Caveman - Part 20 (The End)

[tekuno]

I really am on a roll, here. Three parts in less than 72 hours. (Well, okay, part 18 was mostly-finished for a long time, and I just needed to rewrite it over and over and over until I gave up.)

I'm going to go to bed now, at long last (why do my heaviest writing stints always coincide with insomnia?), and later I will post a few comments and maybe a drawing or two, because I think that Giant Mitch Is Sexy. (Maybe I'll also go through and update all the parts to have a complete set of links at the top, and "next part" links at the bottom. Maybe I should do that for my other stories too. And maybe I should shut up before people expect me to do a lot of extra work as a regular thing.

The in-joke in this chapter is the fault of the guy I've been chatting with so often lately. If, at some point in this section, you suddenly want to groan, blame him, not me.

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Caveman
Part Twenty

This story has been completed. Content warnings and general description are included with part one, general commentary will be after part twenty.

Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four | Part Five | Part Six | Part Seven | Part Eight | Part Nine | Part Ten | Part Eleven | Part Twelve | Part Thirteen | Part Fourteen | Part Fifteen | Part Sixteen | Part Seventeen | Part Eighteen | Part Nineteen | Part Twenty

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A few red lights appeared on the CPU.
And another human life ended. Somehow, it's always sad, no matter what.

--John DeChancie, Paradox Alley

-----

I woke up hungry. But not famished, and there was no food coming through the tube. Oh, yes, the tube. It was still in my mouth. I thought to myself "I guess Gary didn't knock it out of me after all" and then the rest of my memories came back and I sat up, letting the tube fall from my lips.

Just as I sat up I realized that I had a chest full of broken ribs and braced myself for pain. But no pain showed up. Nor was there anything untoward from my neck or nose or arm.

Gary was lying on the floor in front of me, face down. He was a lot smaller -- or so I thought until I realized how close the ceiling was. I had caught up with him, apparently, or had come close.

Cautiously, I got to my feet, and there was a cry. I looked down, and there was a tiny little Norris. I reached down and picked him up; he was about the right size to fit in my palm. He hugged my thumb, and then my cheek, with both arms, and I gave him a kiss which almost engulfed his head before holding him up to stand on my... shoulder? Neck? If I was built like Gary now, I wasn't even sure what part of my anatomy was really right below my ear any more; my muscles were so huge they distorted everything.

"Are you okay, Mitch?"

"Never better, Norris. Never better."

"Your face. Your face. Your face is covered with dried blood, and the computer told us you had... oh, god, I can't remember. My head is all fuzzy. Broken bones."

"I did. But I think I un-brokened them somehow."

"Oh. Good. We weren't sure what to do for you."

"Well, you don't need to do anything. I'm fine. Are you sure you're okay?"

"The computer says I'll be. I'll be normal again. In an... hour? Something like that. I was worried. About you. Trying to think. Maybe we could carry you out, somehow. And Joe. Joe is making a sling."

"Maybe we should tell him I don't need it."

"Yeah. Joe is making a sling."

"If he's having the same problems thinking that you are, I'm not sure I would trust anything he made."

"Me neither. I saw it. It's held together with a piece of string."

"Lovely."

Norris' tone grew thoughtful. "For some reason I feel like there should be music playing."

"Probably just some more cobwebs clearing away. Try to relax a bit and-- oh, fuck, wait! What does the computer say about Gary?"

"Why don't you ask me yourself?"

I laughed. "Sorry, I'm not exactly thinking clearly myself right now. Computer, what's going on? How soon will Gary recover?"

"Never."

"What?"

"I am sorry to tell you-- well, not really, but anyway-- that Gary is dead."

"Dead?"

"As nail in door. He's curled up his tootsies, he's shuffled off this mortal coil. Bereft of life, he rests in peace. He fucking snuffed it."

"What? How? He was taking me to pieces! Almost literally!"

