| The Eye Scream of the World, Part Six
NOTE: For those who came in late, our intrepid "heroes" (we are using that word extremely loosely, especially if you always thought a true hero showed the occasional flash of intelligence) were on their way to the Off-White Tower, headquarters of the powerful Ice Sedate organization, who virtually monopolize the use of the Fun Power in this part of the world and take pride in being as illogically clueless as possible (their claim to that title has never been seriously challenged) - but recently our "heroes" have been sidetracked by the coincidental discovery that three different rumors about perilous threats to the legendary Eye Scream of the World had suddenly come to their attention simultaneously. The current roster of those characters traveling in a single group reads thus (aside from a bunch of very forgettable horses): Morphine Sedate, leader.
ADDITIONAL NOTE: In this installment, I have deviated from my previous course of closely following the exact events of the original material (the first book of the WoT) in favor of sticking in some additional scenes for comic effect. I'm sure this will greatly shock all of you, but . . . Panel 1. MORPHINE: So, Loveable, you say that Rant promised to give you plenty of time to tell him your life story, and since we're about to leave town, that means you will have to come along with us? Normally I would say Rant's promises were not binding on me in any way, shape, or form, but I guess I'll let it pass! RANT: Really? Hey, everybody! I also want to promise you that Morphine will distribute ten gold pieces to each of us, that we can all sleep in as late as we want in the mornings, that she'll tell us the REAL reason for - LEAN: Don't push your luck, sheepherder. She only agreed to let Loveable tag along because he can guide us through the Maze! MAD: The what? LEAN: You'll find out soon enough! Panel 2. MORPHINE: Here we are! The entrance to the Mazegate! The Maze leads from one part of the world to another, and maybe even beyond! In fact, there are those who say it's not part of this world at all! It also has the dreaded Wayward Wind lurking in it, ready to drive men mad with its off-key music! EGGING: You mean it sings that old song, "The Wayward wind / Is a restless wind / A restless wind / That yearns to wander! / And he was born / The next of kin, / The next of kin / To the Wayward Wind!" LEAN: Sometimes. Originally the author of this parody was going to give us a full page of dialogue in the Maze with the Wind singing a different wind-oriented song in the background of every panel on that page, but he relented in favor of a more literary idea (according to my master copy of the script). In the meantime, though, please don't sing that after we step inside, you might make the Wind jealous with your smooth soprano! Panel 3. LOIAL: Actually, in the ancient texts of the Ochre Steadyings, it is rumored that the Maze is only one subsection of a great multiversal underground labyrinth, which various authors of SF/Fantasy are prone to draw upon for stock settings whenever they want their characters to wander around in dark tunnels and rooms for awhile. We may see and hear some very strange things . . . NIGHT'MARE: Like a society where men and women get paid EXACTLY the same amount of money, and receive EXACTLY the same amount of respect and social prestige, as long as they are doing EXACTLY the same sort of work for which they are equally capable (granting that some tasks are better done by one gender than another), with no discrimination on either side? LOIAL: I meant conventional fantasies that are at least vaguely realistic
in terms of their dealings with human nature. Psychedelic hallucinations
are handled somewhere else.
Panel 4. LEAN: I don't like it, Morphine! There's some vague, not-very-TourBlockish, individual thingie skulking along behind us! MORPHINE: What's so bad about that? LEAN: Well, we've been followed by TourBlocks, we've been followed by
Moredrawls, we've been spied on by hordes of Dorkfriend agents, we've been
followed by armies of ravens and hundreds of rabid Brightcloaks, but we've
never yet been followed by one quiet, skulking thing that any one of us
could probably knock over with a feather! It's downright undignified! We
deserve BETTER than this!
Panel 5.
Page 21 In each of the six panels on this page, Loial is throwing open a new door. In each cases, voices (from unseen characters in other stories) are speaking, unaware of their temporary eavesdroppers from another continuum. Panel 1.
CHORUS (offstage): Far over misty mountains cold, to dungeons deep and caverns old, we must away ere break of day, to seek the pale enchanted gold! LOVEABLE: Then again, it could be a tunnel connecting to the interior of some lonely mountain or other. Next! Panel 2. GUARD (offstage): I'm told there's a loose step. PRINCE (offstage): Which one is it? GUARD (offstage): Prince Gerard's reported it several times, but no one else seems to notice it." LOVEABLE: Nope, this sounds like the catacombs under some weird castle
or other . . . next!
