Previous Post Running – a sequel to KS’s really excellent “Farewells and Ne’er-Do-Wells” Things you need to know about these people: * The Probability Dancer recently lost her power. She also lost Premiere, a.k.a. Victor Brooke, one of the heroes who died in the Parody War. She got a theatre tour gig in her secret ID as Sarah Shepherdson from her new date Harry and she’s leaving Parodiopolis soon. * Zdenka Zarazoza is the shapeshifting Candian superhero Rabid Wolf. She’s also goddess of the north. She’s also romantically entangled with Hatman, and recently got back from an alternate dimension where they thought they were married and were living happily. * Katarina Allen is a lacemaker who was rescued from the horrors of the alien world Apocalyspe by Legionnaire superhero Mr Epitome, a.k.a. Dominic Clancy. They have been dating ever since, and they’re now considering moving in together in a secret house Dom is having seven dwarf political refugees from Fairy build for him. ____________________________________     Zdenka liked the Eastern shore of Lair Island, where the pebbled beach sloped down to the wide Atlantic and the ocean seemed to go on forever. She liked the wheeling gulls and the way the water washed up into the tiny coves with each pulse of the tide. She liked the peace and the quiet. Not many people came here, this far from the Mansion.     Except for the joggers. Even in her human form Rabid Wolf could hear the crunch of trainers on sand. And even before that she could hear the complaining.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“This is supposed to make me fit?” gasped Katarina Allen. “How does cardiac arrest make me fit?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“You’re not going to die,” Dancer assured her. “Just push through the burn. If your muscles don’t hurt a bit then you’re not improving.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Could I volunteer to not improve? Not improve and live?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“You’ve got to keep trim. You can’t just rely on constant sex with Dominic for all your exercise. Although sex is a very good workout, very recommended. Meggan Foxxx offered to do an instructional video on it with me, for the mass market, but I thought perhaps people might misunderstand.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“No,” panted Kat, stopping near Zdenka and bending over to try and catch her breath. “I think that’s great. Wonderful idea. You should go and do that right now. I’ll just wait here.”     Dancer stopped and jogged backwards and stood beside the gasping weaver, still running on the spot. “You shouldn’t give in now.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“You’re right. I should have given in half a mile back.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“You’re not unfit. But a regular regimen of exercise will keep you that way. It’s a good habit to get before middle age.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Middle age? I’m only…”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Anything past twenty and you need to keep yourself in trim. Your body stops doing it all for you. You can’t abuse yourself any more without some payback.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Right,” agreed Kat savagely. “So we have fitness instructors to abuse us instead.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Exactly,” grinned Dancer. “Now come on. If we get round to the lighthouse we can pretend to be exhausted and cadge a cup of cocoa off Vizh.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Pretend?”     Rabid Wolf snorted with laughter at the expression of Kat Allen’s face. Dancer and Kat noticed her.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Help me,” begged Kat.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“You are doing just fine, I think,” Zdenka Zarazosa assured the weaver. “You just perhaps need a little bit of break, yes?”     Dancer sighed dramatically and settled down on a rock next to Rabid Wolf. “This is very bad for discipline,” she warned. “Can I convince you to run with us, Zdenka?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Perhaps later, and in wolf form,” conceded the Candian refugee. “For now I am sitting and watching the waves.”     Dancer looked again the willowy russet-haired shapechanger. “Sitting and watching the waves in a good way or in a bad way?” she checked.     Rabid Wolf kept on looking out to sea. “I do not know,” she answered.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Why not?” asked Kat. Anything to keep the conversation going until her lungs clawed their way back into her body.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Ooh,” Dancer sensed, “boyfriend issues alert! My relationship-sense is tingling!”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Dancer, you don’t have a relationship-sense,” Kat Allen pointed out. “You’re famous for not having a relationship-sense.”     The Probability Dancer hunched her shoulders a little. “It’s because I’ve had so many problems with guys that I can tell when one’s happening. I’m like a one-woman survivor’s group. A really hot one-woman survivor’s group.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I do not have relationship problems with Jay,” Zdenka said.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“So it is Jay!” Dancer squealed. “I knew it!”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I do not have relationship problems with Jay,” Zdenka said, “because I do not have a relationship with him.”     Kat winced. “Ouch.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Hold on!” Dancer objected. “You and Hatty, you’re the original love bunnies. Well, not the original love-bunnies, because Yo locked them in spiffy’s bedroom that time and we had to get a truck to ship them all off to live in the wilds of Idaho. But you know what I mean. I’ve rarely seen two people so into each other as you and Jay. Heck, when you two got dropped into some kind of dimensional elder-gate thing it was your love for each other that created that alternate realm thingie where you were married.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Was that the problem?” Kat guessed, seeing Zdenka’s face. “You were married?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“We thought we were,” Rabid Wolf agreed. “It was like living in dream. We were together, and we lived happily. It was wonderful.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“So you know how good it could be,” Dancer encouraged the goddess of the North. “It’s like when some people live together to see if they’re compatible. Sometimes it turns out they’re not, and you never see your portable CD player again. Other times you find that he’s The One, and you live happily ever after. Apparently.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Apparently?” Kat caught the edge in Dancer’s voice.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Did I mention that Harry and Shep aren’t seeing each other any more?” Dancer asked. “Well, obviously they’re seeing each other because Harry’s working on Lair Legion: The Musical and Shep’s going on tour with them so they’ll see each other every day. The tour I’m tagging along on now I’ve lost my powers, just because. But they’re not seeing each other in the seeing each other naked sense anymore. Shep doesn’t sleep with people she works with. Same with me. That’s why I don’t sleep with Vizh now.