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Author: cbcsc063@ma.secs.csun.edu (Roger M. Wilcox a.k.a. Jeff Boeing)

Anyways, IUDC was written (primarily) in 1986.  This story, The Sick Kids,
is its sequel, and was written two years later in 1988.  To date this is
the only novel-length work of fiction I have concocted, and it still stands
as one of my better (though still seriously flawed) prose works.

Those of you who have memorized the nuances of all the AD&D first edition
loopholes will doubtlessly get a big kick out of this.  Especially if you
picked apart "Unearthed Arcana" the way I did when I got it in the *middle*
of writing this story.  (Unearthed Arcana is referred to as "The Other Book
of Infinite Wisdom" by the characters in this story.)

If anyone's interested, I can put together an ASCII version of the actual
character sheets for the characters in this story.  I used them *constantly*
for reference to make sure I wasn't missing any of their (tons of) abilities
or enabling them to do anything they couldn't.

----------CUT HERE----------CUT HERE-----------CUT HERE----------

   Roger M. Wilcox                           Length = 55000 words
18550 Prairie St. # 10
 Northridge, CA 91324
    April 2, 1987









                         "The Sick Kids"
                         Roger M. Wilcox







                             PART ONE

     Sick Sword nursed her baby daughter in one arm and her Sick
Sword in the other.  Disgusting Sword was quite a name to be born
with, but she was worth it.  After all, she would never have even
been born had not the Intercontinental Union of Disgusting
Characters brought Sick Sword and Ringman the paladin together.
     Ringman entered from a nearby room and smiled at the sight. 
About a year ago, Sick Sword had moved the small keep she'd
gained from the Deck of Many Things to the same clearing in which
she and Ringman had had their first romantic interlude, and the
sunlit trees sparkled gaily through the portal spells -- er,
windows.  This place hadn't seen any combat in its life, and
Ringman always liked being able to walk around without having to
wear +5 plate mail.
     "Do you know what day this is?" Sick Sword asked as she
simultaneously carried on a telepathic conversation with the Sick
Sword.
     "It's Tuesday," Ringman chuckled in reply.
     "Mm hmm.  It was also one year ago this date that the
I.U.D.C. was completely disbanded."
     "Oh, that's _right_!  It is, isn't it?  And it's also the
first anniversary of Omnion's death."
     "Thank goodness you got rid of her, too.  She was a real
pain.  I'm just sorry that God II doesn't condone going to the
outer planes and destroying someone's soul, otherwise I'd --"
     "-- But you wouldn't want to lose your alignment status, now
would you?" Ringman assured her.
     "Mm, I s'pose not.  I just don't like the thought of her
taking over Hell, or coming back as a 49th-level arch-lich, or
plane-travelling to any of the other outer planes and wreaking
any more havoc."
     Ringman hadn't heard of this last one.  "She can do that?"
     "Well, not for another 99 years; and even then she couldn't
get away with much.  Most of her power lay in her magic items,
and they've all been stored away in The Dungeon."
     "Uh, you _do_ mean a few levels _below_ The Dungeon, don't
you?"
     "Yeah, yeah, well, it's all the same place," Sick Sword
agreed as she put down her Sick Sword.  "I had to do _something_
with that old freehold of mine, didn't I?  And what better use is
there for stone walls and adamantite bars than to hold all the
surviving Union members?"
     "Ah yes.  Wild Max, the Grandfather of Assassins; Rango, the
17th-level ranger; Dirk the Destructive, the 20th-level anti-
paladin; Da Bad Dude, the 31st-level evil illusionist; and that
dastardly 20th-level 'paladin' Peter Perfect.  I hope I never see
any of 'em again."
     "Without their magic items and stripped of their psionic
powers, they're just as harmless as 31st-level kittens."
     Ringman suppressed a shudder and decided to change the
subject.  "So, what were you discussing with your sword just
now?"
     'He's getting pretty perceptive,' Sick Sword noted.  "I was
just seeing how well it was doing in the major benign powers
department."
     "And how many major powers does it have now?"
     "It's up to five.  Two more and I get another prime power."
     Ringman shook his head and snorted a disbelieving chuckle as
he turned and walked out of the room.  "I always thought it took
more than a year for something to become an artifact," he
muttered.
     The Sick Sword's rate of power gain _was_ pretty impressive,
she figured.  "I have eight extraordinary powers and eight
special purposes," the Sick Sword had told her.  "I'm almost an
artifact right now.  Why not let me go that last extra step and
become a real artifact?"  She had agreed, but she also made sure
that the sword picked up enough malevolent and side effects to
keep its personality score below hers.  The sword, therefore, now
had "alignment of possessor permanently changed to that of item"
and "user has limited omniscience" as well as bestowing total
immunity to all forms of mental and psionic attack.
     She fingered Disgusting Sword's chin lightly, and the baby
replied with "Hi mommy, you feel nice."  Age 3 months was a
little late to start speaking, but she would catch up.  She'd
need all the skills she could muster if she were to become as
powerful as Sick Sword wanted her to be.
     And then again, she thought as she rubbed her belly, if
Disgusting Sword didn't measure up, there was always the next
child she was pregnant with.
                                #
     "YOU!!" Rango screamed, clawing through the adamantite bars. 
"YOU'RE the one who got me into this mess!  You ought to be in
one of these cells just as much as any of us!!"
     Clerasil the 38th-level high priest maintained his smugness. 
"If you recall, I changed my mind."
     "Yeah, right, and I suppose none of the other Union members
gave you AAANNYYY peer pressure to stay in the group!"
     "That's right."
     "That's because you were away from headquarters when you
defected!!"
     "True, true.  But Wierd Dough wasn't away from
headquarters."
     "He was also nearly fried by that half-elven ultra-arch-
devil!"
     "Koenieg, Middle Monk, and Melnic the Loud thought the risk
was worth taking."
     "My God IV, man, Wierd Dough didn't even let me IN on what
was going on!!"
     "You knew about them later.  Omnion was practically
screaming their names out at every turn, from what I hear.  You
could _always_ have come over to the Right Side."
     "UP YOUR SIXTEEN-FOOT-STOP, CLERASIL!!"
     Clerasil, in the most insulting gesture he could dream up,
grinned at him and left without another word.
     "Looks like Rango hasn't calmed down yet," Wierd Dough the
49th-level arch-mage commented when Clerasil joined him.
     "Yeah, yeah, and he's sort-of right."  Clerasil was looking
slightly down and away.  "We _did_ make the Union in the first
place, after all."
     "Hmmph.  Don't think Peter Perfect wasn't instrumental in
that too."
     Koenieg the 14th-level Great Druid broke his druidic
silence.  "It is very convenient for you, then, to have Peter
Perfect to dump all of your blame and guilt on."
     Wierd Dough blinked at that.  Clerasil only looked down and
away even more.
     Middle Monk the Grand Master of Flowers, meanwhile,
approached Da Bad Dude's cell.  "How ya doin', Da Bad Dude?"
     The illusionist growled.  "If I had my spell books right
now, I'd cream you."
     Middle Monk folded his arms.  "No you wouldn't."
     "Okay, then," Da Bad Dude decided, "If I had my spell books
and my psionic powers, I'd cream you!"
     "No you wouldn't."
     "Well, then, if I had my spell books, and my psionic powers,
and my _magic items_, I'd cream you!"
     "No you wouldn't."  Middle Monk turned and walked away.
     "ALL RIGHT, THEN," Da Bad Dude shouted after him, "IF I HAD
MY SPELL BOOKS, AND MY PSIONIC POWERS, AND MY MAGIC ITEMS, AND MY
_ARTIFACTS_, I'D CREAM YOU!!"
     Middle Monk rejoined the other anti-Disgusting-Characters. 
Melnic the loud the Magna-Alumnae bard looked around.  "So, why
isn't Sick Sword on these little prison tours any more?"
     "She _says_ it's because she doesn't believe in laughing at
the prisoners," Wierd Dough said, "Which is ridiculous because
_everybody_ likes to gawk at the bad guys.  Actually, she hasn't
been around recently because --" he made a cradle out of his arms
"-- she has a little ga-ga to take care of."
     Clerasil shook his head.  "I _told_ her not to take off that
ring of protection."
     "Aah, she probably wanted it that way.  She _is_ a mortal
human after all, and she _does_ have to worry about the next
generation."
     Clerasil cocked his head to one side.  "So are you."
     "Er, um, yes, well, ahem, you see, I haven't had . . . uh
. . . much time for family life recently.  Yeah, that's it, not
much time."
     "Oh?" said Middle Monk.  "You seemed to have plenty of time
for that cute blond apprentice sorceress last --"
     "That's different!" Wierd Dough stammered.  "She needed help
learning her . . . um, somatic technique."
     "I'll bet.  What did you teach her to cast, a sleep spell?"
     "Well, you're just jealous because _you_ couldn't score with
any of the female recruits in your monastery."
     Clerasil intervened.  "_You've_ got your monastery, Middle
Monk; _you_, Wierd Dough, have your wizard's college; _you_, Melnic
the Loud, have your faculty position at Ollamh; _you_, Koenieg,
have your trees; and _I_ have my church of Clerasilism.  We've
been out of the Disgusting Character scene for over a year now. 
I don't even know why we bother to come to The Dungeon any more."
     "TO CHORTLE AT PETER PERFECT," Wierd Dough, Melnic the Loud,
and Middle Monk replied.
     Peter Perfect heard that, and clenched his teeth.  He was
the greatest thing on horseback until _those_ wimps decided to
join up with Sick Sword.  Now, he'd already spent a whole damn
year rotting away between adamantite bars and unbreakable stone
walls.  They'd stripped him of all his magic items.  They'd
whittled him down to zero psionic strength points, feebleminded
him, inflicted him with idiocy through an ego whip, then healed
both the idiocy and the feeblemind to leave him exactly as he was
before except without any psionic powers.  They'd dispelled every
spell he'd had made permanent upon him.  And they'd been feeding
him terrible meals every day since then -- without any dessert.
     He'd show 'em.  He'd get out and get even with them . . .
somehow.
                                #
     Sick Sword's second baby was just as beautiful a girl as the
first, especially considering that they both had 18 charisma.  In
fact, they both had straight 18's all the way across the board. 
She'd named this second child Ridiculous Sword, in the hope that
she'd be even more powerful than her first daughter.  She also
hoped that Disgusting Sword wouldn't mind if she played
favorites.
     "Don't play favorites, mommy," Disgusting Sword warned her. 
So much for that idea.
     Ringman entered the nursery and put his hands on Ridiculous
Sword.  "May I?" he asked.
     "Be my guest," Sick Sword shrugged.
     Ringman picked up the little girl and held her close to his
chest.  Ridiculous Sword liked that.  She always liked being held
by daddy.  She reached up and ran her tiny fingers through his
beard.
     "So," Ringman said, "You're going to bring them up to be
weapons masters, then clerics, then magic-users, right?"
     "No, silly, they're going to be druids first."
     "Uh . . . druids?"
     "Sure.  First they become druids and work their way up to
14th level, then they change to monk, then at 17th level they
change to thief, then --"
     "My goodness, what are they going to be?  Characters with
seven classes?"
     "Eight classes, actually.  After thief comes paladin, then
comes illusionist, then cleric, then magic-user, and finally
weapons master.  I figured if you put weapons master last you
could get to the highest level in that class, and that way you
could do even more per-level damage in melee combat."
     "Oh, _wow_, you're raising them to be the last word in
killing machines."  Ridiculous Sword sensed his anxiety and
withdrew.  "Sick Sword, what _use_ is there in making them into
disgusting characters?!"
     Sick Sword frowned.  "Don't _ever_ call them that."
     "Why not?  You're a disgusting character.  Just because you
didn't join the _Union_ of Disgusting Characters doesn't mean you
didn't make yourself just as powerful as they were."
     "Look, mister self-righteous, we've been over this before. 
I made myself disgusting so that I could get _rid_ of the
Disgusting Characters.  You know it would have been impossible to
stop them otherwise; you were there."
     "And that's just the point.  They're _not around_ anymore. 
You don't _need_ our kids to kill centaurs and take their four
one-million-gold-piece gems.  In fact, who's to say that one of
them might not turn power-hungry and abuse her disgusting
abilities?"
     Sick Sword's eyes turned to steel.  She lunged from her
chair and snatched Ridiculous Sword from Ringman's arms.  "That's
just about the lowest suggestion you could make, paladin!  These
are my children, I can keep my kids on the right side!"
     "They're my kids, too."
     "Not if you're going to raise them to be wimps like
yourself!"  Sick Sword shuddered slightly at having said that,
then turned her eyes away and looked at her daughters instead.
     Ringman walked over to a dresser, pulled open a small
drawer, and took out a pack of cards.  He slapped them down
loudly on the bureau top to get Sick Sword's attention.
     Sick Sword gasped, "My Hero's Collection of Commonly Used
Sayings!  What are you doing with them?!"
     Ringman put them in his left shirt pocket.  "You obviously
won't be needing them any more."
     "Get out."  It was a simple, poignant command.
     "Sick Sword, hon, if you can't take --"
     "Get out!  Get _out_ of my keep!"
     Ringman stopped cold.  "Out of the whole house?"
     "Get out!  And don't come back!!"  She pointed.  Her helm of
telepathy flared a dim red.  She'd psionically dominate his will
if she had to.
     Open-mouthed, Ringman slowly turned and walked out the
nursery door.  What had he brought upon himself?!
     "Get out!!" she called after him.
     He walked down the corridor to the foyer, half sad and half
dumbstruck.  He heard Ridiculous Sword's muffled voice cry,
