The Road To Roo Inn

It wasn’t going to be easy getting an orc through customs, that much was obvious. It was also becoming increasingly obvious that Zig Zag McClintock was an orc, and some of the passengers aboard flight 625 to Sydney, Australia, were starting to get a little twitchy. Thankfully, the cabin lights were still dimmed a soothing blue, the blinds closed to allow people to sleep, but even in this semi-darkness it was clear that something wasn’t quite right about the man snoring very loudly to himself in seat 23a. It was the teeth, mostly. It probably didn’t help that the young man sitting in 23b, one Vincent Christ, kept disappearing every time they hit turbulence.

“Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking,” said the captain smoothly. “As you can see, I’ve turned on the fasten seat belts sign just while we get through this bumpy patch...”

Vincent clung to his seat for dear life, apparently under the mistaken impression that it would somehow cushion his fall if the plane were to suddenly plummet into the ocean below. He tried not to think about how far that fall would be, or about the fact that he’d have time to think about that, too, on the way down. Bumpy patch bollocks! Eight hours they’d been bouncing around on this nightmare flight that seemed to be deliberately aiming for bad weather, and thanks to Zig Zag taking all the sleeping pills Vincent had endured every stomach-churning minute of it.

Vincent hated flying. Of course, never having flown before today – or was it yesterday? – he’d had no idea that he hated flying, but he really fucking hated flying. The boredom had been bad enough, eleven endless hours from Berlin to Tokyo, with his arse going to sleep and his brain wide awake, but this was hell! The plane shuddered and pitched, the cabin staff long abandoning the idea of serving any refreshments, liquid or otherwise. And Keanu Reeves was just about to ruin The Matrix again on a screen the size of a postage stamp. Yes, this was definitely hell!

And then there was the ring.

Since Vincent was eleven years old he’d been the owner, if not the rightful owner, of an invisibility ring that made him vanish whenever he was in danger. In the right hands it was incredibly powerful, and the bounty on it ran into the millions, but unfortunately Vincent’s were not the right hands. They weren’t even the right fingers! Technically, it was only supposed to work when he was actually in danger, but somehow it also worked when he thought he was in danger, and so, instead of keeping him safe from harm, it often had a habit of making his life vastly more difficult, by making him invisible on his motorcycle, for instance. Or, like now, making him disappear in public on a very full flight from Tokyo to Sydney.

Vincent poked at the screen to make Keanu Reeves go away, switching the display over to show the flight path. He tried to do some breathing exercises to calm himself down. Not long to go now, an hour and a half, and if the cabin staff had to stay seated for the remainder of the flight then he should be fine as soon as they landed. Mercifully, many of the seats around him were taken by fellow members of the outlaw motorcycle club, Aberrant MC, for whom Vincent was prospecting, and they all knew about the ring, but, still, his disappearing act might cause a few problems with the general public if he couldn’t keep his fear under control.

Not that Aberrant MC were a particularly inconspicuous bunch to start with, and already they had caused a minor scene going through airport security. For obvious reasons, Andy One-Leg had raised a few eyebrows when he took his leg off and put it through the X-ray machine, hopping on the spot while he waited to go through the metal detector. Then Vincent kept setting the metal detector off, virtually down to his underpants before they took him away for a pat down. His invisibility ring was the only metal on his person, and wouldn’t come off his finger, but for some reason it took a good twenty minutes to ascertain, quite wrongly, that it couldn’t be employed as a weapon of mass destruction. Next came Stone, extremely reluctant to take his sunglasses off, as if the airport strip lighting were brighter than the midday sun, cringing at every step.

“Sir, you must take those off,” said the uniform, a spotty German with no sense of humour.

“Migraine,” pleaded Stone, shielding his eyes. “Blinding headache. I’ve taken some painkillers so it should pass.”

“Sir, you must still take them off.”

So Stone took his sunglasses off to reveal what were clearly the eyes of a complete drug fiend and he, too, was promptly taken away for a search that was rather more intimate than necessary. Smiler and Joker both got through okay, though not unnoticed, with Billy Toothless causing people in line to recoil at the stench when he took his boots off. And then came Zig Zag...

Technically Zig Zag was a dworc, half dwarvish, half orc, and an extremely rare breed considering how much dwarfs and orcs hate each other. Indeed, he was not the result of love, but of rape during an orc raid, his mother unceremoniously dumping him in the woods as soon as he was born. But standing at five feet five inches in his socks, he looked more like a small orc than a particularly vicious dwarf, so orc it was. He could pass for an orc child, but never as a dwarf, though it was fair to say that he hadn’t been blessed with the most attractive features of either race – leather-skinned, pointy-eared, and with a surplus of nasty teeth. It seemed the only thing he’d picked up from his dwarf genes was a thickness in girth, a height disadvantage, and the uncanny ability to tell gold by its smell. His looks had not been further enhanced when, many years ago, his face had been split in two with an axe and then bound up with dockyard rope.

“Sir, you cannot bring this liquid in your carry-on.”

“No liquidsh? What do you mean no liquidsh? I need thish!” protested Zig Zag.

“Three ounces is the maximum allowed in carry on bags,” said the German. “This must go in your checked luggage or you must throw it away.”

“But I need thish with me,” insisted Zig Zag. “It’sh exshpenshive shtuff, I don’t want it getting losht. It’sh shpecial shampoo,” he added.

“Shampoo?” said the German, not at all convinced that anyone would want to get this suspicious-looking green goo anywhere near their skin, let alone use it to combat dandruff.

“Yesh,” said Zig Zag. “It makesh the hairsh grow schtronger.”

The uniform looked down at Zig Zag. Given his height disadvantage it was possible to see the top of his head, and the uniform could see no signs at all that this miracle shampoo was even remotely miraculous. Zig Zag was completely bald.

“It does not appear to work,” said the German, perhaps betraying a sense of humour after all.

“Yeah, well, I haven’t schtarted yet,” muttered Zig Zag.

“Still, it must go in your checked luggage.”

“Bollocksh.”

The green goo was in fact a powerful magical liniment, and before heading to the airport Zig Zag had vigorously applied a significant amount of it to himself in order to appear even vaguely human. But still, there was only so much it could do. In human form he was not an attractive man, appearing as if he might once have been involved in some horrible industrial accident, or perhaps suffer from the world’s worst cleft palate. His teeth were too big for his mouth causing a shower-fitted speech impediment, his thin grey goatee beard almost permanently moist. It might even be possible to feel sorry for him if he didn’t look like such a complete bastard, but that’s exactly what he looked like, a spiteful little thug with an attitude problem. The recently tattooed face, some sort of Mike Tyson tribal thing, probably wasn’t helping much with PR.

And so Zig Zag had been forced to put the liniment into his checked luggage, which had then, most inconveniently, been checked all the way to Sydney for his convenience. Unable to reapply the liniment en route as he’d planned, he had instead taken a large quantity of sleeping pills in the hopes of slowing down the reversal process. Which perhaps it had, but there could be no doubt that it was wearing off fast. At this rate it would have worn off completely by the time they landed, and he would look nothing like the picture on his counterfeit passport. Australian immigration policies on orcs were vague at best, considering they’d never knowingly encountered one before, but it was a safe bet that they wouldn’t be pleased.

The passports were also worrying Vincent. Given that he had no criminal record it wasn’t strictly necessary for him to have a forged passport at all, but, for reasons that had become abundantly clear in his relatively short time prospecting for Aberrant MC, it was best if as few people as possible knew the club’s travel arrangements. At least three of the club’s thirteen full patch members were wanted fugitives, and the same number again weren’t even human! Aside from the threat of arrest there was also the very real danger that they’d get thrown into quarantine.

Admittedly, the passports had worked just fine so far, and customs in Tokyo seemed more interested in showing them pictures of drugs and porn to make sure they weren’t bringing in any of their own. But still, with all the high-tech security at airports, there was always the worry of getting caught out.

Beside them, in the aisle seat, Stone let out a long and sorrowful moan. Tortured by his migraine he cradled his head in his hands, eyes blindfolded. It had been getting progressively worse, growing from a few urgent stabs every now and again, when they left Berlin, to a constant agony by the time they boarded the next plane in Tokyo. Now, as they approached Sydney, it was unbearable, like his skull was too small for his brain, worse than the worst of hangovers. How was it possible for eyeballs to produce so much pain?

And yet Stone knew only too well where the pain was coming from, and that all he could do was endure it. Follow it. Somewhere, in the vast open space that was Australia, his old friend Derain was sending a distress signal, a psychic SOS so powerful that it completely overwhelmed him. There was no knowing what it meant, only that Derain was in great danger, likely enduring some torture of his own. All Stone could do was get there as fast as possible.

And then, suddenly, the pain stopped.

Stone sat upright and removed his blindfold. He opened his eyes and looked about him, wildly.

“Oh dear,” he said. “That’s not good. That’s not good at all!”