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Plus he is your brother,” Kat pointed out.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Well, yes. Adopted. Now. You really had to be there for the crossover for it to make any sense.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I do not know what to say,” confessed Rabid Wolf. “What Jay and I had was very… intense.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“That can happen,” admitted Kat. “Say you get zapped to an alien planet and have to survive for months while they hunt you like vermin, and you happen to meet some amnesiac guy who’s so… so what you need just then, so hero and so shining, and you end up making a complete fool of yourself and taking him to bed even though you hardly know him and then you find he’s actually a superhero and you don’t know where to look because this is so not what you’re really like but by then…” She petered out. “It can happen,” she said, getting a grip.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“But you and Dom are fine,” Dancer argued. “You have your piece of wood.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Piece of wood?” Zdenka’s English wasn’t that good. She wasn’t really up on all the euphemisms. “This is sex, yes?”     Kat blushed. “It’s a pelmet, actually. California pine. For the bedroom of Dom’s house. It’s really beautiful, so well crafted, not just the pelmet I mean but everything, and it makes me happy thinking about it.” She realised she wasn’t clarifying things very well. “It’s made by dwarves,” she explained.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I do not think my English…”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Dom and Kat are thinking about setting up house together,” Dancer translated. “They’re at the picking furnishings stage, and Kat’s kind of gushy about the domestic details. And we are in no way jealous that she’s moving towards a happy stable relationship with the only man on the planet interested in settling down and raising a family.”     Kat winced. “Well… Dom may not be able to give me kids.”     Zdenka’s eyes widened. “So Miiri was correct?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“It’s a side-effect of that process that gave him his powers, I think. It’s apparently very classified.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Most guys try to classify stuff like that,” Dancer observed. “Can he still…?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Yes. Lots of exercise, okay. Lots of it. Burning calories every night. But if we want children we may have to adopt.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“You could adopt Glory,” suggested Rabid Wolf. She didn’t have the same species boundary perceptions as most people. “You have a future.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Why don’t you?” demanded Dancer.     Zdenka looked confused. “I do not think Glory would want me as a parent, Dancer.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I mean, why don’t you and Jay have a future? You were so good together, even in your dream.”     Rabid Wolf shook her head. “I am Zvesti Zdrugo, goddess of the north, avatar of Candia. I cannot stay too long from my country or I become sick and so does it. And though I am exiled from my home, I am still having of husband there. Dmitri. Captain Mud.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Hey, we have this fine tradition here in the U.S.,” Kat said. “It’s called divorce. One in two couples try it these days.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“In Candia this requires the permission of the Commissar,” Zdenka explained. “I do not think he is too happy to give it to me just now.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“On account of you jilting him at the altar just before he annulled your marriage to Dmitri and made you Mrs Commissar of Candia,” remembered Dancer. “Yeah, that kind of muddies the waters.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Dmitri did not mean to do that,” Zdenka said. “Sometimes he loses control of his powers.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“But it’s not unsolvable, right?” Kat demanded. “I mean, if you and Jay want to be together…”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Jay’s a straight-arrow,” Dancer said. “He won’t go against his principles, but he won’t let you down either. What did he say to you after you both got your memories back and you returned to Earth?”     Rabid Wolf still gazed to sea. “Nothing.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Nothing?” Kat asked. “Nothing nothing?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“He was hurt,” Rabid Wolf explained. “He had been tortured by the Parody Master. Tortured more than he would tell. Then he had been given a little paradise. I think it was paradise. Then he had to throw it away. Coming back to the real world again, after everything that happened…”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Second time for Hat, because he had a similar ordeal with Sorcy,” added Dancer.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Coming back, it was… cold.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“So what have you said to each other?” Kat insisted. “You must have talked. You’ve spent time together.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Jay is very busy with Lair Legion. There are many things to put right after big war.”     Dancer looked round. “Okay, I’m going to march right into his office and…”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“No.” Rabid Wolf caught her arm. “Please do not. If Jay wants to talk with me, he will talk. If this is over, then it is over. If he needs time, I will give time. I love him. It may be I cannot have him. But it is for Jay to decide.”     Kat and Dancer caught each other’s gaze. “I thought I had boyfriend problems,” Dancer said.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“You do,” Katarina answered, seeing through the façade. “Premiere died, didn’t he?”     Dancer swallowed hard. “Not everybody is cut out for happy endings like you, Kat.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Soon I will have to go home, one way or another,” Zdenka said. “Going away helps sometimes, I think.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“It does,” agreed Dancer. “I’m going to Europe. What I might have had with Victor if things had turned out different… that’s staying here.”     Kat blew out of her cheeks. “Well, this just confirms my view of jogging,” she told them. “It’s dangerous.”     The three women looked out over the ocean, to see if they could glimpse the future. Original concepts, characters, and situations copyright © 2007 reserved by Sarah Shepherdson. Other Parodyverse characters copyright © 2007 to their creators. The use of characters and situations reminiscent of other popular works do not constitute a challenge to the copyrights or trademarks of those works. The right of Sarah Shepherdson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved.