Out of Darkness…
… The First Wave
The moon was little more than a smudge behind storm clouds when the first wave came.
They slithered out of the darkness in their millions — slick, bloated shapes shimmering wetly in the torchlight. The sound was worse than the sight: a ceaseless chorus of schlup, schlup, schlup, like the earth itself was chewing. By dawn, entire fields of wheat had been stripped to bare, skeletal stems.
Farmers spoke in whispers of The Night of the Slime, but that was only the beginning. The slugs were changing. Some grew as long as railway cars, their eyestalks twitching like semaphore arms. Others sprouted shell-like ridges of jagged metal, and still others pulsed with faint green light, their bodies swollen with strange energies. No barrier stopped them. No poison worked. No prayer seemed to reach the ears of whatever gods might care about corn or barley.
And then, one night, a stranger rode in…
He came through the fog on a brass-and-iron steed — a half-motorcycle, half-mechanical stallion. His wide-brimmed hat shadowed his eyes, but the gleam of gears and leather straps caught the moonlight as he dismounted. On his back hung something strange: a whip coiled like a sleeping serpent, its handle humming with latent power.
A man stepped from the shadows to meet him — tall, lean, and dressed like an alchemist who’d robbed a clockmaker’s workshop. His monocle glowed faintly blue, and the scent of burnt sugar and ozone followed him. This was De Sangosse — the mad genius of chemistry and agronomy, part oracle, part sorcerer of soil.
“They’ve breached the southern orchard,” De Sangosse said, his voice tinged with a faint Spanish lilt. “We’ve got one chance. You remember the three sequences?”
The stranger nodded.
From the treeline came a deep, wet thoomp. Then another. And then the ground began to quake. The slug was colossal — its body rippled like molten tar, its trail burning the grass black. Eyestalks swayed as it fixed its attention on the stranger.
The man uncoiled his whip.
First Power: The Attractant.
The mutated slugs-like-things perk up and notice the cowboy hero as he draws closer
With a snap that cracked the night open, the whip exhaled a cloud of shimmering vapours – part mist, part liquid, part something stranger still. It smelled of wild strawberries left to ferment under summer suns, of rain-wet moss and lightning-struck cedar. The slug froze mid-slither, its eyestalks trembling. It knew the scent was danger, but desire drowned its instincts. It lurched forward, drawn into the spell like a moth to flame.
Second Power: The Transport Agent.
The man thumbed a brass stud on the whip’s handle, and the cord stiffened, glowing with an otherworldly light. A beam of coiling force shot outward, wrapping the slug’s glistening bulk in a net of arcane energy. The pull began — slow at first, then irresistible. The slug fought, thrashing, but the beam did not weaken. The man reeled it in as though hauling a monstrous fish from a black ocean.
Our hero’s attractant super-power working to lure the beasts of evil cotyledon stage massacre
Third Power: The Active.
The slug was close now, its bulk casting a shadow that smelled of decay and rot. From the bandolier at his belt, the man plucked a glass vial shaped like a shotgun shell. Within it swirled a liquid that shimmered between gold and electric blue.
“One shot,” De Sangosse murmured. “Exact dose. Too much and you burn. Too little and the dark takes you.”
The man downed it in one swallow. His body arched, the air crackling around him. Bolts of lightning licked across his arms and shoulders, wrapping him in a cyclone of energy. The slug hesitated, sensing the storm before it broke.
Then he struck.
The spell roared outward, threads of light piercing the slug’s body. Its eyestalks writhed as if trying to tear themselves free. And then — confusion. Its body slumped, memory dissolving. No longer a predator, no longer a destroyer, it turned and began burrowing into the earth, seeking only the cool darkness beneath.
The field was safe. For now.
The storm of power faded. The man holstered his whip and mounted his brass steed once more.
Our hero’s trusty companion, the agri-chemical genius known only as De Sangosse now felt a burning question… but after witnessing such perfect teamwork, it had an answer that he need no longer fear…
Our farmer-cowboy hero now leaves, having defeated the slugs.
“Will they be back?”
… asked De Sangosse.
The stranger tilted his hat back, revealing eyes the color of hammered steel.
“Always,” he said. “But so will I.”
The gears of his mechanical horse clanked, the wheels churned mud, and as the dawn broke over fields that still lived, De Sangosse spoke the name that farmers would whisper for generations.
“Iron Max.”
His name, was Iron Max
And somewhere in the distance, a million slugs shivered.
Coming soon to a cinema near an OSR field near you…
… The SEQUEL everyone has been waiting for…
… you’ve met the man, the man they call Max?
Sure!
Well now meet his estranged daughter “Ferricia Phosphoria”…
… trapped in a parallel universe where apparently everything is neon, Ferricia, who was trained by her father in the ways of the Jedi Ninja Laser Warrior, remembering form her early years the three sacred tenets of Slub Combat doctrine… 1. ATTRACT … 2. TRANSPORT … and 3. deliver the ACTIVE
Believing her family lost forever, she has spent her life doing battle with the Mutated Molluscs of planet EDEN 5. Having taken the world from the brink of agricultural and economic collapse, the people of EDEN 5 now call her Princess Phosphoria… but when the portal of fate that once wrenched her from her loved ones, she faces the ultimate choice.
To re-unite and do battle with her father, once again fighting side by side. Or will her obligation to keep the citizens of EDEN 5 free from slug pressure and the horrors it bestows… lest the oil seed rape guzzling children of the planet that has been her home for some twenty years starve in the light of failed crops…