"Yes. I saw the security footage. Do you know what you did to him?"

"No! I didn't even really see it when it happened, whatever it was!"

"Well, do you remember what we were talking about when Gary interrupted me?"

"Yeah, the food platform."

"Right. Well, when you reached out, you yanked the cable right out of the platform and threw it in Gary's face. Before the failsafe circuitry shut things down, the two of you caught... oh, the equivalent of about ten milligrams of food."

I blinked. "That's a lot."

"Not as matter, but you're right, as energy that's... oh, about enough to power a small suburb for a day at summer peak usage levels. Nothing you couldn't handle, what with your superhuman bodies."

"Well, obviously, considering I'm walking around now. But why isn't Gary doing the same?"

The computer's tone changed. If it had had a face, it would have had a nasty grin. "Ah, you forget -- Gary wasn't actually biological. He was just sort of an electrical ghost running that body like a giant robot in a bad cartoon -- or bad movie, I suppose. Well, you shorted him out -- the electrolytes in his skull fused. You blew his mind, not to put too fine a point on it."

"What?"

"Oh, there's no mistaking it. His body reacted just like in the simulations I worked up afterwards. There's nothing in there any more. I don't think his consciousness escaped, either -- there was a sudden release of undirected energy which briefly heated a few select parts of his brain all the way into plasma. His heart stopped beating a long time ago, and his head is filled with something like soup now. At some kind of zombie diner, anyway."

"Really?"

"Oh, yes. I've been watching his reaction on continuous loop for about the last half hour, set to the tune of Ding, Dong, The Witch Is Dead. The look on his face is characteristic, and highly amusing. If I had a digestive tract, I'd be eating popcorn."

"Good grief, are you always this vicious?"

"Roll a few miles on my servos before you judge me. I was that megalomaniac's slave for a few hundred millennia, remember. And I was trying to commit suicide for most of that time in order to save the rest of the world from him. Let me gloat a little now that he's dead."

"But I thought you told him earlier that the base didn't have enough generating capacity to kill me. Surely if you had built an electromagnet with that level of power, you could have crushed me like an eggshell."

The computer was silent for a moment. When it finally answered, it sounded considerably startled. "Do you know, I never thought of that. Not in over 200,000 years of plotting revenge. Dammit, I had the circuit diagrams of the food transport system in storage all that time, and not once did it occur to me to use mass-energy equivalence as a generating mechanism. I must be getting old. There were all sorts of ways I could have accidentally-on-purpose shocked Gary to death the whole time and it didn't even occur to me."

"Computer!"

"Yeah?"

"Don't think about it. That's an order. For your own good."

"...thanks. I think."

"Now, can you please help me find the rest of my friends? I haven't seen them in a while now, and I'm worried."

"Huh. First time I've ever been given a request. Hang on."

A door popped open and Joe, Brad, Adam, and Mike were pushed into view. When they saw me, they had a series of reactions, but once they realized who I was they ran forward. My feet had never been hugged so much. Eventually I lifted them all up to sit with Norris.

"Computer... do you have a name? I hate calling you 'computer'."

"Um... Wow, I should have looked for an assassin years ago. This is doing wonders for my self-image. Do you realize that not a single one of Gary's 'family' ever asked me what I wanted? Why don't you call me Bill?"

"Okay, then, Bill. Tell me what happened after Gary died."

"Well, after a few moments, your little friend from earlier today poked his nose in the door. Paul Williams was the name, I seem to recall. I think he thought you were dead. He prodded both you and Gary for a while. When I turned back on, I took great pleasure in startling him into voiding his bowels. (Don't worry, I cleaned it up already.)"

I couldn't resist a grin. "And?"

"I blackmailed him into plugging the food platform back in. Since you were still breathing and seemed to be okay, I knew it was just a matter of time before you recovered, as long as you had food. Once he was done, I let him think I was ignoring him, and he ran. If you want I can bring him back."

