Now That That's Over

I'll be getting back to some regular and more frequent updating very soon, with a closing post on the CYOA coming first. If you still read this "blog" thank you very much for believing in me, and your loyalty will start to be rewarded again, I promise.

Until next time,

The 901 Blogger

CYOA: Thomas Asby and the Minimal Mastermind (Volume 1, Chapter 7)

Last Week’s Winning Choice:

Kill Fitzgerald

Chapter 7

    Asby swallowed his pity for Fitzgerald and extended his arms. For the third time in fifteen minutes he began to strangle the unconscious dwarf, but this time the dwarf did not immediately fight back. When he finally woke up in anguish his eyes widened in fear; he stretched out his small arms but this time could not reach Asby’s face. As they waved pathetically, Asby felt a twinge of pathos and broke eye contact with Fitzgerald. He felt the body go weak in his hands and Fitzgerald’s arms fell to rest on Asby’s. Asby looked back into Fitzgerald’s wide, lifeless eyes and let go of the dwarf instantly. He scrambled out from under the canopy of the parachute and vomited for the first time in ten years. When the heaves had passed he wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his jacket and returned to Fitzgerald’s side. After crouching alongside the body for a few more minutes, taking in the murder he had just committed, he passed a hand over Fitzgerald’s eyes and closed them.

    Asby reemerged from under the parachute and shielded his eyes from the Kansas sun as he pulled out his cell phone, which had miraculously survived numerous beatings and the collision with the ground. He dialed the number of the B.I.A. and put the phone up to his ear.

    “Basic Intelligence Agency, Harold speaking,” came the voice from the other end.

    “Hey Harold, it’s Thomas. Put me through to Doe.”

    Asby heard movements, there was a brief pause, and then he heard a whisper on the other end: “Sir, it’s Thomas.”

    “Oh, thank you. Hello Thomas!” came John Doe’s voice from the other end.

    “Hi, sir. I elimin– I killed Fitzgerald.”

    “Did you really?” Doe’s excitement was apparent over the phone. “Well done, Thomas!”

    “Thank you, sir.”

    “I’ll let the government know immediately! This is very good for our branch, Thomas, very good. You’ve done an outstanding service for our country as well.”

    “Thank you, sir.”

    “I’ll have Harold pinpoint your location and I’m sure the government will send out a team to pick you up.”

    “Thank you, sir.”

    “Once again, well done.”

    Asby didn’t answer and soon heard the line go dead. He closed the phone and returned it to his pocket, then turned to look at the parachute canopy. He ducked back down underneath the awning and returned to Fitzgerald’s body’s side, where he would sit until a government helicopter landed nearby a half-hour later.

THE END

This marks the successful conclusion of Thomas Asby and the Minimal Mastermind

CYOA: Thomas Asby and the Minimal Mastermind (Volume 1, Chapter 6)

Last Week’s Winning Choice:

