On a lighter note...

[daibhidc]

So I thought I'd share an excerpt from my absolutely ridiculous WIP (well, the most ridiculous of several absolutely ridiculous WIPs) because I don't know how long it's going to take, and I want people to appreciate how absolutely ridiculous it is.

(I'm at the point where I've written up all the cool scenes that inspired me to come up with the thing in the first place, and I now have to join them together in an interesting fashion.)

So here's a taster of Anno Duckula: 1987.

Yes, really.
 

Colonel Kevin K. Kernel, chair of the organisation that was once known as the Dangerous Club, and was now the Danger Agency, looked around the conference table and sighed. He was not happy. This was partly because of the Agency's new headquarters; the Colonel was a simple soul, and thought a secret agency should actually be, well, secret. When Mykennel Hound ran the place (he glanced briefly at the portrait of an immensely obese bloodhound in full Victorian evening dress) it was just based in an ordinary building in Whitehall, and that was how things should be. The eccentric architect Persistent Ache, however, had seen fit to deface the London skyline with a thirty-storey pillar box, looking almost as out of place as Castle Duckula itself (which had mysteriously transported itself to directly in front of Buckingham Palace overnight, thanks to the Count's dark magicks). What was next, the chinchilla wondered gloomily. Giant glass pickles?

What really irked him, however, was the company. Oh, his side of the table was fine, more or less. Yes, the Scotland Yard detective was a bit intense, the Danger Agency associate who was the meeting's token vampire (since Dr Dieubunné had sent her apologies) was a bit of a glory hound (if you could say that about a cat), and he didn't know what to make of the representative of the American organisation S.H.U.S.H. (another cat, who claimed to be some kind of sorceress), but at least they were all on the same side. Whereas on the other side of the table…

They were criminals, that was all there was to it. And most annoyingly of all, their spokesanimal was the Danger Agency's Public Enemy Number One. Or at least, had been, before Duckula. He glared at the so-called Baron, who merely chuckled to himself and stroked his pet caterpillar. Then the Inspector also glared, which made the Baron subside a bit. The Colonel seemed to recall that the police badger had also tangled with the terrible toad. He also recalled that Archie's definition of "reasonable force" was sometimes a bit vague.

The animal to the Baron's left, representing the crime families of America, was a sharp contrast. If the bulldog Bruno Them, better known by the sobriquet "Bugsy Vile", had still been the Dogfather, they would have seemed a matched pair, despite their species, since Them, like the Baron, had been a squat, thuggish figure badly stuffed into a tailored three-piece suit. Instead, the beagle who had replaced him was tall and rangy with untrimmed fur, and appeared to be wearing a prison uniform. There was presumably some reason for this – maybe he'd sworn revenge on whomever had managed to arrest him, and this served as a reminder or something – but wearing it and a domino mask to a meeting like this seemed unduly provocative.

Mind you, both the Duke de Fantom and Ms Furr on the Colonel's own side of the table were also wearing masks for some reason, so he couldn't exactly cast aspersions there.

On the Baron's right were the representatives of the criminal fraternity of the Continent. As far as the Colonel could tell, the tall, gangly stork and short, fat parakeet appeared to be a pair of incompetent buffoons, but rumour had it that they had crossed paths with Duckula before, and lived to tell about it, so they obviously had something going for them, even if it was only luck.

All in all, the Colonel thought, the array of dangerous people of varied allegiances gathered around the table made him very glad that he was somewhere else entirely and chairing the meeting through a video screen.