"Daddy?", but nothing else.
     'My deity, my deity,' he thought.
     He glanced at the stone walls around him, half stunned and
half in sorrow, knowing he'd probably never see them again.
Despite the interior decorations, this place was still a converted
castle and thus had all the standard fortifications.  The vertical
notch in the outer wall, for instance, was called an arrow slit,
and Ringman had always thought that was just about the most
suggestive name for something he'd ever heard.  That comforted him
little now.  He took his +1 composite longbow and his quiver of +1
and +3 arrows off their pegs by the arrow slit, and stared
solemnly back at the nursery that was now around the corner.
     "Get out!" Sick Sword insisted.
     'X-ray vision,' Ringman thought, halfway in contempt.
     "No, clairvoyance; now _get out_!"
     He shook his head and would have chuckled were things not so
grim.  He put on the +5 suit of plate mail still standing in the
hall while he looked for his +3 periapt of proof against poison. 
Periapts were always easy to confuse with any ordinary gems that
might happen to be lying around.  He found it, though, thanks to
the big white +3 he'd painted on its side.  After securing the
adamantite-alloyed armor to his body, he strapped his +3 hand axe
and +5 holy longsword to either side.  Finally, he picked up his
+4 shield and slid his arm through it.
     One more trinket caught his eye, and he felt even worse for
having forgotten it.  It was Sick Sword's ring of shooting stars. 
A year-and-a-half ago, right after the downfall of the Disgusting
Characters, he'd given her the only ring he had, which was his
own ring of shooting stars.
     "That's sweet," Sick Sword had told him, but insisted that
he take _her_ ring of shooting stars, both to make them even and
in case he ever needed a shooting stars ring again.  Of course
he'd later recovered his old +3-in-a-five-foot-radius ring of
protection since he'd used up his potions and had two more slots
available within his magic item limits, but at times he had
cherished the ring she'd exchanged with him.
     He picked up the ring, turned it over in his hand, almost
put it back down, and finally slid it over his left ring finger
with a sigh.
     He opened the outer door, looked out solemnly, then looked
back one last time.  "Sick Sword," he began.
     "GET OUT!" came the reply.
     "I still love you."
     "_GET OUT_!!"
     And so, he did.  He had only one last stop to make, and that
was at the one-horse stall just off the east side of the keep.
     "Warhorse, old boy," Ringman addressed his warhorse, "It
looks like we'll be riding off alone again."
     The horse neighed in apparent sympathy and understanding.
     Ringman checked the horse's hooves; yes, the horseshoes of
speed were still firmly in place beneath the horseshoes of the
zephyr.  He hauled out his warhorse's old suit of magic plate
barding and began to put it on him; the horse didn't mind, seeing
that the armor was nearly weightless.  Odd; the Dungeon Master
must have decided to publish another official book, since the
horse's plate barding had dropped from +5 to +3 and was now only
meteorite iron steel.  Unlashing the horse's reins from the
hitching post, he put his right foot in the right meteorite-steel
stirrup, pulled himself up onto the meteorite-steel saddle, and
urged the horse forward with a sulken "Giddyap."
     He couldn't believe Sick Sword had actually thrown him out. 
She was his girlfriend -- effectively his _wife_ -- and she just
tossed him out like all their months together had meant nothing. 
He shook his head hard.  Why had he pushed her so hard about the
way she should raise their kids?!  Couldn't he have just talked
her out of her position more slowly?  Now those poor, fatherless
children would have an even bigger chance of turning to the wrong
side!
     He'd taken an oath, he assured himself; he'd taken an oath
when he became a paladin to uphold truth, justice, and the
lawful-good way.  Like The Impossible Dream, he would "fight for
the right without question or pause" and "be willing to march
into hell for a heavenly cause."  He had to tell her, straight-
out, that she was raising their kids to be just as disgusting of
characters as the ones they'd both despised.  Maybe she'd cool
down, eventually; maybe she'd even see it his way.
     He rode off into the wilderness.  He didn't feel like going
back into town right away.  The old I.U.D.C. headquarters at the
bank of Crysglass lake, in fact, would probably provide the
solitude he needed, if it wasn't swarming with scavenging
looters.  Who needed that old Sick Sword anyway?  After all, from
one centaur she'd gained four million experience points, and from
being instrumental in saving Central Earth _he'd_ gained enough
experience points to put him a fourth of the way to his next
level. . . .
                                #
     Peter Perfect hadn't heard many things from all the times
the Anti-Disgusting Characters had come to gawk at him, but he'd
heard enough.  Every magic item and magic artifact the Union had
had was stored in some vault a few levels below The Dungeon. 
This included his sentient holy sword, Prometheus.  He crossed
his legs on the floor and tried as best he could to let his mind
slip into alpha state.  He wondered why he had never thought of
this before.
     'Prometheus,' the word echoed in his mind.  'Prometheus,
hear me!'
     The sword should answer.  Eventually.  Even if Peter wasn't
telepathic any more, his sword still was.
     'Prometheus!'
     "I hear you, Peter Perfect."
     A response!  The sword heard him!  At least he _hoped_ that
dull voice in his head was the sword's and not something he'd
made up.  'Prometheus, where are you?'
     "I'm in a dark vault surrounded by bits of enchanted junk. 
I think I'm a few levels below ground in a freehold basement."
     'What signal strength are you reaching me at?'
     "Really strong.  I figure you couldn't be more than fifty
feet away.  Say, why didn't you use any of your telepathic powers
to call me?"
     'Because the Anti-Disgusting Characters stripped me of all
my psychic abilities.  Listen, can you cut your way through the
ceiling?'
     "Sure, I can try, but I can only animate myself for one
minute."
     Peter Perfect sighed.  'Yeah, that's right, your telekinesis
only lasts that long.  Well, give it a try and see what happens.'
     "Okay," the voice agreed.
     Deep within a chamber beneath The Dungeon, something moved. 
It wriggled its way through all the helms of brilliance and rings
of elemental command that had been heaped on top of it, and shot
up, impaling itself in the ceiling.  There, it sawed and pried
enough of the stones loose for its hilt to fit through, slid all
the way up to the next level, and found a darkened room there
too.
     "I made it up one level," the voice told Peter Perfect, "But
you're still a ways above me.  I'd estimate you're twenty or
twenty-five feet away."
     'Well, your teek still has some time to run.  Plow up
through another level.'
     "Roger."
     The object shot up through the darkness and impacted the
ceiling.  Peter Perfect could see the glowing green blade
sticking though his own cell floor.
     "It's working, Prometheus!" Peter Perfect urged it on with
his own voice.  "Work your way up through the rock!"
     The sword blade jutted its full length through the stone and
smacked into its own hilt.  "I can't go any further," it spoke to
Peter directly, "I can get my blade or my handle though, but my
T.K.'s almost gone and I can't work a hole big enough to fit my
hilt through."
     By now everyone's attention was drawn to Peter Perfect's
cell.  Even Wild Max the Grandfather of Assassins was getting
interested.
     "Then turn around and stick your grip through the hole,"
Peter Perfect insisted.  "I'll take it from there."
     "Okay, but --"  The blade withdrew from sight and switched
to telepathy.  "-- hurry up!  I'm almost out of lift!"
     The grip of the sword barely managed to poke itself through
the hole.  It shuddered, and started to drop -- and at just that
instant, Peter whipped out his hand and grabbed the handle. 
"GOTCHA!" he cried.
     "Yaaaaay!" all the other Disgusting prisoners cheered.
     Peter Perfect acknowledged the cheers of his audience, then
started to pull the sword loose.  "Come on, give," he insisted,
futilely trying to pull the sword through the hole with his
makeshift titan strength.  "What do they make the floors out of
in these places, anyway?"
     "Interlocking silicate stones containing trace quantities of
mithral, bound together by a mortar laced with 7.3 percent
mithral," the sword told him.  "Far more sturdy than the stuff
they made the last floor out of."
     "Prometheus," Peter Perfect said as he continued pulling.
     "Yes?"
     "Shut up."
     Peter started jamming the sword back-and-forth.  Bits of
rock crumbled away.  Finally, he gave a good stiff yank and the
whole assembly sprang out of the ground and held itself upright
in his right hand.
     "All RIGHT, Prometheus," Peter cheered, "We're a team again! 
Now let's get out of this rat trap!"
     He swung the sword around edge-on at the bars of his cell. 
The sword thwacked against a bar, made a loud ringing sound, and
shook in his hand.  The bar wasn't even scratched.
     "Damn," Peter cursed, "That's right.  Solid adamantite bars. 
The pure metal is +6, and you're only a +5 holy avenger.  Well,
the floor is just plain old mithral-laced, and that's only +4; so
it looks like we're gonna have to tunnel our way out."
     He hacked at the ground with Prometheus, widening the old
gash by several centimeters.  He stuck the sword in the crack and
began to saw.  In two minutes he'd nearly completed a full
circle.  Finally, he withdrew his holy sword and stamped his foot
down hard on the saw-loosened section of floor.  The little tab
still holding it on broke, and the disk fell through with a
crash.
     Peter triumphantly jumped down the hole, landed on top of
the slab he'd just loosened, and added enough weight to the
already-punctured floor beneath him to break _it_ as well and
continue on down until he landed in a pile of miscellaneous magic
items.
     Shaking himself back to his senses, he held prometheus up
high and looked around.  The green glow from the sword
illuminated everything within a twenty foot radius; and
everything within that radius looked wonderful.
     "This is IT!" Peter Perfect cried.  "This is where all our
stuff is stored!  In fact . . . yep, there it is!  My old +5 suit
of plate mail!"
     He pulled himself up onto his legs with his makeshift titan
strength (the permanent potion he had in effect didn't increase
his to-hit chances, you see) and walked through the minefield of
magic items to his suit of armor.  He was about to put it on when
a shimmer off to one side caught his eye.  The sword's green
light glittered off a coat of very fine chain links.
     "On the other hand," Peter Perfect mused, "Why bother with
just a run-of-the-mill suit of +5 plate mail . . ."  He crossed
to the chain coat and took it off its wall peg.  ". . . When I
can have the Invulnerable Coat of Arnd?"
     "Good choice," said Prometheus, thoroughly impressed. 
"Didn't that used to belong to Omnion?"
     "Aah, Omnion's dead now anyway," Peter replied, pulling the
coat over his head.  "She won't miss it."  He got the coat all
the way on and put his arms through the sleeves.  "Hmmm . . .
this only goes out as far as my upper arms and down as far as my
groin.  I'm gonna have to pirate the leggings and vambraces from
my old magic plate mail."
     He did.  His forearms and legs were now armor class -2.  He
clanked the vambraces on his arms together.  "Ahh, adamantite
alloy once again.  It feels so good to have this stuff back on my
body."  He tried to impale himself with Prometheus, but it only
sent up a few sparks.  "And this mail is totally unbreachable.  I
wonder what kind of stuff it's made out of; pure adamantite would
only be +6.  Now then, where's my Axe of the Dwarvish Lords?"
     He found his Axe, of course, after he'd located a scarab of
protection to let him resist the Axe's malevolent effects.  He
also found a germanium ring (that would be a ring of protection)
and an obsidian ring (a ring of regeneration).  His cup and
talisman of Al Akbar were hidden behind somebody else's +5 suit
of leather armor.  He eventually collected a helm of brilliance,
a helm of telepathy, a helm of teleportation (which he carefully
stacked on his head), a medallion of ESP with empathy, all the
rings of elemental command, a rod of lordly might, a cube of
force, a vampiric ring of regeneration, five dull gray ioun
stones (which he remembered he didn't need since his psionics
were gone), his +4 cloak of protection, a girdle of titan
strength, one pair of reverse eyes of petrification, his warhorse
(which had been stowed in a portable hole for the last year-and-
a-half), his warhorse's plate barding (which was still +5),
gautlets of dexterity, gauntlets of ogre power, a ring of raise
dead fully, a book of infinite spells or two, every other ring he
could possibly use (he could stack them on the inner and outer
sides of his gauntlets), his longsword of green dragon slaying,
and all the other various odds-and-ends he'd had when the Union
was still in force.  It was a good thing he had enough portable
holes to carry everything in.
     Getting out was the easy part.  He simply knocked open the
vault door from the inside, mounted his warhorse, rode across to
the staircase, and galloped out to freedom.
     "Hey," Prometheus complained, "Aren't you going to free the
rest of your comrades?"
     "Are you kidding?  Most of them are evil."
     "Rango the ranger isn't evil."
     "THAT wimp?  You must be kidding.  Let him find his own way
out."
     "Don't you even feel obliged to get back at Clerasil and
Wierd Dough for the way they treated him?  And you?"
     "No, no," Peter explained, "Vengeance isn't my style."
     'Now to get even,' he thought nastily.
                                #
     Tiamat rolled lazily over onto her back and laid another
white dragon egg.  This one was of the small variety, so the
white dragon that grew out of it wouldn't have quite as many hit
dice as it could.  She wondered if she should bother sending it
to a cooler climate so that it could survive.
     'Naah,' she figured, 'I saved a white dragon runt last week. 
Let this one burn here in Hell.'
     A rap on her front door rudely interrupted her train of
