Previous Post Vinnie De Soth and the Virgin Factory     The Ghost Taxi shimmered through the curtain of rain and became solid again outside the ruined paper mill in upstate Gothametropolis. It picked its away around the debris surrounding the foreboding plant’s dark silhouette and drew to a halt at the twisted remnants of the main gate.     Vinnie de Soth leaned forward and handed a folded wad of bills to the cab driver. “Thanks Rudge. You mind staying here for a while? Keep the meter running.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“No problem, Mr De Soth,” agreed the dead young man behind the wheel. “Take care out there.” The Ghost Taxis were just one more strange by-product of the occult and metahuman activities around Paradopolis, a fleet of phantom yellow cabs with limbo-bound drivers seeking a slow and grinding redemption from whatever awaited them beyond the final gates of death. When Rudge folded away the sixty dollars Vinnie had passed him for the ride to the Thompson Paper Mill he’d also pocketed a generous karma note that had helped him towards his final salvation.     Vinnie climbed from the back of the taxi into the heavy downpour. The midnight rain bounced off the broken pavements outside the factory. The torrent had already doused most of the fires that had collapsed the roof over the main block. Only acrid fumes rose from the huge hole in the shattered front wall.     A police line warning ribbon fluttered across the gateway. Vinnie ducked under it and approached the ruin. His left foot found a pothole deeper than he’d expected and he sand up to the ankle in cold muddy water.     And then his foot was dry again.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Ah. Thank you, Liu Xi Xian,” Vinnie guessed without even turning round. Drying a wet sock was only a tiny part of what the slim oriental elementalist could do with the traditional Chinese elements. “I, um, I hadn’t expected to see you here.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Somebody had to wait for the clean up crew to arrive,” answered Liu Xi, stepping out of the shadows perfectly dry despite the driving rain. “I volunteered.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Well thank you,” Vinnie said, trying to check whether his collar was straight without the attractive girl noticing he was doing it and managing only to channel cold streams of rainwater down inside his shirt. “It’s nice to see you. And nice that you can dry me and warm me. With your powers I mean. Not any other way. I wasn’t thinking about…”     Liu Xi put the babbling occultist for hire out of his verbal misery again. “This way,” she indicated. “Ebony said you’d need to do a low-grade exorcism over the whole site to be sure.”     As the elementalist had expected, Vinnie unconsciously switched from clumsily gabbling social wreck to quietly focussed professional. She quite liked the change. “What do we have here, then?” the acting sorcerer supreme asked, looking round the wreckage.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“This was a rather nasty place. Under cover of being a paper mill it was actually a factory for breeding and raising children to be sold as sacrificial victims to various cults and vampire clans and so on. The Librarian’s still going through the account books and the Lair Legion’s out visiting those clients he’s already identified.”     Vinnie looked at the collapsed front wall of the building. Some of the steel support beams were folded back on themselves like pretzels. A few were bent through more than three dimensions. “I guess the Shoggoth didn’t like this place very much, then.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“He was a little tetchy, yes,” agreed Liu Xi. “The people operating this place haven’t stopped screaming yet.”     Vinnie picked his way over the remains of the wall and ventured into the structurally unsafe interior. “Where are the children?” he asked.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Dancer and Icy got them out. Hatman’s lodging them all with Hagatha Darkness for now until proper arrangements can be made with St Jude’s Orphanage. Nobody’s going to try and snatch them back from the witch of Covenant House.”     Vinnie shuddered. “I do hope they try,” he said maliciously.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“CrazySugarFreakBoy! offered to lodge the older virgins at his place and find ways of curing them but Hatman overruled him,” Liu Xi reported. “Vizh says don’t go lingerie shopping with them.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Good tip,” agreed Vinnie. “This isn’t the time for underwear. Um, I mean their underwear. Well, obviously they can have underwear, I didn’t mean… And you. You can have underwear too, Liu Xi. I mean you probably do have. I’ve not been thinking about it or… It’s not like we have to check…”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Nats said to tell you that he thought there were still some ghosts and stuff active here that Al B.’s ectoplasmic wave disruptor hadn’t got. And also to make clear that he hadn’t accidentally married any of them.”     