Jump from the plane

Chapter 6

     Asby staggered to his feet, spit a wad of blood from his mouth, and hurled himself like a jackrabbit through the plane’s open door.
     What was he doing? That was the first thing to cross his mind as he was whipped away from the aircraft, his whole world spinning violently around him. He settled on the notion that he had gone insane, his mind warped from more than a decade of cat-and-mouse games with nefarious criminals. Was there any other way he could justify jumping out of an airplane? Well, people do it for fun all the time, he reassured himself. But six miles above the ground? Of course! Without a parachute? Nope, he had gone insane. The only comforting thought was that he would die in the line of duty, and in his mind there was no finer way to go.
     He eventually righted himself the best he could, and looked in the direction of his terminus to find fellow fallee Fitzgerald. He spotted the falling mass only a couple hundred feet beneath him. It was this man Asby could blame for his skydiving shenanigans, with his tuft of orange hair, dastardly desire to kill, and four-foot tall stature. Asby streamlined his body, focused on the shiny dome of the crook, and shot down toward his target.
     His attempts to catch up were almost for naught, as Fitzgerald was a very tiny man without having to fold himself into the shape of a pencil. The dwarf did not look to have a parachute either, not having put one on the plane, yet Asby figured that a man of such intelligence would probably figure out some way to survive a six-mile freefall.
     As Asby drew within fifty feet he reached for the gun strapped into his shoulder holster, only to find the space it usually occupied. He slapped himself on the forehead as he remembered Fitzgerald kicking it away during the in-flight struggle.
     It’s quite amazing how much time a man has to think about things during a six-mile drop, when your only objective is to fall faster than the man you are chasing. It was because of this that Asby’s mind flitted to all sorts of miscellaneous subjects at the moment of head-slapping, such as why he had signed up for the typically bungling and inept Basic Intelligence Agency, how he ended up in a doomed breakneck skydiving chase of a yard-high man, and if the Red Sox would start Josh Beckett on three days rest tonight against the Indians.
     When he refocused his thoughts on his current predicament, he found himself in amazingly close proximity to Fitzgerald, though Asby in all seriousness cared more about the remaining mile between him and the ground. Asby reached out with both hands and for the second time in five minutes throttled the midget about the neck, easily wrapping his fingers around its entire circumference. Fitzgerald’s head twisted in agony, the small mouth snarling at the sight of the secret agent he had probably figured he’d seen the last of when he was whipped parachuteless from an airplane at cruising altitude.
     PFFFFOOOT.
     The simultaneous discharges of parachutes wrenched the two enemies apart, and in that millisecond Asby saw that Fitzgerald looked as surprised to find himself with a parachute as Asby did to find that he had one. Their progress through the sky impeded, though sadly not entirely, Asby closed his eyes as the ground rushed up to him with horrible speed.
     WHAM!
     He was in extraordinary pain, feeling as if he were smashed into millions of agonizing pieces. Even if he could he dared not open his eyes lest he see a large pool of blood flooding the expanse around him. Many minutes may have passed, possibly even hours, before he felt the impulse to draw his eyelids apart.
     The light, even though there was not much, was at once blinding and Asby shielded his eyes as he lifted his battered head off the ground. He rotated his head painfully on his neck, able to only see blurry green and brown shapes in his immediate area. Shaking his head painfully, it wasn’t long before he rightly deduced that he had landed in the middle of a Kansas cornfield.
     He staggered to his feet, stabs of pain shooting through his spindly legs, and emerged up into the vastness of his parachute. He collected the parachute around him and dropped it onto the ground in a huddled heap. All the while he was visibly seething; no one had ever told him that his tuxedo had contained a self-deploying parachute, though in all fairness he realized it was just like the B.I.A. to forget to do so.
     His eyes roved the top of the cornfield and he soon spotted the small chute that was sure to hold Fitzgerald. Pain continued to shoot through his maligned body as he stumbled down the rows of unpicked corn, all the while his common sense trying to convince him that this would be a great time to give up and move to Zimbabwe. When he reached the edge of the chute, he collapsed, lifted the flap, and began to crawl underneath.
     Fitzgerald was indeed there, lying unconscious near the center of the shadowy area, one small arm hooked around a stalk of corn. He’s not that bad, Asby had to admit. He really looked like a cuddly little toddler holding his teddy bear. Sympathy for the little man flooded over the throbbing pain he felt, and Asby even managed a weak smile. But hard reality beat back the tide of empathy and he realized he had to complete his mission, and now was the perfect time. Fitzgerald was there for him to kill. Should he spare Fitzgerald, or kill him?

What should Thomas Asby do next?

- Spare Fitzgerald

- Kill him

Vote for your choice in the poll on the right, and check in next Monday for the next installment of Thomas Asby and the Minimal Mastermind!

CYOA: Thomas Asby and the Minimal Mastermind (Volume 1, Chapter 5)

Last Week’s Winning Choice:

Attack Fitzgerald now

Chapter 5

     Asby opened the hatch slowly and turned his gaze toward the rear of the aircraft. Fitzgerald was sitting down, headphones on and a sleep mask covering his eyes. Two of his bodyguards stood on his left, tirelessly scrubbing what appeared to be an expansive splatter of blood off the wall of the plane. Asby raised an eyebrow and began looking for the third bodyguard. Soon though he was able to put two and two together, connecting the conspicuous absence of the bodyguard with the conspicuous bloodstain on the wall.

     “The boss is sure good with a bat,” one of the men was saying as he dipped a fluffy sponge into a bucket of suds.

     “Apparently too good,” the other man said exasperatedly.

     “I wish we coulda given Joe a proper funeral, though.”

     “Eh, he’s lucky he even got buried. True it coulda been in a nicer part of the country but whatever.”

