When the darkness had slipped over Celia she had kicked the person nearest with all her might. She rather thought she had broken her toe. It was quite painful. She couldn't even be sure that she had kicked the right person. The man carrying her was not limping and seemed to be impervious to pain. But it probably wasn't the guy she had kicked. She had felt herself change hands several times, as well as going down many new streets. She had no idea where she was, but she thought she might be inside now. The man carrying her had stopped to open a door before.
Celia didn't know it, but she had not been kidnapped as part of a game. The first kidnapper had been kidnapping her for that purpose, of course, but he was only a thug doing what his boss told him. His boss, was also just following orders, and had handed her off to another person, who was also just following orders. The whole system was horribly convoluted, and nobody knew who was working for who, and nobody knew why she had been kidnapped.
The only person who knew why Celia had been kidnapped was the evilest man in the history of evil men, and he had a foul and wicked plan to take over not just the throne, not just the world, but the universe on the heavens too. He wanted to control the fates and the weather and all the little people. He would be onmipotent. But his greed for power would be his undoing, as is so often the case in tales such as this.
He was unwilling to reveal his plan to anyone, because like anyone who has gone crazy with their yearning for power that does not belong to him, he had grown distrustful of those around him, friends, co-plotters and enemies alike. Actually, he had not grown to mistrust his friends. He had never had any of those. So he sat alone in the dark and plotted, and sents his minions on seemingly pointless missions that only ever involved picking things up and delivering them somewhere, without finding out why, or even what they were delivering. Celia was instrumental to his plan.
Currently, though, Celia was in a stone cellar with three of her kidnappers. They were surprisingly friendly, and one of them was very handsome indeed. And the cellar where she was... well, dungeon if she was completely honest... really wasn't too bad. It had a comfortable chair, and food and a chessboard. Celia didn't know how to play chess, but it was a nice thought. One of her guards had just suggested a nice sing-song when suddenly there was a rumble like a bulldozer crashing into a concrete wall and then falling off a cliff.
One of the kidnappers jumped up and ran to look. He came back grinning. "That was meant to happen," he assured her, "just the staircase collapsing. Nothing to worry about. Now, how about Twinkle Twinkle Little Car?" And the two of the kidnappers started a jolly sing-along. The other one just laughed evilly.
A few moments later there was another crashing, followed by a large amount of splashing, like a whale with a belly-ache. "Nothing to worry about," the handsome kidnapper reassured Celia, "just your rescuers falling in with the eels."
Celia was slightly concerned by this. Obviously Sammy had come to rescue her, like she knew he would, and had brought Barney along, which was never a good idea, because Barney's balance left something to be desired, and he was forever falling into things and panicking. Sammy would have to save him, and then it would be longer before they were together again. Although, Sammy was a little stupid, if she was honest, and that guard was very handsome and had a lovely singing voice.
Celia's captors were quite pleasant really. But they were just small fish. Not literal small fish, of course. A small fish would be quite incapable of carrying an ordinary sized young woman any distance at all. No, small fish in the sense that they were not proper criminals, just people doing a spot of work to make a bit of money. Their bosses were slightly larger fish, who worked for a larger fish again, who was in turn carrying out the orders of someone who was not a fish at all, but was extremely nasty. So they didn't really feel bad about kidnapping her. In fact, the handsome one with the nice singing voice thought she was rather pretty. He wished she would shut up about her fantastic friend Sameus Rufus Pegasus, who was apparently some kind of god, and quite prepared to smite them when he caught up. The girl seemed to have a very high opinion of him. When his comrades returned with the news that the people who had slipped into the vat of eels were not this enormous fighting machine, but were in fact a small and twisty boy and a large hairy man, he was quite relieved. He sniggered.
Celia, on the other hand, was not relieved when she heard the news that the people who had fallen into the vat of eels were a small twisty boy and a large hairy man, because it certainly meant Sammy wasn't coming. The large hairy man could not be Sammy, because although he was very large, the only appropriate adjectives for describing Sammy were 'magnificent' and 'fantastic' and 'marvellous' and 'godly'... She recovered herself. It was concerning that her rescuer was Barney. Barney was not a person you generally associated with heroic rescues. It was certain to go wrong, and then they would be in real trouble, because Barney tended to rub people the wrong way. She felt sure that once he was captured with her, her kidnappers would stop being so nice.
She was right of course. The rescue mission was failing spectacularly. After they had recovered from the collapsing-stairs fiasco, Barney and Elfin had not walked 30 steps before they found the vat of eels. Find here meaning fell into. Barney, being mostly afraid to leave his stones as a child had not learned to swim well. Most of the swimming holes near his home had been surrounded by forest, or at the very least shrubbery. So he was not much use. Elfin had also not learned to swim, as it was a skill that was not valued highly in cobblers, and he came from a family with so little shoe-making talent that all his capacity for learning was required to learn to make a shoe that didn't fall apart before the customer had paid for it. Failure to learn to swim in earlier childhood is a failure indeed, and this situation was a perfect illustration of the dangers of it.
