ZA 23: Outback out back

Lizzie chewed her stick of peppermint quietly so as not to rouse the smallish zombie horde. Of course, floating in a bubble of silent and invisible invulnerability basically negated the need for such measures, but Lizzie was nothing if not careful.

Having been raised by a family of cross-bred dingo wolves in the far reaches of the Australian outback, Lizzie learned stealth and caution practically as soon as she could snarl. When a svelte Adonis wearing naught but loincloth first walked into a clearing where she was bathing many years ago, her instincts allowed her to completely disappear, such that he saw nothing of her, though she was naked in the water not twenty feet away.

She followed the mysterious stranger, for she had never seen one of his kind before. One of her kind. After two days of tracking the strange but beautiful man, she could no longer help herself. She jumped him. Her appearance and her devastating beauty affected him like a sparkling hammer to the groin. Which is to say, he doubled over, moaning in orgasmic agony.

Lizzie decided this was probably a good effect to have on people.

When the stranger recovered, he told her his name--a name that would change when the stranger changed a few years later, obsessed with his experiments and the magic Lizzie offered him. To her profound disgust, Selig Retsuc would be born, a loathsome blob with a wanker one tenth the size of his original equipment.

Sigh, maybe Lizzie didn't have such a good effect on people.

The trouble was, by being raised purely in the natural world, free of all human contamination, Lizzie learned about the extraordinary magic that underlay all things, the magic humans had disowned and forgotten when they became civilized, when they became infected with the idea that any human could know the mind of the magic, could tell the difference between good and evil. While this infectious idea liberated man from the rhythms and constraints of the natural world, it also plunged him into a despairing fog of violence that would only escalate over the coming years as competing ideas about good and evil met and clashed.

Lizzie, however, was innocent of such things. She only knew the stories the rocks and trees told of mankind's fall. She did not know she had only escaped such a fall by being abandoned by her feckless mother on the eve of her birth. When Selig, whose former name was once music to her ears, told her of his high minded ideals and began to infect her with his own moral disease, Lizzie didn't know what was happening. She told Selig about the magic, showed it to him, not knowing that doing so would cost the human world everything.

Now, years later, she had come to reset the natural order. Her plan had been simple. Selig gained his magic from being inside Lizzie and thus it was concentrated primarily in his pocket snake. As he began to use the magic for himself, draining its powerful concentration from his chief of staff and infusing it into his increasingly putrescent form, said powerprawn shrunk to pinkie-size and came close to falling off. After Lizzie stopped allowing him between her legs, the fat lug took off for America to find another source. Apparently, he mistook Lizzie's sister for Lizzie and thus lost his Admiral James T. Cock.

Making an unholy pact with her wretched mother, Lizzie managed to get hold of the calcified wrinklebeast and was prepared to cast a spell ending Selig Retsuc's reign forever when a gentleman walked in to the burnt-down house she was occupying. This was not just any gentleman. This was a man so beautiful he smashed a sparkling hammer into her groin.

He then lifted Lizzie's poor crispy sister and walked with her into the desert to bury her. So moved was she by this man's beauty and handsomeness and intelligence and perfect ass and grace and great sense of humor and--perhaps most of all--his humility, Lizzie nearly forgot the zombie zipper ripper in her hand. Instead she watched as her hunka hunka burnin love set fire to an entire plateau's worth of bombies simply by singing in his peculiarly wonderful voice. Then, she looked into the man's mind as he began, slowly but surely, to unravel the mysteries of the universe. When Lizzie's mother's evil cookie magic took over once more and the man was forced to go commit an act of unspeakable atrocity against a raven-haired wizardress's furry companion, Lizzie intervened. Teleporting the wizardress back to her home and to a tray full of zombie guts, Lizzie took the woman's place on the plain. Apparently, she was a sometimes lover of this man, this scion of all that was good and holy, this Virgil. Pretending as best she could to be the raven haired wizardress, Lizzie did her best to work a spell to save her dear love.

She then followed at a safe distance until he arrived at her mother's cookie bunker. Floating in her bubble, Lizzie hovered over the bunker and listened. When the dialogue became unbearable she took over one of the zombies to try to straighten things out a bit, but...unfortunately...as was too often the case with zombies, her mouthpiece was eaten before he could really accomplish anything.

Finally, a moment of truth came. Having laid out his diabolical plan, Selig Retsuc reached out a claw to Virgil. If Virgil shook it, her love for him would disappear like a twinkling snowglobe smashed by a sparkling hammer, but if he resisted...if only he resisted, she would do all in her power to save him and to at last set right the evil Selig Retsuc had wrought.

Unfortunately, so caught up was she in the tension of the moment, she didn't notice that her magic--that which had been with her since birth--began to swiftly drain away.