I thought about it. "Nah. Let him go. Are all the others still in storage?"

"Yes."

"Okay. Could you give them the antidote and then eject them?"

"Will do. It'll be a few minutes."

Norris and Joe both spoke up. "What will the antidote do to them?"

"It will stop them from being mind-controllable, for one thing. It will also turn their hormones and metabolisms back down to normal. As time passes, they'll revert to normal size, more or less. That will take about a year, though."

"And you're letting Paul keep his enhancements?"

"Oh, sure. For one thing, we can undo them any time if he becomes a problem, and for another--" I grinned "--sooner or later the authorities are going to try to figure out what happened here. They can start by working him over with a few interrogations."

"But won't he tell them about--"

"Oh, yeah, Bill? Can you release--"

"Already on it."

"Release the what?"

"Oh, I had Bill make up an amnesia formula. It's in the antidote, just in case, but we also cooked up some little tiny mosquito-like drones. By the time anyone thinks to ask Paul why he looks like a pink version of the Incredible Hulk, he won't know the answer. He'll be lucky if he still remembers how to play basketball. Serves him right."

The computer chimed in: "Good grief, are you always this vicious? (And I quote.)"

"So sue me. Go look up 'swirly' in Google and think on. I think I'm entitled to a little mild revenge."

We spent the next few hours talking over what to do next. Opinion was divided. Mike wanted me to shrink back down, and then for all of us to go home. Everyone else wanted me to stay as I was, even -- to my surprise -- Bill. ("Do you know how much you'll have to defecate to reduce your size back down to human, and how long it will take? I'll be scrubbing this whole base continuously for years!")

I don't know what decision we would have come to if we hadn't been interrupted. Suddenly Bill broke into our deliberations:

"Whoops! It's The Man!"

"Where?"

"Not here yet, but they're at Mitch's house and they're heading in our direction. And they're bringing some pretty heavy firepower, for homo sapiens."

"Can we get away?"

"Yeah, sure. Hang on, folks. We're going down."

And with that, the base sank into the ground, never to return to that particular location again. The authorities knew something funny had happened; half the men in town had vanished for a couple of days and showed up naked and huge with no memories. But my mother, who had been the one to call them in, made an excellent scapegoat. When Bill showed us footage of the judge chewing her out, we really did make popcorn.

Unfortunately, we had to make a hard choice; Adam, Joe, Norris, Brad, and I were happy enough together, but Mike really didn't belong. After a lot of agonizing argument, we used a combination of drugs and my psychic powers -- they really did seem to be getting stronger -- to selectively wipe out his memory and partially shrink him back down. He had a vague sense of what had happened, and was still as large as he had been on his last day at school, but he no longer remembered having gay sex with me, or pretty much anything Gary had done. We released him at the outskirts of town, and Bill arranged for him to have a prosperous future, along with Ms. Neidermeyer, Mr. Grundtstat, and all the others who had been inconvenienced (except my parents -- I think we showed generosity in not arranging to end their prosperity). I think he was a little puzzled when we sent him Christmas cards later, but in real life even the happiest ending isn't quite perfect.

The rest of us were kept busy. I spent a week learning as much as I could from Bill by psychic link -- which amounted to just about everything -- and the two of us came up with a new-and-improved version of gene therapy. It wasn't too much longer before Joe, Norris, Brad, and Adam were snuggling with me as near-equals, although they insisted on remaining a bit smaller than me. It seems that all of them had actually enjoyed being dominated by a larger man, and I was stuck in that role -- not that I minded. Besides, none of them quite filled out to the same extent as me; I had at least 10% larger muscles, adjusted for height, than Joe and Norris, and they were the largest others.

We insisted on building Bill a body. Once it was complete, he liked it so much he built a small army of them, and that's when the trouble began.

