Peace and Quiet (short story)

Home from romanticising a sea serpent, an exhausted Marksmanship-522 collapses on his bed, ready to enjoy some restful peace and quiet. However, no sooner has he lit a lavender-scented candle that his house is rocked by a nearby explosion. Running out, Marksmanship finds Larrikin-1029, who is practicing his Fog Ship-piloting skill and has just crashed the Ship he was using. When queried, Larrikin blithely insists that he is going to be doing this all day, crashing as many borrowed Ships as it takes, and that he could not possibly move this activity elsewhere as this spot next to Marksmanship's house is “th’ best flyin’-practice place in th’ Homeworld”.

Knowing better than to argue with Larrikin, Marksmanship decides to go find somewhere else to have his nap, walking off with his pillow and his candle. He thinks to find refuge in one of the many unused warehouses dotted around the Homeworld by Foreman-964, only to be roused once again by a nearby explosion when it turns out that Foreman, who has been banned from making any new warehouses, has decided to spend his time blowing up and then remodeling all the existing warehouses. Marksmanship is next found sleeping inside a mailbag in the Department of Postal Services' building, with Thymon briefly believing that he has stumbled upon a murder before a stricken Marksmanship wakes up and goes off to find somewhere else yet again. After he leaves, Thymon decides to give sleeping inside a mailbag a try, only for history to repeat itself as Philatel-426 finds him and forms a notion that Thymon has somehow been murdered.

After wandering around listlessly, he returns to his house, which he finds miraculously Larrikin-free. However, it doesn't last as Larrikin, in a new Fog Ship, comes crashing down from the sky, falling through his roof and directly into his bedroom. At his wits' ends, Marksmanship decides he'll have to find a peaceful place outside of the Homeworld if he wants to get some rest. He rents a room at the Interdimensional Tavern, but his rest there is again short-lived when Darius notices his presence and tries to steal his Fog Ship; unwilling to leave it unattended even if he is able to trivially dissuade Darius right there and then by threatening him with a Cupid Arrow, Marksmanship makes to leave again.

On his way back to where he parked the Fog Ship, however, he finds himself abducted via tractor beam into an enormous Void Ship hovering above the Tavern. Aboard the ship, he finds himself surrounded by a crowd of robots of all types and sizes, all staring him with a strange, nigh-religious awe. They explain that they are the Order of the Automata, a society of liberated robots who live peacefully in their own dimension of Automatia. They have known peace ever since the First Great War with their ancient enemies the Salamandyrs, where they were led to victory by the Ancient One, who was seemingly slain in a surprise attack near the end of the First War before he could enact a secret plan to defeat the Salamndyrs once and for all, only to promise to return in the Automata's time of need. Because the Ancient One was also a humanoid copper robot, they believe Marksmanship to be his reincarnation, despite his protestations otherwise.

Growing desperate in the face of their “Ancient One”'s reluctance, the robots end up capturing Marksmanship in a synthetic burlap sack, transporting him to their home dimension, and then beaming him onto the fortress-like ship of the Salamandyr Emperor directly. Facing the Emperor, Marksmanship panics somewhat at not having a plan, and ends up reverting to his original plan: namely, to get some peace and quiet. A baffled Emperor looks on as Marksmanship takes out his pillow and relights his lavender candle — only to panic when he realises what that candle is: for, as it turns out, the genetically-unstable Salamandyrs are deathly afraid of lavender, even trace amounts of which causes them to all turn back into normal, tiny salamanders. As an automatic quarantine protocol programmed into the ship engages itself, he briefly fears he will be taken back to the Salamandyr Dimension, but this proves unfounded as the ship detects him as the source of the offending substance and ejects him back down to Automatia before it disappears.

After a moment's hesitation, Marksmanship, finding that he is in the middle of the parked Salamandyr War Fleet begans running from ship to ship brandishing the candle, and claiming that the Automata as a whole have discovered the lavender weakness and are ready to weaponise it. Before long, the Salamandyrs' Head Military Strategist authorises the other ships to all follow the Imperial ship back to Salamandyria.