thought.  "Come in," she grumbled.
     Peter Perfect flung open the five-ton mithral door. 
Suddenly, Tiamat breathed with all five of her heads at once, and
Peter got hit with a cone of frost (which bounced off his
Invulnerable Coat of Arnd), a bolt of lightning (which bounced
off his Coat of Arnd), a stream of acid (which bounced off his
Coat of Arnd), a cloud of chlorine gas (which bounced off his
necklace of adaptation), and a cone of fire (which bounced off
his cup and talisman of Al Akbar).
     "WHAT DO YOU WANT?" all five of Tiamat's heads requested at
once.
     "Do you always breathe first and ask questions later?"
     "Of course," her red and white heads replied, "It keeps out
the door-to-door salesmen."
     "Tiamat, let me get right to the point."
     "Ohhh, please doooooooo. . . ." her black head said acidly.
     "I need some help taking revenge on the Anti-Disgusting
Characters."
     "And what's in it for me?" her white head asked coldly.
     "If I'm right, your life."
     "That's a pretty serious threat," her red head growled
hotly. 
     "Do you seriously think that those new sick kids Sick Sword
and Ringman have are going to just let you crank out evil dragons
in peace?  More likely, they're going to try to hack your brains
out right here in your lair.  And if they're anything like their
mother, they'll succeed."
     "I see your point," her blue head agreed, and there was a
spark to its voice.
     "So what do we do?" Peter inquired.
     "_WE_ DON'T DO ANYTHING," the five heads said in unison. 
"_YOU_ WOULDN'T STAND A CHANCE AGAINST SICK SWORD ONE-ON-ONE.  IN
FACT, NEITHER WOULD I; BUT I _CAN_ DESTROY HER AND HER FAMILY
. . ." she inhaled, "THROUGH TREACHERY.  SHE AND HER CONSORT,
RINGMAN, HAVE RECENTLY SPLIT UP, BUT HE DOES NOT REALIZE THAT SHE
IS PREGNANT WITH YET A _THIRD_ CHILD.  A BOY.  I SHALL PLANT THE
SEED OF EVIL WITHIN SICK SWORD'S WOMB.  WITHOUT A FATHER TO GUIDE
HIM, AND WITH HIS MOTHER PUSHING HIM TOWARDS
DISGUSTING-CHARACTER-LIKE POWER, HE WILL EASILY FALL PREY TO
BECOMING EXACTLY WHAT SHE DESPISES."
     "Okay, great," Peter Perfect agreed, "But how are you going
to plant this 'seed of evil' in her womb?"
     Her green head said: "I'm not," and then the other four
heads kicked back in: "YOU ARE."
     Peter folded his arms.  "Phhh, oh, right, I'm just going to
walk over to her with a packet of seeds and stuff them up her
birth canal without her objecting."
     The chromatic dragon only smiled evilly.  Her blue head: "Do
you have a potion of polymorph self in permanent effect on you?"
     "Of course I do."
     "Good. . . ."
                                #
     Sick Sword felt despondent.  Why should she? she thought. 
What did she need that paladin for, anyway?  Anybody who said she
shouldn't raise her kids to be tough and successful deserved to
be thrown out.  Maybe she just needed somebody else to go to bed
with.  Yeah, that must be it, she just had to get laid.
     She set Disgusting Sword and Ridiculous Sword down -- they'd
know how to take care of themselves -- put on her most arousing
skin-tight suit, and teleported into town just outside the
saloon.
     "Hey, Sick Sword!" echoed someone's voice as she walked
through the swinging doors.  Then another: "Hey, Sick Sword!"
     "How ya doin', Sick Sword?!" everybody turned around and
said.
     Sick Sword smiled wanly and started checking out the meat. 
She knew most of these guys so well she couldn't stomach the idea
of propositioning them.  There was one newcomer who caught her
eye, though, and she decided to try him.
     "You're new around here, aren't you?" she sidled up to him.
     The stranger's azure eyes looked straight at her.  There was
a nervousness about them that he kept carefully hidden.  "Yes, as
a matter of fact, this is the first time I've been out in over a
year.  I'm a paladin."
     "Really?" she said.  "Uh, hold on just a moment."
     She turned around, made some barely-noticeable gestures,
took a pinch of something out of a pouch, and mumbled some
phrases in Latin.  The stranger cupped one hand to his ear and
listened.  He recognized the incantation; she was casting a
detect lie spell.  He would have to be very careful about what he
said to her from then on.
     Forty-two seconds later, she whirled back around and asked,
"Say that again?"
     "You mean that I'm a paladin?"
     In her mind, a green light blinked over the stranger's head. 
He was telling the truth.  "How interesting.  I like paladins. 
What's your name?"
     The stranger's eyes rolled up into his head for a split-
second, then he decided, "Call me Slim."
     He wasn't very slim -- he was quite brawny, as a matter of
fact -- but she let it slide.  "Okay, Slim," she stuck out her
right hand, "I'm --"
     "Sick Sword.  Yes, I know."  He took her hand and kissed it. 
"I've heard much about you, m'lady."
     Sick Sword took her right hand back with a coquettish smile. 
"You're cute, you know that?"
     Slim smiled and raised his eyebrows.  "Yes, I do.  You're
not so bad-looking yourself, either."
     "Hey," Sam the bar frequenter said to the bartender,
"Wouldja lookit Sick Sword put the moves on that guy?"
     The bartender shook his head.  "I know.  Jeez."
     "But don't she and Ringman --"
     "Well, ya never can tell these days."
     "So," Sick Sword winked at her pick-up, "You wanna split
this joint and come up to my keep?"
     "Mmmm, sounds like fun."  He winked back.
     'Thank goodness this guy doesn't scare as easily as most of
them do,' she thought.
     "So, are you going to use any of those special powers of
yours and teleport us there, or --"
     "As a matter of fact --" boink "-- yes, I am."
     Slim looked around and took his bearings.  Considering the
large bed dominating the scene, this was probably her bedroom. 
This girl didn't waste any time.  He felt even more nervous than
before, now that he was in her home court.  He had no armor,
weapons, psionic powers, or charms; if she decided to take her
troubles out on him now . . .
     She stripped herself down to her bare 18 charisma skin right
in front of him.  He would have come in his pants were his
charisma not the epitome of perfection to match.  He slowly
unbuttoned his shirt, exposing the beefy chest within.  Sick
Sword couldn't restrain herself any longer and took off his
clothes for him in a 150%-permanent-potion-of-speeded flash.
     They didn't even bother to get beneath the sheets.
                                #
     "Mmmm, you're not bad, kiddo," Sick Sword cooed into his ear
after the exciting part was over.  "Where did you say you were
from?"
     "I didn't say where I was from," Slim told her.  "I hope I
didn't get you --"
     "Oh, don't worry about that, I'm _already_ pregnant."
     "Oh . . ." Slim said, trying to act surprised.  "Um, I
meant, I hope I didn't give you any --"
     "Well, you're immune to diseases anyway, being a paladin and
all; and even if you _are_ carrying something, I've always got my
periapt of health."
     "Oh.  Glad to hear it.  Well . . ."
     "Well, um, I . . . uh . . . guess I'll see you later then?"
     "Uh, yeah, guess I'll see you later too."
     They got up and got dressed at opposite ends of the room. 
If anything, Sick Sword felt worse.
     "G'bye," Slim said, and walked out the front door.
     'Hmm,' She figured, 'Guess he didn't need a ride back.'
     Slim didn't need a ride back, certainly not.  His warhorse
was parked just beyond the edge of the clearing he was now
exiting, as a matter of fact.  He could see the +5 plate barding
through the trees.
     "Whew," he told his horse, "Glad that's over with.  She
coulda gotten suspicious at any second."
     "Neeeigh," the horse replied.
     "Yeah, I know what you mean."  He pulled the finely-tooled
chain shirt out from one of the saddlebags of holding and put it
on.  By the time he'd drawn the coat of mail completely down over
his torso, his features had changed.  His hair was blond.  His
lower jaw jutted ever-so-slightly more forward.  His cheekbones
were slightly wider.  And his voice was more firmly in the
baritone range.
     He put on a weapon belt and drew its green glowing sword. 
"Well, Prometheus," he said to the sword, "At least I got laid. 
Even if that wasn't my own sperm I injected into her womb."
                                #
     Ringman only heard about his son Gross Sword through the
grapevine.  After living with his lady love for eighteen months,
here he was right back in his old cottage in town.  Of course his
cottage was actually a small castle, but without Sick Sword in it
it was hardly a keep.  He'd never managed to get back to the way
things were before Peter Perfect and the Disgusting Characters
had come along.  He would've started drinking were he not
concerned about keeping his paladinhood.
     So he had a third kid and he'd probably never see him.  He'd
come back to Sick Sword's keep once, all right -- for the sake of
seeing his daughters if not her -- but she only tossed him out
with an even louder "GET OUT" than before.  The glimpse he'd
gotten of her face before she slammed the door looked more like
Omnion than it did like her.  The next thing he knew, Sick Sword
had moved her keep several leagues away, back to where she'd
first drawn it from the deck.  He hadn't seen or heard from her
since.  Well, a paladin operated best as a solo player anyway; at
least, that was how he tried to reassure himself.
     He picked a volume up from one of his shelves and flipped to
the page he'd had marked.  His doomed relationship hadn't been a
total loss; she _had_ taught him how to read.
                                #
     Disgusting Sword reached her first level of Druidicism at
age 10 1/2. Again, she was a slow developer, but she could still
make it.  Sick Sword took her to the edge of a centaurs' lair and
pointed inside.
     "That's a centaur's lair," she told her daughter.
     "I know," Disgusting Sword replied.
     "Good.  And you know what to do?"
     "Of course."  Disgusting Sword activated her permanent
potion of flying at 150% effectiveness and wafted into the
shallow cave.
     One psionic blast and several clatterings of gems later, she
emerged as a 15th level druid, a 17th level monk, an 18th level
thief, a 21st level paladin, a 31st level illusionist, a 38th
level cleric, a 49th level magic-user, and a 58th level weapons
mistress.
     "Well," she said to Sick Sword, making sure all 533 of her
hit points were in place, "That was easy.  How long before my
magic sword becomes an artifact?"
     Ridiculous Sword was a little smarter.  The only reasons
Disgusting Sword had taken those particular levels of development
was so that each of her classes would be of higher level than the
one before it.  Reading between the lines on the rules,
Ridiculous Sword figured that it didn't matter what order her
levels were stacked in, so long as the last class she chose had
the highest experience level.  As the bard class couldn't be
started with a lawful-good alignment, she would need that rules
assumption if she were to become both a 20th level paladin and a
23rd level bard without losing her paladinhood.  
     And so, hitting the centaur pits on her tenth birthday (only
one day after her sister did), Ridiculous Sword emerged as a 23rd
level druid, a 15th level assassin, a 17th level monk, a 17th
level ranger, a 17th level thief, a 23rd level bard, a 20th level
paladin, a 31st level illusionist, a 38th level cleric, a 49th
level magic-user, and a 60th level weapons mistress.  She would
have gone farther in that last class had not the . . . Dungeon
Master . . . set the maximum half-point-per-level damage bonus
for weapons masters at +30 points.
     And she didn't stop at just one artifact weapon like her
sister did, either.  No sirree.  No one "Ridiculous Sword" for
Ridiculous Sword.  She had the Ridiculous Hand Axe -- a +6 holy
vorpal defender frost-brand flame-tongue sun luckblade of
wounding, dancing, life stealing, disruption, slaying everything
(as in the arrows of the same name), throwing, thunderbolts, red
blue green black white brass & copper dragon slaying, speed,
final word, and nine lives stealing with maximum intelligence,
eight special purposes, and enough artifact powers to leave her
set for life (including "weapon damage is +2 hit points" taken
five times) -- sure, Disgusting Sword practically had one of
those.  But she also had the Ridiculous Broadsword, which did
_almost_ everything the Ridiculous Hand Axe did except allow her
to cause serious wounds by touch.  And she had the
nearly-identical Ridiculous Dagger and Ridiculous Longsword, both
to boost her weapon damage by 20 points and to serve in melee if
she had to fight for more than four minutes and got to loose the
other two weapons to dance.  And in case she got totally unarmed,
she also had the Ridiculous Pair of Gloves, although it seemed
kind of strange to combine the gauntlets of ogre power effect
with a +6 holy vorpal pair of gloves of wounding and all the
rest.  And she had the Other Ridiculous Pair of Gloves, in case
her first pair got to fight for more than four minutes and could
be loosed to dance.
     And as if that weren't disgusting enough, she topped it off
with the granddaddy of all artifacts: the Bracer of Irresistible
Damage.  No sentience, no ego, just immunity to all forms of
mental, psionic, heat-in-a-20-foot-radius, and cold attacks, and
the ability to cast first, second, third, and fourth-level spells
simultaneously.
     And the "weapon damage is +2 hit points" major benign power
taken 100 times.
     Then came Gross Sword's turn.  The lad was younger than his
sisters, a bare nine years old, and Sick Sword had felt uneasy
about her third child all along the way.  But she felt obliged,
and was determined, to prove to herself that she didn't need that
old paladin Ringman to bring up her kids as deity-level psionic
magical powerhouses that could _really_ take care of themselves in
the outside world.  And so, when Gross Sword's whack at the
centaurs came, he was ready; although not quite the kind of ready
that Sick Sword had hoped.
     He found the cave, jumped in, and hit all the centaurs in
the room with a psionic blast just like Sick Sword had told him
to.  That stunned most of them and put the rest of them in a
coma.  He collected the sixty million gold pieces worth of
million-gold-piece gems just like Sick Sword had told him to. 
And he systematically killed every centaur in the room without
telling Sick Sword or anybody.