Vinnie touched a half-melted wall and frowned. “There is some psychic residue left,” he admitted. “Nasty stuff. There was some kind of chymeric guardian summoned but it’s no longer active.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I think the Shoggoth ate it,” admitted Liu Xi. “Or possibly mated with it. It’s hard to tell.” She shot Vinnie a mischievous glance. “I’m pretty sure the chymeric guardian wasn’t wearing underwear.”     Vinnie poked his tongue out at her. “You give evil a whole new definition.” His smile faded. “Speaking of evil, here’s an accumulation. What’s this place?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“The warder’s office,” Liu Xi reported. “What the…”     She was interrupted by Vinnie barrelling her aside and hurling a handful of silver threads into the room ahead of her. The strands flashed and evaporated with a static hiss.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Sorry,” Vinnie told her. “Saaiitaaii manifestation. Psychic land mine. A trap.” He helped Liu Xi to her feet.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Thank you,” the elementalist told him, to indicate that she could now stand unaided without being held in his arms. “I didn’t sense anything.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“It’s not your field,” Vinnie replied. “It’s not elemental at all, not even void. There’s a lot of bad things been done in here over the years and that’s left all kinds of karmic sludge residue. Worse still, there’s been enough people in here with a little occult knowledge to even shape some of the negative emotions and twist them into nasty little memorials. Ebony was right to send for me.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Can you exorcise it? Destroy it?”     The occultist pressed further into the factory. The large area beyond the charred offices was a huge compound filled with barred livestock cages. The far end of the roof was stripped away, allowing the rainstorm to flood in.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I could do a blanket abjuration,” Vinnie considered, “but that’s pretty major. It’s the psychic equivalent of a napalm grenade. And where am I going to get a goat and six hundred pounds of incense at this time of night?” He looked around the gloomy prison block with an unhappy frown. “No, there’s got to be a better way to fix this.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“What kind of…” began Liu Xi before Vinnie hurled her to the ground again.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Watch out! Miserygeists!”     Liu Xi felt the air around her growing colder and it was nothing to do with the elements. She had a sense of something vast and terrible reaching out to seize her.     Vinnie locked his lips on hers and jammed his tongue into her mouth. That distraction made the miserygeist attack seem somehow irrelevant.     After five minutes or so Liu Xi ventured to come up for air and say “I think they’re gone.”     Vinnie looked around the darkened warehouse. “So they have,” he confirmed. “Damn. I mean, er, sorry about having to kiss you. It’s one of the traditional ways of fending off minor miserygeists.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Do I want to know how major miserygeists are fended off?” Liu Xi wondered.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Do you?” Vinnie asked hopefully before catching himself. “That is, we’d better press on. With exploring. We’d better keep on with the mission.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Yes,” agreed Liu Xi, refastening her jacket and blouse. “Is there any way I could see any of these dangers that are lurking out there before you have to hurl me to the ground and snog me?”     Vinnie looked guilty. “Well, I could share some second sight with you for a while but…”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“But?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Well, there’s this traditional way.”     Liu Xi sighed. “Is there a traditional way that only involves the top half of my body?” she checked.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Kissing,” Vinnie clarified urgently. “It’s a kiss-transferred enchantment. Very old magic. Standard Sleeping Beauty rules.”     Liu Xi’s mouth quirked. “Right then. Enchant me.”     Vinnie enchanted her as thoroughly as he could.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“One question,” Liu Xi asked finally and a little breathlessly. “What if Visionary or Nats had stayed behind on clean-up duty instead of me?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Well, there is a kind of handshake version,” confessed Vinnie, “I must have forgotten that one for a minute.”     