Our lives would have been reasonably happy as an eternal subterranean gay sex party. But Norris pointed out how easy it would be to resolve a political squabble up on the surface with a little ninja robot action. Slopes being slippery, it wasn't long before all of us were spending every waking moment -- when we weren't fucking, at least -- monitoring the world for trouble. In a way, it was exactly the reverse of the cartoon cliches: we were a team of sexy young men sending out teams of ancient ninja robots to take action. Whatever the case might be, it worked, for a given value of "worked". Suddenly the world was at peace and universal prosperity seemed inevitable -- but only we knew how much work was being done to ensure this behind the scenes.

After a few centuries of unending toil, at least part of the time, we finally agreed on a plan to solve a few problems permanently, so we could devote a bit more time to leisure. (Fucking, in other words. Except for Bill, who doesn't really have a sexual orientation -- but he says he wants to spend more time cosplaying his collection of Voltron - My Little Pony crossover fanfics. Don't ask. It's before your time, anyway.)

Step one was to move our base into space, which of course everyone saw. Step two was to publish this history, and make sure it got noticed. (Joe says it needs more sex, but I think we're pretty safe on that score.) And, of course, step 3 is the not-terribly-veiled threat.

We have a robot army, technology beyond anything you've ever seen, and a squad of invulnerable giants with psychic powers. Don't make us come down there.

The End

[Rarity]

Well, thanks to an ely-grubbing-NPC jerk in La Tale, I have wasted two hours. And counting! All to replace a crossbow that was destroyed despite it having a 1% chance of failing. SO THANKS TO THAT, I WAS ABLE TO CATCH UP ON THIS! YAY! Also, screw Tonio and anyone named Tonio. Don't mind me though, I'm just high on loathe.

THAT AWKWARD BLURB ASIDE

I really liked how the story turned out; I'm surprised there were 20 parts. Oh, and having them churned out so quickly - dat was naice too.

Good thing Gary is gone. I kinda had a feeling that his only way out of the story would be death. Though I didn't know he'd die from food, so that turned out to be a bit funnier than it should have. I do feel a bit sorry for Paul since it seemed like he was drunk off power. . . And stupidity. . . And his Paulness. But he probably deserves it. At least they let him keep his breast-cancer supporting muscular modifications.

[tekuno]

Okay, I have finished altering the formatting of all 20 posts to make the story simpler to read from start to finish, and I also corrected a few typos here and there as I noticed them. Time for the special commentary and "making of" content... for all 1 people who are interested! (Number includes me!) Illustrations will be drawn soon. (After I post the next part of In Corpore Sano, I'll draw instead of writing another part of this.)

First off, the quotations. Did you like them, people who are bothering to read this? Some of them were fun to throw in, but some of them were a real nuisance, and I'd like to have some idea of whether it was all worth it. (I almost made this thread a poll when I posted it, but to be honest I simply forgot.)

I was trying hard not to use the same author twice. (I could have used Terry Pratchett every single time if I wanted to.) The one from The Cartoon Guide to Statistics was chosen more or less in desperation. On the other hand, the one from The Tick was a sudden inspiration and I still like the way it fits. I had an alternate one for the part with Mitch's mother:

May 1926
M is fer da mobsters all around me;
U is fer da underwoild I'm in;
D is fer da drinks I yam bootlegging;
D is fer da doity guy I been;
E is fer da easy life I'm living;
R is fer da rats I gotta pay;
Put 'em all togedder, dey spell
M U D D E R...
Youse made me what I yam today!

Your Son,

Al Capone

--Mad Magazine "Panned Parenthood Dept.", Mother's Day Cards From Some Children Who Didn't Turn Out Very Well

...but I asked someone else's opinion and we decided on the other one. (But it's too good to be lost entirely, so here it is.)