     He emerged into daylight and immediately began spending his
experience points just as his sisters had.  He progressed until
he was a twenty-third level druid, then switched and became a
fifteenth level assassin, then a seventeenth level monk, and then
on to rangerhood.
     Well, not quite on to rangerhood, and that made Sick Sword
feel really uneasy.  What he chose instead was to become an anti-
ranger so that he wouldn't once have to shift his alignment away
from evil.
     'Have I created a monster?' Sick Sword thought.  'No, no,
I'm overreacting.  Gross Sword knows what he's doing, sure.  His
alignment doesn't really mean that much, does it?  After all, the
Intercontinental Union of Disgusting Characters had all _sorts_ of
different alignments in it, and they got along just . . . fine.
. . .'
     And up through the 17th level of anti-rangerdom, to the 17th
level as a thief, to the 23rd level as a bard, and then . . . and
then he became an anti-paladin all the way out to the 20th level.
     But still, Sick Sword held firm.  This was her son, for
crying out loud, she couldn't just send him to his room for
something so trivial as an alignment choice, now could she?  Naw,
of course not.  And besides, his becoming an anti-paladin would
allow him to keep all the benefits of being an anti-ranger. 
Yeah, that must be why he did it.  Yeah, yeah, sure.
     Gross Sword kept that chaotic-evil alignment of his anti-
paladinhood all through his being a 31st level illusionist, a
38th level cleric, a 49th level magic-user, and a 60th level
weapons master.  It would be stupid to change alignments now;
he'd have to sacrifice both his anti-rangerhood and his anti-
paladinhood if he did.  Sick Sword knew that, and she wasn't
about to change him into anything less powerful than he already
was.
     And like Ridiculous Sword, Gross Sword bought four hundred
of each type of pearl of power (so that he could cast 426 of each
level of magic-user spell every day) and created seven magic
artifacts for himself: the Gross Dagger, the Gross Broadsword,
the Gross Longsword, the Gross Hand Axe, the Gross Pair of
Gloves, the Other Gross Pair of Gloves, and the Other Bracer of
Irresistible Damage.
     It didn't take long for all three of them to probability-
travel through a few dozen spheres of annihilation and gain every
major and minor psionic discipline, either, but every Disgusting
Character had done that at one time or another.
     'Every _Disgusting Character_?' Sick Sword thought in horror. 
'No, no, they're not Disgusting Characters.  Not _my_ kids.  No,
they're anti-Disgusting Characters, just like I am.  They must
be.  They have to be.'
     Ridiculous Sword, on the other hand, was extremely nervous
about her kid brother.
                                #
     A clamor in the streets shook Ringman from his midday doze. 
He heard cries of "Run for your lives!", "My god, it's him!", and
"He's back!".  'Finally,' Ringman thought.  'I haven't seen any
action in nearly nine  years!'  He clasped himself into his +5
suit of plate mail -- it still fit -- strapped on his +4 shield,
fastened his weapons belt around his waist, made sure his two
rings were still in place, and tramped out into the middle of
town.  
     He'd walked barely fifty feet from his door when he stopped
dead in his tracks.  He recognized the figure at the other end of
the street and drew his holy avenger.
     "Peter Perfect!" Ringman worked his voice into order.   
"How . . . how did _you_ get out?!"
     Peter had positioned himself so that he stood directly
between Ringman and the sun.  It made him look more impressive
that way.  "Ha ha, I've been 'out' for nine-and-a-half years!" 
He started to approach.  "And I must say, your ex-concubine is
really good in bed!"
     Ringman gasped.  "Sick Sword!  What have you done to her?!"
     "Nothing, Ringman, nothing at all.  Nothing she didn't agree
to, anyway."
     Ringman suppressed a shiver.  He couldn't speak.
     "Face it, Ringboy, you're ancient history and Sick Sword
knows it!  And so does Prometheus, right?"
     "Right," the sword in his right hand pulsed.  It would have
smiled if magic swords could smile.  "It's been a long time,
Ringman."
     Ringman sneered.  "At least the holy sword I have now
doesn't want to kill everything in sight!"
     "Too bad," Prometheus sighed.  "It doesn't know what it's
missing."
     "Oh, sure it does, Prome," Peter Perfect told his sword, at
every moment stalking closer to Ringman.  "It used to have a much
more lethal wielder, remember?"
     Ringman clenched his jaw hard.  "They should never have let
you live, Peter Perfect."  He spat out the two P's.
     "And I should never have let you live," Peter cursed, and
charged at him.
     Ringman saw the incoming flash of green.  He gasped, raised
his shield, and blocked Peter's Promethean swing with a full-
parry.  Pete followed up by hacking with his Axe of the Dwarvish
Lords; he hit Ringman's right shoulder, but not hard enough to
sever the arm.  (That is, he didn't roll an 18, 19, or 20.)  Of
course, Peter Perfect's cause-serious-wounds-by-touch ability
didn't help Ringman much, but at least he saved against contact
paralyzation.  As he clutched the wound with his shield arm,
Peter Perfect kicked his groin with an adamantite-tipped boot as
hard as he could.  Even Ringman's +5 plate mail couldn't
dissipate _all_ the impact strength of a blow like that; he
shrieked involuntarily, and was stunned.
     Peter Perfect straddled him, a nasty smirk across his face. 
He reached down and tore the +4 shield from Ringman's left arm,
then reached out once more for his downed opponent's holy
avenger.  Panicking himself back to his senses, Ringman rolled
aside and kept his holy sword in his own right hand.
     "Think you're pretty tough, do you, paladin?" Pete scorned. 
"You all thought The Dungeon was pretty tough too, didn't you!? 
So tough that none of you even came back to see if I'd escaped! 
But I _did_ escape, bwa ha ha, and I got back all my magic items
and artifacts -- and a certain invulnerable coat as a bonus.  And
I bought a few scrolls and, with the help of Prometheus here,
managed to recast all my permanent spells -- including protection
from good."
     Ringman wondered why he was incapable of moving during this
ego trip Peter Perfect was on.  He thought it was some special
power, but then dismissed that since he didn't see any magic
twinkles.  He thought it may have been some obscure rule about
getting to make unlimited soliloquies in combat; then he
remembered that it was just the fact that one exchange of blows
in melee combat took a whole minute.
     "And furthermore," Pete continued, "I struck up a deal with
Tiamat!"
     "Tiamat?" Ringman gulped.  "As in the chromatic dragon?"
     "No, as in the lady across the street!  Of COURSE the
chromatic dragon!  Geez, you never were very intelligent, were
you?  In any case, thanks to Tiamat's seed of evil, your son is
now precisely what you and your ex-bed-partner wanted him not to
be."
     "You struck a bargain with Tiamat for some 'seed of evil,'
and you're still a paladin?!"
     "Hey, the ends justify the means, Ringo.  It was my pleasure
to thrust Tiamat's seeds into Sick Sword's womb."
     Ringman lay there, dumbfounded.
     "Why do you think I did it with that bitch in the first
place?"
     Things couldn't have been much worse, Ringman figured.  He
had to get out of this disadvantaged position, though, before he
could think of what to do next.  He put his right thumb and index
finger in his mouth and whistled a string of three notes.
     "What are you doing?" Peter Perfect demanded.
     "Whistling," Ringman told him.
     "I KNOW that, but for what?!"  Peter Perfect clutched his
medallion of ESP and aimed it at Ringman's cranium. 
Unfortunately, he rolled a 6; he whacked the medallion in
disgust.  "Stupid newfangled piece of junk, can't even count on
it to work right!"
     Just then, a horse galloped silently into view on a cushion
of air.  Peter Perfect recognized it instantly from its +3 plate
barding; it was Ringman's warhorse.  He stood out in front of it,
between the horse and Ringman, and punched the horse across its
meteorite-steel-plated jaw as hard as he could.  The animal
rolled with the punch onto the ground some twenty feet back.
     In the mean time, Ringman had recovered his shield.  Peter
Perfect sneered at Ringman for daring to try something so dirty
and underhanded while claiming to be a paladin.  "Savor death,
insignificant flesh slug!"  He hacked down with his Axe of the
Dwarvish Lords, this time slashing Ringman's right shoulder
cleanly enough to sever his right arm.
     Ringman screamed with pain, now shocked out of his stunned
condition.  The arm socket gushed blood, but it would stop before
he ran out.  He let go of the top strap of his shield and grabbed
his severed arm -- which still held his holy sword -- with his
remaining hand.  The shield flopped uselessly from his elbow as
he scrambled for his horse.
     "Hah!" Peter Perfect called after Ringman, shaking his
Dwarvish Hand Axe in his left hand and inadvertently switching it
to Battle-Axe length.  "Let's see you fight without your writing
arm!"
     Ringman made it to his horse and tried to mount up.  He had
to hold the arm between his chin and his chest to get on.
     "You're a wimp, Ringman!  A one-armed wimp!"
     Stowing the right arm between his legs, he grabbed the
reigns in his left hand and giddyapped out of there.  He was
grateful for those horseshoe-of-the-zephyr shock absorbers; any
jostles could have sent him tumbling.
     "Ringman has no writing arm!  Ringman has no writing arm! 
And he's got a chaotic-evil Disgusting Character for a son!"
Peter chided him.
     'First stop, Clerasil's place,' Ringman thought as his horse
accelerated.  'He'll probably be able to reconnect my writing
arm.  Well, Peter Perfect, at least it _is_ a writing arm now. 
What self-improvements have _you_ made during lo these past
years?'
                                #
     Knock knock knock.
     "Who is it?"
     "It's Ringman."
     A bit surprised, Clerasil got up from his desk and went to
the tremendous gothic double doors.  The man on the other side of
it had +5 plate mail, a beard, and a severed right arm.
     "My right arm's been cut off," Ringman said, just in case
Clerasil hadn't noticed.
     "My word," Clerasil inspected the limb, "That does look
rather nasty.  Er, come in, come in."
     Ringman came in.
     "Tell me, who did this to you?"
     Ringman stared at the ground.  "Peter Perfect."
     Clerasil gasped.  "The Disgusting paladin?  He's escaped? 
But how?"
     "He didn't _say_ how, only that he's been out for nine years
or so."
     Clerasil seemed to be in a mild state of shock.  "Well . . .
uh . . . it's true that we stopped visiting him after a while;
er, we got tired of ragging on him.  But escaped?  I don't
unders-- wait a minute.  That's right.  We stored all their magic
weapons in a vault two levels below The Dungeon.  He could have
made telepathic contact with his holy sword and had it hack its
way up to him."
     "So, in other words, you didn't even bother to eliminate his
psionic powers."
     "Oh, yes we did; we were very careful about that.  It just
so happens that his _sword_ has its own powers of telepathy that
we couldn't touch."
     Ringman put a hand to his chin.  "Oh yeah.  That's right,
Prometheus _was_ telepathic.  I guess Prome just didn't want to be
telepathic with _me_."
     Clerasil changed the subject.  "Let's reconnect that arm of
yours, shall we?"
     Ringman had practically forgotten about it.  "Oh, uh, sure,
sure."
     Clerasil exposed the severed flesh on the end of the arm and
pressed it up next to the stump on Ringman's shoulder.  Ringman
had thoughtfully tied a tourniquet over the open end of his
stump.  "You know, you're lucky you're a paladin here.  Your
disease resistance let you get away with this without getting
gangrene."
     Ringman folded his arm.  "And then you'd have to cast a cure
disease spell on me, right?"
     Clerasil didn't reply, he merely opened the tourniquet and
let little bits of blood leak through to the severed limb.  He
sprinkled holy water on it and began to chant: "Ooom, shalagoom,
shak shak.  Qui tolis veal pecata mundi, et in unum domino's
pizza, e pluribus uranium, semper ubi sub ubi.  BY THE POWER OF
GOD III, I COMMAND THIS LIMB -- REGENERATED!"
     The mighty hand of God III stretched its fingers through
Clerasil's body and touched Ringman's shoulder with its awesome
pinky.  He could start to feel sensations in his arm almost
immediately, and within a minute, the limb was whole again.  He
moved the joint and flexed the arm a bit.
     "Uh, thanks," Ringman said.
     "And since you're a paladin and have had to give away all
your excess wealth," Clerasil said, "I'm gonna let you keep that
regenerated limb for the low low price of only 15 000 gold
pieces."
     Ringman scowled at him.  "That's the _usual_ price; and
besides, I gave all but a little under 300 gold pieces away to
some amorphous lawful-good institution long ago."
     "Hmmm.  Well, considering how crucial a role you played in
vanquishing Omnion 'way back when, I'll let you have it on the
house.  Now good day."
     Clerasil indicated the front door of his church and turned
back to his desk.
     "Um," Ringman umed.
     "Yes, yes what is it now?"  Clerasil kept his back turned to
him.
     Ringman exhaled.  "Peter Perfect's out, and I'm no match for
him."
     "And I suppose you want me to just go charging out there and
bring him back to justice, right?  Sorry, no sale."
     "He's already done plenty of damage."
     "Yeah, I saw your arm.  Now go away."
     "That's not all.  He made a pact with Tiamat."
     Clerasil dropped his writing utensils and froze.  "Tiamat? 
The chromatic dragon?"
     Ringman chuckled, recalling his own reaction.  "Yes, Tiamat,
the chromatic dragon, the hellbound spawn of all evil dragonkind. 
Apparently he and Tiamat . . . um . . . 'implanted' some seed of
evil in my third child before he was born, and now he's a
chaotic-evil genociding machine at least twice as powerful as his
mother.  Or at least he has the potential to be one."
     "Now I _know_ I'm out of my league.  Sick Sword herself could
have creamed me if she'd been so inclined; any kid more powerful
than her could stomp me into a little grease spot before I had a
chance to cast a spell.  Sorry.  Uh, you _could_ try asking Wierd
Dough, though."
                                #
     Knock knock knock.
