Storyline 1

== The Crystal Castle ==
“Wait, so there’s no mission here? Not even to go over the bridge to that castle over there?”
“Yep”
“Ooky, you dragged me out of bed at 3 AM, across gulfs of spacetime, to do nothing and look at the stars and a castle we can’t even get to?”
The man saying this, very indignantly, was Quentin Quigley, a magician wearing the sweat-stained tuxedo from last-nights show, with bags on his eyes and the exact sort of face you would expect on a young man more concerned with being woken up at the middle of the night rather than the fact that he was standing at the end of a broken bridge of light to a crystal castle amidst a field of stars.
The aforementioned Ooky (full name Ooky-Spooky), a top-hatted skull-faced orange-and-purple being that could be best described as a bug-skeleton-coffin-mechanism thing, looked puzzled. “Well, you would’ve said no otherwise silly!”
“That’s because I don’t like it when you drag me on nonsense journeys like this one!” he said indignantly. Of course, this was only half true, and only half of the time at that, the other half of the times being totally un-true
He sat down on the light, It felt liminal “Well, it is kind of pretty. Moderately. Begrudgingly.”
He stared into that castle, gleaming in the distance. “So, do you have any idea of what’s in there?”
“Nope!” Ooky said, sitting down bony and bandy legged in a way that was elegant and helter-skelter all at once, Her tophat opened its jaws and panted with its slimy tongue. She gave it a pat. “You can’t fly there though, believe me I’ve tried. There’s some way to make it open by unifying the two sides, maybe we can do that someday.”
“Yeah, maybe.” Quentin said. They sat there, a while, in silence, as the luminous violets and ultraviolets of the cosmos drifted amongst the stars, and the castle sparkled in the light. One could see something moving there as one sat to look at it, blending subtly with the glistening light of the structure, but Quentin couldn’t make out what it was. It was certainly beautiful though, near the end of the bridge, forever crumbling and reassembling across the gap as the road began to rumble.
Wait, rumble? There was a sound of thunder breaking the music of the spheres as a creature like a motorcycle mixed with a lion came tearing through, skidding to a halts its gold-and-red-garbed rider jumped off. If Ooky hadn’t grabbed Quentin and fluttered up on beetle-wings, they’d have been knocked over like bowling pins.
Quentin took a look at their unprovoked rider-assailant as Ooky fluttered down. She was a woman wearing a bizarre neon nightmare of a helmet, covered in blades and a glowing visor, with six arms and purple skin; gorgeous in a biker-who-could-punch-you-in-the-face-and-leave-you-begging-for-more way with a hint of very curly hair beneath her helmet.
Ooky, being Ooky, simply looked at the woman; who was currently digging through the pockets in her jacket; and smiled. “Howdy there!” She said, tipping her fanged hat and letting its tongue pant out, “What brings you to this neck of the void?”
The woman turned, still digging, and smiled a warm grim “My name is Miss Mash, and I seek the legendary White Weapon! I ride wherever the universe may take me, and where it takes me to this place, this destiny, right-now!” As she was making this passionate speech, her mount was yawning and curling up on the edge of the bridge. Biomechanical cat-cycles were still cats after all.
“Well, the bridge is out, and there’s no going in without it. Some timey-spacey nonsense. We’re just here to look!” Ooky said, jgesturing about.
“Nonsense!” She took out a machine that looked like somebody put the soul of Las Vegas in a trash compactor and attached it to a gun handle. The lights all over read in an ever-shifting mandala of forms “EAT AT JOES.” “My Neon Blaster’s magic sigils have not failed yet, whether it be repairing bridges or blocking them for a duel!”
Mash aimed the blaster at the gap between the castle and the bridge. She pulled one trigger. The gas snaked out, prismatically; hypnotically in what Quentin guessed and Ooky knew to be some sort of sigil. Then, with the pull of another trigger, it lit up all at once, a great shining sigil betwixt the gap, slowly conjuring something. Ooky clasped her hands in glee.
