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The Continuing Adventures of Rack and Ruin - Story Thread
#41
The rain came as Boy In A Dress stood at the corner of Brick Lane and watched the fog dissipate under its steady 
drenching of the poverty-stricken district known as Whitechapel. Behind him, Ninurta was waiting for the grisly exercise
to be over. But for BIAD, the feelings he was receiving from the little room spoke of the depravity that man can sink to.

There was evil there and the Man-Girl knew it. The problem was that it wasn't as abhorrent to him in the way most humans
would consider normal, it whispered thoughts that he wanted to ignore. Many times in the long existence of Boy In A Dress,
there had been times when such horrors had been witnessed and the taking of life had long ago, left him with the easy
choice of indifference.

But this one was not the same, there was much more behind the Ripper murders, a long-term organised scheme that he
could only catch a whiff of, like a familair scent that brings troubled memories. 'It's the Devil in yer' BIAD heard Muckles
taunt in his musings and shaking his head violently, the thoughts were dispersed along with the raindrops from his bonnet.

Still, the daylight would be here soon and the ghosts of what Tibbs assured him was his destiny, would fade away like the
city's fog.

In the distance, Big Ben chimed 3:00.am and as the clapper struck the great bell for the last time of the hour, a steady
tapping came to Boy In A Dress from the shadows of the street known as Buck's Row. BIAD recalled that this was the
place where the Ripper's first slaying took place and tilting his head, he wondered if the steady tempo was from a leaky
gutter.

"Who's there?" a voice called and into the small illuminated area of a gas-fuelled streetlight, the questioner stepped into
his full reveal. BIAD saw by the small round spectacles and the white cane that the stranger was blind and the real query
should be what was a sightless man doing out at this time of the night.

The Man-Girl in the Victorian finery softly cleared his throat and put on his best lady-like modulation, "Er.. I'm afraid I seem
to be lost" BIAD said in his high tone and quickly chastised himself for creating the impression of a victim.
It wouldn't do to look weak in Jack The Ripper's hunting ground.

"Lost or not wanting to be found?" the blind man sarcastically responded and stopped his stick from its grasshopper tattoo.
The faint light offered no real description of the quality of the person standing in the rain and for a few seconds, Brick Lane
seemed like the only reality in the cosmos.

BIAD stepped from the corner and surveyed the man in the flat-cap and stevedore's coat. The hat's peak succeeded to shadow
his face, but the spectacles glistened with reflection and something the hermaphrodite struggled to contemplate.
"You're a long way from home, dear brother" the typhlotic male murmured and the realisation of who it was struck Boy In A Dress
just like the wrought-iron bar demands London's iconic landmark to clarion the time of day to the Queen's subjects.

It had been awhile, a different time and a different part of the universe. Boy In A Dress had first met the rebus that Earthlings call
'Death' somewhere in the far-future and in the backalleys of New Orleans. Death had told him of of kinship and how his rightful
place was at the terrible essence's side.

Later and in a time closer to the one they both now inhabited, Death had machinated to take the one-thing away from BIAD's
defiance of his supposed eminence and in the town of Tombstone -Arizona, he had killed Ninurta.
The only flaw in Death's plan was he had never taken the time to discover who the gravel-voiced Vandalian actually was and
even now, under the storm-clouded skies of Victorian London, the little old man with the white stick fumed at what Ninurta had
done to  him.

When you die, Death takes you and that's it. The only single exception ever -and I mean ever, was when Ninurta beat the shit
out of the entity that cannot be swayed. Tibbs could attest along with the Perfect Nine that no such repudiation has ever existed
and it went against all universal rules in every universe created.
Morally speaking, a neutral would say it was just plain-wrong.

In the Lore written down before time existed, nobody punches Death in the face, rubs his face in the dirt and forces him to say
'Uncle'. Nobody. There are rules, there's a natural order to things and there are those who dispatch and manage such decrees
and those who abide them.
Chaos is tolerated due to the action of creation and even havoc has its place in realities, but these are eternal forces that cannot
be opposed and certainly not by a mean son-of-a-bitch who just doesn't get it.

And it was that self-restraint to live a life of mundane humanity that balked the Chancellors from The Hall Of Owls and the seething
figure beneath the Brick Lane gas-lamp. Ninurta cannot die and that puts him in the elite, the beau-monde and a reveller of ambrosia.
Yet, he courts trouble, lives in the dust of the ordinary and dares to walk alone.