Liu Xi punched him on the arm. Another thought occurred to her. “Didn’t the sleeping beauty spell require it to be true love’s kiss?”     Vinnie hurried over to one of the cages. “Hey, look at this!”     Liu Xi followed him to examine the wire-meshed box. Unlike most of the crates this one hadn’t been torn open to rescue the occupant. As the elementalist looked inside she could see why.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“That girl is transparent.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“She’s a ghost,” Vinnie explained. “You can’t see her too clearly because because she’s already fading and because we didn’t go past second base. This place is too full of occult predators and psychic sinkholes for her to last long.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“She died here?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I guess. Why don’t you ask her?”     Liu Xi peered through the bars. “She can see us and talk to us?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Not right now,” the occultist admitted, “but if I channel a little life into her ectoplasm I think she could properly manifest. Hold on.” He scratched his palm across a ragged nail on the box frame and squeezed a few drops of blood out. The ghost blinked in confusion as she noticed Liu Xi Xian.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Hello,” said the elementalist, as kindly as she could.     The ghost shrank away from her. “Who are you?” she asked with wide frightened eyes. “I’ve not seen you before.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I’m new. I’m Liu Xi.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Are you a guard?” The ghost girl shrank away further. “The guards beat me. When I tried to run away. They beat me very hard. I deserved it.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I think they beat her to death,” Vinnie murmured. “She doesn’t understand it yet.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I came with some good people,” Liu Xi explained. “The Lair Legion. They’re heroes. We came to rescue you.”     The ghost looked puzzled. “Rescue me? Why?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Don’t you want to be free?” asked Vinnie.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Free?” the ghost blinked. “I’m going to be married!”     Liu Xi felt her stomach turn. “The girls we rescued, the ones that went to Hagatha… they’d been educated from childhood to believe that they were going off to marry somebody wonderful. To be the bride of… well, whatever demon or god was worshipped by whichever cult had paid for their upbringing. They were actually looking forward to it. Some of them were fighting Yuki and Whitney as they were dragged from their cages.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Best way to control them,” Vinnie realised. “Listen… what’s your name?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Hope,” answered the ghost girl. “I am to be the bride of Shabba’Dhabba’Dhu.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Yeah, about that. The wedding’s off. Two reasons. One, you’re dead. Not that that would necessarily stop the Groper Out of Grossness from rending your soul but still… And two, he’s a loathsome multi-tentacular city-sized elder beast who gives hentai a bad name and you do not want a wedding night with him.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“It’s even worse than when Vinnie saves you from miserygeists,” Liu Xi confided. She poked her tongue back at the outraged occultist.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“But…” Hope examined her spectral hand. “How can I be dead?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“The usual way, I’m afraid,” Vinnie told her. “And like all the spirits loosed from flesh in this awful cursed place I think you’ve been sundered from the afterlife.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“What does that mean?” Liu Xi demanded.     Vinnie drew her a little way from the cage. “It means that if I do an exorcism here she might go off to wherever souls go when they pass beyond the furthest we can track them, heaven or whatever I guess, but she might very well just get smeared out of existence for eternity. She’s missed her regular bus to the afterlife and the service has been withdrawn.”     Liu Xi covered her mouth. “She’s only a girl, a couple of years younger than me. She was brought up to be sold into marriage slavery, like me. We can’t let her just be… totally destroyed by those cho wang ba dan.”     Vinnie looked around. “We’ve got another problem right now, too. Since I manifested her she’s become visible to the other presences here. They can sense her purity and innocence. She’s just become major nasty-bait and they’re closing in.”     Liu Xi followed his gaze. Black sticky ribbons of evil were oozing out of the walls, the floor, the cages; coalescing into miasmic tendrils to surround Hope’s cell.