Marksmanship-522 and the Multi-Dimensional Race

Marksmanship-522 and the Multi-Dimensional Race
Cover given to the story in “The Quintessential Cupid”.
INDUCKS	--Not Indexed--
Source	Blog
Writer(s)	Lupan Evezan
Artist(s)	Aristide Twain
Dates	May the 1st, 2019 (release date)

Marksmanship-522 and the Multi-Dimensional Race is a written story by Lupan Evezan, illustrated by Aristide Twain. It features the Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids, and specifically the individual Cupids Marksmanship-522 (in his debut) and Bibliophile-962, and also features, in their debuts, Lilathia and Brutus. Lord Thymon, Tpxszum and Frederick are obliquely referenced.

Description

What starts out as an ordinary day for Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids member Marksmanship-522 quickly unravels into chaos as he is kidnapped and forced to judge an interdimensional race between two feuding aliens.

References

• Marksmanship-522 is known as one of the best marksmen of the Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids.
• Marksmenship-522's past endeavors include having led the team which romanticised the Zyargaff Beast in Dimension 42µ and having fired the apparently-famous first shot of the Second Great Noodle War.
• Brutus and Lilathia live on a dusty, nameless planet near Earth in the Prime Universe.
• The species of Lilathia and Brutus have been at war for centuries, although they are the only two left fighting, as everyone else got bored and took a vacation.
• Lilathia and Brutus each owned a type of transport vehicle which can fly through thousands of dimensions in a fraction of a second, referred to as a Speedster Ship. Lilathia later gave hers to Marksmanship, who gave it to the Department of Transportation.
• The locations visited by Marksmanship and the aliens include: a city implied to be Duckburg, the Void, Dimension ^6-Q, the Cupid Homeworld, the 2017 Continuum, a dimension in which the events occurring were nothing more than a story (seemingly the real world), a dimension of their own creation, a dimension inhabited by fish people, a cluster of dimensions in which all events were the same as in the other dimensions visited but occurred a few milliseconds later (until Marksmanship's visit, after which things were very different), and a dimension inhabited by anthropomorphic root vegetables (where they accidentally created french-fried potatoes).
• The Cupid Intelligence Institute contains a Department of Completed Assignments and a Department of Transportation.

Continuity

• The fact that Lord Thymon now works at the Department of Postal Services is briefly alluded to, and was later expanded on in Whatever Happened to Lord Thymon? (2019). Lord Thymon's association with the Cupids is a consequence of the events of Lord Thymon and the Department of Problem-Solving (2019).
• Fog Ships, which first appeared in The Labors of Juliet (2019), make a return appearance here.
• The Interdimensional Tavern, subject of Cupid Fact File No. 124 — The Interdimensional Tavern (2019), is mentioned.
• It is revealed that Dimension )-0//zx, said in Cupid Fact File No. 124 — The Interdimensional Tavern (2019) to be the no-longer-existent homeworld of Tpxszum and Frederick, is revealed to have been erased from existence when the Speedster flew through the Void and woke an eldritch abomination which had been dreaming the dimension into reality - which itself is a reference to The Call of C'Russo, in which an eldritch abomination is revealed to be dreaming the Prime Universe into existence.
• Dimension ^6-Q, and the 24-sun Gambit System located therein, makes a return appearance from Cupid Fact File No. 124 — The Interdimensional Tavern (2019). It is revealed that the interdimensional trip of Marksmanship caused the creation of four of the suns.
• The events of the story were later referenced in Acquaintanceship-982 and the Missing Mail Mystery (2019), in which Marksmanship-522 makes a second appearance. That story explicitly takes place just before the main narrative of Cupid Fact File No. 444 — The Faction of the Fooling Fish (2019), which places its events in April of 2011, suggesting the earlier two stories (and Lord Thymon and the Department of Problem-Solving) did as well.

Behind the scenes

This short story was released in May of 2019 on the Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids website and later collected in The Quintessential Cupid. It was the third fully narrative short story released there and the first by the Cupids' own creator Evezan.

It marks what appears to be the first in-universe mention of the term 2017 Continuum.