath my castle. Now die vermin!”

    She flaps her mighty wings, two white arcs of solid wind fly from them towards Jim.

    “Hoo-wah!” shouts Jim as he cracks his knuckles and tosses identical wind arcs with a mocking gesture of his hands. The two sets
of wind arcs hit and explode upon contact.

   “I see,” says the woman, “so you have come to challenge me, the mighty Litmet to battle. Do not forget creature not of my ilk that I am not only the goddess of all vampires, but also the goddess of destruction!”

    An aura of blue fire appears around her body as she announces this, her eyes glowing blue from an inner light.

    “Oh right,” says Jim a thought coming back to him, “Litmet, I remember that now, that…goddess thing, said Litmet was really…Lilly!”

     Litmet pauses, her fire dieing down as she floats in the air, her wings seeming to serve no real purpose for flight.

    “Hey Lilly,” says Jim, “that is you isn’t it? Yeah I remember now, wow, weird that I can remember anything at all.”

    Litmet eyes him suspiciously, only recently had memories from a time when that was her name had come back to her, and she has told no one of these memories. Memories of bits and pieces that came back when she saw where Peter Jones was going in Other World; of knowing somehow of a lab on that world and her name from her time before she was an immortal beast.

    “Who,” says demands in a voice that drips venom, “Are you?”

    “Its me,” he says, “James Porter, Jimmy, the lab assistant. But I guess I can’t expect you to know me, after all I only remember a teeny tiny bit from back then and only recently thanks to some uber being messing with my head.”

    He pauses a moment and looks around, “Truth be told I don’t remember much past the last few thousand years other than knowing I’m like two million years old.”

     He puts his hand on his head, “wow, I guess that lady…goddess…higher dimensional being…or what ever was right, we really weren’t meant to live this long, can’t remember much of anything, it’s a really bad memory when you think about it. I remember long lasting bouts of insanity; really…but my mind is weirdly clear right now…hmmm.”

    He smiles wickedly, “Lilly, Litmet, I got no beef with ya, but I think someone or something is setting us up, and no one plays the Thing Named Jim. With my new found clarity I will solve this riddle.”

   He sticks his thumb in his mouth and blows, his body increases in size as he does so surprising Litmet and the two police man-bats. After he gets big, really big, like four hundred feet tall big, big enough to look down on Litmets castle big. He floats, his body shimmers forming purple and red samurai armor with a cosmic twist.

   “I am the great and might Thing Named Jim!” he announces, “The Alpha Que, the numero uno of crazy cartoon reality warping power.
I am a cosmic being now, not merely some little god on some…horror movie world or what ever. And I with my cosmic power declare that
I will transcend dimensions and seek the source. As I remember now.”

    He claps his hands together and vanishes, leaving behind a purple smoke that also quickly vanishes; leaving behind a very confused Litmet, and confused vampire populace who looked up from the buildings and streets at the giant floating above their heads.

    ******

    Jim stands now, not in a dark neo-apocalyptic vampire run metropolis, no now in his typical business casual attire he stands on a dirt road between fanciful medieval houses in a land lit like the day but with no sun.

    “The pet shop,” thinks Jim, “If anyone knows a way out of this predicament it’s the owner of the pet shop.”

    He looks around as he walks down the deserted road; if one were to zoom out they see that this area is only one street with houses on either side sitting on a floating chunk of land against a blue sky below and above. It’s a little area with a big secret here, in the Dream World.

    “The first time I came here,” he thinks, “my mind was no where near as clear as it is now, its weird being able to think clearly. I was told about this place from one of my minions, a place that powerful beings would travel too in search of pets. However, the clientele are all powerful god like beings, Celestials and other such entities, I couldn’t just walk in and buy something in one of these many shops I had to get the approval of the shopping center keeper.”

    He smiles as he rubs his chin, “man, as whacky as I acted that day when I saw she was some sort of dragon ferret thing I’m surprised I passed and was permitted to buy something. Although…”

   He stops before the main shop at the end of the street, “If I’m remembering this clearly I was told she has more pleasing forms she can turn into if she likes you…but I only ever get to see the dragon form.”

    “eh,” he says as she shrugs his shoulders and walks in.

    He looks around the store, small tanks, cages, all filled with tiny creatures of all sorts of weird shapes, a tiny cube like cyclone with six orb like glowing red eyes along opposite sides in a horizontal row, a tiny blue slime with a smiling face, even little black dots that look exactly like the creatures that had been summoned in his fight with the imposter Corinth.

   “Oh yeah,” he says out loud, “these are all shrunk down, samples of the pets she can give you; Monsters, demons, wild fantastical beasts, from all across the multi-verse.”

    He stops and looks around, “and why have I been talking in exposition since I got here? What the hell?”

   “Welcome back Thing Named Jim.” Comes a high pitched feminine voice, very un-befitting its source of a black Chinese dragon with a lupine face, mane darker than the rest of its body and glowing red eyes.

    This creature continues, “Come back for another pet…or something else.”