Then it began to rain spoons.
Spoons made of a silvery pink metal with a faint glow granted, but still spoons. Ooky pulled out an umbrella from the keyhole in her chest and Quentin quickly ran beneath it also. Miss Mash just scratched her head as her mount simply stayed put, the spoons plinking off its metallic surface. “I could have sworn the setting were right” she said, looking at various shifting knobs and switches on the weapon and tweaking them.
Quentin rolled his eyes. He had a feeling this would take a while. And that this was going to be just the beginning of yet another very, very strange day.
== The Great Clock ==
“So, it’s just a dusty clock, what’s wrong with it?” Quentin Quigley asked his be-top-hatted partner, as Miss Mash tested her sword skills against her own reflection against the crystal in the background.
‘Just a clock?! JUST a clock?! This is no mere clock, it is THE Great Clock! And, its stopping means…”
Ooky-Spooky stopped for a moment, and pondered. “It means?” Quentin asked her. He looked at the clock. 
It was ticking away as if stuck like a zombie in rigor-mortis, struggling but unmoving past its point as the seconds-hand jittered.
“Actually, I haven’t the foggiest.” Ooky answered, her hat shrugging as she did “But it is something definitely BAD! And we are on a time limit!”
“Okay,” Quentin said, rubbing his eyes, “I didn’t wake up for this, but okay. How much time do we have?”
“That’s the thing,” Ooky said, pacing about, “We don’t know the time! Because the clock has stopped!” She started pacing, her pointer finger morphing into a magnifying glass as she snooped. “We have to look everywhere in this castle, even if it takes us hours, days, weeks indeed!”
Quentin was about to groan with his head in his hands, when suddenly an accelerating red-hot sphere flew past his head, and flickeded right next to the clock. 
It hit something. He saw something. Something flickering in and out of existence. It was at once like a hole into a world of stars and a hole into nowhere at all, in the form of a great twelve-legged spider. It was dripping from the spot it was hit. It was dripping stars. It was dripping nothing at all.
Ooky looked up at the light flashing down and down and down. Miss Mash simply pirouetted around, awkwardly yet showily, and pointed a great leaden sword at the thing. “I beleieve,” she said, “that is your problem dear people. And I totally meant to do that, and didn’t at all misfire my Bullet-Sword!”
Quentin noticed that it was looking at them. With its glowing; hollow eye. IT was twitching before them. And Ooky was shifting her spyglass-finger into her hand, into a guillotine-razor claw…
=== Author Notes ===
Both my first attempt at a continuation of another drabble and at a Gif! Flashing lights/epilepsy warning here n in the tags for those tryin to filter this.
== The Cursed Cup ==
“What is that?”
“Over there, with the cup?”
“No, no, over there, behind the book.”
Ooky-Spooky, who the author gives a drawn portrait thereof in lieu of description because the author cannot be arsed with it yet again in a work this short, sauntered over to the dim glow beneath a dusty bookcase, in a musty antiquities store in god knows what plane. 
She shuffled through the stacks of books and picked out something producing that light. It was a small orb glowing faintly . “Ha. Looks like a long-burner, not much power, but a lot o energy, like for a clock!”
“Goddammit, I should’ve expected it to be a broken battery and not the giant spider thing chewing at it that was ruining the the stupid thing.” Quentin said, drinking the off-tasting Jolt Cola he’d bought from a vending machine in the shop. He could’ve sworn they stopped making that ages ago.
“What I didn’t expect was you taking the dust from that old one!” she said. A slight buzzing sound was heard from a small bag in Quentin’s pocket.
“Well, it might be useful.”
“Yeah, but that’s why I didn’t think you’d take it, you’ve never liked to touch any of my magic stuff. I might be rubbin off on ya, eh, eh?” She wiggled her eyebrows and nudged him in the ribs as she put the battery in the store-bag held by the tongue of her hat
“Or it could be the insomnia.” Quentin yawned and rubbed the bags under his eyes “But, we’ve got the thing, so can we pay and go now?”
