Octonpussy
His footfalls remained silent as Glaz tip-toed his way down the uniform concrete corridor of the bad guy base. Glaz, super spy extraordinaire of Sector V, peered into the adjoining corridor and – with all the grace of a ballerina on a floor made of black ice and custard – squeezed his poorly suited, one-ton bulk around it.
His mission – the first since his return from an extended (and rather hedonistic) leave – was to neutralise Professor Outstandingly Nefarious by any means possible. And now here he was, in the base, slowly waddling his way to the central room where he blindly assumed, but was quite sure, that Professor Outstandingly Nefarious would be hiding.
Little did Glaz know that the good Professor was already watching…
With the daintiness of a beluga whale, Glaz turned into another familar grey, dank and notably devoid-of-bad-guys corridor, letting out an audible sigh as he lowered his primed revolver. “Oh c’mon! Still no bad guys to take down in a really cool way?!” he looked around for a moment, “Where even am I?”
As if answering his question (which it actually was) a speaker on the ceiling crackled to life. “You, Herr Spy,” screamed the poor German accent, “are trapped in mein non-Euclidean nightmare maze! Prepare to meet your doom!”
“Wow that’s bad. You’re not really German are you?”
“I… vhat? Shut up!”
“With a fake-ass voice like that, you must be compensating for something,” snickered Glaz.
“I AM NOT!” The PA crackled once more and went silent.
“Totally compensating,” Glaz muttered to the non-existent person next to him.
* * *
As he turned into another corridor which he had should already have been in but hadn’t, Glaz came upon something he hadn’t seen before sticking out from the wall – a metal pipe. Well, of course he’d seen a metal pipe before, just not one since he entered this claustrophobic and altogether quite boxy maze.
Channeling his inner beat cop, Glaz trotted up to the innoculous metal tube, “Well well well, what’ve we got ‘ere then?”
“DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!” screeched the PA.
“Shut up!” Glaz shouted back, not looking away from the pipe.
“Eh, It’s your extra-vide casket-ed funeral,”
Faster than you could say Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled parmesan, a thick lime green mist started pouring out of the pipe and filling the corridor with its fog. It smelled a lot like spearmint.
“What is this, your air freshener collection? Not exactly doom-y, Nefarious,”
The PA huffed, “Breathe up, Herr Spy. No one said doom had to schmell bad, vhich is ironic given vhat vill happen in a few paragraphs,”
“You’re a madman! I think… I’m not really sure, this is still just minty. Like the colour choice though,” Glaz shrugged, kicking some of the heavy fog congregating on the floor.
“Vhy don’t you come and find out if I am der madman, ja?” a nearby wall slid open to reveal another corridor stretching far into the distance, “Come at me, Herr Spy,”
* * *
With stunted breaths Glaz waddled down the corridor as fast as his legs could carry him, his bulk bouncing from side to side with each lumbering footstep. He stopped for breath after a solid thirty metres, gazing down the seemingly endless corridor as he leant into the wall and wiped away the sweat dripping from his brow.
“Aww, out of breath already mein little Apfelstrudel?” Nefarious taunted, “but you still have so far to go!”
Glaz grunted as he got back to his feet and defiantly started waddling again, this time at a more reasonable speed, “This corridor better not be another one of your geometric tricks, Nefarious,”
“I can assure you,” he spoke smoothly, silk literally dripping from the speakers, “vat zis is completely legitimate,”
“And I can assure you that I’m legitimately gonna kick. your. uuuUUUUUUUUURRRRRRPPPPPP!” He belched.
“I’m sorry, can you repeat vat?” teased the disembodied voice of Professor Outstandingly Nefarious.
“I said, I can assuuUUUUUUUUURRRRRRRRRRRRRRRPPPPPPP!!” He belched again.
“One more time, if you please?”
“UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUURRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP!!!” And again. He didn’t know why, but every time he opened his mouth an overwhelming amount of hot gas, stink and spittle saw fit to rush out.
“Got it, please do hurry Herr Spy, you do not have much time left,” You could hear the smirk in his voice.
“Vhat- I mean, what have you done to me?” Glaz shouted between poorly stifled explosions of gas.
“Do hurry,”
Glaz grunted as he waddled onwards as fast as he dared to go, his efforts rewarded by a heavy stream of sweat pouring from his body and dousing his ill-fitting tuxedo. He panted for air between belches, his thick tongue lolling out of his mouth as he lumbered laboriously onwards.
He had only made another thirty two metres before another eruption of gas spewed forth, this time from his rear end. They came as relentlessly as the belches, but with a stench a thousand times worse than a student bedsit’s bathroom. It was horrific!
“Your time is running out, Herr Spy,”
What was happening? Glaz thought to himself. Was he filling up with gas? Was he going to explode?! Oh god he’ll be just like a character in some weird fetish story on the Internet! That’s the absolute worst way to die!
The end of the corridor was in sight. He quickened his pace, ignoring the shallowness of his breathing and the stabbing pain in his tree-trunk legs for a chance to get there and stop the Bad Guy before he went pop. He was sweating even more now, so much so that there was a trail of saturated, sticky sweat being left in his wake. He was going like the DeLorian from Back to the Future, but his flaming tyre tracks were a lot less impressive.
With some fifty metres to go (but really, who’s counting?) the door at the end of the corridor slid open, “Come and get me, Herr Spy!”
“I, UUUUUUURRRRPPPPPPPP, will!” cried the one-ton terror. He was too exhausted to think of a suave way of responding, really.
And then he tripped over. Sliding face-first on his own viscous sweat right into the doorway and getting stuck right around his abundant waistline.
“Herr Spy,” a voice called from out of view, “so good to see you! Or should I say fat you?”
Glaz tilted his head, “What? That doesn’t even make sense,”
As if on command his stomach rumbled. All at once his body groaned and bulged; his belly tripled in size, his already thick legs became even thicker, his ample buttcheeks swelled to sizes more requiring of extra aircraft than extra seats. Even his face grew chunkier, his chins doubled in quantity and his cheeks almost smothered his vision in its entirety. All together his dark green fuzz filled the corridor from floor to ceiling, now laid belly-down in a puddle of tattered tuxedo and a rapidly growing puddle of slimy sweat.
“How about now, Herr Spy?” queried the Nefarious voice.
Glaz smirked, “Nope, ‘fat’ still isn’t a verb,”
A chair in the centre of the room span around, revealing a diminutive grey pegasus wearing a monocle and a fake moustache. He got up and started walking around “All zis and still you are insolent! Do you not know vhat situation you are in?! I have you, trapped here in mein base, you have no escape! You cannot even move!”
Glaz smiled, “Bloody hell you’re short. Knew you were compensating for something,”
“I AM COMPENSATING FOR NOTHING!!” Nefarious screamed, storming towards the foxblob trapped in the doorway, “I have you here, now. You have no escape!”
“Yeah, but you’re tiny. There are 8-year-olds more vertical than you!”
“SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP!!” he screamed again, ramming a hoof into Glaz’s corridor-clogging form, “Do you not get it! You are TRAPPED, Sector V shall never find you, vhatever-your-name-is… Spyface McGee!”
Something felt wet. Professor Outstandingly Nefarious looked down to find his hoof rammed into Glaz’s mouth. Glaz was grinning. “OoohScheiße.” Like the piece at the bottom of a Pot Noodle, Glaz slurped up the really, really tiny horse, concluding the action with the most satisfying belch yet.
“The name’s Glaz. Just Glaz.”
Mission accomplished.