     "Come in."
     Ringman opened the door and stepped into just about the
biggest magical pyrotechnics display he'd seen.  Sparks showered
off the walls in all directions.  Jugglers juggled without using
their hands.  People whose faces were glued to instruction
manuals cast burning hands spells without looking where they were
pointing.  Several graduate-level pranksters, doubtlessly from
one of the half-elven fraternities, were casting fireball and
cone of cone spells at the same time, annihilating each others'
effects mere milliseconds before disaster would have struck.  And
this was just Wierd Dough's magic college's anteroom.
     "Ah, whom may I say is calling?" asked a third-level
apprentice who was seemingly unaware of the din going on around
him.
     "Ringman."
     "Ringman.  Lessee, Ringman, Ringman, Ringman -- that Ringman
with an 'R'?"
     "Uh, yes.  R-I-N-G-M-A-N.  One word."
     "Ring, Ringfield, Ringling, Ringworm -- nope, sorry, no
Ringman on my appointment list here."
     "Look, this is important, I have to see Wierd Dough.  It's a
matter of life and death."
     The conjurer apprentice stared at him coldly.  "The
chancellor sees no one without an appointment."
     Ringman opened his mouth to speak, but a stray lightning
bolt startled him and he had to begin again.  "Just tell Wierd
Dough that Ringman is here to see him.  He'll know who I am."
     The apprentice shook his head.  "What level are you,
anyway?"
     "Ninth."
     "Oh, and I suppose you think you can push everybody around
just because you're a sorcerer?  Well, listen here, bud--"
     "I'm not a sorcerer," Ringman folded his arms impatiently,
"I'm a paladin."
     The apprentice mouthed the word 'paladin,' and then
evidently something snapped and it All Made Sense.  "Ringman     
. . . the paladin.  RINGMAN THE PALADIN?!"
     The spell casting going on through the room stopped in mid-
syllable.  Everybody dropped what they were doing and looked. 
"_RINGMAN THE PALADIN_?!"
     The apprentice gawked, "The same Ringman the paladin who
defeated Omnion in the final battle of the I.U.D.C. at Crysglass
lake?"
     "Yes, the same Ringman the paladin.  Boy, for a character
class whose prime requisite is supposed to be intelligence, you
can sure be --"
     "_Welcome_ to Wierd Dough's college of magic, Ringman!  Won't
you have a seat, make yourself comfortable, can I get you a glass
of --"
     "No, no, no."  He was still impatient.  "I have to see Wierd
Dough.  It's a matter of life and death."
     "Whose?  Yours or his?"
     "Everybody's."
     Now just a tad more nervous, the apprentice ducked behind a
curtain and shouted to the next rung in the chain of command. 
Ringman could just barely hear the "Ringman wants to see Wierd
Dough," and the "Not _the_ Ringman!" issuing from beyond.
     Twenty-four seconds later, everything spun around and
suddenly he was elsewhere.  He was in a very dimly lit elsewhere,
as a matter of fact.  In the center of this dimly lit elsewhere
was a robed figure who illuminated his bearded face by holding a
handful of magic flame up to it.  "Welcome," the firelit face
said in a haunting tone, "What can I do for you?"
     "Can the theatrics, Wierd Dough.  This is serious."
     "Oh, all right," the figure acquiesced, and switched on the
light spells by snapping his fingers.  "You sure know how to
spoil other people's fun!"
     "Peter Perfect escaped from The Dungeon nine years ago."
     Wierd Dough rubbed his chin in thought.  "Hmmph.  I wouldn't
put it beyond him.  He probably made telepathic contact with
Prometheus and had the sword hack its way up through two levels,
then grabbed on to it and worked his way down to the magic items
chamber, took his own stuff and the Invulnerable Coat of Arnd as
a souvenir, rode his warhorse out of the complex, and sought
revenge against the lot of us.  Pity we stopped going there to
make funny faces at him, or we would've found out."
     "You _knew about how he made his escape all the time?!"
Ringman stammered.
     "You mean my guess was _right_?"
     "Yes!  Your guess was _exactly_ right!  Why didn't you think
of it before?!"
     Wierd Dough shrugged.  "I just never wondered about it
before.  Anyway, he couldn't have done much or we would've heard
about it."
     "He _has_ done quite a bit, but it's the type of stuff you
_don't_ hear about until it's too late.  He got some 'seed of
evil' from Tiamat and implanted it in Sick Sword's womb while she
was pregnant with my third child, Gross Sword."
     Wierd Dough grinned.  "The old sexual-implantation-of-the-
deity-spawned-seed-of-alignment-determination-in-a-womb-that-has-
an-unborn-child-in-it bit, eh?  I tried that once myself. 
Nothing much happened, though."
     "Yeah, well something happened _this_ time.  Gross Sword is
supposedly a couple times more powerful than Sick Sword herself;
he could probably bring Central Earth to its knees."
     Wierd Dough nodded solemnly.  "And you want me to help you
get rid of him, is that it?  No, it's not.  You want me to help
you vanquish Peter Perfect and _then_ do something about Gross
Sword.  Sorry, kiddo, but I know about how poor you paladins tend
to be.  No sale."
     "You want me to _pay_ you for ridding the world of those
menaces?"
     "Sure.  Running a college of magic is expensive stuff."
     "You could rob centaurs if you wanted money."
     Weird Dough looked up at the ceiling, whose distance was
distorted so that it appeared 5 feet above the floor.  "True, but
then I wouldn't be able to complain about how low we are on funds
over here.  How would it look to all the other colleges if mine
didn't desperately need more money?"
     "Don't you feel the least bit indebted to me for having
gotten rid of Omnion?"
     "Indebted for how much you participated in that campaign? 
Sure I am!  I'll cast a polymorph others spell on you at no cost,
if you want it!  But going back into action again is another
matter entirely.  You're better off trying Middle Monk; at least
his profession involves constant fighting."
                                #
     The instant Ringman stepped on the welcome mat in front of
the monastery, a fifteen-foot-diameter gong sounded on its own
and Chinese movie music issued from enchanted loudspeakers.  One
of the lesser disciples approached the front gate and bowed,
greeting the man in the +5 plate mail.  "Gleetings, most
honolable Lingman the paradin, wercome to our humbre monastely. 
How may we assist you?"
     "I need to see Middle Monk," he told him.  "It's --"
     "--A matter of Rife and Death.  It always is.  I wouldn't
berieve you if you welen't who you are.  Forrow me."
     Never unclasping his hands, the disciple led Ringman in
through a complicated maze of hanging gardens, beneath a row of
paper lanterns, past some statues with unpronounceable
monosyllabic names, and past a paper sliding door into the Main
Training Room.  Ringman was a little worried about the security
of this place until he noticed that the paper walls were made of
adamantite-woven paper.  Three rows of monks, each wearing a
white bathrobe and a different colored sash, were going through a
training exercise.
     "Ichi!" the one up in front shouted.  They all stepped
forward and thrust their right fists into imaginary opponents. 
"Ni!" he shouted again, and they did the same with their left
fists.  "San!" came the shout and the punch again.  "Chi!" issued
the cry and its consequent a fourth time.  "GO!"  This time, the
three rows yelled as they stepped forward and punched.
     Middle Monk, the one at the front of the group wearing a
black belt with several victory notches carved in it, caught
Ringman out of the corner of his eye.  Realizing who it was, he
dismissed his students with an impulsive "Yasumeh!" and walked
like a slob up to the man in armor.
     "Ringman, ol' buddy!"  Middle Monk slapped him on the back
with his full titan strength.  Being a monk, his strength did no
extra damage, but it sure toppled the paladin.  "Long time no
see!  Whatcha been up to?  Can I get you a Coke or a Pepsi?"
     "Uh, Coke?  Pepsi?  Um, are those some oriental --"
     "Uh, no, no, never mind.  So," he began to walk alongside
Ringman, "What brings ya to these parts?  Wanna be a monk and be
easier to hit than a first-level illusionist?  Or do ya just need
a new magic bo stick?"
     "No, it's a bit more serious than that.  Peter Perfect
escaped."
     "No!  Really?  Wow, that's intense.  He wanted to go
surfing, right?"
     "He escaped nine years ago."
     Middle Monk stopped bantering for a few seconds, which was
about the longest time he could be relied upon to be banter-
proof.  Then: "Well, that cat probably would've gotten out some
time anyway.  Not much trouble he can cause."
     "Oh no?  He made a bargain with Tiamat so that my son, Gross
Sword, is just as chaotic and evil as my two daughters are lawful
and good.  And my blacksheep son is more powerful than anything
that's come before.  He could take on the entire I.U.D.C. and win
if they were still around."
     "Including Omnion?"
     "Including Omnion."
     "Oh."  Middle Monk grimaced a bit.  "Wow.  Gee.  Awesome. 
Tubular.  Cosmic.  Like, what's he done so far?"
     "Nothing that I'm aware of, but at any moment he could
decide to kill Bahamut or something."
     "I thought Weird Dough killed Bahamut for the experience
points," Middle said, then recalled:  "Oh, yeah, that's right. 
That was only a Bahamut android, programmed to act like him in
every detail."
     "Both that damned Peter Perfect and my multiple-deity-
powered son are running around loose, and there's no way I can
deal with them on my own."
     "Mmmm, so you want me to help.  I catch your drift.  Um, I
don't think that's such a hot idea, what with my armor class
being higher than negative 17 and all.  I mean, one hit and that
kid of yours could do . . . uh . . . how much damage did you say
he could do in one blow?"
     "I didn't say, but from what I've heard, over three hundred
points.  Times five if he hits you from the rear."
     "YEEESH!  I only have 104 hit points myself!  Um, take care
of yourself, man, but I've got my temple to attend to.  Why don't
you try Wierd Dough?"
     "Already tried him."
     "Hmmm.  Then Cleras-- no, that cleric wouldn't get involved
for all the holy water in the Specific Ocean."
     "Yes, I know," Ringman added coldly.
     "Then your best bet is Koenieg the Great Druid.  He lives in
the Great Big Forest surrounded by some large menhirs -- er,
standing stones -- that are supposed to predict eclipses and
things."
                                #
     Ringman could have sworn he'd gotten the address right.  He
was in the Great Big Forest, 5 leagues north of the Really Huge
Falls, twelve furlongs east of the Vastly Hugely Mind-bogglingly
Wide River, standing right in front of the Ring of Large Menhirs. 
He should have seen _some_ druidic activity by now.
     It was then that the bottom fell out of the universe beneath
him.  Screaming, he fell in a direction that was the fifth-
dimensional equivalent of down, and landed five feet away from
the center of the Ring of Large Menhirs.  From this angle, he
could easily see the nine initiates of the 9th Circle mulling
about and Koenieg the Great Druid seated in lotus position at the
center.
     "Oh, I get it," Ringman commented, "I can only see you from
_inside_ the menhir ring."
     "Naw," one of the 11th-level initiates told him, "That ring
of stones out there in the Great Big Forest is just a decoy.  The
ring you're in now is in a parallel universe.  It keeps the
salesmen out."
     A wave of mistletoe from the center caught Ringman's
attention.  Koenieg addressed him: "Welcome, Ringman, to the Tree
of the Universe."
     Ringman didn't see any trees around, but he had more
pressing matters to worry about.  "I'm here to --"
     "Enlist my help in vanquishing the escaped Peter Perfect and
your blacksheep son.  Yes, I know; Middle Monk sent me a
Telepagram.  I believe his words were 'Watch out for this one. 
He's a loo-loo.'"
     Ringman exhaled.  "Well, that was _his_ answer.  What's
yours?"
     Koenieg went off into alpha state for a few milliseconds,
then came back with: "No."
     "Why not?" Ringman asked, even though he knew it was futile
to try and talk a 14th-level druid out of anything.
     "The tree of the universe spreads like a golden path upon
the well-spring of Life.  He who can pick its fruits and not be
cast down the dark pit will know ultimate wisdom.  If Buddha
tripped and fell while nobody else was around, would he make a
sound?  He who always finds fault in his friends has faulty
friends.  A penny saved is a penny earned.  A bird in the hand is
worth two in the bush.  A stitch in time saves --"
     "Okay, OKAY, I get the message!  Sheish!"  He looked out
through the menhirs and saw only swirling darkness.  "Uh, can I
get back to the Prime Material plane now?"
     "Certainly.  Just click your heels together three times and
say, 'There's no place like home, there's no place like home'."
     Burying his face in his hands, Ringman grudgingly tapped the
heels of his high hard boots together and meekly chanted,
"There's no place like home, there's no place like home."
     And while Ringman had his eyes closed, Koenieg cast some
obscure plane transport spell on him so that he would think he'd
gone back to Central Earth under his own power.
     Of course, Ringman wasn't _that_ stupid, but he was glad to
be back on Central Earth again.  Well, sort-of glad.  Oh, all
right, he could barely stomach the thought of living on the same
planet with Peter Perfect and his killing machine son.  And he
hadn't even seen his killing machine son yet.
     "Yep," Ringman told his warhorse as he mounted up to ride
off, "There's no place like home."
                                #
     Clerasil had refused to help.  Wierd Dough had refused to
help.  Middle Monk had refused to help.  Even Koenieg the Great
Druid had declined his services.  The only anti-disgusting
character left was Melnic the Loud, and that bard would almost
certainly not get involved.
     The instant he stepped on the welcome mat in front of
Melnic's Ollamh college, he realized it was a telepad.  That was
because everything around him had suddenly congealed and
deposited him in the middle of the college's courtyard.  He found
himself surrounded by raucous, noisy, semi-drunk Ollamh bards,
some pure human and some half-elven, who upon his arrival began
strumming away at their lutes (a few had genuine Anstruth or
Ollamh harps) and singing:

     "Welcome, Ringman, to our fancy-pants abode!
      Ringman, the paladin, whose tale is still told
      Of how he vanquished Omnion to the realm of burning cold;
      Ringman, Ringman, aren't you getting too old?"

     "Uh, hi, guys," Ringman said wanly.
     "YAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYY!!!"
     Melnic the Loud emerged from the middle of the crowd,
strummed his Ollamh Banjo, shifted his Recorder of Ye'Cind into
overdrive, and sang a fast little ditty that sounded very much
like Haydn's g minor symphony (except that Haydn hadn't been
invented yet):

     "From days of long ago a legend down to us has come,
      Or maybe it was Wierd Dough's mind that this message comes
          from;
      'Tis said that Peter Perfect had escaped his cell of late,
      And went to Hell to make a pact with Tiamat the great.

      And from his loins an evil seed in Sick Sword he did spray
      To make an evil child nine years ago this very day;
      And now he's tough, so all we'll say
      Is singing, singing, singing, singing, ye-e-e-e-e-es,
          . . . we are!"

     And all the other bards joined in and repeated the refrain:
"And now he's tough, so all we'll say / Is singing, singing,
singing, singing, ye-e-e-e-e-es, . . . we are!"  STRUM. 
Stru-dummmmmm.
     Ringman rolled his eyes up into his head.  That last line
didn't even fit in the context of the song.
     "We know that last line doesn't fit within the context of
the song," Melnic the Loud admitted in recitative, "But it's
. . . a tradition."
     "Well, for one thing, HE didn't make that child, I did. 
Gross Sword is my son just as much as he is Sick Sword's.  Peter
Perfect only . . . 'sprayed' . . . a little Tiamatish evilness
onto him a bit later."
     "OoooOOOOOOooooohhhhhhh," everybody sang.
     "So you probably already know that I need to enlist some
help.  I can't stop Peter Perfect and Gross Sword on my own. 
Melnic the Loud, will you --"
     "Well, er, I, um, that is, uh . . . I've got this college to
run, see?"
     Ringman folded his arms and shook his head.  "So did Wierd
Dough."
     "Good.  Then you'll understand."
     "I know why you're declining," Ringman said, "But I don't
think I'll ever understand."
     Ringman turned his back to Melnic and started to walk away,
then noticed all the 20th+ level Ollamh bards around him.  "Any
of you bards want to help me?"
     "Grumble grumble grumble grumble," they grumbled, suddenly
becoming concerned about their studies.
     Ringman walked slowly toward the telepad marked "MAIN EXIT"
at one side of the courtyard.  This had been his last shot. 
There was no one else he could turn to.
     'Oh well,' he tried to console himself, 'I've had to go it
on my own before.'
                                #
     Gross Sword scratched a few dark magic symbols into the
ground around Sick Sword's keep's clearing.  He couldn't stand
his sickening mother or his two goody-goody sisters.  He had
tried to wish them away once before, but they'd all made their
saving throws and a wish spell probably would have sent _him_ away
instead anyway.  Luckily they hadn't found out about that, so
they didn't vent any retribution upon him.
     He spied a squirrel scurrying up a nearby tree.  He hated
squirrels.  They were so cute and cuddly he wanted to throw up. 
He took out his Gross Hand Axe, whirled it around as though it
were a 5-ton war hammer, and let fly at the critter.  The
squirrel was instantly felled, frozen, burnt, wounded,
dismembered, poisoned, level-drained, hacked to bits, and finally
stunned by the axe's clap of thunder.  Sick Sword would
doubtlessly hear the noise, just like she always did, that bitch.
     "Gross Sword!" called his mother's voice from within the
keep.  "Are you killing squirrels again?!"
     "Yes, mother," he replied.
     "How many times have I told you not to do that?!"
     "Fifty-seven, counting now," he called back.  God IV, how he
hated Sick Sword.
     "Well, don't do it again!  How do you ever expect to make it
on Central Earth if you just go around killing things
indiscriminantly?!"
     Gross Sword shook with rage.  "All right, mother, THAT'S
IT!!"  He opened up one of his portable holes and took out a
tubeful of disappearing dust.  He spread the dust over his entire
body in the blink of an eye, and was gone from sight.  "YOU'RE
DEAD MOTHER!  DO YOU HEAR ME?!  _YOU'RE DEAD_!!!"
     "YOUREDEADyouredeadyouredead . . ." echoed his cry from
every distant mountain.  Disgusting Sword and Ridiculous Sword
looked up in alarm.  "That's it," Ridiculous Sword commented,
"He's making his move.  Come on, we'd better stop him."
     Their helms of teleportation glowed purple for a moment, and
they emerged at their mother's keep two leagues away.
     The town heard the thunderous cry as well.  Ringman, from
the top precipice of his house (which was actually a small
castle), heard the thunder's words and knew who the voice had to
belong to.  These were the first words he'd ever heard his son
say, and they frightened him down to his kidneys.  After all
she'd done to him, he still loved Sick Sword deeply, and now his
Tiamat-infected son was about to kill her and there wasn't a
damned thing he could do about it.
     Except dash for his warhorse and ride like lightning to Sick
Sword's keep, that is.
     Sick Sword zipped over to her portal spell -- er, window --
and saw the dust-of-disappearance-covered killer urchin trodding
through the front drawbridge of the keep at a rather alarming 40
feet per second.  The old cover-yourself-with-dust-of-
disappearance-and-cast-a-light-spell-directly-on-Sick-Sword's-
robe-of-eyes-to-blind-it-for-one-to-three-minutes-so-that-even-
her-permanent-detect-invisibility-spell-can't-see-you-and-you-
can-sneak-up-on-her-from-behind-and-backstab-her-for-quintuple-
damage trick; Omnion had tried that on her twice before, and had
succeeded the first time and nearly succeeded the second.  Sick
Sword knew what to do; all she had to do was spray him with dust
of appearance when he first showed up.  Now, where had she put
her dust tubes?
     The Sword sisters arrived just in time to see their evil
brother dart into the keep covered in dust of disappearance. 
They both knew this maneuver well; it was the only known way of
handling a really disgusting character.  Without even having to
use ESP on each other, they rushed in after him.
     Ringman rode hard and fast.  Very fast.  He'd equipped his
warhorse with horseshoes of speed and secured them in place with
an outer layer of horseshoes of the zephyr.  His horse could move
at double speed without tiring; and for some reason, right now it
was going two feet per second faster than that.  That would get
him there in time, he assured himself.  Of course it would.
     With a flick of his middle finger, Gross Sword knocked down
the solid adamantite door to Sick Sword's room.  His mother was
ready for him; she uncapped her tube of appearing dust and blew
at her son through the other end.
     That would have worked perfectly, had not Gross Sword also
been prepared.  For the last fifteen seconds, he'd been chanting,
gesticulating, and fiddling with a legume seed behind that locked
door; and now, having carefully integrated the flicking-down-the-
door maneuver into his somatic components, he released his spell,
blowing the spoilsport dust right back to its owner with a strong
gust of wind.  And since his artifact bracer allowed him to cast
simultaneous spells, he followed that gust of wind up with a
light spell thrown directly on Sick Sword's robe of eyes.
     Disgusting Sword and Ridiculous Sword had a clear line of
sight from the splintered drawbridge through the knocked-down
adamantite bedroom door to their blinded mother and her unseen
adversary.  He'd succeeded; she didn't manage to coat him with
dust of appearance in time.  "Get out of there, mom!" Disgusting
Sword and Ridiculous Sword shouted as they charged across the
foyer.  "Teleport!"
     Ringman could see the edge of the clearing through trees
blurred by speed.  Within that clearing lay the unmistakable
silhouette of her keep.  This was not the same clearing they'd
lived in together -- it was instead where the keep had first
materialized -- but it may as well have been.  There were
hundreds of bushes, trees, and leaf piles that could hide Sick
Sword and Gross Sword, if they weren't inside the keep.  Only
because that terrifying "YOU'RE DEAD!" sounded like it had come
from this particular spot did he ride here at all.  He changed
course ever-so-slightly and headed for the keep; he could only
hope that they were in fact in there.
     'My own son,' Sick Sword thought.  'How could I have misled
myself this far?'
     She didn't teleport.  She didn't look from side to side in
panic.  She didn't try to find another container of dust of
appearance.  She didn't even pick up her Sick Sword from the far
wall.  She just stood there and regretted her fate.
     'The bitch always was a pushover,' Gross Sword thought, and
rammed his Gross Dagger through her heart from behind.
     Disgusting Sword and Ridiculous Sword both saw the phantom
form impale their mother.  They both cringed in horror as she
convulsed and fell over dead.  Disgusting Sword involuntarily
dropped her Disgusting Longsword, which clanked noisily against
the stone floor.  As Gross Sword shook off the disappearing
faerie dust, he trumpeted an evil, victorious chortle that sent
shivers though both the still-approaching Ringman and his horse.
     He was still chortling when he left the prime material plane
six seconds later.
     "My God II," Disgusting Sword cried as she knelt beside her
dead mother.  "He wasn't supposed to _get_ this far!"  Her fists
clenched as her throat tightened up and wavered.  "We were
supposed to stop him first!!"
     Ridiculous Sword nervously looked at Disgusting Sword, then
at Sick Sword's body, then at Gross Sword's footprints in pile of
invisible dust he'd just shaken off, then back at Sick Sword's
body, then back at Gross Sword's footprints.  "I'm going after
him," she resolved.
     "But how will you know where he is?!" Disgusting Sword
demanded.
     "There's only one place he could have gone," Ridiculous
Sword replied.  "What's the matter, have you forgotten Standard
Evil Operating Procedure number twenty-six?  After an evil person
kills someone who's lawful-good, he or she goes to Heaven to
permanently destroy the soul!"
     Disgusting Sword just stared back at her and continued
breathing hard.
     "Well, don't just stand there, start a raise dead spell on
her!"
     "Oh," she blurted.  "Oh yeah."  She took out a white-with-
blue-striped generic holy symbol and began chanting and
gesticulating.
     "I only hope I can reach him in time," Ridiculous Sword
mumbled, flicked the switch or her amulet of the planes, and went
to Heaven.
     Ringman double-parked his horse by the keep's entrance,
jumped off, and rushed in through the door.  Without his bulky
adamantite-alloyed plate mail to hinder him, he could run a whole
1% faster.  He saw Disgusting Sword kneeling over Sick Sword's
body chanting a now-all-too-familiar raise dead spell, gasped,
and continued to rush forward.  He had been right; damn it, that
_had_ been Gross Sword's deadly chortle.  His old love was dead.
     He knelt beside Sick Sword opposite Disgusting Sword and
drew his holy avenger.  Solemnly lining up the point with one of
the spaces between the floor stones, he forced the blade three
inches down into the floor.  The upside-down sword now resembled
a cross, the ancient symbol for death.  He clasped the grip of
the longsword and reclined his forehead against his hands,
closing his eyes.  Silently, he prayed to his deity for Sick
Sword's survival.
                                #
     "Pardon me," Ridiculous Sword asked an angel-initiate
passer-by.  "Did you happen to see a --"
     She noticed a double-file path of dead angels littering the
yellow brick road that lead through the pearly gates.
     "Oh.  Never mind."
     She got a running start and then kicked in her artifacts. 
With all the times she'd taken major benign power "O: double
movement speed on foot," she'd multiplied her running speed by 2,
4, 8, 16, 32, all the way up to 64.  She could now run 12 288
yards in six seconds flat.
     Tiptoeing over the dead angels at a mere 6144 yards-per-six-
seconds, she reached the pearly gates.  She addressed the toll
booth.  "Saint Peter, you've got to let me in!  There's a --"
     And then she noticed that the trail of angel-initiates
weren't the only casualties around here.  Saint Peter had been
killed over a decade ago by Omnion, and now even his replacement,
Saint Paul, lay in a desiccated heap.
     'Guess I don't need his permission to enter, then,'
Ridiculous Sword thought, and charged in after Gross Sword.
     Sick Sword felt a sickening lump of deja vu form in her
stomach.  Here she was, perched on the boarding steps of a Trans
Heavenly Airlines concorde SST, unarmed and about to get
CuisinArted by a ruthless, evil foe.  She didn't much like being
in this position when Omnion was bearing down on her, and she
certainly didn't like the idea of getting eternally wiped out by
her own son.  She had seen this coming and had finished a contact
other plane spell several seconds ago, in case the worst were to
happen, and that didn't reassure her one bit.  So she did the
only thing she could: she started psionically telekinesing Gross
Sword and hoped that she'd be raised from the dead in time.
     Gross Sword held up Card Number 8 from The Villains
Collection of Commonly Used Sayings.  It read: "Hah, you puny
mortal fool!  Your powers of telekinesis are no match for my
permanent potion of flying at twice normal strength!"
     Sick Sword raised her eyebrows momentarily at the idea that
such a card could actually be a _commonly_ used saying, and
continued concentrating.  Card Number 8 was right; during the
first minute of concentration, her teke could only reduce his
flight speed by four percent.  She couldn't teleport, either;
teleportation involved using the astral plane for quick transit. 
Since she was dead, she was bound to the plane of Heaven and to
that plane only; she couldn't leave Heaven for another hundred
years.
     Ridiculous Sword wished she _had_ asked somebody for
directions now, even if it was only some cherubim-in-training. 
She was lost.  Every yellow brick road looked the same.  There
wasn't so much as a map pointing out "You are here," or a sign
saying "New angel recruits -->".  Saint Peter or Saint Paul sure
could have told her where Sick Sword had gone, yessireebob, but
for all her Disgusting powers there was no way she could locate
Sick Sword's spirit while it still had that %$!@#* mind blank
spell up!  Why couldn't Sick Sword have relied on her amulet of
life protection just for today?!
     Gross Sword drifted closer by the millisecond.  Sick Sword
was doomed, and she knew it.  Well, she might not be able to
leave Heaven, but she could bloody well still transmit her
thoughts through the contact-other-plane link she'd opened less
than a minute before.  If she was going to be annihilated, she
had to round out one last thing first. . . .
     "Ringman!" Sick Sword's voice echoed in Ringman's mind.
     "What?" he sat upright.  "Sick Sword?!"
     He glanced at Disgusting Sword.  His outburst had not
disturbed her prayer.
     Ringman could feel her presence almost as much as if she
were still alive.  He could feel the quavering fear, the
encroaching doom in her telepathic voice.  He could almost see
his own son bearing down on her with his adamantite dagger and
broadsword.
     "Ringman, you were right," the voice said.  "You were so
right, there _is_ no need for Disgusting Characters on Central
Earth anymore!  I should never have turned our children into
killing machines!"
     "Sick Sword," he clutched his face as he said it, "No, no! 
Don't let this be the end!  I still love you with all my heart!"
     "My love," she replied, and her voice sounded more final
than ever, "Ringman, I'm sorry. . . . I'm so, so sorry."
     A choking sensation cut across the telepathic ether, and her
transmission ended.  Ringman neither spake nor moved.
     "NO!" Ridiculous Sword shouted to Gross Sword when she at
last reached the scene, but too late.  Before she could get any
of her spells off, before even the quickest of her psionic
disciplines kicked in -- before there was any way she could beat
him to the punch -- Gross Sword impaled his mother's ghost on his
Gross Dagger and channeled enough damage into it from his Other
Bracer of Irresistible Damage to vaporize her.  Her phantasmal
form twinkled for an instant, and then dispersed itself back into
the cosmic ocean from whence it came.
     Disgusting Sword finished her prayer, pointed her right
index finger at Sick Sword's corpse's neck, and let her arm
recoil slightly.  The standard raise dead spark flashed on her
fingertip, but it wasn't echoed by the body at all.
     Disgusting Sword's mouth dropped open in disbelief.  Ringman
had already known for the last several seconds that it wouldn't
work anyway.  It was all over.
     Gross Sword smiled chaotic-evilly at Ridiculous Sword,
guffawed a hideous laugh, and left the plane of Heaven. 
Ridiculous Sword couldn't find him now unless he wanted to be
found.
     Ringman buried his face in his hands and started to shake. 
His fingertips grappled with his temples.  Then, not caring if
Disgusting Sword or Ridiculous Sword or the whole town heard him,
he tore his hands away and screamed as loudly as he could.
     "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!"
     "Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!" wailed the first echo.
     "Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah," cried the second.
     "Aaaaaaaaah . . ." whispered the third.
     The silence that followed was thunderous.  It took Ringman a
long while to break down and sob.
     'The poor man,' Disgusting Sword thought.  'It must really
be hard on him.'