     Trusting that the two bodyguards were properly engrossed in their menial task and conversation, Asby edged out of the armory and toward the bathroom on his right. He slid through the partly open door and closed it behind him. He hauled himself up onto the tiny counter and squeezed himself against the mirror, making his presence as unnoticeable as possible, and began to wait.

     About fifteen minutes later he heard a muffled voice from just beyond the bathroom door and it opened. One of the bodyguards backed into the lavatory and shut the door. As he turned toward the toilet Asby flung one foot out, connecting squarely with the bottom of his jaw. The bodyguard’s head snapped back and collided with a metal plate on the wall; his eyes rolled and he crumpled silently to the floor of the bathroom. Asby lowered himself into the spaces allowed by the bodyguard’s collapsed mass and crouched ready by the door, surreptitiously unlocking it as he waited. Another ten or fifteen minutes passed before someone knocked on the door.

     “Vinny are you okay?” came the voice of the other bodyguard. “That’s weird, boss, it’s unlocked. Vinny?”

     The door opened a sliver and Asby burst through it, colliding with the third bodyguard and tumbling with him into the far wall.

     BOOM.

     The sound of the gun firing was magnified in the small interior of the aircraft, the sound waves ricocheting off the walls and amplifying on top of each other. Asby staggered to his feet with the bodyguard in a stranglehold and faced down Fitzgerald, who had a handgun leveled in the pair’s direction; his first shot had missed and blown a hole in the wall of the cockpit.

     “Drop the gun, Fitzgerald!” Asby shouted. “There’s no point in bringing down the whole plane.”

     “If you intend to kill me, secret agent man,” Fitzgerald said maliciously, “I intend to kill you as well.”

     “So be–”

     The cockpit door behind Asby was flung open; the secret agent turned in alarm to see the co-pilot standing in the doorway with a wild look about him. Fitzgerald’s next shot whizzed by Asby’s turning face, and Asby saw the co-pilot’s head snap back before falling to the ground. Before Asby’s eyes could swivel back to Fitzgerald he felt the struggling bodyguard buck and then go limp in his arms. He looked down to see a gaping hole where the bodyguard’s left eye used to be, looked up to see Fitzgerald raising the barrel of the gun, and began charging toward the dwarf with his human shield held in front of him.

     With a heave he threw the body at Fitzgerald, who couldn’t get out of the way fast enough and was bowled over by a mass twice that of him. Asby leapt over the lifeless body and grabbed Fitzgerald by the neck; with a triumphant roar he lifted him into the air and began strangling him. Fitzgerald began to turn purple, a color that clashed horribly with his orange puff of hair, before he extended a tiny arm and jabbed a finger into Asby’s left eye.

     “ARGH!” Asby dropped the dwarf and grasped his face in agony.

     Fitzgerald began kicking Asby’s shins, sending the secret agent to the ground with his eye and legs throbbing. He pulled his gun from its shoulder holster but with one kick Fitzgerald sent it hurtling under a row of seats. Asby reached up and grabbed Fitzgerald by the waist; struggling to his knees he launched the dwarf through the air. Fitzgerald smacked headlong into the plane’s door, wrapping himself around the giant handle to avoid falling to the ground. However little Fitzgerald weighed though, he apparently weighed just enough to open airplane doors with the entirety of his weight. Like the hand of a clock the handle went from three to six, and the door swung out into the open expanse of the sky.

     The small aircraft shuddered violently as cabin pressure was lost, Fitzgerald was whipped free from the door and out into the wild blue yonder, and Asby was swept toward the deadly opening. As he slid across the floor the armory door swung open in front of him, and in a last ditch attempt he grabbed wildly at the handle. He made contact and held on for dear life as the blue ocean of the sky tried to rip him from his last lifeline. 

     A few moments later the pressure had stabilized and Asby lay gasping for air. All was not well though, as the plane was tilting treacherously back and forth; Asby was pretty sure the pilot was dead. He had to abandon ship fast, but he needed a parachute first. But he might not have time. Should he get a parachute, or just jump?

What should Thomas Asby do next?

- Try to find a parachute before jumping from the plane

- Jump from the plane without a parachute

Vote for your choice in the poll on the right, and check in next Monday for the next installment of Thomas Asby and the Minimal Mastermind!