The Mad Cupid of the Euclidean Plane is a written story by Lupan Evezan, illustrated by Aristide Twain. It features the Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids, including Companionship-790, Tracker-764, Colonel-028, Dandy-432 and Larrikin-1029, as well as Pessimist's Fog Ship, Doki Dick and the Old Man. The Faction of the Fooling Fish is mentioned.
Description
For decades, Tracker-764 has been roving through the Euclidean Plane seeking Doki Dick. However, when a Rift transports both him and Doki Dick to a dimension where a lonely old man needs help saving that world (and many others) from destruction by a natural catastrophe, Tracker has to learn there are more important things than proving his worth as a marksman to Colonel-028!
References
- Tracker-764 has spent several decades in the Euclidean Plane by the time the story starts, and has had his wooden leg for five or six years.
- “Rain” in the Euclidean Plane takes the form of perfectly regular, and solid, drop shapes falling from the sky.
- The stars visible in the night sky of the Euclidean Plane are “large, cartoony-looking five-pointed things hovering an indeterminate distance above the ground”.
- The Old Man was originally a cobbler in his home dimension. After falling into a Rift, he found an empty cabin in a dimension eaten up by a number of Rifts; it was empty but contained a library of books on dimensional science, and he spent his time by educating himself with them (as well as by planting tomatoes).
- The Old Man learned to create Dimensional Prisms which can capture and stabilise Rifts. They must be made from a specific type of naturally-occurring crystal, which happens to be available in the dimension where he ended up. Foru of another type of Prism (larger and of a different composition) can be used to stabilise a given location and prevent new Rifts from forming there.
- Dandy-432 tells Pessimist-242 to tell the Department of Rifts about the Rift through which the Old Man entered the Cupid Homeworld so that they can close it.
Continuity
- This story picks up the plotline of Tracker-764 and Doki Dick, first mentioned in Cupid Fact File No. 94 — The Euclidean Plane (2019).
- This story features the first direct encounter between the Cupids and the Rifts Crisis, after a Rift was featured in Cupid Fact File No. 444 — The Faction of the Fooling Fish (2019) under the control of the Faction of the Fooling Fish. It is through the Rift originally used by the Fish that the Old Man enters the Cupid Homeworld.
- The Old Man explains that too many Rifts opening in a given universe can cause it to explode into nothingness, along with a number of “neighboring” dimensions, with the risk that this effect could spread exponentially until it destroyed, if not the entire multiverse, then at least a significant portion of it. This threat was restated by Fenton Crackshell-Cabrera in Let's Get Dangerous! (2020).
Behind the scenes
This short story was released in July of 2019 on the Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids website. It was the sixth fully narrative short story released there and the fourth by the Cupids' own creator Evezan.