Panel 3. VOICE OFFSTAGE: No time to argue! Throw me the idol, I throw you the whip! SFX: RRRRRUUUUMMMMBBBBLLLLEEEE! LOVEABLE: Sounds like a couple of men in the middle of an ancient temple that's about to collapse on top of them! RANT: You can tell all that from what you heard from around the corner of that passageway? LOVEABLE: These big ears of mine aren't just for show, you know! Next door! Panel 4. SPY (offstage): Trying to fly, last time I saw him. He wasn't doing it very well. WIZARD (offstage): Maybe it'll come to him in time. SPY (offstage): He doesn't really have all that much time. SOUND EFFECT: THUMP SOUND EFFECT: THUMP SPY (offstage): Does bouncing count? WIZARD (offstage): Not really. LOIAL: Nope, sounds like we ran across a commando-style raid coming up out of the tunnels that permeate the interior of a mountain stronghold of the bad guys . . . Next! Panel 5. Through an open doorway we can see an archway in the distance which has the following inspiring message chiseled in the stone: PUNISHMENT PRODUCES FORCE, FORCE PRODUCES STRENGTH, STRENGTH PRODUCES AWE, AWE PRODUCES VIRTUE; THUS VIRTUE HAS ITS ORIGIN IN PUNISHMENT. On the stone floor of the cavern are bits and pieces of lots of human skeletons, previous visitors to this underground labyrinth who didn't find an exit in time. VOICE (offstage): Master Li, the thing that did that had to be stronger than twenty dragons. TEACHER (offstage): Oh, far stronger than that. LOIAL: Um, not quite what I had in mind. Looks like a great place for
a tyrant to hide his treasure hoard, though. Next!
Panel 6. OLDER VOICE (offstage): To judge by the angles of the walls, I would say we are in the pentagon of another tower, but there is no central heptagonal room. Perhaps we are mistaken. YOUNGER VOICE (offstage): But what about the windows? How can there be so many windows? It is impossible for all the rooms to overlook the outside. LOIAL: Nope, sounds like they're locked up inside a weird library after closing hours. NEXT! Page 22. Panel 1.
LEAN: This could the Borderlands - it's chilly enough that it sure ain't
the tropics, much less anything well into the Southern hemisphere at this
time of year! - and with my unparalleled military training, which was only
heightened by the additional curriculum available to BodyGuarders at the
Off-White Tower, I will soon be able to tell you exactly where we are on
the globe to the nearest inch! Now stay quiet and don't bother me for a
few minutes . . .
Panel 2. LEAN is down on his hands and knees, sniffing at the grass. LEAN: Hmm, this has the distinctive scent of the Borderlands, perhaps
northeastern Shienar I'd say from the percentage of zinc in the soil .
. . And . . . it ought to be about 9:30 PM Two-and-a- half Rivers time,
and we came two time zones over to the east, so . . .
Panel 3.
LEAN: Hurm. The moon is now about 37.539128 degrees above the horizon, the horizon is reasonably flat rather than mountainous, the Wain constellation is currently in the southeastern quadrant of the sky . . . Panel 4.
LEAN: Carry the five . . . adjust for daylight savings time . . . convert from miles to kilometers (which is a real trick to accomplish since Jordan won't be telling us how long our own persnickety "miles" are in this series until Book 6), take the cosine and multiply by the number of pages in the first volume of this series . . . RANT: The number of pages of actual storytelling, or do you have to count the Glossary too? LEAN: Shut up, you're disrupting my concentration. Panel 5. LEAN: Okay, we ought to be precisely 345 leagues, 3 miles, 677feet,
four inches, and two shillings north-by-northeast of the location of the
baseline measurements I took while in the land of the Two-and-a-half Rivers!
If someone would just pull out their Rand McNally travel atlas, we'll be
oriented in no time!
PEERING: Rand McNally atlas? That wasn't on MY list of emergency survival equipment! LEAN: No atlas? We're doomed! Wait, where's the nearest bookstore? Panel 6.
"THIS WAY to scenic Folderol, site of the annual Springtime TourBlock
Raids!
This sign is just to the right of another saying, "Welcome to scenic Shoeshine'ar!
RANT: On the other hand, we COULD look at the road signs . . . LEAN: Well, sure, if you want to do it the EASY way! I don't know what
this lazy younger generation is coming to . . .
Page 23. Panel 1. Finally our heroes are riding up to the fortified city of Folderol. MORPHINE: Okay, everyone, push back your hoods! They don't permit eyeless Moredrawls to enter! Serial killers, religious fanatics, traveling salesmen, criminal lawyers, jaywalkers, all those people are permitted to come and go as they please, but not Moredrawls! Even the Borderlanders have SOME standards! Panel 2. ANGLEHARD: My guards have just captured a raving lunatic who wandered into town. His name appears to be Pathetic Faint, except when he claims it's something else! Do any of you know him? EGGING: Pathetic Faint? Why, he's so useless that the author of this parody hasn't even bothered to depict his occasional cameo appearances in any scene between the opening scenes at the Two-and-a-half Rivers and his tagging after us in the Maze! MORPHINE: Excuse me, I think that's my cue to go interrogate him and find out that (surprise, surprise!) he's secretly been a Dorkfriend all this time and led the TourBlocks into the Two-and- a-half Rivers in Part 1 of this parody! Lean, you'll come along with me, of course; it's time to give these people a chance to gossip about us behind our backs! LEAN: As you wish, Ice Sedate.