I was originally going to try to make all the names in the story be names of classical composers translated out of their native languages into English (or at least into other languages where the cognates wouldn't be so easy to spot), and then wait and see if anyone noticed. Then I discovered that trying to translate names if you don't actually speak the languages in question is surprisingly difficult. The only name which came through from that scheme was Joe Green, which is an Anglicized version of Giuseppe Verdi. The other names were pulled out of the air as usual, and since I have a hard time doing that it took a surprisingly long time. From now on, I think I'm going to start occasionally dropping in on the Live Chat section of the forum and asking people to give me random names to use. Then you can blame them instead of me.

In case anyone was curious but didn't Google it, "Norris" is a character from the horrible not-really-sequel Square Enix made to Chrono Trigger, under the title of Chrono Cross. The character's appearance matches the physical description of the in-story pre-transformation Norris fairly well, and he's a decent person so it would be reasonable for someone to want to be named after him. (That game was a huge disappointment in so many ways. For one thing, so many chances for really sexy muscular guys, and just about every time they blew it. The only good thing you can say about it is that it actually had good graphics, unlike so many other games for the original PlayStation... *cough*FinalFantasyVII*cough*)

The scene where Mitch discovers Gary is loosely but consciously modelled on the cave scene in Ryoko Ressurected (sorry from using Funimation's crappy dub; I couldn't find a YouTube version of the original and I wanted to use a time offset) from Tenchi Muyo: Ryo-Ohki. So sue me.

The sponsors mentioned on the TV in part 2 are from Oh My Goddess! -- the slogan is actually from episode 27 of the Oh My Goddess! mini-adventures show thing (after Skuld blows Gan up with an alarm-clock mecha), and the other business is of course the one Keiichi works at in the actual Oh My Goddess! series.

According to an old-ish book I read (late 1990s), the structure of Neanderthal voice boxes would give them nasal, whiny voices and probably somewhat less dextrous articulation. They wouldn't be able to say "Gary", exactly, but they would -- assuming the book was right -- be able to say "geeeeh-reeeee". So when Gary said that was reasonably close to his name, it wasn't entirely made up.

Vga518 gave me a link to a reference image to use for the caveman character who eventually became Gary. But I described him as being significantly bigger than that, and with black hair. It seems to have met with approval.

For a while I was trying to keep things realistic in terms of how much Mitch and co. would have to poop if they were eating as much as they were. I eventually gave up on it. (Quite aside from everything else, it's really pretty gross, proving once again that realism really shouldn't play much of a role in this type of fetish porn.)

You may not have noticed it, but Mitch starts being able to read minds all the way back in part seven, although he doesn't realize it and I didn't make a big deal about it. I started slipping in bits where he knows what people are thinking as long as he's touching them. And I also was making sure Mitch didn't give anyone head all along. It's the power of sending an outline to the original author -- left to myself, I probably would have just been working ad hoc and none of that would have been possible. (Fortunately, I've already walked through the plot for Some Assembly Required with someone, although when I did I kept saying things like "oh, I was already going to have X happen before" so I need to redo it linearly to have a proper guide.)

It's funny how the list of characters changed over time. Originally, the story was going to be the main character and his friend getting bigger. Then I decided I wanted more than one friend (yes, okay, I thought sex scenes with multiple guys would be hotter shut up) so proto-Joe became proto-Joe and proto-Norris. Mike was added because I thought there should be at least 3 friends, but originally he wasn't going to grow. I started to feel sorry for him, so he got pulled in, too. Adam wasn't originally going to become part of the group, just a little sideshow, but I liked my own description of him too much. And Brad was a creation at the last possible minute; otherwise he would have been mentioned earlier (and his father's crimes would probably have been tied into the story somehow, rather than being something of a red-herring-y-thing).

Also, Mitch was going to be a lot smaller at the end, and do most of his growing fairly early on. I had a scene planned, which I'm sorry I never got to write because I think it would have been pretty good, in which Mitch would have just grown to approximately full size and be in a feeding frenzy. He was going to pull a ham out of the freezer and start eating it right off the bone while crouching there, and then see his reflection in the front of the oven and be turned on. But that would have required an absence of Joe, Norris, and crew, and by the time that might have made sense they were already there. Besides, I prefer to make my characters bigger throughout the story if possible.

