Welcome to Gaia! ::

Around the corner, standing on the other side of a runic circle, Marvin was struggling through the binding rituals written in L'Encyclopediae d'Yestermorrow. He was supposed to light the four candles in invocation of the four cardinal directions of the gross material plane, but his lighter had run out of fluid.

He put down his ancestral weapon, which clucked disapprovingly and began searching the soil for grubs. With both hands free he could consult the ritual's incantation while simultaneously lighting the candles with the torches that he'd lit the clearing with, for ambience.

"Spirits of the West," he spake, "In the name of the autonaiscent, I beseech you. Spirits of the East, in the name of the autonaiscent, I beseech you. Spirits of the So-- Of the North! I beseech you, or whatever. Spirits of the South, weren't you listening? Be beseeched already!"

He lit one of the candles for each spirit, and, satisfied, replanted the torch and retrieved his ceremonial flamingo.

Nothing happened for a few minutes, so Marvin relaxed. He was ahead of schedule.

When the demon rounded the corner, he mumbled, "Evil one, born of blood or something, in the name of the autonaiscent, and with the will of the four directions, be bound."

The black form, which was charging across the circle, reversed direction midstep, as if it were suddenly wearing elastic manacles. It dropped the bundled figure it was carrying and thrashed violently against its' fetters.

"Listen, I'm going to take five. You go ahead and flail around and stuff."

Marvin closed the tome and sat down on a rock, fishing a device out of his robes.

The device Marvin was futzing with was like a hand-held holographic dial, which he spun one way and another and stared at intently. Exactly what it was displaying was beyond anyone not wearing anaglyphic eye-wear. He looked up at Zen and raised his brow.

"Hold on, dude, I've got to finish this message," Marvin said, staring at the device with renewed focus before tucking it away.

"How can I do you for?"

"I know you're probably not used to this level of technology," Marvin began, patronizingly, like explaining sheers to sheep, "But that's called a candle, and it's part of my Summoning Circle."

He shifted the weight of the massive book to under his arm. It beeped, and an LED in one of the pages started glowing.

"Only this isn't really a summoning circle, because I wasn't going to use it to summon anything, I was going to use it to bind a demon. And I did. In accordance with prophecy."

The ravenous monster lunged at Marvin with renewed intensity, but he was just outside the range of its confined claws. Casually, he batted at it with the flamingo, leaving a big hooked wound in its face and several pink feathers floating to the ground. One feather landed on a candle and was incinerated.

"So your name is Zen, but you're not called Zen, or you aren't, definitively, zen. Sure! Hold on, let me check the prophecies."

He opened the book to the glowing page, and a wavering hologram of a vente Starbucks mochafrappechinajava materialized in the space over it. He knocked it over, spilling its contents all over the forest floor.

"Stupid advertisements are driving me nuts," he said explanatorily, "One time it's going to be something really important, and I'm not going to check it. My given name is Marvin. I'm from a future that has no past. YET."

"Hold on," Marvin said, "Let me check the L'Encyclopediae."

He leafed through it impatiently, highlighting sections at a touch as he went. "Space and time, by the way, are so fundamentally interconnected that they're actually the same thing. Oh, here we go."

The page he was on projected an image that was only barely recognizable without anaglyphic specs, providing a real-time miniature version of himself, Zen and the demon. Anything further away was too fuzzy to make out without the color-coordinated glasses.

"Turns out, I don't have a place to stay. For the next ten seconds."

"Excellent," Marvin congratulated Zen, "Good work!"

Closing his book and sheathing his flamingo, he started off in the direction of the town, though it hadn't really been indicated to him. Then he stopped dead in his tracks.

"Whoops, forgot about the demon," he said, turning. He pulled his weapon back out, and adopted a preparatory stance. "Hold on..."

His eyes narrowed and his attached wings fluttered and stretched vaingloriously. The bird's eyes took on a terrifying and primal light that seemed to grow and grow until it squawked, firing a ray that caused the demon to vanish in a puff of sulfur and brimstone.

"Halfway done!"

Marvin marched off, beckoning to Trent to follow him.

"Oh, I captured its essence. It can be a useful thing to have around, but the important thing is that exactly half of the demons that existed in this world are gone now."

Marvin seemed to increase his pace very slightly every time Zen caught up.

"I've got to get rid of them all so you can have a new age, so the level of advancement here can reach the point where I'm from, so this can be our past."