In the last episode: having awoken to a painful reality that didn’t feature his nice warm bed anywhere, Ichabod found himself lying on a debris-strewn desolate bombsite. His newly acquired friend, Allium – a walnut-sized plant-mouse thing – quickly turned Ichabod ‘s attention to the task in hand and, having succeeded in unwittingly killing a nest of overgrown mutant ants, was promptly sucked from that world into another… a picturesque world negated by a T-rex as tall as a block of flats.
As much as Ichabod tried to enjoy his blissful escape from consciousness and a reality that involved everything that shouldn’t exist, the increasingly loud and ground-shaking T-Rex footsteps persisted to interrupt until at last he came to. Wasting no time, he got to his feet, dusted himself off, and started once again to run away.
Allium followed close behind – he was surprisingly fast for a walnut-sized creature and possessed an admirable amount of conviction. They ran behind a small collection of rocks that had tumbled down the cliff side, possibly torn off by a T-Rex, Ichabod speculated. They watched the creature pass by and let out a huge sigh of relief.
Ichabod caught a glimpse of himself in the water. Dark, lined, mysterious eyes peered back at him. The eyes were accompanied by long dark hair, tied back in a plait. His eyes glanced over a gymnast’s physique, pleasantly tucked into a green, skin-tight leotard, itself tucked into what could only be described as desert hot pants, a little racy under the circumstances, but it was something else that caught Ichabod by surprise. The leotard didn’t lie flat against his body, as he would have expected it to on a man of his stature.
“Oh my” he exclaimed. “I’m a woman!”
Ichabod stared for a long time – a long, long time – until at last his concentration was broken by Allium tapping his small technological device in a ‘let’s get back to business’ kind of way.
“Oh, right. Yes. Let’s take a look at this situation, shall we? What got us here was performing a successful action from the last place, with success clearly determined by the laws of that world. So I guess we’ve got to do the same again here, right?” Ichabod looked expectantly at Allium, who gave a little nod.
“Ok, so let’s have a think here.” Ichabod looked around his surroundings.
Time passed.
12 hours later, the pair fell to the ground, physically and mentally exhausted.
“Nothing’s working! I’ve come at this problem in a completely logical way: I used the steel key to open the door on the roof garden and it led me to a useless golden dragon statuette; I tried using the sphinx icon on the door with the sphinx head sketched on it – quite a sensible solution if ever there was one – and nothing; I volleyed myself between rock edges using angles that are more improbable than my newly-acquired woman bits simply to reach the top of the highest wall here. None of it has gotten us anywhere.”
Ichabod slumped, truly defeated. He sat in a contemplative silence for quite some time. At last, he scratched his head.
“I’m looking at this all wrong. I must be.”
The little contraption that Allium carried around with him started making bleeping noises. The little creature peered intently at it. He looked away with a strained expression, then turned back to it again. Allium suddenly stood upright and presented Ichabod with another note.
“Where are you getting these?!” He took the note. It said, ‘Jump into the unknown’. Ichabod stared at it. “Jump”, he said, “into the unknown”. He looked up, in the direction of the cliff edge.
“Allium”, he said, “I have indeed been looking at this in entirely the wrong way. My biggest setback was trying to tackle the problem using a logical solution, one that naturally followed from the nature of the problem itself, when in fact the solution was completely arbitrary, following from no logical thought whatsoever.”
Ichabod ran towards the cliff edge and threw himself from it. He fell… and fell… and fell, until finally he stopped falling, apparently suspended in mid-air.
“It’s an invisible platform” he shouted up to Allium. “It was so unobvious all along! I didn’t think of it on account of its horrendous ambiguity.”
Suddenly the earth… and air… shook violently around the pair. There was a deafening crackle, a fork of lightning, and a flash of yellowish blue, then the two of them were gone.
“Uuuggghhhh.” Someone – not even they knew which one of them – let out a mellow moan. Ichabod felt like his head had been sent through a mincer. He wanted to sleep. He wanted his bed. He prayed that he would open his eyes and find him self tucked up in it. With a hot water bottle. And it was the weekend.
He prayed… and opened his eyes. He saw Death approaching with great haste. He closed his eyes again. Was it Death? It was hard to tell because the world was so… rudimentary. He opened his eyes again. The scythe gave it away – yes, it was Death. Ichabod could recognise a scythe no matter what dimension he was forced to view it in.
“Oh boy” he muttered.
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