Morning in Vinci:
A Fanfic
Part of the ongoing Crimson Version Epic
This story takes place after Battle #19. Read that first!
A potent scent wafted into Leonardo's nasal passages, jerking him awake. The smell was thick and viscous. It floated into his cerebrum, and once there began tearing through Leonardo's gray matter like Jaws through Captain Quint. His badly seared brain struggled to idenify the revolting stench, and soon a coherent thought wormed it's way through the scorched wasteland of his mind: It's me, isn't it?
Indeed it was. Leonardo Da Vinci, once-renowned scientist and inventor, was having a bad year. After a big mess with time-travel and renegade lab assistants, Leonardo found himself turned into a bloated, hideous freak of creation, a monster with no legs, a huge gut, unneccesarily long horns, and a tendacy toward extreme flatulence. He was laughed out of the Italian Renaissance's scientific community, attacked by a swarm of angry villagers, scorned by every woman he met, robbed, beaten in the head with a tire iron, pushed down a flight of stairs, insulted by Jay Leno on national TV, thrown in prison for vagrancy, spit on, punched in the mouth, blasted by a shotgun at point-blank range, slammed through a table by Terry "Hulk" Hogan, pistol-whipped, and to top it all off his website at Geocities was deleted. And that was just the first day; after that he really hit the skids.
It seemed that life had cheated Leonardo Da Vinci, a man who was once destined to be remebered for centuries to come as one of the greatest scientific minds of all time. At least, he should be remembered for centuries to come, but the way things were going it was unlikely he would live for another five minutes before dying of a massive heart attack due to cholestoral buildup.
Leonardo shook his head from side to side, trying to find a patch of air that wasn't lousy with his own bodily funk. No such luck. He finally gave up the futile head-shaking, because it caused his horns to scrape against a piece of smoldering, warped steel every time he tried it.
Leonardo sat up and looked around. Somehow he had wound up in a filthy alleyway between two buildings. Leonardo had a vague remembrance that the building on his right had a sign that read Dickerson Bail Bondsman, and looked to be in great business. The enterprising individuals in the other building weren't doing bad for themselves either; the sign above it's front door simply read Girls. There was no doubt about it, Leonardo had landed in a rough part of Vinci.
He tried to recall last night's events, without much luck. He had a hazy memory of sticking together large pieces of steel with oiled things he found in a dumpster, then trying to give life to some half-mad concoction by jolting it with electricity from the storm. Then a more recent memory made an appearence in his head, and Leonardo realized that the piece of smoldering, warped steel his horns kept scraping when he shook his head might have some significance.
Leonardo turned around and gasped in surprise. Someone, clearly in a feverish, intoxicated state, had constructed some sort of crude machine behind him. A few moments passed before Leonardo made the connection: he built the machine himself, and the machine was a temporal reality dislocator, the most dangerous and unstable invention he had ever created.
Da Vinci stared at the dislocator for another two hours, wondering what the hell it was supposed to do. His eventual conclusion was that the temporal reality dislocator's function was to sit around and do nothing. Why he had thought of it as his most dangerous and unstable invention crossed his mind briefly, but before he could ponder the implications of that thought a hole in the time/space continuum opened and three strange creatures stepped through.
"Leonardo Da Vinci, I presume?" remarked one of the creatures, which looked uncannily like a small bird. The other two creatures, who appeared at least slightly human, looked very uncomfortable.
"Hey," Leonardo said. He paused for a moment, waiting for one of the creatures to speak, but they only stared at him dumbly. "Uh, so, are you guys from around here?" he asked. The creatures seemed to take notice of their surroundings at the moment. They scanned the dank alleyway, and all three of the creatures came to the same conclusion: they weren't from this hellhole or anywhere near it, and had no plans to stay there any longer than necessary.
Leonardo Da Vinci sensed that the creatures wanted him to keep talking, and so he kept on for another fifteen minutes, listing hundreds of gooey substances he had found in his armpits since he transmogrified into a disgusting monster. He might have continued listing substances even longer, but the tallest and most human-looking of the creatures finally gave in to impatience.
"Listen, lard-bucket," said the creature, whose name Leonardo would later learn to be Explanation, "none of us are strong or smart, and you happen to be both. Do you want to help us, or not?"
Leonardo thought this over for a few moments. "Why not," he said finally. The three creatures looked at Leonardo. Leonardo looked at the three creatures. The hole in the time/space continuum sucked up a parked Mercedes. The small bird-creature had a revelation.
"Where's the narration?" he said. Leonardo and the other two creatures looked at each other, looked at the bird, looked at the hole in the time/space continuum, looked at the temporal reality dislocator...
Sudden comprehension assaulted Leonardo's mind like Lawrence Taylor sacking a Quarterback. "My temporal reality dislocator," Leonardo said, pointing to the ugly machine, "is leaking. We must have slipped into an alternate reality or something."
The three creatures, whose faces were deep purple in color because they had been holding their breath since they entered the alley, gave Leonardo a strange look. "That's a very dangerous and unstable thing to invent," the bird said. "Don't do it again."
The third creature, which looked like some sort of deranged pirate, gestured toward the hole in the time/space continuum. "Arr, le's get outta here," he grumbled, in a pirate-y way. "Pittsburgh is playin' tonight." They all started toward through hole, and the pirate said in an off-hand way: "My name's Cap'n Pete, in case you were wonderin'. The bird is D'Ron, an' the other guy is Explanation." (At this point Leonardo learned the name of the tall man that called him a bucket of lard, as previously foreshadowed.)
Leonardo waddled after his new allies, into the black, gaping hole which had already sucked up half of downtown Vinci. As he waddled through into whatever brave new world awaited him, Leonardo had another brief flashback to the night before. The chill of forboding doom swept across his skin, and Leonardo was filled with the frightening and surprisingly powerful idea that he had left behind something very important. But before the thought could manifest itself, he was through the hole and gone.