Word spread quickly among the pagan underground, and those who returned to their faiths found they also received immediate and tangible results for their requests.
Soon the pagans dissented openly, telling anyone who would listen that the old ways were still valid, and even superior to the New Paradigm.
As one might expect, this new development pissed Tim off quite a bit.
Dan, Sarah and Chris, as well as other pagans across the nation, took to the streets to protest and attempt to educate others. They told the people they met that it didn’t matter what faith they chose, so long as it wasn’t the New Paradigm.
Dan was deep in conversation with a woman in her late twenties, telling her about the amazing miracles they’d seen recently. He was so engrossed in his story he didn’t notice the van that pulled up next to them and parked. He also didn’t notice the track suit wearing men who got out of the van, until they grabbed him and dragged him into the van.
One of the men nodded to the young woman Dan had been talking to. She smiled in return. He got in to the van with the rest, and they drove off.
Sarah and Chris didn’t notice Dan was missing until they went to the coffee shop that was their designated meeting spot.
The van took Dan deep into the New Paragidm’s compound. They drove the van in to one of the building through a large loading door. Inside the building was access to a spiral ramp. The True Believers took Dan far underground before the van finally stopped.
Two of the True Believers dragged Dan out of the van and hauled him into a small room. A cell, actually, with a cot, a toilet and nothing else. They shoved him on to the bed, then left. Dan heard them locking the door, then silence.
Several hours later, the sole lightbulb in the room shut off, and plunged the cell into darkness.
Dan slept, and woke up in the dark again. He had no idea how much time had passed. He slept again, and woke once more. This time he stayed awake. He sat up and waited for the light to come on.
Hours passed. Dan sat on the bed wondering if he was simply going to be left to die in a dark cell. He’d just decided that his present circumstances were ideal for going mad, and was about to begin being crazy when a slot in the door to his cell slid open. The light coming in through the crack nearly blinded him.
Dan saw something getting shoved through the slot, and then the opening slammed shut again. Dan smelled food. He felt his way over to the door and nearly stepped in his lunch. He smelled the food, prodded it with one finger, and finally gave in and took a bite.
McDonald’s. He ate, and then he noticed there was something on his tray that wasn’t food. It was wrapped in plastic. He tore the plastic open and felt the object. It took him a few minutes to realize it was a toy. They’d given him a Happy Meal.
Dan had to hand it to the New Paradigm; they really were sick, twisted bastards.
He sat in the dark and turned the toy over and over in his hands. He figured it was a doll (action figure?) of some sort, but couldn’t figure out what it was supposed to be. It’s head was freaking huge.
After a while, Dan slept again.
***
Sarah and Chris spent hours walking around trying to find Dan. They figured he probably found some girl and decided to follow her around pestering her about the benefits of polytheism (“It’s like multi-tasking,” she imagined him telling this imaginary woman) instead of meeting up with them. He’d been kind of flakey in the past, after all.Without realizing it, they walked past the very spot where he’d been abducted several times. The woman who had trapped him for the True Believers was long gone, off finding other people to betray for the greater good.
Eventually they gave up, and went back to their hotel to rest. Maybe there’d be a message from Dan waiting for them there, they figured. If not, he’d probably give up on whatever his current fascination was by the next morning and go back to the hotel.
By noon the next day they hadn’t heard anything from Dan, and began to really worry about him. Sarah and Chris went to find Hep and Scroat and see if they’d heard anything.
“Hey kids, how are you doing today?” Hep asked as he opened the door and let them into the hotel room.
“We’re doing ok. We haven’t seen Dan since yesterday afternoon. Have you guys heard anything from him?” Sarah asked.
“Nope,” Hep said. “I guess we should be a little worried about him, huh?”
“Can’t you go get him all magic-like?” Chris asked. Hep looked at him as if he’d just asked him to bring home the Eiffel Tower for dinner.
“No, I can only get to him if I know where he is,” Hep said. “I can’t just appear wherever he happens to be. Even if I could, showing up next to him where ever he happens to be could be dangerous. What if he was standing on a cliff or something? ”
“Do you think the New Paradigm goons got him?” Chris asked.
“Well, that or he was arrested for outstanding parking tickets,” Hep said in a sarcastic voice.
“What do we do?” Sarah asked.
“Nuke their compound?” Hep suggested. “Nah, that probably wouldn’t work out too well for anyone. I have no idea. We don’t know where he is, and it’s possible he just ran off somewhere too.”
Scroat walked into the room then. “How about we go and get some breakfast?”
Hep, Sarah and Chris turned to look at him.
“It’s nearly two o’clock,” Sarah said.
“You say that like two o’clock is too late for breakfast. I’ll have you know that it’s never too late for breakfast.” Scroat replied.
They left the hotel in search of a restaurant that serves breakfast all day. Luckily there was a diner only a few blocks away.
Just outside the diner, the group heard a ‘POP,’ and turned to see a bucket of fried chicken next to Hep. He rolled his eyes.
“This experiment in hands-on divinity is really getting on my nerves,” Hep said. “Excuse me a moment, won’t you?” He vanished.
The rest of them went inside and ordered breakfast, except for Sarah who got a BLT. A few minutes later, Hep walked in to the restaurant and joined them.
“That one was kind of fun,” he said, and gave the others a goofy grin.
***
Steven Thorp’s car had been giving him more and more trouble. It was close to thirty years old, and was far from being a collector’s car. The two door Dodge Aries had certainly gotten him around for a long time, but the chewing gum and baling wire holding it together were starting to show.
One of his pagan friends told him about the amazing things that happened when she’d performed a ritual asking for help with her massive debt load.
Steven had not really expected much to happen, but he went ahead and made a sacrifice to Hephaestus (figuring he could help with mechanical problems).
The next morning he left his house to go to work, wondering if the Aries would start, and was shocked to find a brand new, shiny black Ford Mustang where he’d parked the Dodge the night before. He looked around to see if there were cameras or someone playing a prank on him.
He opened the door and on the driver’s seat was the title to the car, in his name. The keys dangled from the ignition.
The leather interior did a great job of catching him when he fell face first into the car.
***
Dan heard the metal slot in the door slide open, squinted against the light that poured in to his pitch black cell. He heard a tray sliding through the opening, and then the slot slammed shut again.He walked over to the door and felt around for the tray. He smelled food again. It was another Happy Meal, chicken nuggets this time. Dan ate, then opened the plastic bag with the toy inside. It felt like another action figure, though he couldn’t figure out what it was.
To keep himself entertained, he tried to make both of the action figures dance a waltz, but the first action figure’s huge head made it nigh impossible. The Electric Slide was equally elusive, though that had more to do with the dolls’ total lack of groove.
Dan was fairly pleased with how smoothly his descent in to madness was going. He’d figured there’d be a lot more shaking and jibbering involved. Earlier that day he’d tried jibbering for a while, but it really just wasn’t him. He had found rocking back and forth rather relaxing and accidentally fell asleep. Given the total lack of stimulation in the room, sleeping was as good as anything else, so Dan rolled with it.
Wide awake from the sugar high he’d gotten from the Happy Meal, he decided to play hide and seek with the action figures. He threw them across the room so they bounced off the wall, then tried to find them again in the dark.
It would have been harder if the action figures hadn’t kept calling “Hey, shit head, I’m over here.”
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