                            PART TWO

     "Portable hole," Disgusting Sword read off the inventory
sheet.
     "Check," Ridiculous Sword replied, taking the folded piece
of black hyperdimensional cloth from Sick Sword's bureau and
stowing it in a trunk.
     "Second portable hole."
     "Check."  Ridiculous Sword did the same to this facsimile.
     "Fifty containers of dust of disappearance."
     "Tentwentythirtyfortyfifty -- check."
     "Ring of earth elemental command."
     Ridiculous Sword pulled the ring from Sick Sword's finger
and threw it into the trunk.  "Check.  Ringman, you sure you
don't want any of this stuff?"
     "Huh, what?" Ringman awoke from his stupor.  "Oh, no, no,
I've got my limit as a paladin.  Can't have more than four non-
armor non-shield non-weapon magic items, you know."
     Disgusting Sword shrugged.  "We've never gone by that
stipulation."
     "You also got this way via robbing centaurs," Ringman noted. 
"Sorry, that lifestyle's not for me."
     "Suit yourself.  Ring of water elemental command."
     "Check."  The ring made a "ting" as it landed in the trunk.
     "Plus six dagger of wounding."
     "Check."
     "Plus six bastard sword of wounding."
     "Check."
     "Mace of Cuthbert."
     "Check.  Hey, you think one of us ought to use that?"
     Disgusting Sword pondered the idea.  They _were_ both lawful-
good clerics with strengths of 18 or more, after all.  "Well,
we'll see.  Maybe later.  Hammer of thunderbolts."
     "Check."
     "Arrow of slaying lawful-evil half-elven fighter/magic-
user/thieves."
     "Check."
     "Plus five longbow."
     "Check."
     "Helm of brilliance."
     Sick Sword's lifeless head lolled gently up, then down, as
Ridiculous Sword took its bejewelled helmet off.  Ringman
couldn't bear to look anymore.  "Check."
     "Helm of teleportation."
     She took the helmet underneath the first off her head. 
"Check."
     "Helm of telepathy."
     She took the third helmet off her head.  "Check."
     "Amulet of life protection."
     Ridiculous Sword moved to the bureau and took out a charm-
on-a-chain.  Sick Sword hadn't needed the amulet's limited
psionic protection when her now-artifact sword had given her
total immunity to _all_ forms of mental or psionic attack.  And
despite its namesake, Ridiculous Sword reassured herself, the
amulet of life protection wouldn't have done any good against
Gross Sword anyway.  "Check."
     "Reverse eyes of petrification."
     Ridiculous Sword covered the spectacles with her hand so as
not to look at them.  "Check."
     "Sphere of annihilation."
     Ridiculous Sword calmly chucked the black ball of
nothingness into the trunk.  "Check."
     "Wand of negation."
     _This_ item she was more careful with.  "Check."
     And the list went on and on.  Altogether, 10 magic wands, 20
magic rings, 150 containers of magic dust, 3 magic helmets, 3
magic pairs of gauntlets, 17 magic ioun stones, 3 magic staves,
13 non-artifact magic weapons, and 45 other miscellaneous magic
items completed the inventory of the late Sick Sword's magic item
arsenal.
     "And last but certainly not least," Disgusting Sword
finished the list, "The Sick Sword."
     "I AM THE SICK SWORD," the Sick Sword bellowed as Ridiculous
Sword grabbed it.
     "Oh, pipe down," Ridiculous Sword silenced it.  "Check."
     She was about to toss it in the trunk, but she stopped
herself.  "You know, this weapon right here could do a lot of
good in the right hands.  Ringman, are you _sure_ you --"
     Ringman backed away emphatically.  "Even if I did have room
for it on my inventory, which I most definitely do not, you
understand, I am _not_ going to touch that sword again!"
     Ridiculous Sword let the sword fall and put her hands on her
hips.  "Hey, wait a minute.  You have four magic weapons, right?"
     "Yeah, that's right.  My holy sword, my +3 hand axe, my +1
bow and +1 and +3 arrows, and my --"
     "And you have one suit of magic armor and one magic shield,
right?"
     "Well, yeah, but I was in too much of a hurry to put them on
when I heard Gross Sw--"
     "And what other magic items do you have?"
     "Well, there's my ring of shooting stars," he counted _one_
on his fingers, "My +3-in-a-5-foot-radius ring of protection," he
counted two, "My +3 periapt of proof against poison," he counted
three, "And my . . . and, my . . . my . . . uh . . ."  His voice
trailed off.
     "You don't have a fourth magic item, do you?"  Ridiculous
Sword chuckled.  "Ha!  You'd been hauling around those two magic
potions for so long that you forgot when you used them that they
freed up _two_ slots on your inventory."
     "Oh, I remembered that, all right," Ringman defended
himself, "It's just that I've been --"
     "So preoccupied with the rest of the things going on in your
life you forgot about it," Ridiculous Sword finished the sentence
for him.  "Well, now I'm reminding you.  You _can_ have one more
magic item in your care."  She indicated the overflowing trunk. 
"Well, now's your chance to pick one.  These things might never
get used again otherwise."
     "No, no, I couldn't, I'm --"
     "Afraid of taking anything that once belonged to your true
love."
     Ringman grimaced.  "Well, yes, because then --"
     "You'd feel like a vampire."
     "WILL you stop doing that?!  Just because you can read my
mind doesn't mean I want you to!"
     Ridiculous Sword nodded solemnly.  "Sorry about that.  I
guess all the experience points in Central Earth wouldn't teach
me respect."
     "Anyhow," Disgusting Sword reached into the trunk, "How
about her old helm of brilliance?"
     "I already told you, I don't want --"
     "Oh, come come now.  It'll protect you like a double
strength ring of fire resistance, it'll glow pale blue whenever
undead are around, this pale blue glow'll do 1-6 points of damage
to the undead per minute, you can produce flame at will, it'll
turn your holy sword into a holy sword of flame, and you can fire
up to ten prismatic sprays, twenty walls of fire, thirty
fireballs, and forty light spells."
     Ringman rubbed his fuzzy chin.  This magic item _did_ seem
awfully useful.  "Uh . . . uh, no.  No, I couldn't.  Really."
     "Then how about this handy-dandy girdle of titan strength?" 
She held up the harness and added temptingly, "Plus 7 to-hit,
plus 14 to dam-age!"
     Hmmm, he thought.  Compared to the normal +2 to-hit and +5
to damage that his 18/92 strength allotted him, 25 strength would
certainly be an improvement.  He recalled how much he'd enjoyed
being super strong after imbibing that storm giant potion for the
final battle against the IUDC, and that only gave him 24
strength.  But that was only a power trip, he realized.  "No.  No
super strength for me.  There's enough of that in Central Earth."
     Disgusting Sword shrugged.  "Suit yourself.  Hey, then how
about a wand of negation?  One zap from this wand can instantly
neutralize any magic item it's pointed at 3/4 of the time.  Or,
in the same vein, a rod of cancellation might do wonders for you. 
It can instantly drain an item of all its magic powers just by
touching it."
     "They _would_ be useful against Peter Perfect and his ilk. 
Listen, I'll tell you, one of the reasons I'm reluctant to take a
fourth magic item is that my warhorse already has horseshoes of
the zephyr and horseshoes of speed.  I'd feel a little guilty if
--"
     "And you'd feel a little _stupid_ if having that one extra
magic item could have saved your skin the next time you clash
with Peter Perfect," Ridiculous Sword butted in.  "Besides,
didn't you used to have a carpet of flying?"
     "That was a _very_ long time ago.  I got rid of that years
before I even met Sick Sword.  And I have a fast warhorse
anyway."
     "Hey," Disgusting Sword resumed, "How about a rod of lordly
might?"
     "Doesn't that count as a weapon?"
     "Not if the Dungeon Master isn't looking."
     Ringman covered his eyes with his hands and shook his head.
     "Her old amulet of life protection would make you immune to
psionic blasts, and that's the only psionic attack mode that can
affect you.  Or that amulet of proof against detection and
location would keep the bad guys from finding out where you were. 
Or . . ."
     Ringman wasn't listening anymore.  He was lost in thought. 
'That helm of brilliance sounds marvelous.  Wearing that would be
like being a fire god.  But . . . titan strength, the ability to
lift and carry 1500 pounds without even straining, smash open
locked doors 9 times out of 10, successfully bend bars and lift
gates 110% of the time, and get +7 to hit and +14 to damage.'  He
rolled the words around in his head.  "Plus 7 to hit and plus 14
to damage.  Mmmmm.  +7 to-hit/+14 damage.
     "WHAT am I SAYING!" he suddenly blurted out.  Disgusting
Sword stopped rattling off item names.  Ringman hyperventilated. 
"Look, I can't get involved in any power trips, no matter how
tempting."
     "Don't tell me you actually think your code of paladinhood
prohibits that sort of thing!"
     "No, no, no, power trips . . . power trips got the I.U.D.C.
together in the first place.  Power trips turned Gross Sword to
chaos and evil.  I don't want that to keep on happening to
people, least of all to me."  He grasped his holy sword by the
hilt, which was still stuck point-first in one of the gaps
between the stones in the floor, and pulled it out.
     Or at least he tried to pull his sword out.  It wouldn't
budge.
     "Oh, come _on_, holy avenger, we've been through this before. 
You're not sentient.  You weren't forged by a wizard who looked
like a red push-button telephone receiver.  So stop playing that
sword-in-the-stone bit and come on out."
     He yanked again.  The few inches of the blade still stuck in
the masonry still refused to give.
     "Maybe it likes being Sick Sword's tombstone," Disgusting
Sword suggested.
     "We're gonna move Sick Sword anyway," Ringman said as he
strained with the stubborn longsword.  "She'd stink up the keep
if we didn't bury her.  And we can't exactly cremate her while
that permanent potion of fire resistance at 150% effectiveness is
still in effect on her.  Oh, stop playing dead, you stupid sword,
_let go_!"
     Ringman exhaled and dropped to his knees.  It seemed there
was only one way to get it out.  "Pretty please?" he pleaded with
the sword.
     The holy avenger leapt from its place in the floor into
Ringman's right hand.  Ringman shook his head in tired disbelief.
     Ridiculous Sword eyed the holy sword warily.  "Are you sure
that sword's not sentient?"
     "Sure I'm sure.  It's never so much as throbbed at me for
the whole time I've owned it, and Peter Perfect _said_ it was an
ordinary holy sword."
     "Lemme have it for a few minutes."
     Ringman shrugged.  "Okay."  He handed her the sword.  "What
are you going to do."
     She held the sword in her right hand, took out a scroll
she'd had specially scribed for just such an occasion, and read
the runes from the page.  The scroll looked like it would take a
while to read.
     "She's identifying it," Disgusting Sword told him.  "The
identify spell itself takes ten minutes to cast, but she can pick
up one property of your holy sword every six seconds after that."
     "Oh."
     "Say, what weapon do you use in your off hand?"
     "You mean, what's in my left hand when I'm wielding my holy
sword?" Ringman replied.  "My shield, of course."
     "No, I mean, what do you use in your left hand when you're
_not_ using your shield."
     "Oh.  Well, when Peter Perfect splintered my old +4 shield I
had to use my magic hand axe in my left hand."
     "I see.  And just how magic is your hand axe?"
     "Plus three.  Why?"
     "Well, you can use a dagger, right?"
     "Well, yeah, I have --"
     "So why not trade that old +3 hand axe in for Sick Sword's
+6 dagger of wounding?"
     Ringman opened his mouth in a half-stupor.  "A plus . . .
six . . . dagger . . . of wounding?" he whispered.  Then, in his
normal voice: "Hmmph, it's bad enough she was ever able to buy
such a weapon in the first place.  Can you imagine me walking
around with a pure adamantite dagger that leaves unhealable
wounds?"
     "And . . . you're sure you won't want that girdle of titan
strength?"
     Ringman stood up and put his hands behind his back.  "I
think," he mused as he strolled toward the window, "That I would
rather take in the view of the surrounding forest than wear a
girdle of titan strength."
     Disgusting Sword glared at him out of the corner of her eye. 
"Are you sure you're really our father?"
     Ringman glanced solemnly over his shoulder at her, and after
a few seconds replied, "Are you sure you're really my kids?"
     He looked out over the fields in the late-afternoon sun for
a long time, never so much as flinching.  Never so much as
looking back at his first daughter, whom his last question had
hurt.  It was only Ridiculous Sword's voice ten minutes later
that broke him out of his trance.
     "I think I've found something," she said, putting the sword
down.  She would have been quite exhausted had not that spell
come from a scroll instead of herself.
     "Oh?" Ringman turned toward her, only half-interested.
     "Your sword has no intelligence in the usual sense of sword
intellect.  However, it is sentient, in a way."  She handed the
holy avenger back to Ringman.
     Confused, Ringman carefully took the sword in both hands. 
He viewed it in a totally different light now.  "How . . . is it
sentient?"
     "It has one special power, in addition to being a run-of-
the-mill +5 holy longsword."
     'Run-of-the-mill holy sword?' Ringman thought.  "Um, what
power is that?"
     "If you embed it in stone, it won't come back out unless you
say, 'Pretty please'."
                                #
     Ringman rode rather slowly back to his own castle. 
Disgusting Sword and Ridiculous Sword could straighten things out
at his late girlfriend's keep on their own.
     His holy sword hung from his belt as it had on that hurried
journey over there.  He had firmly decided not to take any magic
items from Sick Sword's inventory home with him, so there was no
helm of brilliance capping his head or girdle of titan strength
circumscribing his waist.  However, there was one charge of Sick
Sword's that he did feel obliged to look after, and it sat on the
saddle behind him.
     "My master's gone," the brownie sobbed.  It had taken a long
time for him to get over the shock of having the mental cord
between himself and Sick Sword snap apart.  Familiars always took
a while to recover from the loss of their master.  Now his crying
had subsided to a gentle evening shower in the middle of the
forest.
     "I know how you feel," Ringman commented.  "Believe me, I
know how you feel, . . . uh, what's your name?"
     The half-pixie dried one of his eyes with his index finger. 
"Sick Sword always called me 'the brownie'."
     "She . . . she never even asked you your name?"
     "Naah, she was usually too busy, and most of the time I was
astrally projected so I wouldn't get hurt."  He gazed skyward,
then out at the forest.  His first home had been in a forest much
like this one.  "The astral plane was an awfully drear place; but
at least I had her thoughts to keep me company."
     "Did you have a name among the brownies?"
     "Well, yeah, my folks and all my friends used to call me
'Homer' before I got recruited to be Sick Sword's familiar."
     "So . . . you left your family and friends behind then."
     "Yeah, but at least I got this in the bargain."  He held up
a dimly glowing short sword.  "It's made of pure adamantite."
     Ringman chuckled slightly.  "So what around here isn't?"
     "Did . . . did you used to have family and friends too?"
     "You mean, before I became a paladin?  Well, yes, as a
matter of fact, I did.  My father was a mason, you see; in fact,
that was the family trade, fitting and mortaring stonework.  Of
course, like everyone in this culture I learned the family trade
too, but my father knew somebody who had connections with the
Knights' Guild, and that if I trained hard enough I could enter
the service of King Whatshisname the Seventy-Fifth.  So I went to
knight school --"
     "Couldn't you have gone in the daytime?"
     Ringman grimaced.  "That's an old pun.  Anyway, I made it
through knight training, entered the king's service, and
eventually got selected to be one of the elite palace knights. 
They said it had to do with certain rare qualities that were
determined at birth.
     "Anyhow, they gave me this book to learn called 'The Code of
Paladinhood.'  Only problem was that at the time I couldn't read,
so I had to learn it by rote.  Well, I did learn the paladin's
code, and the instant I finished reciting it before the Knights'
Guild I gained all these weird powers.  And pretty soon, I got
assigned to be guardian of the town I'm still living in."
     Homer rubbed his chin for a second.  "But you still haven't
told me about your family and friends."
     Ringman thought for a long moment.  He was looking down at
nothing in particular.  "Maybe that's because . . . I've been
trying not to remember them."
     They rode on through the forest in silence.
                                #
     Now that was something you didn't see every day, the first
guard thought.  Rarely did little boys ever visit The Dungeon,
and even then they usually weren't wearing robes of eyes.  Still,
he had his duty to uphold, so he straightened his scale mail,
drew his broadsword, hefted his shield, and asked, "Who goes
there?"
     The boy grinned and parted open his robe of eyes on one
side, then opened the black robe of the archmagi underneath so
that both guards could see the dagger sticking out of his belt-
sheath.  The tiny sliver of the blade that was exposed to sight
glowed a dim blue.
     The first guard nudged the second out of his nap with his
elbow.  The second guard rubbed his eyes to resolve the very
dangerous looking little boy stalking toward them.
     The first guard pointed his sword at the kid.  "Halt and
identify yourself!  Who are you?"
     The boy stopped four feet away from him and narrowed his
eyes until he stared out of slits.  "Your worst nightmare."
     The second guard drew his sword as the first one gasped and
tightened his posture.  It wasn't very easy to move in scale
mail.  It was, however, very easy to move in a robe of eyes and a
robe of the archmagi, particularly if you happened to be a 17th-
level monk and a 60th-level weapons master under the influence of