Panel 3. ANGLEHARD:: This seems like a good time to tell you that your traveling companion, Lean the BodyGuarder, is actually the rightful King of the now-nonexistent nation of Mockery, voted for Ross Perot in 1992, still uses an Apple Mac at home for his computing needs, and intends to invest his life savings in helping Erich Von Daniken do more "archaeological research" to prove his point about advanced beings in flying saucers having originally brought civilization to the human race way back when! RANT: In other words . . . ANGLEHARD:: Yep! He's a SUCKER for lost causes! The fact that he is currently fighting on YOUR side really fills you with hope for the future, eh? NIGHT'MARE: A King of an extinct country I never heard of before? What a shock! I don't see how a girl like me can possibly marry him now! EGGING: I can see your problem! You deserve at LEAST a Baron who owns an INHABITED piece of real estate, so you can bully his peasants all day and all night! PEERING (to MAD): When exactly was it established that Night'mare and Lean would even WANT to get married? MAD: Gee, weren't you there when she called him an arrogant, stone-faced, insensitive clod whom she wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole, except to poke his eye out with it? PEERING: No, but it must have been a dead giveaway for anyone who WAS
there! The nicest thing she ever called ME was a yellow-eyed jaundice victim!
Panel 4. MORPHINE: Now then, Lord Anglehard, we must soon take our leave. We go north into the Bloat to seek the legendary Eye Scream of the World and its caretaker, the Jolly Green Giant! ANGLEHARD:: I can send some men with you for security. MORPHINE: Nope, too dangerous! I'll just stick with Lean and these Two-and-a-half Rivers bumpkins! The Old Blood will do its stuff! ANGLEHARD:: Really? How much military experience do they have? MORPHINE: Lean has taught them how to hold their weapons properly without cutting themselves! ANGLEHARD:: And you're going to trust the Old Blood to do the rest? MORPHINE: Yep! ANGLEHARD:: Near as I can tell, boys, her strategy is for you to go toe-to-toe with the TourBlocks, get wounded, and bleed your potent Old Blood all over their colorful T-Shirts! Maybe then they'll panic and run home to the nearest dry cleaners before the stains dry! Worth a try! RANT: I'm not sure I remember volunteering for this hazardous mission . . . PEERING: I don't remember volunteering for ANYTHING, but nobody else ever seemed to care about that! MAD: Excuse me, boys and girls, but if we're headed deep into enemy territory to face overwhelming odds and probably get slaughtered, I better start doing really manly things to prove I have the right stuff for a military career! EGGING: You mean . . . MAD: Yep! I'm going to start swearing! (Such swearing as Jordan permits us, anyway). Watch this! Panel 5.
MAD: All right, get out of my bloody way and let me lead the bleeding charge into the bloody battle with the bloodthirsty foe! So help me, I'll bloody well make those bleeding bleeders BLEED before I'm bleeding finished with this bloody bloodbath! PEERING: You did it! Twelve uses of variations of the word "blood" in only two (reasonably brief) sentences! The new record for profanity! A SOLDIER: Egad, for a general who can cuss that fluently, I'd follow him into the Dork One's lair itself! I wouldn't be surprised if he ends up the most celebrated military commander of the age! FOOTNOTE: AH HA! You really thought we were going to let an entire episode go by (at long last!) WITHOUT any gratuitous foreshadowing, didn't you? But (as we keep telling you) foreshadowing is your guide to Quality Literature, and if we ever failed to include some, we might be accused of turning out second-rate parodies with no intrinsic artistic merit instead! Can't have that! So at the very last moment, we squeezed something in! WILL our heroes be able to locate the legendary Jolly Green Giant and the Eye Scream of the World? WHY does Babbles'on intend to melt the Eye Scream? HOW did Morphine find the Eye Scream of the World the first time around, 20 years ago, given that she obviously didn't have a dire and pressing need at the time for the Eye Scream itself OR the legendary Horn of Veneer? (Oops, we forgot to mention her briefly-alluded-to past visit during this parody! Oh well, no harm done really! How important can it be? Jordan's had eight volumes to answer that question in a more serious fashion (8.1, if we count "New Spring" as being roughly 1/10 of a volume) and he hasn't bothered to develop the idea either!) WHAT will Larry Homer decide to use as the parody version of the title Forsaken? For once, most of these questions WILL be answered in the forthcoming installment, which will be the Grand Finale of this infamous parody, and good riddance to it! Raina's Hold / Raina's
Library / Other People's Humour / The
Eye Scream of the World
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