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I don’t suppose that enchantment you put on me allows me to use my powers to blast these things down to hell?” Liu Xi checked. “I guess third base might be an option if it means I can…”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“They’re psychic mould with some basic reflections of sentience,” Vinnie reported. “I’ll modulate what you do onto their frame of reference. Fire would be good.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Oh yes,” breathed Liu Xi. “I can do fire.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“What are those?” worried Hope, noticing the prowling shapes. “Mister Blakeney! Mr Swinn! No!”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“No indeed,” agreed Liu Xi Xian. She opened her palms and raised her head. “Burn!”     The factory exploded with ectoplasmic fire. Outside in the ghost taxi Rudge yelped and dropped his sub.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Okay,” noted Vinnie in a slightly high-pitched voice. “I was thinking flame thrower not Krakatoa but whatever works.”     Liu Xi hissed. “I don’t like this place.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I’d drawn that conclusion.”     Hope looked around her in confusion. “What happened? What was that? Where did the bad people go?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Nowhere good,” answered Vinnie with a certain satisfaction.     Despite the rain and Vinnie’s psychic shift some of Liu Xi’s flames had taken hold on the physical fabric of the building too. Liu Xi gestured to hold back the fire but the blaze was spreading. “Is this place cleansed now?” she asked.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Not quite,” Vinnie judged. “There’s a nasty ravel of evil deeds going back to whenever this place was started, twenty, thirty, fifty years ago? It’ll take more than one angry firestorm to clean that up. Not that it wasn’t a very good firestorm, honestly. Don’t kill me.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Then what?” Liu Xi demanded. “And what about Hope? She’s as much in need of rescue as any of those girls we shipped to Hagatha’s house.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I’m going to be married,” Hope told them, desperately. “It’s what I’ve been bred for. I’m going to get married and live happily ever after.”     Liu Xi looked across at Vinnie, appealing for him to do something.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Right,” said the young occultist. “Hope, you’re right. Come on. Let’s go find you a new husband.” He gestured to Liu Xi and the elementalist blew the front of the cage to splinters.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“But I’m dead,” objected Hope, suddenly uncertain, frightened to leave the cage. “How can I live happily ever after now?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“There’s dead and there’s dead,” Vinnie told her. “While there’s life there’s Hope. Come with us.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“He seems like a stumbling babbling idiot but he’s really quite clever deep down,” Liu Xi comforted the ghost girl. “Also he’s not a bad kisser.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Not bad?” objected Vinnie.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Maybe you just need practice?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Urk.”     They led Hope across the waterlogged floor past burning crates and cages and back out to the front of the paper mill. She stared into the wide black night with a sense of wonder.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“What now, Vinnie?” Liu Xi asked. “You can’t keep donating blood to keep her in this world. Can you get her that bus to the afterlife now she’s out of the factory?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Nope,” admitted Vinnie. “But maybe a cab.” He led Hope over to the Ghost Taxi. “Hey, Rudge, this is Hope.”     Rudge tipped his cap to the ghost girl then did a second take. “Whoah. Hope. Hello. Hi. Yeah, hey there. Good to meet you.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“This is Rudge,” Vinnie told Hope. “He’s going to teach you how to drive.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“To drive? To drive a car? Like Rudge’s car?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Sure, exactly like that.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I am?” Rudge asked. Then, catching on that he was being invited to give tuition to a phantom hottie of the first order, added, “I am. Sure. Yep. Driving. Yes. Hope, I’ll be taking you out every day. Two hours driving lesson and maybe, you know, pizza or something afterwards.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“I’m dead, Rudge,” Hope told him.