Converged

Cthullu stirred deep under the ocean. His primitive brain knew very little of the going-ons of man, or the struggles they endure. His brain knew only hunger and sleep. Cthullu had slept deeply the last 2,000,000 years, but something was waking him. The twisting tendrils of time had fractured, and the split was enough to stir his cold blood. His heart began to beat again, the pulse deep, and resonating. It would be only a matter of days before he was fully awake, and his hunger would drive him to eat. Cthullu was not the only one to feel the aftermath of the time fracture. Several thousand miles away, Oscar was clutching his head in pain. His eyes were attempting to adjust to a sight he knew could not possibly be true. He felt himself being torn apart, then pushed together. He was looking out the window, seeing the other riders, but he was still by the couch staring at the the three men that had fallen through the wall. Suddenly, he felt a wave pass through him, and reality seemed to shake and fade. He felt empty, as though his every thought had been nothing but a sick man's dream, and he found himself deep under the sea, staring out through cold, hungry eyes. He felt hunger, deeper than anything he had felt before, and he felt evil. Something deep inside him snapped, a tiny thread, broken by the weight of so much stress, and he was back in his living room. Spence was wheeling herself down the hall towards him, eyeing the three men that were helping him to his feet. He wiped his nose, somewhat surprised by the blood, thick and dark, on his hands. He could hear the riders outside, their horses pawing the ground impatiently. He looked around, his sanity bruised. It was Gregor that spoke first...

“You… look… familiar,” Gregor said. He looked strange to Angus and DyRE. It was like only half of him was there. He was definitely lacking something, “A few cans short of a six-pack” DyRE thought to himself. Then DyRE realized, Gregor and Oscar look almost, in fact, completely identical. Just then Oscar realized with frightening apprehension what was happening. “I am you and you are me…” he said with confusion. Could it really be true? Yes, Oscar was a rider, but he was intensely disappointed with the unabashed shallowness and horror of his position. Was he so disallusioned that he would create an alternate personality to fight the riders? It all came back to him now. His disillusionment with the riders combined with his psycho-kinetic powers had allowed him to literally create another personality, one completely separate from his own, and project it, even give it substance. That was why he felt “twisted, and distorted, as if he were pulling away from himself” when he saw Gregor (himself) come through the portal. He remembered breaking off from the riders to hand himself a note. A note containing the people the riders feared. The people that the Dread Cthulhu feared. And now they were here (except for one), and it was high time he stopped fooling himself. Gregor and Oscar moved towards one another and then… there was a flash, and only one man emerged from the blinding light. A man who had come to terms with himself. A man ready to oppose the riders and their master, Marduk. Marduk’s mad plan to awaken Cthulhu from his deadly slumber must not succeed… All Oscar/Gregor had to do was find someone named, he looked down at the sheet of paper sealed with the crest of, he now knew, Cthulhu. “We must find grenville,” He said solemnly. Angus, DyRE and Spence stood slackjawed. In all the commotion, no one noticed that a lone meep had made its way through the portal and was now watching, and waiting…

Dread Cthulhu turned in his slumber, a flicker of animosity passing across his subconscious. "This is all very well," he thought, "all this amorphousness and slumbering and trans-dimensional high-jinks, but it makes for appallingly bad prose." He tried to get back to sleep, wrapping a tentacled hand around his sopping wet quilt and pulling it up over his viscous abdomen, but phrases rang in his ears . . . "the twisting tendrils of time had fractured" . . . how can tendrils fracture, he asked himself, rhetorically, and why should time be like tendrils in any case? It was almost enough to make him sit down and write a letter. Another phrase surfaced from deep inside his semi-sentient mind . . . "his disillusionment with the riders combined with his psycho-kinetic powers had allowed him to literally create another personality, one completely separate from his own" . . . the baldness of the explanation made him retch. "Good God," he fumed, "here I am, not even fully sentient, and if I can't stand to read this rubbish, how on earth can sentient humans bear to write it?". Cthulhu moaned, wrapped the pillow round his head, and finally, shivering with rage, left his bed.

Dread Cthulhu turned in his slumber, a flicker of animosity passing across his subconscious. "This is all very well," he thought, "all this amorphousness and slumbering and trans-dimensional high-jinks, but it makes for appallingly bad prose." He tried to get back to sleep, wrapping a tentacled hand around his sopping wet quilt and pulling it up over his viscous abdomen, but phrases rang in his ears . . . "the twisting tendrils of time had fractured" . . . how can tendrils fracture, he asked himself, rhetorically, and why should time be like tendrils in any case? It was almost enough to make him sit down and write a letter. Another phrase surfaced from deep inside his semi-sentient mind . . . "his disillusionment with the riders combined with his psycho-kinetic powers had allowed him to literally create another personality, one completely separate from his own" . . . the baldness of the explanation made him retch. "Good God," he fumed, "here I am, not even fully sentient, and if I can't stand to read this rubbish, how on earth can sentient humans bear to write it?". Cthulhu moaned, wrapped the pillow round his head, and finally, shivering with rage, left his bed.

After several long months of searching, it seemed as though the small group would never reach their goal in time. They needed to complete the list, or Cthullu would destroy them. Little did they know that this was all a dream, and that the piercing cry of a telephone ringing would put an end to all of their troubles. Yes, This entire episode amounted to nothing more than the deranged dreams of one sexual deviant young human male by the name of Matt. All of these dreams had been little more then the deranged product of his previous nights exploits. The familure sound of the telephone ringing woke Matt, and killed any pretense of a proper ending ever coming to this long, strange journey.

Dread Cthulhu groaned in astonished pain, "They don't really intend to end the story this way, do they?" He thought of all the loose ends, all the errors in continuity, and, indeed, all of the blatant copyright infringement, and he found that his corpulent body was going limp and his mad dreams were no longer so maniac. Cthulhu babbled as his pulpy, tentacled head withered, "I've come all this way, only to be defeated by iniquitous writers! In the beginning there was Howard- oh how I do miss Howard. Now he could spin a yarn! I would rather be in an August Derleth story again, if it meant I didn't have to endure this tripe!" Cthulhu convulsed in grotesque, peristaltic motions as his body came undone. "So thats it? What the hell about us?" screamed Gregor/Oscar, "We spent all this time searching for this... this... Grenville character, now you're saying we didn't need to do anything!?" Everyone was in Gregor/Oscar's living room again, trying to decide what to do now that the threat had unexpectedly disappeared. Angus, ever the optimistic, announced that everyone should be glad that Cthulhu had passed without any significant harm done to anyone. Spence had always been, and still was, completely indifferent to the entire situation. With Dread Cthulhu dead, Marduk was left powerless to control the Riders, who were now preparing to embark on a new journey to craft the "definitive daisy-chain". DyRE had found his way into Gregor/Oscar's movie vault, proclaimed that everyone should relax and enjoy the deluxe Widescreen Edition of Evil Dead II, then proceeded to recline on Gregor/Oscar's Lazy-Boy. And thus, Cthulhu was defeated by appalling prose as the dream of the prepubescent Matt jeered to an end.