The shape of the old man warped and stretched like taffy and where once a hesitant physique of small stature stood, a tall appearance
in a black robe now stood. And the walls of the Brick Lane houses frosted with the cold of despair. "I am blithesome to see you, my
brother" Death said wickedly.
Edith Head Gives Good Wardrobe. 
#42
Boy In A Dress pulled his shawl about his shoulders and stepped onto the cobbled surface of the godforsaken thoroughfare of the
destitute. The shimmering vision of Death also moved forward and the slithering action of his travel reminded BIAD of rolling steam
surrounding a waiting locomotive. To say Death's raiment was coloured black would be an injustice to the word, the cowled vestment
merely rejected light. The hood contained true darkness and BIAD had often wondered what his unwanted brother truly looked like.

They met in the middle and canvassed each other. The Man-Girl looked like he'd taken a wrong turning from a gilt-edged opera
and belonged to a house with a maid. Death looked like he usually did, all caliginous and hazardous. BIAD eased his stance and
looked up into the void where a face should be.

"We're here to thwart the Final Mainyu... have you heard of such beings?" the bonneted absentee-Devil asked in a flat tone.
A faint sound of hooves came from behind the eight-foot tall Emperor of Eradication and for some reason, BIAD believed it was
a merchant travelling to Spitalfields market. "Well, have you?" he echoed.

Time ticked behind the glass-dials of Big Ben as Death stewed his thoughts in a broth of heed. The Mainyu had first punctured
through from their reality in the Earth-year 1947 after countless attempts to actually prevail in the unknown environment.
The scientists had merged with their magicians and arrived at their unique conclusion. They would grow the vehicles called
'humans' around them and infest this universe at a slower rate than Ba'al had preferred.

The Mainyu were here and their maraud meant little to the omnipotent taker of souls. Life was his buffet and names, races and
species also meant little to Death, but sometimes the petty intrigue was occasionally entertaining. Now looking at Boy In A Dress
standing in the rain wearing a full wardrobe of this age, Death wondered if this current drama could tickle his amusement.

"They're embedded in places you'd never believe..." the Captain of The Forlorn whispered with a drip of licentiousness. "...You
and your Vithian instructor have quite an undertaking" he sneered softly. BIAD tilted his head and pondered what his somber
sibling had told him.

"Then is there a way we can recognise them? the disguised sodden simpleton asked. Death's cowl moved to indicate he was
looking over BIAD's shoulder and in thought, he wasn't keen on giving clues. "They do not yawn" was all he offered and held out
a skin-taut hand to catch the easing raindrops. Somewhere in Boy In A Dress hat-wrapped head, he stored the information and
then said thank you.

Finally the tall figure nodded to BIAD's gratitude and as he absorbed the idea that his brother was on a supposed mission,
a sudden thought dawned on him and the temperature dropped some more. Death had come to take Mary Kelly and the small
child a mile away from this foul wallow of human dregs, Scarlet fever quarrelled with the Ripper for culling humans in Whitechapel.

The rain pit-a-patted on the frilled bonnet of the smaller being before him and Death had only question to counter Boy In A Dress'.
"Apart from the delusive Tibbs, are you alone in your duty?" and before BIAD could answer, the tall night-mantled guide of the
departed faded into the drizzling rain.

The Man-Girl stood alone in the grim street and looked around at the vacant windows and narrow doorways, a tug-boat on the
Thames announced it was ready for work. "He's a lot more cheerful" BIAD chirped to nobody and turned to return to the person
Death had guessed was somewhere in the vicinity.
'There's just no pleasing some people' the solitary figure thought as he waddled back to where his friend waited for the butchery
to end.
Edith Head Gives Good Wardrobe. 
#43
Mucklebones watched the pair carrying the wriggling bagged-body towards their agreed rendezvous and thought about
the past that the man in the top hat had come from.

Ninurta had been born after the Energy Wars that had changed the way Earth had governed itself. What was to become the
lean stoic man's stomping-ground of North America had been re-labelled 'The Autonomous Republic of Vandalia' and as the
boy grew, he became acclimatised to the only element nurtured within the region that wasn't mined for immediate external
-exploitation, namely poverty-enriched confrontation.

The legendary Clans Wars of the 23rd century had honed his character and acrimony down to a cold, calculated being that
surveyed his environment in the manner of a distrusting predator. Always prepared to take, but always aware of the chance
of being taken and at all times, never wasting his energy on sentiment.