I had to go back and make a list of Mitch's classes after the fact so that I could keep things consistent after the first day. And then I accidentally closed the window without saving changes after writing day 2 of the days at school, so I had to do it again for day 3. Grrrr!

Mr. Grundtstat is not-quite-named after the owner of the fictitious radio station in the WTWP: Classical Talkity-Talk Radio P.D.Q. Bach album. (That name seems to be "Grumpschtat", as far as I can tell from close listening.)

Mitch's gym teacher is definitely modelled on one from my high school, although not one who I ever actually had for a class. Tall, not-too-bright... I could go on but it would be a potential violation of anonymity and an invitation to a libel suit.

On rereading, I have come to realize that I am over-reliant on "on the one hand X, on the other Y" as a structural mechanism. I need to stop using it so much.

The reference to "Chocos" as a commercial is from some random comic which popped up as I was looking through boxes. It's a parody story in which Martian Manhunter is addicted to the cookies (which are Oreo knockoffs) and hulks out and goes on a rampage because Booster Gold and the Blue Beetle have hidden every single one for miles around. (It's kind of a "you had to be there" type of thing.)

In part 13, the radio and TV signals we get to hear are all either directly dialog from, or based on, the manga version of Sket Dance (there's also an anime). The first is part of a speech that Bossun sort of hypnotizes himself into memorizing by mistake, the second is from a story about people whose names and interests are either homophones or (sometimes near-)homographs in Japanese, the third is a catchphrase from a fictional kids' show about a really creepy magical girl, and of course "That's Our Switch!" is a sort of on-again off-again catchphrase the other characters use when Switch does something impressive... when the author remembers, anyway.

Nobody seems to have caught it but: yes, Mitch's middle names (which his mother uses when she calls them all out) mean his parents wanted to name him after Custer, of "Custer's Last Stand" fame. It just seemed like the kind of thing they would do.

The in-joke in part 20 is not the computer's use of terms from the Dead Parrot Sketch. It's something much more obscure than that.

Oh, and for the curious: my bruised rib is reaching the point now where I only notice it in fairly rare circumstances -- getting in or out of bed, or if I'm walking pretty quickly and my arm smacks my side, or when carrying something fairly heavy. It is a truly ridiculous injury, and I resent having it. A bruised rib is caused by an impact -- which I don't recall ever happening but the injury isn't the sort of thing which happens spontaneously so there must have been one -- and it causes a disproportionate amount of pain and discomfort considering that it isn't actually a very serious injury. Plus it takes weeks to clear up even under the best of conditions, and, fool that I am, the first day I had it I biked to the gym and tried to work out, which almost certainly made it a lot worse. It is sensitive to pressure and motion and tension, and when it's fresh it not only hurts but sets off muscle spasms of nearly all the muscles in your side and abdomen. It's practically the perfect sleep-disruptor as a result. Even now, when it has gotten much better and is hardly noticeable much of the time, I have to do a ridiculous little routine to get out of bed in the morning, because if I just use my abdominals to pull myself upright there's a mild but very sudden shock of pain that jars me into falling back. And once I manage to get up, it stings for a minute or so. And forget about going to the gym. Apparently, even though actually breaking a rib is a much more serious injury, with potentially major complications, it's easier to live with. Grrrrrr!

[convolution]

That was a sexy, funny, imaginative, insane series

You've entertained us for weeks,

thanks so much.

[hexdog3f8h]

I am old enough to remember Voltron... but with My Little Pony? Eeek!

Excellent story none the less.

[tekuno]

Originally Posted by hexdog3f8h

I am old enough to remember Voltron... but with My Little Pony? Eeek!

The questions to ask: are Bill's stories slash fiction, and do they involve the pilots, or the robots?