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Yeah, me too. But there’s this pizza place down on Ploog and Sutton that does a ham and salami that’ll make you feel like you just been born. Um, if you want to have some pizza with me, that is.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Rudge is working towards his final destination,” Vinnie explained. “He’s doing good deeds. Like looking after a lost soul who’s had a real bad time and needs someone to take real good care of her.” He gave the cabbie a significant glace of warning and encouragement.     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Hey, I’ve been a slime in my time, Vinnie, but not that kind of slime. Sure I’ll see Hope’s okay, get her set up with a place. She can room with Myrna till I work something out with Roswell. If she wants a cab there’s always room on the shift roster.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“This isn’t right,” Hope whispered to Liu Xi. “You said I was going to my husband.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“By the long route,” the elementalist whispered back. “Believe me, getting there’s part of the fun. The happy ever after has to start with a happy right now.”     Hope looked over at Rudge and shyly said, “I would like a pizza one day. Whatever that is.”     Rudge’s face broke into a big wide grin. “You would? Stick with me babe and I’ll show you the whole damn city.”     Hope smiled back in delight. “Okay,” she agreed.     Rudge held open the cab door for her, something that almost never happened in Paradopolis. “C’mon toots. Let’s you and me see the sights.”     Vinnie looked back at the smouldering factory. “Now the place is cleansed,” he affirmed. “Do I need to do a schmaltzy explanation about the redeeming power of love?”     Liu Xi blew the interior up in a massive fireball of explosive gasses. “Do I need to tell you about hydrocarbon thermal chain reactions?”     Vinnie was so busy ducking that he didn’t even notice that his cab had driven off to show Hope the city until Rudge was out of mortal and mystic sight. “Hey, that was my ride home!”     Liu Xi shook her head. “I can fold void to get you back to that hovel of a shop,” she promised. “If you ask nicely.”     Vinnie looked relieved. “I’d really like you to give me a ride, please,” he agreed. “Er, by which I mean a ride home. I wasn’t suggesting… what I mean is… not a ride in the bed sense. I don’t want to… well, obviously I do but… when I say ride I was…”     Liu Xi shook her head in amused disbelief that the sorcerer supreme could manage to shoot himself in the foot quite so often. She prodded him on the chest. “You’ll get your ride home, Vinnie De Soth,” she promised him. “But first you have to take back that second sight you gave me. Seeing ghosts is way too spooky when you can already see elemental activity all the time. Triple vision just makes me queasy. Take the ghost-vision away.”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Yes, I can do that. Of course.”     Liu Xi looked at Vinnie speculatively. She pushed the hair back from his forehead and moved closer. “Is there any special ritual required for that to happen?”     Ã¢â‚¬Å“Um well…” Vinnie gulped. Then Vinnie smiled.     It was going to be a happy Hallowe’en. *** The Vinnie De Soth Stories: The Compound #1: Gathered #2: Scattered #3: Slaughtered - A deserted underground lab, an experiment gone wrong, a small group trapped in a base full of ghosts... must be Hallowe'en again. The Bride - Vinnie De Soth and Liu Xi Xian consider arranged marriage. The Last Victim - Charity Hanson was perhaps the last person to die in the Parody War... but that doesn't mean her story ends there. Old Acquaintance - Vinnie De Soth is reunited with a girl in trouble - and she used to be his fiancée. Aagrah In The Afternoon Supernatural Special - a very unusual episode of the popular chat show, with some very special guest stars. Vinnie De Soth and the Sorority Poltergeist - a bloody haunting at the worst time of the month. The Hooded Hood's Homepage of Doom Who's Who in the Parodyverse Where's Where in the Parodyverse Liu Xi image by Visionary Original concepts, characters, and situations copyright © 2009 reserved by Ian Watson. Other Parodyverse characters copyright © 2009 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 Ian Watson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved.

A fun Halloween treat! Always good to see Vinnie in his element. Er... so to speak. I mean, things with Liu Xi didn't quite get that far. Not that we saw, in any event.

Great job establishing a creepy location and keeping the whole story atmospheric. I also like how you break down the differences between Liu Xi's areas of expertise, which are grounded in the natural world, and Vinnie's, which are decidedly not. It makes them a good team... no wonder he's so sweet on her. Plus, who doesn't love dry socks on a wet and chilly night?

Good stuff!