The Witch glanced over to where her husband managed the craft's controls and smiled to herself in regards of the present
situation. Tibbs and herself were currently eight-feet above an ancient flood-marsh that absorbed the ebb and flow of the
tidal river a hundred yards to the south. A river that would be known centuries in the future as the river Thames.

And yet in the same time-frame of Mucklebones and the little Vithian checking the frequency-vibration of his invention, they
were also half-embedded in a Bakery wall comprised of burnt clay bricks and looking out at three males travelling fast along
a 19th century alleyway. One was captive, one was the captor and the other wore a bonnet.

Boy In A Dress had something else that made him different from his fellow-escapees and it wasn't the strapped-in bosom that
bobbed up and down as he ran. It was a small leather bag that Jack The Ripper had been carrying when Ninurta had arrested
the famous killer. Arrested -as in brained him until he'd stopped struggling, that is.

Now, Tibbs manoeuvred the craft from it's duel-location and not only startled a heron from it's boggy pre-roman angling site,
but out away from the crusty wall that forced travellers of that dirty byway of Whitechapel to turn right.
"Are we close enough?" Tibbs asked without taking his eyes off the small screen.

Muckles saw Ninurta grit his teeth at his exertions of holding the writhing form over his shoulder and probably at his annoyance
that the meeting seemed delayed. "We're clear and ready" the crone barked and felt the time-machine begin to lower.
With a flick of a switch, the spine-covered craft exposed itself to the two men panting in the alley.

Any unaffiliated observer of the reunion would now realise that Ninurta's earlier beating of the murderer who had terrorised old
London had now become inoperative as the man in the tied-bag marked 'Potatoes'  began to wriggle again.
"How dare you Sir, I'm a Doctor..." he snarled from his position of looking at Ninurta's inverted ass. "...And there seems to have
been some sort of mistake" the stranger added haughtily from inside the hessian sack.

Tibbs appeared at the hatch with his wife and deliberated on whether the reported injuries of James Forrestal could be delivered
here in order to quieten the replacement or to... the decision came quicker as the bundle's exertions began to increase.
"His face was damaged from the fall and his knees were bleeding from where he hit the third-floor roof..." Tibbs stated over the
grumblings of Ninurta's burden and reluctant to step off the time-machine, the small man looked into his friend's emotionless
eyes for an understanding.

"Gotcha Chief" the GunMan said confidently and dropped the squirming sack onto the cobbled ground. BIAD walked on and
without a word, placed the surgery-bag inside the craft and pushed it under the sawn-off park bench out of the way. The night
was beginning to give way to another grey-day in the capital and everyone -except the Ripper, knew they didn't have much time.
Only Tibbs saw the irony.

Ninurta leaned over and pulled the neck of the sack open and didn't miss BIAD moving to counter any escape attempt down the
alley next to the Bakery. Jack The Ripper gathered himself and failing to maintain the awe-inspiring infamy that the media had
portrayed him in, clambered out of his cloth-prison. He wasn't much.

Victorian men of standing did sport beards and moustaches, but in George Gaston's case, it was different.
Tibbs silently sighed to himself and was thankful that they wouldn't be shaving a dead man's face later.

"What is the meaning of this..." Gaston said indignantly and brushed unseen debris from his top-coat. "...Never in my life have I
been so abashed in my duties as a surgeon" he supplemented and ran his fingers through his hair. Ninurta moved slowly towards
the outraged gentleman and scanned the man's face for proof of a Forrestal semblance.
Two seconds later, the GunMan realised the nose had to be flattened a bit.

What happened next was always the part that Tibbs could never understand about the detached immortal who had once loved a
woman called Margot and bore an unnamed son. Inflicting damage to serve a purpose was not only barbarous to the little man
watching the proceedings from the craft, it was -in his view, down-right sadistic.

Granted, needs must at times and for the sake of getting to the leader of the Mainyu, physical abuse was the only course of action to
save the US Secretary of Defence from his faux suicide. There was the saving-grace that they were also ridding this time and this
existence of a horrible serial-killer, but still... witnessing it is always difficult.

As Ninurta went about his brutal business, Boy In A Dress watched the alleyway entrance for a passing Peeler or even another
appearance of his brother. Apart from a man pulling a barrow in the main street, nobody came to investigate the suffering that
Jack The Ripper was going through.

"Forrestal was reported to have tried to hang himself with his dressing-gown sash" Tibbs said reluctantly and moving away to
prepare to return to 1949, he inadvertently touched the leather case beneath the homemade seating. What horrors reside in that
terrible satchel? -he thought as he turned engraved dials and flicked chunky switches
What can one human do to another? -came another inner-voice that he hadn't encouraged and failed to ignore Ninurta's grunts
of his efforts.

Muckles stayed quiet as BIAD and the heavy-breathing man bundled Jack The Ripper's lifeless body onto the time-machine
and following his movements with her tear-shining eyes, the Witch of Carbiox recalled a comment her husband had relayed to
her from Ninurta's Psychological Profile that had been logged with a star-ship he'd served on.

"...Sometimes you gotta do what's wrong to do what's right".
Edith Head Gives Good Wardrobe. 
#44
I would like to pretend that many people have contacted Ninurta and I about expounding more on what the
Mainyu are and how they could possibly puncture entry into a universe that is tremendously different from
their own.
I will explain and also add that in fact, nobody asked us... sad, huh?

Looking through our standard lens of perception, the Mainyu are basically built in a fluid-like form.
Technically speaking, their bodies are have a syrup-like quality that changed when entering our universe
due to the effect of its unique harmonics.

It's simply a different tone or vibration of our reality to theirs and it caused their form to dilute even more
than it was. The Mainyu were already handicapped by the differences between our carbon-orientated
universe and after many centuries of experimentation, they realised that any advancement in conquest
would only come to pass if they matched the organic composition of their prey.

So just as we protect ourselves from the effects of space, they created an external layer that would be
able to assist in interactions with the various species in our cosmos and when the Mainyu came to our
little blue planet, they stayed with the plan.

Producing a fully-grown adult is still difficult outside of natural means and the onboard systems to control
a human body can sometimes seem to take on a personality of its own. Since life's first rule is to survive,
social interaction can be an obstacle and this took a long time to harness.

I could point to poorly-programmed 'Mainyu-suits' that have shown up in our recent history, but the evidence
could always be countered by those who demand we sit in front of the magic fireplace and be quiet.
But you'd be surprised.

I hope this helps, Mainyu are small entities inside the casing of a human body and from Death's revelation
to his brother -Boy In A Dress, they don't yawn. Let's just cross our fingers we can win this one, yeah?
...........................................

Ironic Connections.
There's a little twat of a creature that flies around and can impact on a lifestyle of someone who could change
history. The Mosquito is an insect that -via the female's proboscis and her saliva, can transmit many diseases
such as malaria, yellow fever, Chikungunya, West Nile virus, dengue fever, filariasis and the Zika virus.

In 1901, a U.S. Army physician led the team that proposed and confirmed the theory that the viral disease -yellow
fever is transmitted by a particular mosquito species. That doctor was a guy called Walter Reed and years after
his death, had a hospital named after him.

A hospital that's colloquially called Bethesda Naval Hospital and the facility that Tibbs' time-machine now hovered
outside of in order to change history. Now being 1949 and the exact proximity is the storey where James Forrestal
is being kept, of course.

A place named after someone who looked at stopping negative effects from a different species.

"Who's he?" Ninurta whispered from the hatchway and wondered that even though he and his three cohorts were
technically invisible due to their alternative resonance, could they still be heard. Sound... a true magic, the lean
GunMan decided and turned his focus back on the uniformed man looking out of the 16th floor window.

Tibbs waved his hand to disturb the rolling cigarette smoke surrounding Ninurta and after stepping over the pile of
rope that was tied to the smoker, he hunkered down beside him.
The Maryland night was chilly, but the Vithian knew the closeness to the detached man certainly added to the effect.
"A guard who will leave the room for five minutes..." the smaller man said and glanced towards where his wife slept.

It had been a long day -or century if you wish to be concise, and Mucklebones was exhausted. Saving Forrestal
and getting him to a secure place required none of her magic or wisdom and to be frank, she deserved the rest.
The only unsettling part was the Witch of Carbiox was currently using the dead body of Jack the Ripper as a pillow.

Boy In A Dress was sitting quiet in the shadows and on the stunted passenger bench. He'd said nothing since
returning from London and both Tibbs and Ninurta knew that it would be up to BIAD when he would relate whatever
thoughts or craziness were cooking under all that black hair.

The face on the other side of the meshed-glass belonged to Robert Wayne Harrison, the Navy man responsible
for James Forrestal's safety and the person who would always doubt the official Navy review board conclusion.
Harrison stepped back and moments later, Tibbs heard the auto-timer on the console bring the machine and its
occupants fully into the current period.
"I just hope he can tell us more about Rhanes" Tibbs mumbled, but more to himself rather than the cold-eyed man
squatting sixteen-floors up from Park Street.

As Tibbs pondered on the strange similarities between the names of Forrestal's doctor and Ba'al's latest squeeze,
George Raines and Aura Rhanes, the reason they were all there, kicked-off.

The window exploded, glass flew everywhere and James came hurtling through with the a dressing-gown sash tied
around his neck. Almost at the same time, Ninurta dived forward and grabbed at the dangling and choking man just
below the concrete window ledge. "Shit" was all the GunMan hissed as he resisted the need of his knife and began
to work on undoing the knot around Forrestal's neck.

Unseen by tbe surprised Tibbs and the cursing Ninurta -but instructed by both, Boy In A Dress pulled the corpse of the
Ripper from under Muckles' snoring head and in one swift movement, tossed it out over the Vithian's head.

Oddly enough, the flailing body hit enough outcrops of the Bethesda structure that by the time it landed on the wider
ledge of Room three eighty-four, any facial identification would be fruitless.
Mucklebones moaned in her sleep and went back to where an alien-sorceress goes in dreamland.
But at least the snoring stopped.

Forrestal's eyes were wide in the reality that he was not only failing to die from strangulation, the reason for the failure
was a growling guy hanging onto the sash he'd used to complete the hanging. Then as the knot came away, they both fell.

Gravity, the stuff Lucifer dealt with during his fall from heaven, the unseen force that Newton came to worship and the
impalpable action that Sandra Bullock's movie was oddly named after, desired Ninurta and the squealing man in arms to
join the crumpled carcass below them. An do it with velocity.

The rope twanged at the same time the panting dwarf in the brown robes reached the time-machine's main console
and changed the vibration of the craft, its passengers -awake or not, and the two poor bastards hanging below the spiked
contraption.

Officially James Forrestal leapt from the sixteenth-floor window and after the strip of cloth became untied from his attempted
hanging, he fell to his death below. He jumped at one-fifty a.m. and pronounced dead at one fifty-five a.m. on the morning
of Sunday, May 22, 1949.

Unofficially -or not known by the powers-that-be, Forrestal tried to hang himself because he believed the 'foreign-looking men'
-who he thought were trying to take over the United States, were coming to torture him in order to find out what he knew.

After a stranger in a coat that belonged to a Victorian age and a rope around his waist thwarted that suicide attempt, the
ex-Secretary of Defence now glided through solid objects and the night air that occasionally fluctuated into a summer's day
near a lake and some woodland. Fundamentally, the serene surroundings of the planet where Ninurta, Tibbs, Mucklebones
and Boy In A Dress first encamped.

After three minutes, the minutes it took for Dr. Robert Deen -Raines' assistant and Navy corpsman Harrison to arrive on the
same floor that Forrestal's supposed-body was laid, the real James Forrestal stopped wailing and flinching as he witnessed
something called 'time-flutter' whilst in the arms of a fellow Earthman.

The undignified landing in the meadow just south of the lake ruined whatever calmness Forrestal had acquired and the feeling
of bridled wrath the small man felt from his saviour during his trip across the universe, also didn't help.
Now watching the GunMan undoing the rope as the aerial-covered spaceship landed close by, the shivering man in his pyjamas
wondered if this was the madness Dr. Raines had warned him about.

"Hello me-old mocker, how's yer' bladder!" Mucklebones called happily from the small hatch of the craft and the soft grass of
the meadow welcomed James' body in his faint. The tiny insect that had been sleeping there, a creature that looked surprisingly
like a mosquito, flew off to find somewhere less crazy.
Edith Head Gives Good Wardrobe. 
#45
@"BIAD" On what the Mainyu are,

I naturally assume they were Chinese,,,,,,  mediumitwasntme
Once A Rogue, Always A Rogue!
[Image: attachment.php?aid=936]
#46
(11-11-2018, 06:19 PM)guohua Wrote: @"BIAD" On what the Mainyu are,

I naturally assume they were Chinese,,,,,,  mediumitwasntme

Personally, I've never seen a Mainyu close-up, but I think in their natural form they're
something like a highly-intelligent horse-faced humanoid with an insatiable hunger to
covet.

I'll ask BIAD if he has a picture.
Edith Head Gives Good Wardrobe. 


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