"Nibiru, My Name Is"
©2013
by
Jordan S. Bassior
No, it isn’t.
“Nibiru” is what it wants to do to your world. And trust me, you wouldn’t like that..
My name?
Names have power, and I don’t want my power at your call.
No offense. I’m sure that you’re a nice enough human, when something isn’t trying to use you. But I don’t want you to have my power at your call.
This form tells me that she doesn’t mind if you know her name. You can’t control her with it, so I suppose that’s all right. You couldn’t have controlled her even before I expanded her mind, and now she’s at least the mental equal of one of your kind.
You may call us “Nova.”
The Entity? I know Its name, but I won’t tell you. I especially don’t want you calling on Its power.
Oh, I know that you think it would be useful. They all do. But that’s because It wants you to think It would serve you. It wouldn’t. It might pretend to, for a while, until It manipulated you into doing exactly what It wanted, and then It would devour you.
Give up your quest. I know you want to use It against the Unspeakable, but It would only use you. There are other ways of defeating your foe.
No, you couldn’t contain It. You think you could because It wants you to think you could.
Your friends think they could because this is why … It’s done this before.
It’s escaped before.
It didn’t destroy the world because my … you call us the Elder Gods … because Our traps are subtler than you think, and sometimes, we can even turn back time so that things can unhappen.
But there’s a cost. To the souls of those it touched.
There’s a rich man here in Crystal Cove who winces in pain every time he sees a snake, and he doesn’t remember why. There’s a brilliant young woman who startles every time she hears a string of fireworks. And nobody in town will eat calamari, and only one will keep a parrot, and the parrot himself is more than a little bit crazy.
Some things can’t be forgotten, even if we turn back time so they never happened. So don’t ever let them happen again.
The Unspeakable?
I know that humans can defeat Him. They’ve done so before. And as I said, Our traps are subtle, and ready to be primed by the right mortals.
How?
I can’t tell you, directly. It’s against the Rules.
I’m sorry that it has to be a mystery. A mystery … yes, that’s your answer.
Go to Miskatonic University, in Arkham, Massachusetts. There are five mortals there: four young humans, and a very special dog. They can help you. Ask Professor Ellison … he knows them. I'm sure they'll help you. They like to meddle.
And …
… Give the dog my love.
Oh, you’ll know which dog.
He’s unforgettable.
He’s unforgettable.
END.
All the characters of "Scooby-Doo," in all its incarnations, including the Scooby gang, the Nibiru Entity, Nova (both dog and Elder Goddess), Ricky Owens, Marcie "Hot Dog Water" Fleach, and Professor Pericles, are the property of Hanna-Barbera Inc, as is this version of the real-life science-fiction writer Harlan Ellison. My thanks to H. P. Lovecraft for creating the Cthulhu Mythos, and Eddy C. Bertin for writing "Darkness, My Name Is" © 1976, which of course inspired this fan fiction.
I rubbernecked at a Scooby Cthulhu game once.
ReplyDeleteVelma kept doing okay on SAN points despite her continual reading of tomes, because her glasses fell off at the worst parts. The DM ruled that Scooby Snacks were SAN restoratives for Shaggy and Scooby, so those players unknowingly were helped by their comedy routine. But Fred and Daphne suffered a bit.
Scooby-Doo and the Cthulhu Mythos were always natural crossovers for the same reason that, when they scripted the Ghostbuster movies, both of them were based on Lovecraft premises (the first one on "The Dunwich Horror" and the second on The Case of Charles Dexter Ward). The premise underlying Scooby-Doo, Mystery Incorporated was basically "The Call of Cthulhu" with the numbers filed off: imprisoned evil god-alien able to communicate with humans through their dreams. What made it really creepy was that its Master Plan involved creating the teams of mystery-solvers, because it knew that they could be drawn to actions which would aid in its own release, which is a nice twist on the more usual role of Lovcraftian Investigators.
ReplyDeleteThe reason for combining the two, of course, is that comedy works better against a backdrop of real drama; and drama works better when relieved by comedy. Consider the menaces in both Ghostbuster movies: in both cases, the menaces were real and horrible. The first movie was about a cultist plot to release an Eldritch Abomination into New York City to devastate our civilization; the escond one about an evil sorceror who planned to return from death by possessing a baby. What was funny about both movies was how the characters reacted to this situation.
That's why this recent version of Scooby-Doo is so much better than the earlier ones. The threat of the Nibiru Entity is very, very real and apocalyptic. What makes it work as comedy is the reactions of the Scooby Gang. And the drama within the team: the fortunes of the relationships between Fred and Daphne, Shaggy and Velma, and Shaggy and Scooby, and Velma's own secrets, make the characters seem more real, so that their reactions are funnier and we care about them when they're put in danger.
The really dark bits -- the deaths of several sympathetic characters -- only made us care more, because the writers were serving notice on us that people could die.
Excellent -- and they managed to at one and the same time finish with a happy ending whose very happiness was in itself Cosmic Horror. What's even better is that they took it from an Eddy C. Bertin story, "Darkness, My Name Is," which had one of the nastiest Lovecraftian entities ever (Cyaegha) and one which was deliberately drawing Investigators in to release itself (which means that this is probably where they got much of the story arc for the first two seasons).
I keep hearing contradictory stories that Mystery Incorporated has been canceled permanently, and that they're going to do a sequel series set at Miskatonic University. I'm not sure which is the case, but as you can guess, I really hope that they continue the series!
Oh, as to the Cosmic Horror of the happy ending? Well, it turned out well for the town, including for the major characters who got killed -- but it did so by changing the whole timeline. And the Scooby Gang knows this happened. This means that they've lost the reality they grew up in forever (though admittedly it was a reality doomed to end in the jaws of the Nibiru Entity and the cataclysm of Nibiru itself) they can't trust reality: even things witnessed and written into history may have really happened because of the machinations of one or another of the Annunaki. Sure, they like Nova (or at least Scooby does), and most of the other Anunaki claim to be benevolent, but ... it implies that humanity has no more real control over its own destiny, or even hold on its accomplishments, than a culture of microbes in a Petri dish. And we're just one change of mind by the Annunaki away from being obliterated, from never having existed.
ReplyDeleteTalk about Cosmic Horror!