Previous Post Interlude: Kara Harper and the Infernal Concert Note: This scene is preceded by Al B. Harper’s tie-in ***     â€œNice piece,” the guy said.     Kara Harper, who had been bending over to attach an amp for the coming show, stood up and turn around. “You’d better have been talking about my guitar,” she warned.     â€œYeah. The guitar. Sure, why not?”     Kara turned to heave the last bit of kit onto the outside stage where she and her new punk band were setting up outside the Triple Alpha frat house for tonight’s big party. Guests were already arriving, hitting the open bar and dancing to a frankly-overrated DJ. Her admirer lifted the heavy stack up to her one-handed, still balancing his own Stratocaster across his back. He didn’t look that strong.     â€œYou’re not on the programme,” Kara pointed out.     â€œNicest thing I’ve heard about me in a long time.” The guy grinned. His eyes were sunken into shadow and his long dark brown hair hadn’t seen a barber for years but he had a kind of cocaine-cool bad-boy look and he could have been an artist’s model for Gaiman’s Sandman.     â€œAre you one of the fraternity here?” Kara asked. She was new to the Triple Alphas.     The guitarist snorted. “Do I look like a dull pompous self-absorbed mummy’s boy?”     â€œYou look like a road accident got addicted to heroin. Are you a guest, then? Or a gatecrasher?”     â€œWell, nobody invited me.” He winked at Kara. “Night’s still young, though.”     Kara patted him on one leather-dustered shoulder, “Word of advice, buster. I’m from hundreds of years into the future. Every line you’ve got that you think is fresh, it’s been tried on the girls in my era about a million times.     â€œGood to know. Since the human race doesn’t go extinct, I guess our lines must work.” He passed over the jack cables Kara was looking for.     â€œI’m working tonight,” she warned him. “You’re wasting your time in a target-rich environment.”     â€œI’m really not. I need to be right here.”     â€œYou are not jamming.”     â€œMore threshing, probably. But you go do your set, with your plastic play guitar.”     â€œThis is a Yamaha Pacifica. It’s state of the art for this prehistoric period. That thing on your back is an antique. It probably uses clockwork.”     â€œSteve? Oh, he’s old, for sure. But he has souls.”     The rest of the band were coming onto the platform. “That Stacy Royale girl says if we want to get paid we should probably make some noise,” the drummer warned. “She was pretty mean about it.”     â€œBut she’s hot,” Keyboards pointed out.     â€œOut of your league, Melanie,” Kara warned. “Maybe you should go annoy the Princess, Stratocaster?”     Chronic had vanished. ***     About half an hour later, the entire AAA mansion vanished.     â€œA phase-warp inversion contusion using non-Cartesian vector shifts,” Kara estimated.”     Half the crowd were too buzzed to notice the disappearance. Whatever was spiking the beer was going its job. Many of the other guests seemed to think it was all part of the fun.     â€œOkay, I should probably call dad and tell him that Young Heckfire have dimension-warped off with the Juniors without paying me.”     â€œYou may want to do a bit more math,” the pale guitarist mentioned. “And you might want to do it stood at least three paces to the left.”     â€œWhy?” Kara demanded, but already her mind was processing the equations for the mass/energy teleport transfer and recognising that there had to be a backlash component of comparable density and power. And the likely co-ordinates for that were…     She skipped hastily to the left.     The Bodach Glas rose from a rift in the ground right where she’d been standing. In fact he rose to about ten feet high, not counting the antlers, and he swivelled his cow-skull head to look at her.     â€œYeah, that’s about right,” Chronic said. He stepped between Kara and the hellspawn and waved at it. “It’s a private party,” he warned.     The Bodach Glas gathered up his power and prepared to manifest it by shredding the screaming partygoers that were failing to worship him.     â€œYou worked out the frequencies he used to ride the transfer backlash here, yet, Shoulderpads?” Chronic asked Kara.     â€œNaturally. And if I only had a phase reversal infraduction loop and antitesla coil with a quantum point power source I could make him really wish he’d stayed at home. As it is, I didn’t even bring a purse.”     â€œWhere would you put it?” the guitarist asked, admiring the performer’s white-leather straps outfit. “Anyway, you don’t need whatever it was you just said. Can you convert the wavelength to express it in octaves?”     â€œBase eight ascensions? Yes. Do I look like a simpleton?” Kara reeled off the chords.     Chronic unslung Steve from his back. The Bodach Glas swivelled his head round urgently. The guitar made an ominous sub-twang that promised really bad things were going to happen to somebody very soon.     â€œTold you there’s be threshing,” Chronic reminded Kara. “You may want to remove your panties and cover your ears.”     â€œWhat? Why?”     â€œIt’s going to get loud, and then afterwards we can go somewhere quiet.”     Steve screamed out the music like an explosion in a sound effects department. The Bodach was smashed back as if he’d been hit by a truck. And the truck had been carrying ginsu knives. And all the ginsu knives had been heated by blowtorches.     â€œYou know what’s coming here soon,” Chronic told the shattered demonspawn. “You know you don’t have permission to intrude right now. So you have only yourself to blame for this.”     He took it to the bridge.     When Kara opened her eyes and took her hands from her ears, the Bodach Glas was gone. The stage was a bent mass of scaffolding and wrecked equipment. The audience was on the floor, though a few of them were clapping in stunned response. Police sirens wailed in the distance.     â€œWho the hell are you?” Kara asked Chronic.     â€œA guy with a pick-up approach you haven’t heard of before. Can we get out of here now?”     â€œYou came here to stop that thing?”     â€œNah. The Lair Legion lives for stomping things that the Bodach. I just wiped him to spoil their fun.” He looked Kara up and down. “I came here to pick up you.”     â€œAnd you think that’ll do it, fighting an extraplanar entity?”     â€œI think maybe it gets me to the first drink stage. But you’ll have to buy, because I’m broke.”     â€œI didn’t get paid yet, either. My employers fled the dimension. And like you said, I have limited purse placement opportunities.”     Chronic pointed to Kara’s Yamaha and the Devil’s Guitar across his back. “We could always try busking?” *** Original concepts, characters, and situations copyright © 2016 reserved by Ian Watson. Other Parodyverse characters copyright © 2016 to their creators. This is a work of parody. The use of characters and situations reminiscent of other popular works are in fair-use parody and do not constitute a challenge to the copyrights or trademarks of those works. Any proceeds from this work are distributed to charity. 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.

Nice work including it while not derailing the story! I enjoy a good use of music to banish monsters from another dimension story, complete with insane costumes. And nice to see Chronic again!