After much flailing, sheer panic brought them to the edge of the vat. The walls were slippery, but eel-fear gave them wings. The adrenalin rush caused by falling into a vat of eels gave them wings. It didn't actually give them wings of course. That would require a vat of radioactive eels. Really it just made them very scared and helped them get to the edge of the vat and up the slimy walls at top-speed. Barney almost walked on water. An eel slimed against him and he decided that eels were definitely not his favourite animal. That would be something fluffy and nice, like bunnies.
So they escaped the second trap, wet and slimy, but not eaten by eels in remarkably little time and with remarkably little fuss. Several minutes later Elfin discovered a young eel eeling its way around in the water pooling in his shirt. There was much squealing and amusing jumping about. The eels were more horrifying now that they were out of the water. Also it is very unnerving to discover something swimming in your clothing, even if it isn't a nasty slimy eel. Even a small goldfish would be worrying. While Elfin was leaping about, squealing and attempting to remove the eel from his clothing, and Barney was leaping about, squealing, because he was beginning to feel slightly hysterical, the ground gave out beneath them, again. Actually, it didn't give out beneath them. What really happened was that they made the sudden and unexpected discovery that the path was only half as wide as they had thought it was. In other words, they fell off the edge. Off the edge was a short drop no more than Barney's height, into a sloppy, mud-filled ditch. At least they hoped it was mud. They kept telling themselves that anyway. It was extremely smelly, cold and unpleasant. The walls were unclimable. Barney and Elfin dejectedly began to squelch in the direction they assumed Celia had been taken. Just out of earshot, the kidnappers laughed evilly, and Celia tried not to cry.
They squelched along until they were exhausted, shivering, and surprisingly hungry, considering the stench. And then they squelched some more. It was slow going. The 'mud' was deep, in some places knee-deep, in others over Barney's waist. But they forced through it with admirable determination. Barney could feel the occasional creature move around his legs, and his mind filled with horrible images of blind, slimy mud-dwelling creatures with suckers and large teeth. But still they kept on. Hours later, or it might not have been hours - neither of them had a watch, and even if they had, it was pitch black in the underground mud ditch and even a glow in the dark watch would have been difficult to read, especially covered in gunk - they came to the deepest part yet. THe mud was over Barney's chest. "Come on!" Shouted Elfin joyously, "They are making it more difficult! We must be getting close!" He was beginnging to talk in a very exclamatory manner, trying to fool himself into not wishing he was back in his workshop making a poor quality pair of boots. So they pushed themselves, half swimming, through the mud, in a fashion that would have been very funny to watch, had anyone been able to see them. As it was, the kidnappers were chuckling to themselves as they imagined the scene. They knew that it wasn't mud. At last, they reached the end of the tunnel. And that it what it was. The end. It finished in a smooth, slimy, vertical wall with no door. They had spent hours in pursuit of the bad guys, and now they were up to their necks in poo at the very end of a dead end tunnel.
Barney and Elfin managed to struggle back up onto the path they had fallen off, eventually. They had to squelch back to a shallower part of the ditch, which took a really really long time, and then perform what was almost a comedy routine, attempting to regain the path. It involved Barney standing on Elfin's hairy shoulders and climbing up onto the path and then attempting to pull Elfin up. This was doomed from the start, because Barney was less than co-ordinated, and not very strong. There were several instances of falling back in the mud, and once Barney was completely submerged. He reminded himself of how grateful Celia would be, and how he would finally be worthy of her love. At last, entirely brownish grey with mud, he started back along the path. Elfin had to stay in the ditch, because Barney couldn't pull him out. In the end they had to go all the way back almost to the eel vat before a place was found where he could scramble out.
As Elfin scrambled out of the ditch, Barney's ears were met by a horrible sound. Someone was singing. It wasn't that horrible, he realised. Actually, whoever it was was quite a good singer. But that wasn't the point. It was horrible because it is never nice to hear someone singing happily when your true love is kidnapped, your best friend, hero and rival is missing, possibly dead, and you have just had stairs collapse with you on then, fallen into a vat of eels, and spent several hours in a ditch of mud that was possibly sewerage.
After a quick consultation, it was decided that they would sneak up on the singer, tie him up, and force him to reveal Celia's whereabouts. Unfortunately, they had failed to take into account when making their plan that a) they had nothing to tie up the singer once they caught him, and b) it is very difficult to sneak up on someone while wearing wet, muddy clothes. Also that Elfin was huge and his sneaking was about twice as loud as anyone else walking normally or even trying to make a lot of noise. So the sneak up and tie up mission was unsuccessful. The kidnappers decided when they heard Barney and Elfin discussing the plan that the fun would have to end. And so, as the two would-be heroes crept up on the singing guard, the other two kidnappers crept up on them from behind and captured them with ropes
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