Marksmanship-522 and the Multi-Dimensional Race (short story)
Marksmanship-522 and the Multi-Dimensional Race was a Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids short story written by Lupan Evezan and illustrated by Aristide Twain. It was Evezan's first long-form Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids and the first to start Marksmanship-522.
Contents
Plot
Marksmanship-522, of the Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids, has been assigned to romanticise a mere two people from an alien planet in the Prime Universe. After climbing out of his Fog Ship at his destination, he quickly finds the two houses on hills facing each other that he was instructed to find, and goes up to one of them. Its owner, Lilathia, initially thinks that he is an assassin sent by the other house's owner, Brutus, and captures him in a burlap sack.
However, after he clarifies that he is a neutral visitor from another world, Lilathia is overjoyed to have a “neutral robot” on her hands and brings him to Brutus's house. They explain that they are the last members of each of their species still carrying on a feud that started as a centuries-long war between their peoples (although they are not the last of their kind altogether — most of their kinsmen simply got tired of the hostilities and went on vacation in outer space, leaving the two alone on the ravaged planet). To settle their differences once and for all and bring an end to the protracted conflict, they long ago decided on wagering the outcome on a cross-dimensional race. However, with no neutral arbiter to determine who won in case of a close race, they had to put it off until now.
Marksmanship is thus shanghaied aboard Lilathia's pan-dimensional speedster (with Lilathia crashing the latter into Marksmanship's Fog Ship to prevent him from escaping) and the race is on, a dizzying faster-than-lgiht experience that cuts a trail of mayhem across the Multiverse and leaves Marksmanship barely able to think coherently once the two ships finish their tour of all that is and return to their starting point. A somewhat babbling Marksmanship is forced to admit that as far as he could tell, the Grand Prix ended in a tie. Lilathia and Brutus are surprisingly pleased with this result, as they felt they wouldn't have known what to do with themselves if they'd had to stop feuding. Marksmanship is all too happy to take the fact that they're happy feuding as equivalent to them having been successfully romanticised, and returns to the Homeworld in Lilathia's speedster, which she graciously gives him, having no further need of it.
Back in the house Homeworld, Marksmanship hands in his paperwork to the Department of Completed Assignments and specifically requests “that he not be assigned to anything else that might involve any sort of high speeds ever again” before donating the speedster to the Department of Transportation. All is well that ends wall, except for Bibliophile-962 of the Department of Documentation, who is not best pleased at the huge new list of universes to document all from a single Cupid mission.
Worldbuilding
Universes
- Marksmanship-522 travels from the Cupid Homeworld to the Prime Universe.
- A previous adventure in Dimension 42µ is mentioned.
- The Cross-Dimensional Grand Prix accidentally creates a whole new universe, and also interferes with “thousands” of dimensions, including:
- Dimension )-0//zx by awakening a “sleeping abomination” who had been dreaming into existence;
- Dimension ^6-Q, “smashing into” this dimension and causing “a space-time ripple which echoed back through time (and space) and created four of the suns of the legendary 24-sunned Gambit System in the past”;
- the Cupid Homeworld;
- one where the disturbances in reality “destroyed and then promptly recreated” the home of a poor family of fish-people;
- a cluster of Prime-adjacent dimensions which had hitherto been “otherwise exactly the same as the Prime Universe” but where the passage of the Prime Lilathia and Brutus's speedsters “accidentally prevents the very race from ever happening”, causing them to be “very different afterward”;
- a dimension inhabited entirely by anthropomorphic root vegetables where they accidentally and very tragically “caused the invention of french-fried potatoes”.
Other
- Marksmanship-522 “led the team that romanticised the Zyargaff Beast in Dimension 42µ” and “fired the famous first shot of the Second Great Spaghetti War”.
- Lilathia and Brutus's planet is “a dusty, nameless planet a few light-years from the Prime Earth”.
- Members of the Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids have “identification cards”.
- Marksmanship is unsure who assigned him his mission, but supposes it might have been the Parliament.
- Lilathia and Brutus's pan-dimensional speedsters are Void Ships which “can travel much faster than the speed of light”, allowing them to “breaks through to other dimensions”.
- The Crew's Department of Space-Time Anomalies fails to detect the brief incursion by Lilathia and Brutus's pan-dimensional speedsters into the Cupid Homeworld on their radar because “the entire Department is out to lunch”.
Continuity
- The Interdimensional Tavern, recently introduced in PROSE: The Interdimensional Tavern, appears. Furthermore, the events of the Cross-Dimensional Grand Prix are noted to cause the destruction of Dimension )-0//zx except for two survivors, as well as the creation of some of the stars of the Gambit System, in both cases paying off background details from The Interdimensional Tavern.
- It is mentioned that the Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids' Department of Postal Services has recently “received quite a boon in the form of a new, non-Cupid employee of late”. COMIC: Whatever Happened to Lord Thymon? revealed this to be Lord Thymon, who stayed in the Cupid Homeworld following the events of PROSE: Lord Thymon and the Department of Problem-Solving.
- This story marked the first occurrence of the recurring motif (and, increasingly, metafictional recurring joke) in the series of characters being captured inside burlap sacks. It would first recur in the next long-form Cupids prose story, PROSE: Acquaintanceship-982 and the Missing Mail Mystery.
Behind the scenes
Read online
The story can be read for free on the Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids website.
