“Darkness beyond blackest fudge
Deeper than the deepest nougat;
King of Chocolate who shines
Like night upon a sea of caramel;
I call upon thee!
Swear myself to thee!
Let the fools who stand before me be engulfed
By the powers you and I possess!
GIGA…”
Ranma lunged towards the youma, pushing his weary body to its limits, but was rebuffed by the churning winds caused by the wild thermal flux. The martial artist and the Senshi could watch (or, in some cases, listen) in horror as Icee pronounced the final syllable.
“SUNDAE!”
The ice cream parlor was flooded with blinding light as frost rimmed every surface. As the magical flare finally receded, everyone was surprised. Ranma and the Senshi were pleasantly surprised to still be alive. Icee was staggered by the continued existence of her hated enemies and the mysterious being who tried to interfere with their elimination.
Still, no one was more surprised than the swan.
The bird gave a panicked honk as it flew straight into the heap of frozen dairy keeping most of the sailor suited warriors out of commission. For a few moments afterwards, everyone was silent, stunned by the sheer anticlimactic improbability of it all. More so when the waterfowl shifted into an adolescent girl.
Shaking off the last of the disorientation from the sudden teleport and salvaging the last few shreds of her dignity, Skuld carefully slid off the pile of ice cream, sampling a bit on the way. She made a face at the flavor. “Ugh. It’s like someone blended freezer burn, negative energy and corn oil…”
Icee was not the most powerful youma, nor was she the most intelligent. By now, however, she had managed to get over the shock, disappointment, and confusion and confront this… thing. “Who are you?” she spat.
The Norn turned to the speaker and paused, squinting at her like she was some fascinating but ultimately doomed species of bug. Mainly because, to a certain extent, she was. “What are you?” countered Skuld.
“Eh?” Existentialism was, understandably, not something youma dealt with well. Icee confronted this unexpected foray into philosophy with something with which she was far more comfortable: hostility. “I summoned you! I will not have impertinence from my own spells!”
“Your own…” Skuld growled as she unsheathed her debugging mallet. “Oh, you are going down, little miss bugwoman.”
“I have defeated the Sailor Senshi,” crowed the youma. “A slip of a girl like you hasn’t a chance!” She began charging up another calamitous confection, the incantation flowing incomprehensibly from her lips.
Except Skuld did comprehend it. Her eyes widened in recognition before glaring at her opponent and retorting with her own incantation. The humans in the room winced at the sound of a voice buzzing through five thousand words a second.
Icee was unfazed by the youngest Norn’s spell, grinning as she formed a perfectly spherical scoop of mint chocolate chip and hurled it with a cry of “MENTHOLBALL!”
The goddess merely smirked and whispered “Execute.” The Yggdrasil program she had incanted went into action. The mentholball sublimated harmlessly, returning to the depths of the ætheric freezer from whence it came. Skuld’s expression was one that could only be described as divine wrath. “You,” she pronounced, menace dripping from the word like fudge off an overloaded sundae. “You were the source of Skuldomantic energy I was detecting. How dare you.” Her cloak began to billow in an unfelt breeze. “How dare you, you glorified system error with delusions of demonhood. You invoke my magic? You ask me for aid?” The Norn bore a mix of rage and sadistic satisfaction ill-suited for the face of a goddess. “Well, now that I know who you are, what you are, you won’t be insulting me with such actions ever again.”
Icee paled (an impressive feat for something with a literally vanilla skin tone,) as she managed to piece together the facts. “The Giga Sundae. It didn’t malfunction. It worked flawlessly. It summoned the Lord of Headaches…”
"‘Lord of Headaches’?” Skuld did not seem to appreciate this epithet.
“Master of all ice cream magic. King of Fudge. Shining Cherry atop the Sea of Caramel…” The youma fell to her knees, struck with dread and awe.
The goddess grew more and more furious with each name the youma recited. (Shining Cherry admittedly had a certain charm to it, but still.) Finally, her righteous fury at the corruption and misuse of an aspect of her portfolio triggered a long unused function of the World Tree.
<Yggdrasil v. 42.0.1>
<protocol request received (DivineVengeance)> <uploading parameters> <evaluating> <permission granted> <removing limiters> <isolating space> <temporarily upgrading license> <temporarily adjusting physical age> <WARNING: no personal artifact allocated> <searching> <compatible item found> <reformatting artifact> <providing ambiance> |
Skuld’s eyes and hammer flashed glacier blue. As the light receded, both were transformed. No more was the rather incongruous image of a young teenager with a croquet mallet. Clothed in armor and furs, the Norn who was also a Valkyrie stood before the increasingly shocked youma. Held in her grip was a weapon truly worthy of the patron goddess of ice cream magics.
While Skuld would have appeared familiar to those who had known her during the Lord of Terror incident, the hammer was, suitably enough for the goddess of the future, something never before seen. Its handle was a thin cylindrical wafer, a stripe of chocolate spiraling up the length of dough. Fragile as it looked, in its goddess’s hands, it was stronger than steel. The head had changed both material and shape, appearing more like a pickaxe or mattock than a mallet. Atop the haft was a scoop of ice cream that shifted in appearance as one beheld it. Now chocolate, now sorbet, now cake batter, it was the Primordial Scoop, the Platonic ideal of frozen dessert from which all others descended. Embedded into either side of this axiomatic delicacy was a waffle cone. Glowing faintly with divine power, each was tipped with a pastry protrusion of vorpal sharpness.
“This, anathema,” proclaimed Skuld, her voice reverberating with power, "is your doom. Forged from the milk of Audumla, from the grains of Idunn, from the merciless cold that waits at the end of time, this weapon I sanctify in my name. Know it well, for it is Final Course, and with it, I smite thee.” With that, she swung the newly named Final Course, staving in Icee’s head. The rest collapsed into dust as the magically created dairy products began to rapidly melt.
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(Posted Mon, 21 Sep 2009 03:05)
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