Fan Fic: The Wonder Worlock: Gaza, Stripped, Part 1

PRE-GAME

"The Dragon of Gaza IV, by Jason Heichel"

Cloaking his psionic activity, the Wonder Worlock warps light waves through and around his form, effectively becoming invisible. The sentient wormhole that is Nomad grows dormant, telepathically seeking out his quarry while ultraviolet energies search for the mystic’s heat signature. But as the gigantic oval floats mere miles above the third rock from the sun, another hole starts to open next to the godlike being.

The Wonder Worlock has opened – the Dread Dungeon of Doom!

The Dragon of GazaIV! The Tridactyl Trio! The Great Ilahk! The Dozen Dwarves of Wons Etihw! Mork! These deadliest of cosmic denizens pour from the Dungeon, as an irresistible vacuum sucks the high order entity called Nomad slowly towards it. Somewhere, invisibly, the Wonder Worlock smiles a satisfied smile.

The violet Dragon of Gaza IV leaps at Nomad, but its colors splash outward and engulf the reptile. When the colors dissipate into gas, so does the mighty, once-thought immortal Dragon …

PART THE FIRST

The Small Magellanic Cloud is an irregular dwarf galaxy, companion to our own Milky Way. Unlike spiral and elliptical galaxies, irregular galaxies like the Cloud lack any appearance of organized structure. The Small Cloud, like its larger neighboring Magellanic Cloud, appears as a huge and diffused cloud in Earth’s southern nighttime sky. Both of the galaxies are named in honor of the explorer Ferdinand Magellan, who noted their presence in becoming the first to sail around the world nearly 500 years ago.

Eons before Ferdinand Magellan’s great-grandparents were born on Earth, the Dragon of Gaza IV was a benevolent ruler on its home world. It was reptilian and breathed fire, yes, and even then the only one of its kind in the Gazasystem. But the wise lizard’s interaction with the humanoids of the world was friendly and daily, beginning when they were apelike creatures swinging through the trees of Gaza IV’s lush rain forests until shortly before their crafts first took to the air – even as he could with his leathery, bat-like wings.

The Dragon – he has never really had a name, other than the epithets the Gazapopulation later hurled at him – even taught the monkey-men how to talk, to verbalize with their fellow beings. He taught them the ability to write, to make words last the test of time beyond their fragile life spans, to record their histories.

It was his undoing.

Although the population of Gazaloved their protective Dragon-god as a child loves a mother, every child looks out beyond the horizon at what beckons. So the wilier of those ancient peoples began recording not truths, as the Dragon had taught, but falsehoods coming from what they eventually called gen’ego, the imagination. These rocks and later scrolls and later books and later discs and tapes told the horrific tale of a reptilian demon, breathing fire, eating the monkey men and dropping others in the volcanoes in Gaza IV’s northern hemisphere. There was torture, rape, murder and the loss of folk innocence blamed on the beast.

How did this occur right under the Dragon’s nose? Because he was trusting, as a teacher might be toward a favored pupil secretly pulling pranks on her, and also because the giant took slumbers in the mountains surrounding the forbidding volcanoes for years at a time.

The Dragon had taught his people well … too well.

It was in the 15th bleem as the Gazans record time that the world populace made its big move against the Dragon. Having found its lair in the GlaurungMountainsand finally conquered the beast’s last advantage over them (flight), the races of Gaza IV’s southern hemisphere united for the first and only time to battle their “monster.”

Still asleep, the Dragon seemed fated to die in its lair against the onslaught of the races of Gaza IV. Still … The Dragon had taught the humanoids all they knew, but not all he knew. For this immortal lizard was able to whip its wings into such a frenzy that it could seemingly teleport, actually entering another dimension and then returning to its own. It used the same talent for entering hyperspace when flying among the stars.

The Dragon of Gaza IV, outraged at this attack from his beloved “children,” breathed continuous breaths of cosmic fire on the lands of the south, looking like a dark bird of prey in the planet’s nighttime skies, silhouetted against its large orange moon.

The war was going bad for the people of Gaza IV when Riddle-de-de, a visiting wizard from the Milky Way Galaxy caught in the uproar, died in casting his greatest hex: imprisoning the Dragon in the Dread Dungeon of Doom!

The spell was cast, its originator dead but the survivors of Gaza IV living to tell the tale, the tale of how the great alien wizard Riddle-de-de saved their world and their culture by unknown science, ridding the planet of the monster, the horrid creature the Deadly Dragon of Gaza IV forevermore.

Or so they thought. For even now, the Dragon exits hyperspace, having flown from the far-off Mephistoff Nebula to the lesser of the Magellanic Clouds, to the star Gaza near its core, to the fourth world revolving.

GazaIV: the Dragon is home. He returns to seek revenge once more!

*****

Planetside, the divided colonies of Gaza IV’s southern clime are uniting for the first time in bleems. Defenses are off the grid and there is a hemisphere-wide blackout ongoing. It makes many ministers, kings and regents wish they had listened to the people’s desire for a global government many years hence.