a potion of speed at double normal effectiveness.  The boy's hand
flashed out, snatched the broadsword from Guard Number One, and
squeezed until the blade broke in half.
     Startled, Guard Number Two swung his sword around in a
crescent arc, aiming for the kid's left shoulder.  Before he knew
what happened, the boy had drawn his dagger with his left hand,
sliced up through the air, and cut off the guard's right hand.
     "OWWWWWWW!" the guard screamed, slumping to the ground and
clutching his right wrist below the stump just as hard as he
could.  It didn't stop the slow trickle of blood.
     The first guard said some interjection in lawful-neutral and
scampered away as fast as he could.  The second guard wasn't
about to stop the youth from getting in The Dungeon if he wanted
in that badly.  He couldn't have stopped him anyway.
     'That's what I like about being chaotic evil,' Gross Sword
thought as he walked through the entrance, 'You can do anything
you want.'
     "Well well," Wild Max said when he glimpsed Gross Sword
walking into the visitors' arena, "What have we here?"
     "It's a boy!" declared Rango.
     "A boy wearing a robe of eyes!" Da Bad Dude observed.
     "And a black robe of the archmagi," Dirk the Destructive
added.
     "And holding," Rango examined the dagger in his left hand,
"A +6 unholy dancing frost-brand defender anti-sun blade of
wounding, sharpness, throwing, thunderbolts, venom, life
stealing, slaying everything, contradisruption, bronze dragon
slaying, brass dragon slaying, copper dragon slaying, gold dragon
slaying, silver dragon slaying, green dragon slaying, blue dragon
slaying, speed, final word, and nine lives stealing."
     A fire leapt up from the dagger's hilt and consumed the
blade.  "You forgot flame-tongue," the Gross Dagger complained.
     "Oh, how stupid of me," Rango said.
     "Frost-brand and flame-tongue at the same time?" Da Bad Dude
wondered.
     "Humph," Gross Sword humphed.  "Hmm.  Ha.  Ha ha.  HA!  HA
HA HA HA HO HO HO HO HO!  HARDEHARHARHAR!!"
     "Hey," Wild Max sneered, "What's so funny?!?"
     "You call yourselves Disgusting Characters?!?  HAH!  I spit
on your feeble attempts of disgust!  PTOOI!"
     "Well, what do you expect?!" Dirk the Destructive said
defensively.  "We've been stripped of our magic items, our
psionic powers, and our dignity.  Why, back in the days of the
Union, we could --"
     "DO NOTHING!  Your pathetic Union was defeated by a bunch of
wimps as weak as yourselves!"  He reached into one of his
portable holes, pulled out his three magic helms, and stacked
them on his head where they belonged.  "Why, my _mother_ could
defeat your most powerful member."
     "Oh yeah?  Who's your mother, kid, Sick Sword?!"
     "As a matter of fact, yes."
     _That_ got their attention.
     "Or at least she was until today.  Now she's nothing."
     Rango shrugged.  "Well, don't look at any of us.  We didn't
have anything to do with it."
     "Not that we're sorry to see her go," Wild Max gloated.
     "Of course not.  _I_ killed her and evaporated her soul."
     All four pairs of ex-IUDC-members' eyes bugged out.  Then
slowly, one by one, they began applauding their boy hero.  Gross
Sword bowed.
     "Kiddo," Da Bad Dude said amid the mounting cheers, "You've
just got yourself four followers for life."
     "Followers?" Gloss Sword asked rhetorically.  He'd expected
someone to suggest that, but turned the word into a question
anyway for dramatic effect.  "Oh, I'm not interested in
followers.  You four are going to bow down and worship me."
     The cheering stopped instantly.
     "Or I will kill each and every one of you."
     A purple shimmer in the middle of the room broke the mood. 
The ex-Disgusting-Characters all wiped their brows in relief
until they saw who it was stepping out of the purple shimmer.
     "I thought I might find you here, Gross Sword," Ridiculous
Sword said.
     "Well, sister dear," Gross Sword smiled chaotic-evilly,
"Long time no see.  Too bad about dear old mom, eh?"
     "You've killed your last prime material being, Gross --"
     "And she might have survived, too, had she ever bothered to
draw the 'fates' card from a deck of many things.  Tch tch tch."
     Very calmly, she said, "Defend yourself, brother," and
charged at him at 12 288 feet-per-six-seconds.
     Gross Sword's Gross Broadsword deflected Ridiculous Sword's
Ridiculous Hand Axe with no trouble at all.  Of course, the clap
of thunder that rose out of the weapon-to-weapon contact was a
bit unnerving.  "I always have," Gross sword replied to her last
instruction.
     This time, it was Ridiculous Sword's Ridiculous Broadsword's
turn to parry Gross Sword's Gross Dagger, which it did quite
well.  With a little guidance from its disgustingly accurate
owner and another very loud thunder clap, of course.
     "Hmmm," Gross Sword said in between sword hacks, "Not bad
for an amateur."
     Ridiculous Sword glanced around at the cells around her and
their terrified occupants.  Each weapon-to-weapon thunderbolt
probably brought them that much closer to deafness.  She would
have to take the battle outside.  Breaking off from the fray, she
ran out through the entrance doorway, past the wounded guard, and
into the elysian fields.
     Gross Sword ran out as far as the de-handed guard in the
doorway, then stopped.  "Gee, too bad," he said very loudly, "If
you won't engage me I guess I'll just have to kill _him_ instead!"
     Ridiculous Sword had to get his attention, and fast.  "Gross
Sword sleeps with his Teddy bear!" she teased, and scampered
insultingly away.
     "I do not!" the nine-year-old disgusting boy replied.  "And
besides, he's a Teddy dragon-turtle."  He charged after her.
     They clashed again.  And again.  Their weapons sent peals of
thunder echoing from the far-off peaks.  And neither of them got
hit.
     "I see," Gross Sword said over the prevailing thunder, "That
the Dungeon Master hasn't retracted that old limitation requiring
you to roll a natural 20 to hit anyone who's armor class -17 or
better."
     "Don't play dumb with me," Ridiculous Sword replied just as
audibly.  "The Dungeon Master let us add our to-hit bonuses into
those 'extended twenties' on the attack matrices long ago.  Our
armor classes are just so good that we can't hit each other
anyway."
     They couldn't even hit each other by surprise or from
behind, either, as they eventually discovered.  Their rear armor
classes were -45, not counting their protections from evil/good.
     Clang, clash, the skirmish continued.  Clang, clang, clang,
shink, kssh, kssh, shunk, pshank -- they could have knocked each
other unconscious and never hit each other.  They were hit-proof
even in their sleep.  This was getting them nowhere.
     "This is getting us nowhere," Ridiculous Sword commented.
     "Who cares?  This is the most fun I've had in hours!"
     Sparks flew from their weapons, dusty roads and elysian
fields got trampled underfoot, a few people and some forest
creatures in the vicinity went deaf, and still they hadn't a
scratch on them.  Neither of them dared to use any of their "slay
living" or "finger of death" spells, both because they'd easily
make their saving throws and because any spells they cast at each
other would set up a resonating field between their rings of
spell turning.  It was a stalemate, pure and simple.
     And finally, even Gross Sword got tired of playing this
silly game.
     "I'm tired of playing this silly game.  I think I'll go wipe
out an upper or lower plane instead."
     "No!" Ridiculous Sword accidentally gasped.
     Gross Sword smiled.  "You'll see me around again.  On one
plane or another."  And with that, he vanished.
     Ridiculous Sword let her weapons drop down by her side, and
retrieved her Ridiculous Dagger and Ridiculous Longsword from out
of the air.  Being weapons of dancing, the dagger and longsword
had been doing their part independent of her.  Then again, Gross
Sword had been doing _his_ part independent of her since before he
was born.  She wished she knew what had made him go wrong, she
wished one of those commune spells or audiences with the Dungeon
Master or Ollamh bards would have let her in on the secret. 
Something about spraying an evil seed was all she'd ever picked
up.
     But first, she had to warn the other planes of what might
soon happen to them.  Gross Sword could attack anyplace at any
time, but his most likely targets would be those planes that were
lawful good.  After all, he could goad her the most by attacking
a saintly plane, and his own alignment was diametrically opposed
to law and good anyway.  That narrowed his choices down to the
three levels of Arcadia, the seven Heavens, and the Twin
Paradises.  Twelve planes to choose from, and Gross Sword could
strike at any one of those.  Well, she had better get st--
     No, there was a thirteenth plane she'd almost neglected to
include: the back of the east wind, where Bahamut's palace stood. 
The lord of all good dragons; wouldn't _his_ head make an
excellent trophy to hang on Gross Sword's wall.  That would have
to be Ridiculous Sword's first stop.
                                #
     "Bahamut!" Ridiculous Sword called out.  There was no
answer.  Surely, the one platinum dragon could hear her; his
palace was barely a hundred yards away.  Even if the palace _was_
invisible to normal sight.  She approached a bit closer, and
called for him again: "BA-hamut!"
     An old hermit creaked up to her from a nearby brook down a
hill.  There were seven canaries flitting around his head.  "Are
you looking for the platinum dragon?" the hermit asked.
     "Oh, there you are," Ridiculous Sword said nonchalantly. 
"Hi, Bahamut.  We have to talk."
     The hermit studied her closely, then gasped and bugged out
his eyes.  "It's _you_!" he exclaimed, and as he said this his
body underwent a startling transformation.  His neck elongated
and thickened, his arms and legs elongated and thickened, his
head elongated and thickened, his torso elongated and thickened,
his previously non-existent tail elongated and thickened, and his
skin turned from wrinkled dry tan to shining platinum.  Within
seconds, the hermit was a huge ancient dragon once more.
     His canaries turned into huge ancient gold dragons too, but
that was what usually happened anyway.  "Ridiculous Sword!"
Bahamut said, quivering in awe.  He bowed in that way that only
dragons can.  "I'm honored by your presence!  Tell me, what
brings you to the back of the east wind?"
     "I came here to warn you about my brother, Gross . . . hey,
wait a minute.  Didn't Wierd Dough kill you for your experience
points?"
     "Oh, phhh, that was only my Bahamut android, programmed to
act like me in every detail.  So what is this warning about your
brother?"
     "He's finally flipped," Ridiculous Sword exhaled.  "I saw it
coming for a long time, 'though I'm not sure why.  He said he
wanted to wipe out an upper or lower plane, and he's fully
capable of following through on that promise.  This place is his
most likely target.  And so are you."
     Bahamut shook his tremendous mane and swallowed hard in that
way that only huge ancient platinum dragons can.  "And . . . what
can I do to protect myself and my court?"
     Ridiculous Sword glanced downward.  "I wish I knew."
     And that's when the air behind Bahamut glowed purple for a
moment.
     "Holy feces," Ridiculous Sword cursed, "He's here."  She
drew her Ridiculous Hand Axe and her Ridiculous Broadsword and
ran around behind the dragon lord.
     Gross Sword only smiled and sprinted in a wide arc out to
Bahamut's right side.  Ridiculous Sword followed at the same
impossible breakneck speed, but there was really no way she could
catch up to him.  Not unless he made a mistake.
     He seemed to be making a mistake, Ridiculous Sword noticed. 
He seemed to be running too slowly.  Ridiculous Sword was
actually catching up with him.  She knew he had the same set of
artifact powers and the same running speed as she did -- their
infernal balance of power insured that -- so then why would he
run slow enough for her to close the gap?
     It was not Gross Sword that had made the mistake.  It was
Ridiculous Sword who had.  She was so intent on catching up with
her brother that she didn't think that maybe he wanted her to
catch up.  Just as Ridiculous Sword was nearly upon him, Gross
Sword doubled back and headed for the platinum dragon at full
tilt.
     Ridiculous Sword cursed herself for falling into that trap,
leapt, executed a midair flip, and sprinted back toward her
brother and the dragon lord she had been trying to protect.  She
wasn't closing in on Gross Sword this time, though.
     But Bahamut wasn't going to take this sitting still.  He
knew about disgusting characters' armor classes, so clawing and
biting were out of the question; besides, they had far too many
hit points to kill in just a few blows.  Instead, he opened his
cavernous maw and exhaled a cloud of vapor at the boy-demon
charging him.  The seven gold dragons by his side also breathed
seven cones of fire at the light-brown-haired youth in case that
might do any good.
     If by some miracle of nature Gross Sword had managed to roll
a "1" on a 20-sided die against Bahamut's vaporous breath, he
would have assumed gaseous form for two whole hours.  As it was,
though, he was neither vaporized nor fried; the flames all
bounced off his fireproof Other Bracer of Irresistible Damage
anyway.  He closed to terrifyingly close range with Bahamut,
glanced over his shoulder at his sister (who was only 10 yards
behind him), jumped, whirled around in midair, landed on the back
of Bahamut's neck, and poised his Gross Broadsword threateningly
beneath the platinum dragon's chin.  "FREEZE!" he commanded.
     Ridiculous Sword hesitated.  The dragon lord was motionless
as stone.
     "One more step, Ridiculous Sword, and Bahamut here gets it!"
     Ridiculous Sword eyed her brother warily.  He had already
killed his own mother; he was certainly capable of following
through with his threat.  She wondered why he hadn't just killed
Bahamut outright.
     "Now, throw down your weapons," Gross Sword ordered.
     'So that's his plan,' Ridiculous Sword thought.  'Make me
disarm myself, then he can kill me and Bahamut both.'  "You'd
kill him anyway," she said, and leapt through the air toward him.
     "You're right," Gross Sword replied, "I would."  And the
instant before Ridiculous Sword reached him, he stuck his sword
into Bahamut's throat and did 345 points of damage.  And that
wasn't even counting the life stealing, slaying, venom, severing,
or disintegration effects of the weapon.  Bahamut slumped
headless to the ground.
     Gross Sword liked the feeling of that so much he killed one
of the seven huge ancient gold dragons as well before he used his
amulet of the planes to transport him out.
     There wasn't a human or gold dragon present who wasn't
screaming, crying, or moaning.
                                #
     Ringman was unaware of what had just transpired at the back
of the east wind.  He had his own dilemma to worry about.
     He saw it coming the moment he'd parked his horse.  A lone
figure, this time confidently without its own warhorse, stalked
slowly into town toward Ringman's small castle.  The glowing
plate mail, the jewelled helmet, and the sheathed Prometheus
dangling from its side left no question as to who it was that had
decided to bug them again.  "Quick, Homer!" Ringman instructed
the brownie, "To the second floor!"
     "But what's being one floor higher gonna do against Peter
Perfect?" Homer asked as he clambered up the stairs behind
Ringman.
     "If I'm right," the 9th-level paladin explained as he
reached the second story, "Everything."  He pointed.  "There's a
closet marked 'Non-magical weapons' along the south wall.  It it,
there'll be a stack of things that look like javelins.  Grab all
of those javelin-looking things you can and bring them to the
east parapet."
     "Right," Homer said, and got going.  He was too scared of
Peter Perfect to argue.
     Ringman went to the north parapet and unlashed a rather
large war engine on wheels.  "I put this here to ward off attack
from the north," He mumbled to himself as he started to push the
apparatus.  "Peter Perfect _would_ have to attack from the east."
     He was having an Acheron of a time getting this thing to
move on those old, rotten wooden wheels.  He wished now that he
_had_ taken that girdle of titan strength; then he could just
carry this whole mess to the east parapet.  But he was making
pretty good time anyway, considering that the left wheel only
turned about 1/3 of the time.
     "Oh RIIING-mannn!" Peter Perfect's voice echoed from far-off
just as Ringman finished dragging the artillery engine onto the
parapet.  "Where ARE you, Ring-mannn?  Come out and pla-ay!  It's
that time of the month again!"
     Ringman grabbed the front end of the gismo and pulled until
it pointed more or less at Peter Perfect.  Homer was just
emerging from the hallway, carrying a very large armful of
javelin-looking things.  He dropped one about every ten feet. 
Ringman nodded at the brownie, then took hold of the gigantic
rubber band that spanned the front of the device and stretched it
across a large metal tong three feet back from the apparatus'
front.
     "Now what do I do?" Homer asked as Ringman got behind the
machine.
     "Load one of the missiles into the firing slot, just in
front of that rubbery thing as soon as I crank it all the way
back."  He grasped the two levers connected to opposite sides of
a toothed wheel and began to turn it.  Several gears and pulleys
later, the metal tong keeping the rubber band in place pulled
back even farther.  Ringman continued to crank and the rubber
band continued to retract.
     "What is this thing?" Homer asked.
     "It's a ballista," Ringman said with evident strain in his
voice.  It was getting harder and harder to turn the crank.
     Peter Perfect interrupted them again, this time closer. 
"Which part of your body shall I cut off this time?  How about
your left arm?  Or a leg?  Or a different extremity?"
     Ringman ignored him.  "Since I learned how, I've been
reading the Book of Infinite Wisdom a little myself," he
explained.  "I found this little gem in the construction and
siege heading.  So, with a little help from Sick Sword -- before
she threw me out of her life -- I got hold of a +1 ballista. 
Peter Perfect's in for a nasty surprise."
     "Hey, too bad about your little girlfriend, Ringboy," Pe