“Nah, the magic that got us here’s got at least an hour left before cooldown. That’s why we’re getting the battery silly!” Ooky was glancing at a non-euclidean nudie mag as she said this. The centerfold was still intact.
Quentin was sipping his Jolt Cola as she said this, the click of realization in his head timed beautifully with the click of the “Wait, that’s what it’s for, a cooldown timer on magic? I thought you said it was important!”
Ooky looked at him and rolled her eyes “I said it was a very important clock, not that it was the most important clock! Besides, magic cooldown matters a lot more than you thin-”
“HUZZAH!’ A voice came from the dusty labrynth of shelves. It was the store’s proprietor, the black-carapaced woman-crab Carkinekros, with purple robes and an eager grin as sinister as the skull and crossbones on her back. “So, you’ve decided to stay! Unwillingly, which is the most fun kind of decided!”
She looked at Ooky perusing through the stack of books, “Hey now, this isn’t a lending library! It’s a buying library! Except for the library part, but the buying part still counts!” The robed proprietor said.
“Well, good thing I’m a buying!” Ooky tossed the nudie mag into her bag and then flipped through a few books until she found one with an obnoxiously yellow cover. Obnoxious enough that it made Quentin’s eyes hurt, and he went back to the looking at the weird goblet
“The King In Yellow Vaccine Edition” it read. Ooky turned to Carkinekros and asked ”What’s this one?”
“Ohj, that one! It’s an edition of an old play, one of the ones that drives you crazy at the behest of that one god who’s name you are never never supposed to say except that’s a myth and his name is Hastur! Some guy edited it to strike out a few passages, so you can read most of the nasty details but when you read the full version you aren’t as shocked and don’t go full-blown crazy”
“Maybe somebody wanted it buried if it’s in a place like this.” Quentin cynically asked, lookin around the dusty baubles for something that looked useful or not-cursed and failing.
‘’”Oh yeah, H-guy wants it gone, wants it gone real bad.That’s one of the last copies I think, and he might come back for it any day now! But what are the odds of that happening while you’re in the store?” Carkinekros paused for a moment “Quite high actually, but never you mind!”
Quentin found his eye turned back to the goblet.There was a red liquid in it, and it appeared to be talking to him without words. The sigil looked at him, with both hate and infatuation, in a way that drew him forward, and deeper, and deeper and deep enough that he didn’t notice Carkinekros looking over his shoulder.
“Didn’t think you’;d be the person into cursed stuff.” she said. He jumped back with a jolt, “Course, I didn’t think you were into anything when I saw your face, but I digress.”
Quentin looked at her, and looked back at the goblet. “So, what’s the curse?”
“Ha ha, I’m glad you asked! Somewhere in time and space it was commissioned from a forgemaster by a knight who was his closest ally, had the forgemaster’s crest and some powerful magical mojo on it.”
Carkinekros gave a wicked grin, “But when the knight discovered the bodies under the forgemaster’s foundry and what he was using them for, he couldn’t stand to look at it anymore, and thusly it got spoiled.”
Carkinekros picked up the glass and drained it onto the floor. “It’s got the power to enhance the greatest powers of the drinker for an hour, but afterwards it kills you.” Quentin looked down on the floor. It was sizzling, the dusty wood floor it touched hardening to an unsettling crystaline black. “No good for power trips or discrete poisoning.”
“I’LL TAKE IT!” Ooky said, hustling over to Carkinekros, “It and the play-vaccine-thingy, how much does it cost?”
Quentin looked further consternated. “Really Ooky?”
“I’ve always wanted to try and get into the rehavbilitation of cursed items as a hobby, and I always could do with a bit of light possibly-useful-in-the-future reading! C’mon, live a litle Quentin!”