On SmaugIsland, in the Unilateral Citadel of Science, the many big brains of Gaza IV are trying to out-speak each other, sounding rather like a Congressional filibuster. Roj-Le, one of the most respected minds in the Gazasystem – and beyond! – now has the floor, and his thoughts and concerns do not even involve the Dragon.

“My calculations show that this planet, our world is having internal stress,” Roj says. “Its tectonic plates are sliding at an angle that seems outside the realm of possibility, meaning something has effected either our planet’s axis or our sun Gazaitself. We must forget this Dragon nonsense and ready crafts to evacuate our world before it explodes under our feet! Mr. Chairman …”

“Now now, Roj, my boy,” the Elder Chairman says, “you come up with this theory once a decade. The last time it was because your downstairs neighbor had moved a vibrating freezing unit into the basement of your dwelling. We must concentrate on the Dragon’s attack. With all space crafts, both military and personal, dedicated to battling the coming of that monster, our personal nightmare, I doubt anyone will be leaving Gazaanyways soon.”

“But Mr. Chairman …”

“Enough, Roj-Le! Speak to us, Doz of the Great Gaza Army.”

“I have been weighing our alternatives,” Doz, supreme general of the planet’s largest landmass, answers. “The solution is a rather odd but obvious one. The history scrolls say that the Dragon was about to burn our planet’s population in cosmic fire before a visiting wizard pulled our ducks out of the sauce, in a manner of speaking. Since no one practices these arcane arts here in this system, I propose we get the nearest thing we have – the Priests of Amap – to telepathically summon one whose name is whispered across the known universe, even unto our solar system.

“We must contact he who is known as … the Wonder Worlock.”

INTERLUDE

Nomad was defeated that day on Homeworld, a planet killed by the teleportational powers of the sentient aperture, but he was not defeated by the Wonder Worlock.

No, a young would-be God – one worshipped by the peoples of Homeworld and elsewhere – intervened, bringing justice to his dead peoples. Justice and peace.

After Se-Jus vanished, the Wonder Worlock rose into the Position of Nirvana and contemplated the Great Beyond and the expanse of the universe, trying to come to grips with both Nomad’s death and the meaning of it all in the Great Scheme of Things.

With a purple puff of smoke and implosion of air, the celestial crusader then departed the dead Homeworld, never noticing the pooling rainbow river that was once part of the insides of Nomad.

The puddle starts to bubble at first, then boils and steams as it is watched by no one, since all life on Homeworld is now just ash and blown ash.

WHHOOOSSSPPPLLAAASSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSHHHHHHH!!!!!

The head of a mythological beastie, one that had just hours ago seemingly lost its life in brief battle with Nomad, rises from the small puddle and grows.

“What new energy is this?” the returning Dragon of Gaza IV asks, flapping its wings as if a newly-hatched butterfly, feeling its wings for the first time in a spring breeze. “I am myself again, and yet free of my confinement in the Dread Dungeon of Doom … my confinement with those madmen, those monster aliens, no longer under the will of whatever conjurer decides to invoke the hex.

“I am myself, and yet the energies of the enemy I battled – Nomad, was it? – his cosmic Creation-based energies seem to course through my veins as well, giving this old leathery body new bounce, new youth! Beware, good folk of Gaza IV. After bleems of escaping your due, justice is on the way in the form of a very deadly dragon!”

A jerk of his mighty wings and the Dragon leaves the dead world of a family named Jackovich behind, seeking the necessary sustenance among the nearby stars of the Mephistoff Nebula to enter hyperspace.

As he soars, independent and free for the first time in ages among the planets of an alien space, his mystic homing prowess and great eyes guide him toward the Small Magellanic Cloud and the star called Gaza. It is then he sees them. Food!

The Dragon has happened upon a rare phenomenon indeed: the cyclical migration of the Pizzar, whale-like creatures that swim the cosmic oceans of this particular nebula. Such freedom, he thinks, such intelligence! How well I shall enjoy their energies.

The Pizzar are a thoughtful but peaceful race which migrates from one end of the Mephistoff Nebula to the other, a distance of about eleven light-years. A matriarchy, the Old Queen is most likely leading her daughters, granddaughters, aunts, cousins and sisters on her last migration – at least as leader. One of her daughters or sisters will have to take the lead next cycle, and the Old Queen passes on experience and knowledge with her every action.

Suddenly the Old Queen is jostled by the unfamiliar, a new occurrence to her. A spiked tail slams hard against her and her niece as the Pizzar pod bolts in confusion, used to following the ages-old path. Cosmic flame and a flicking poisonous tongue surround them, kill them, absorb their energy and slaughter their meat. A herculean effort by anyone’s account.

The attack lasts less than three minutes, by terran standards. The gorging and a nap following are longer. No Pizzar, or their life’s energies, escapes.

Twenty hours later, the Dragon’s wings jerk shakily and he enters hyperspace. With the energy of a pod of Pizzar and a living wormhole, he is ready to dole out punishment to his former playmates on a cosmic scale.

“Onward!” he says. “To Gaza!”

END INTERLUDE

TO BE CONTINUED …