The Price of Stories

When it was revealed in 2009 that fourteen years earlier not only had one of the largest and best-loved corporations in the world discovered a way to create a portal to famous fictional worlds, but had covered up the discovery in order to exploit what they could from the worlds discovered in order to increase their profits by a factor of twenty, the ensuing public outrage led to global riots, the fall of six nations and the eventual institution of Neo-Hegemonism as the standard form of government.

Before that occurred though, executives found that they had access to worlds of immeasurable wealth and fantastic creatures, most with nothing in the shape of a valid government or defence force to prevent stripping them of their resources. Even so, and despite the avoidance of any world which could pose a credible threat, there were still occasional problems. In one case in particular, the logging of a minor area of well-established hardwood, corpses began to trickle back through the gateway.

But the forest comprised a hundred acres or so of prime woodland, and who knew what special properties had been imbued in these trees by the millions of children who had envisaged their favourite characters walking between the trunks. And with access to tens of thousands of trashy novels of genre fiction to recruit from, lives were cheap. Between the massive oaks strode squads of strapping open-shirted cowboys lured from their cheap romance novels with promise of a handful of coins, cradling powerful automatic rifles, while near-identical iron thewed barbarians hacked away at the grand trees with axe and saw.

The defenders of the forest, pitifully few in number, had paid a high price of their own. In the very heart of the wood, beside a tiny door set into the sandy bank were scratched four pathetically shallow graves, marked with simple poles. But those not yet fallen had perhaps lost more; innocence was gone from their wood, and not one that remained did not have blood staining their hands, or paws.

One of them lurked under a shrub, ears pricked, listening for the sound of the foe. As he heard the hated twang of bad American accents, filled with clich?s of the Wild West, he put his weight against the body of the rifle and, taking care not to make a sound, pivoted it to cover the path. With the gun measuring more than twice his length ambush from a fixed position was his only option, and so his once bright yellow fur was smeared with thick brown mud, festooned with twigs and branches. Only his eyes were truly recognisable, twin black orbs staring with glazed hatred towards the stand of trees from which the experience of the past months had taught him the cookie-cutter cowboys would emerge.

The first shot took the lead figure just beneath his broad Stetson, the high-powered round punching through skin and skull, obliterating bland good looks that had no time to register even a dull surprise. With little skill outside the romancing of shy schoolmarms or the manful downing of hard liquor one more was folded to the ground by a bullet tearing through his belly before the remainder thought to fling themselves into cover, but soon the air was filled with the stentorian staccato of automatic fire from three M-16 machine guns. Furthermore, someone had clearly taken the time to teach this batch the rudiments of accuracy, as bullets splashed against the large rocks in the V of which was couched the ambushing rifle.

"Oh bother" said Pooh, as he chambered another round.