“If it’s all the same to you I’d like to keep living a little more, and these would be very much deleterious to that thank you very much.”
Carkinekros took a black handkerchief out of her robe’s pockets and unfolded it into a small cash register which she placed on the table. “Cost for those two? Fifty percent off anything else, that’s what it costs! Take ‘em, I’ll be glad to be rid of ‘e-”
She paused. There was a sound. A voice as loud as peeling wallpaper and bourgeois despair. .“Still the angered servants burn/Upon the shadowed fables/Beneath the twilight royals rings/The beginning of our dying.”
A sound of poetry spoken in color. The color yellow. And the air slowly turned to yellow as the three players looked round, and from the leftern stage a hooded figure masqued but unmasqued crawled forward and the orchestra of the sphere played on.
Only Carkinekros spoke at that moment.
“Well, shit.”
=== Author Notes ===
Yep, a part three!
Also, fun fact for @borderlineanders, the tender with which Ooky-Spooky was wanting to pay with was Stardust Teeth. Yes, the teeth of Stardust The Super Wizard. Which she knocked out herself.
To quote her “It’s real easy if ya just act stupid enough to get close!”
== In the Halls of the King ==
“Okay, I don’t like you and you don’t like anything that lives, but let’s work together for a bit to get the hell out of here.”
Quentin Quigley, master magician currently holding a cursed cup, was lost. Lost in a labrynthine realm where the windows were garish and the realm was bright, sickly; nauseating yellow.
The cup quailed in his hand. He swore he could hear it growling. Certainly he saw the red venom dripping from its top. Because of course he did. What had Ooky gotten him into this time dammit…
Yes, indeed, when the realm of Hastur had intruded on the shop, she certainly was the first to punch the King himself when he showed his ugly mask/face/whatever-the-fuck with that stupid play. Because of course she would.
She certainly had been one to have read the whole unadulterated; unabridged text of the play herself, as she had bragged to Quigley a couple of dozen times, without going insane. She’d even written fix-fic for it, which she had read to Quentin when he was trying to sleep. God, what even was with that obsession with shipping Cassilda and Camilla anyway?
He looked into one of the windows, one of the ones where the shadows were dancing out of. It was yet another puppet show, this time of a bunch of marionette clown-worms devouring a whole city, while thousands of tiny human marionettes controlled by unknown hands were devoured amongst the miniature city stage.
Boy was that blood uncomfortably realistic. As was the puppet show he’d seen of a singular skeleton dragging itself slowly; surely across a very familiar hall. This was getting him nowhere. “Think, think, use your logic,” he pondered to himself, “Or whatever ate logic and took its place around here.” as the cup bubbled and rattled, being of no help whatsoever.
Or, was it? Thinking about it, the shopkeep had never said what qualified as drunk. Or powers; speaking of the ones the cup supposedly enhanced for a time before it destroyed the drinker. HE wondered…
“Well, no time for not trying stupid things,” he thought, and took out his keys. He scratched a few grooves into the window, just deep enough for liquid to stain and collect in them, and poured the glass on the window.
At first, there was nothing. Then, it was everything. The gouges in the glass mended and the stain of the red wine spread. A kalidescopic view of every window within the palace of the King, all points on the map visible to him, shone through that pane of glass, everything over everything all at once.
And, there was one window at its beating heart that shone out to him. One of the purest, vicious yellow. He could see shadows dancing within. And a face. And a darkest grin. And eyeless sockets looking straight into his soul.
“Him!” Quentin thought. He looked around. The window at the heart of his vision was right behind him, where it hadn’t been before. He could see something moving within. He looked down at the cup.
“Y’know, I have no idea if you can hear this, but thanks. I’ll put you on a special shelf when we get out of here.” He motioned to move. He swore he could hear the cup’s growling turn to purring…
At once he crashed through the window, into a chamber. The windows shone upon him kalidescopicaly, the shadows dancing within them. The shadows of her, Ooky, dancing amongst monstrocities of tendrils, fangs and holes.