    “Well,” says Jim, “I’m having a bit of trouble with that Aesperia world, you know the one you sold me a map too, that you…advised me to give to Betty…and advised me to trick her to go there….to…find an oracle…so she’d learn no one…can harm me…so she’d…give in and…come with me…”

    He pauses, “wow…that sounds stupid when I say it out loud, and…I…I bought that?”

   “Is…something amiss,” says the dragon in its high pitched feminine voice.

   “Your voice,” he says, “that Rhulan lady’s voice, Corinth’s voice, the voice of that giant shadowy goddess thing…its all the same voice…only different volumes, pitches, and inflections…but it’s the same voice at its core.”

     Jim steps back as the dragons circles into its self in the air, becoming a shadowy mass of energy as it moves to a single point and then expands into a sphere. The sphere dissipates and from it emerges a woman, her body and clothing would match that of the giant shadowy goddess, except that she’s not in shadow, granted her dress, the sleeves on her arms not connected to her dress, fingernails, and long wavy hair are very dark in color, almost shadow. Her skin however is pale, and she doesn’t have the antenna things Jim saw on the giant one…her face however makes his eye twitch. It’s the same face as Rhulan and Corinth.

    “You,” says Jim, “I…don’t know how, or…but…you set me up!”

    He points his finger at her accusingly.

   “What ever,” she says as she waves her arm.

   Not even a blink, not darkness, just…like a cut in the film of a movie he finds himself back in his white room. Its fixed now, the table is whole, the orb he had smashed his whole, and his dimension door is whole, the brick wall is even gone from inside it.

   “Woah…nifty dude,” says Jim.

   He walks over to the orb saying, “Magic Orb show me my beloved Betty.”

  The scene with in however is the city of Las Angeles on the Earth where Litmet dwells.

   “No,” says Jim, “Tha…That’s not my Betty you stupid little piece o’shit ball!”

   *smash*

   He smashes it again with his fist.

   He turns and smiles at the door, “my door…on the other, other, other hand…” he looks back and forth, “was there a first hand? Eh who cares this sounds funnier.”

   He goes over to it, throws the door open, and…it’s the ruins of some city with zombies wandering about.

   “No!” yells Jim, “wait…” he looks around with a sneaky smile, “I didn’t go myself…that’s right I sent Impchin…some other guys…and the Black Circus there.”

    He taps his temple, “I just have to know how to get there and I can send people to go get her, she at…”

   “What?! I don’t remember!?” yells Jim, “I want Betty! Betty! Betty! Betty! Betty! Betty! Betty!”

   He throws himself to the floor and smashes the floor with his fists and he kicks about.

   “I am all powerful! I am the big bad! I am The Thing Named Jim, and I want my cartoon woman! I want Betty! Waaaaaaah! Gimme, gimme, gimme!”

  Meanwhile back in the Pet-Shop the figure there, the woman watches all this through a black square screen floating in the air in
front of her, about the size of a laptop.

  “Well that didn’t take long,” she says, “My experiment has given me some interesting results. Placed upon a solid neutronic dimensional layer his mind returns to a solid sane state. Even upon entering the Dream World it is retained; however once he returns to that pocket dimension he created originally to draw power from and augment his abilities he is quick to become unstable again.”

   She pushes the screen with her finger, a dark mist of energy circling from her finger and into the screen, “well then…Jim, lets try this then.”

   In the white room a sudden black cyclone appears, circling the room and lifting Jim into the air and throws him through the dimensional door. He lands with a *thud* face first into the dirt. He picks himself up, spits out the grey dust and wipes his face and clothes off. He looks around to see the same ruins he saw before through the door, and zombies wandering about in the distance in this clearly destroyed city. A red glow that he couldn’t see through the door draws his attention to his left; off in the distance is a massive red dome.

   “That city?” he says eyes furrowed, “Or maybe another like it…wait…I can think clearly again…what the hell?”

   He looks around, “It’s this world…no…it’s this kind of world. These worlds where my powers work the least, where they’re the hardest to do, these worlds with the least cartoon like elements to them…or what I perceived as cartoon like…looser physics compared to the world I was born on. Worlds where people could have exaggerated expressions, sweat drops, massive nose bleeds, be flattened with out harm, and on and on and on in similar fashion; but this…this kind of world isn’t like that…its more…firm in its structure and rules. Makes it harder to use my powers at the same level…why…how can I not know this, how could I not know my own sanity could be influenced by how alien a reality was to the one I was born in.”

    He looks around, “Aesperia is the same way, only it has magic, magic can exist in these places, I saw it with Litmet. Heh! Don’t worry Betty now that I’m sane I can come up with a real plan to find you and….”

   *images flash through his mind of all the things he’s done, the people he’s harmed to get to her, the people his killed, like random waiters, people at a party, security guards and patrons on a space station she was robbing that just happened to be standing between him and her…and…a whole planet once to try and show her that resistance was futile.*

   “Oh…shit.” He says, “Shit…shit, shit, shit, shitshitshitshitshit…”

   He goes to the ground his knees tucked up against his chest and wide eyed, “No wonder she hates me…I…I’m a monster…I don’t think I’m going to like being sane.”