The Mad Cupid of the Euclidean Plane (short story)
The Mad Cupid of the Euclidean Plane was a Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids short story written by Lupan Evezan and illustrated by Aristide Twain. It was the tale which truly set in motion the Rifts Crisis story arc.
Contents
Plot
In the jungles of the Euclidean Plane, a Cupid called Tracker-764 is carrying on with his unending hunt for the elusive Pulsaton he nicknamed “Doki Dick”, who's been escaping his romanticisation for years. He briefly thinks he's tracked Dick down, but it's only an ambagesque, much to his disappointment. Finding the right trail again, he is disappointed to find that it leads to a swamp, which, having only one good leg, he dares not try to navigate on foot. Giving up for the day, he finds a place to rest, resolved to resume his hunt in the morning.
As he sleeps, he dreams back to the day he first became stranded in the Euclidean Plane. It was his first day out in the field, flanked by Companionship-790. Determined to impress Colonel-028, who had told him that romanticising a Pulsaton was virtually impossible, Tracker refused to leave after completing an ordinary quota, insisting on chasing a Pulsaton they came across at the last minute. He ran off just as Companionship's Fog Ship was taking off, promising to be back in “just a minute”, and never came back.
Tracker is jolted awake by a crash of lightning, just in time to see Doki Dick hovering by on the edge of his vision; the telltale healing sensation he feels in the rare Geometron's presence confirms it is no dreamlike illusion. He chases the Pulsaton to the edge of a ravine, where he seems to fall. When Tracker looks over the canyon, however, he sees that a pulsating, luminous rift in the fabric of reality doubles up the natural rock formation, hovering hundreds of feet above the bottom. Through the Rift, he sees glimpses of strange, unknown worlds which fascinate him enough that he ends up losing his balance and falling in.
Tracker feels himself going “upward, downward, backward, forward, inward, outward, and through-ward” before finally landing in a strange new world with a purple sky. After getting his bearings, he realises he is standing inside the valley in a small landmass entirely encircled by more Rifts, no more than a few hundred feet in widths. On one of its edges, he finds a cabin. He makes up his mind to knock, but, after doing so, finds himself captured in a burlap sack by the homeowner.
When the old man who lives in the cabin lets him out, Tracker sees that the cabin is full of Prisms in which Rifts are contained, as well as a number of books and, incongruously, some potted tomato plants. After oiling his long-rusted jaws to enable conversation, the old man explains to Tracker that this place is the apparent locus of a plague of Rifts, seeming to attract them for unknown reasons. He himself was a humble cobbler until he fell into a Rift and was brought here, with nothing more than a set of tomato plants, by a Rift; he's been too afraid of where he might end up to leave through another Rift, and has busied himself reading the collection of books on “interdimensional travel and rift science and the like” which he mysteriously found already neatly shelved in the otherwise-empty cabin when he arrived. He also tells Tracker that he believes the growing concentration of Rifts in this universe is going to cause the destruction of countless universes — not the whole of the Multiverse, but “an extremely large amount of destruction from our perspective”.
As he explains, the old man realises that Tracker's arrival may actually allow him to avert this catastrophe: although he's been making individual-Rift-containing Prism, there is also a method for stabilising an entire area's worth of Rifts and preventing the formation of new ones using four Prisms of a different type, but the two diagonal pairs need to be set down at precisely the same time on opposite sides of the area, meaning he couldn't hope to use them on his own. Although he's only made one out of the required four, he believes that he could make the three additional ones within a few weeks. Tracker accepts after brief hesitation, and the two labour for four weeks gathering naturally-occurring minerals from the valley and shaping them into Prisms via a process Tracker barely understands even as he implements it.
Eventually, with both of them feeling that their realm has only a few days left in it before the apocalypse event begins, the two complete their work and set out in opposite directions to set the Prisms in place on the four stone pedestals they built at the four approximate corners of the landmass. On the way, Tracker sees one more Rift open, initiating the collapse. Hurrying, they set the first pair of Rifts down onto their bespoke pedestals, activating them by drawing sigils in the air above them. With the final, universe-destroying Rift beginning to form, Tracker prepares to slot the final Prism in with the old man, but briefly hesitates when Doki Dick himself lands back in the hub-dimension through another one of the extant Rifts. However, he gets his urge to take the shot under control and slots the final Prism instead of taking his chance, with Dick disappearing through another portal.
After they successfully stabilise all the Rifts, they part ways with Tracker deciding that he should give up his hunt for Doki Dick and strive to head back to the Cupid Homeworld. He leaves through a Rift with some provisions and a few of the old man's books. After he leaves, the old man makes up his mind to do the same, gathering his possessions and stepping through the most promising Rift. As it should happen, the old man winds up in the Cupid Homeworld, where he is greeted by Larrikin-1029 and Dandy-432 of the Blue Feather. With him recognising the place as Tracker's Homeworld (much they recognise the “Tracker” he mentions as the legendary “Mad Cupid of the Euclidean Plane”), they borrow Pessimist's Fog Ship to try to take the old man back home, trying the Prime Universe first and intent on taking him to other, Prime-adjacent worlds if it's not right.
Worldbuilding
Universes
- This story takes place in the Euclidean Plane; in a mysterious dimension consisting of a single small landmass floating in a void, which seems to attract high numbers of Rifts; and, briefly, in the Cupid Homeworld. The Prime Universe is mentioned.
Other
- Tracker-764 lost one of his legs “five or six years back” while following Doki Dick's trail through a mountainous area, accidentally triggering a “sphere-slide”.
- A few weeks prior to the opening of the story, Tracker lost Dick's tracks in the Triangle Mountains.
- Euclidean Plane vegetation includes “low, irregularly-triangular plants” and taller geometrees.
- Most Clockwork Cherubs don't really dream, the closest thing being accurate replays of memories of significant real events in their lives.
- The stars of the Euclidean Plane are “large, cartoony-looking five-pointed things hovering an indeterminate distance above the ground”. Similarly, raindrops are simply rain-drop shapes, which do not disperse into liquid water when hitting the ground.
- The higher the concentration of Rifts already present in a given dimension, the more will appear. Past a certain critical point, the affected universe will suffer complete dimensional collapse, causing a “ripple effect” which may “estroy all of the surrounding dimensions” in a metaphorical radius of “thousands of miles”.
Continuity
- This story is set in the Euclidean Plane as previously outlined in GAME: Cupid Chaos! and PROSE: The Euclidean Plane.
- The Blue Feather appear, still guarding the Rift after it allowed “a society of prank-and-fish-loving folk” into the Cupid Homeworld, as established in PROSE: The Faction of the Fooling Fish.
- The next chapter in Tracker's story was seen in PROSE: Misadventures in the Interdimensional Black Market.
- Technophile-963 later appeared in PROSE: Magic Trick as a member of the Cupid Parliament, thereby being established as a Prefect.
- The Rifts Crisis plot thread continued in PROSE: The Ghosts and the Machine, which also featured a minor appearance by a prism.
Behind the scenes
Read online
The story can be read for free on the Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids website.