And at the center of it all, was a balcony, holding a familiar face. The King In Yellow, leering above all.
“Tho dance is a wandering end/There is no goal; no future’s step”The words came from the hollows of the balcony, musically; like cool breezes of a sunless world; but the King never opened his jaw. “The alabaster to paper yellow/O’ how the dancers do not know/The windows calling nowhere plainly/Shatter to them one by one” The King raised a hand. One of the windows shattered, with a scream in a very familiar voice.
“OOKY!” Quentin shouted; as the shards of glass melted into glistening dust as they flew through the air.
“The lights go out in city’s night/The windows fall into time/O’ what a state of affairs it is/As rhyme does die as love”.
“Think, think, Quentin, what the hell do I do?!” he thought. His friend’s life hung in the balance, the balance of that stupid play and its stupid fucking playwri-
He had an idea.
“And thus I do not understand/Why windows reflect no future’s dances/And thus to you the shadows say/Come join us in our dying.”
The King cocked his head intrigued. Another window began to crack.
“For death and ruin may die itself/And love survive a world’s end/And so to Cassilda’s side I come/Away from yellow skies!”
The King looked around. The windows began to drip like wax. The shadows of them began to comverge. And the King began to howl, and the winds roared from behind.
“And as Faerie Queene to Goblin King/You have no power over me!”
The windows boiled and fell together, winding along the shadows, twisting; turning; crawling until they formed.
“Ooky!”
“I was wondering if you’d figure that out!” she said as she looked up at the King.
The balcony seemed much larger now. And much closer. The King was looking right into Quentin’s eyes, as he grabbed him in a black; gnarled claw.
And, without thinking, Quentin splashed the contents of the cup into his face as it reeld him inwards.
HE then realized how ill advised that was when the King began to change. Cloth robes and pyrrhite crown began to morph into tendrils and jaws and holes; but then into ruin, to the end of all given ether’s form, and darkness, and color, and yellow, and all ways yellow and the grinning mask-face was looking into every part of his mind.
Then there was a voice crying out. “Hey Kingo, don’tcha know when the bad guy takes his final form, it means he’s about to go down like a chump?!” Ooky brandished her razor and sliced clean through the vapor, through the King’s head, and to the end of his play.
A cloth dummy in cheap robes and a painted crown slumped to the floor, decapitated. Quentin looked around. He was back at the cheap room he rented with Ooky, everything back to normal.
Y’know,” Ooky said, brushing aside the dummy, “I toldja we could use that cup.”
Quentin smiled wistfully for a second before going back to his usual demeanor. “And, I’ll tell you,” He said as he tromped over to his musty bed, “I think after all this I deserve to sleep for a week.”
“So, everything is back to normal.” She thought. But, Ooky did notice that as he walked, he did make sure to put the cup right by his bedside, on the shelf. And she swore she could see the thing’s rune change into a sleeping eye. She swore the darned thing was purring…
=== Author Notes ===
Yep, it’s the finale to that story arc! Next week, something completely different!
Tho, I may be experimenting with the times I drop these, to get more eyeballs on them. Because, after all, these are to give me a consistently-updating project to work on to bring people to my Patreon.
== Storyline Author Notes ==
All narrative ideas introduced in this text; such as the castle; are free to use as long as I, Thomas F. Johnson, am credited as their creator. The actual text/narrative and adaptations thereof are CC-BY-SA, though if you want to use it more freely; contact me and we can work out a deal…
Tho, Hastur is public domain, if y’all didn’t know, and god do I hope I did The King In Yellow justice here…
And, if you wanna support me, maybe check out my Patreon or even just send a Ko-Fi my way! Every penny is appreciated, and I am eternally grateful for those who donate!
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Category:Thomas Johnson Fiction