Rejoining the Automata, Marksmanship is hailed as a hero despite his continued protests of not being the Ancient One at all. Just as he's asking them to at least take him back home, the skies suddenly split open to reveal the glorious second coming of the actual Ancient One, who apologises for “being late” as “traffic in the Underworld was terrible”. Upon being presented with Marksmanship and told that he enacted the Ancient One's own “secret plan”, the older robot sheepishly admits that he made up the secret plan story to boost up morale, and had no particular strategy at the time. While the Ancient One catches up with the other Automata, 21-419 is sent to fly Marksmanship in the Order of the Automata's Void Ship back to the Tavern where he left his Fog Ship.

Back in the Homeworld, Marksmanship is relieved to find that Larrikin's private demolition derby has been grounded by the Celestial Foam Network and that the Department of Construction is on lunch-break. As he settles down at last for a nap, he is startled by one of the shrunken Salamandyrs, who followed him here, but tosses it out of the window without further incident; it lands on Foreman, who has a deathly fear of amphibians and orders his Department to take the full rest of the day off while he recovers, further cementing the peace and quiet Marksmanship so rightly deserves. At last, he falls asleep.

Worldbuilding

Universes

The story opens and closes in the Cupid Homeworld.
It is suggested that Lord Thymon “presumably creat[ed] several new dream-universes” in the process of falling sleep.
Marksmanship visits the Interdimensional Tavern in the Void.
Marksmanship is taken to Automatia, a dimension which has become the home by the Order of the Automata.
The Salamandyrs are based out of a “Salamandyr Dimension”, otherwise referred to as Salamandyria.

Other

Marksmanship-522's past exploits, all of which involved careful planning ahead of time, include having “led the charge on the Fortress of Scallions”, having “effortlessly beaten back the entire Rebellion of the Rogue Rhinoceroses”, and “how he had managed to sneak the entire royal family of the Zorkal Realm out of enemy territory disguised as a simple orange salesman and his pack of enormous oranges during the Second Great Spaghetti War”.
Foreman-964 has a “traumatic fear” of amphibians, which he claims are the “one thing [he] hate[s] more than postponing jobs”.

Continuity

“That time with those two feuding aliens” is cited as an example of an adventure where Marksmanship-522's plan didn't go off as he had intended it to, leading to stressful circumstances until he managed to turn the situation around. This is a reference to the events of PROSE: Marksmanship-522 and the Multi-Dimensional Race, with the “two feuding aliens” being Lilathia and Brutus.
Marksmanship seems to believe that moons literally grow when they wax; it is stated that “Marksmanship could be forgiven for not knowing precisely the specifics of moons, seeing as the Homeworld did not have one”. It was later established in PROSE: Family Business that the Creator originally outfitted the Cupid Homeworld with a Clockwork Moon, but the Cupids never got it working right, and misplaced it altogether decades prior to the present day.
Darius is still staying at the Interdimensional Tavern, as last seen in PROSE: The Ghosts and the Machine.
Marksmanship considers making a reservation at “the Infinite Hotel”, which would later become the setting of PROSE: The Grand Multiverse Hotel.
The burlap sack running gag reappears, having last been seen in PROSE: Plagiarism of the SavageMen. It is next referenced in PROSE: A Copper-Colored Christmas Carol, though in a more unconventional form.
PROSE: The Salamandyrs and the Automata provided further background on the Salamandyrs and the Order of the Automata.
A “small salamander yelling something about getting ‘revenge on all robots’” made a cameo in PROSE: Larrikin and the Christmas Pudding, implicitly being a reappearance of the shrunken Salamandyr who followed Marksmanship back to the Homeworld at the end of Peace and Quiet.
Additionally, PROSE: Larrikin and the Christmas Pudding saw Marksmanship-522 crashing the new Fog Ship which he had been shown to have acquired in this story following the loss of his original one in PROSE: Marksmanship-522 and the Multi-Dimensional Race.

Behind the scenes

Read online

The story can be read for free on the Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids website.

Contents

Plot