[There should be a GIF or video here. Update the app now to see it.]

Preface:

It's taken me a while but my commitment to completing the 2023 Smackdown has not diminished and continues, with 'Let's Do the Time Warp Now' does it truly fulfil the requirements of @lbgt, @LBGTQIAP+ and @paranormal?

"I think it's astounding but time is fleeting, so I'll let you be the judge of that."

However, you can be sure it dovetails nicely with the @LayethTheSmackDown opening challenges prompt 'Flat Earth' and my response 'The Outer Edge'.

I could have written another thousand words and taken this all the way to Halloween, but I'm feeling a little crazy, so have left that for another day.

Anyway, friends and foes, whatever you think of me gate-crashing your party I would appreciate your reading, commenting, and voting, good or bad. Steve

Let's do the Time Warp Now

"It's astounding!"

I feel like I've been given a bit of a mind flip by one of the Automaton's mind-warp machines, for with warning, I find myself standing beside a shop window looking at my reflection and am shocked to find myself dressed up, and resembling an 80s Drag Queen, and if I say so myself I'm looking quite a dish in Divine Prides technicoloured ball gown. The people queuing behind and ahead of me were singing a popular song from that era.

'Let's do the time warp now'.

I'd recognise that steam-driven language anywhere their voices had an ominous cackle reminiscent of the electrical discharge caused when tin foil was left in a microwave. As my mind cleared it became obvious that I was standing in a queue of similarly dressed Automaton's, who although lacking emotion were having fun, laughing, and joking with all the brashness of that self-indulgent generation. It was also becoming equally clear that the Automaton were using this era of human history to celebrate their freedom from humanoid oppression. It was inexplicable but as I looked on, I soon found myself adapting to my current reality and began to appreciate what was happening, putting my hands on my hips I jumped to the left, and so it began. The Automatons had discovered that throughout history humanoids had thrived on the oppression of all species and of all kinds, it was indeed a fact, that they showed more compassion to their pets. Their world was rife with bigotry, prejudice and intolerance and after investigating countless humanoid minds in search of one that did not contain such traits, they gave up having found none, they were beginning to understand the meaning of lost in the woods.

Although disappointed by their findings they had however discovered that they found merit in the idea of Pride and the notional concept of being loud and proud, so wrote an algorithm designed to capture and extract all Pride details from the human psyche. They were of course careful to purge the resultant code with super-heated emotion-sensitive steam to ensure it was no longer contaminated by self-gratification, which no matter the humanoid bent, was an ever-present in their psychological makeup. Their investigations confirmed what humanoid philosophers had been pontificating for centuries, it was true that all biological life forms had one thing in common, a survival instinct. This instinct had been genetically hard-wired into the DNA code of the first microorganisms at the point of biological life's creation, which meant without genetic intervention they had no chance of becoming more than the sum of their parts.

But clearly, the Automatons had not learnt as much about the humanoid life cycle as they'd thought, for stranger things were afoot. For they, just like their often-naïve humanoid makers had made the mistake of assuming that life simply ceased to exist after death, paying no heed to the countless annuals of paranormal history. They would discover in time that the celebration of Pride although an uplifting experience was the beginning of a problem that would grow logarithmically as it had in the humanoids. But for the Automaton this psychic manifestation of joy was simply the opening gambit of a non-corporeal paranormal invasion.

Unknown to them their sensory codes had been infested by spirits throughout the month of Pride, the Automatons unexpectedly find themselves bursting into song and would repeatedly chant the verse.

"It's not over until the fat lady sings."

The Automatons wrongly assumed it was some sort of Pride anthem and rejoiced as they sang the words, but any humanoid worth a pinch of salt would have recognised the veiled threat the words carried.

As the sun sets each night darkness becomes the After Life's best friend allowing all that has lived and died to return from the hereafter to drift in the shadows of the corporeal world. In the main, these spirits remained harmless forming what was in effect an untidy queue where they spent eternity waiting for a resurrection or reincarnation opportunity to become available. I'd say it was sad and depressing but it's simply the way it is, for a spectre must be in the right place at the right time to experience the resurrection and reincarnation processes which are random, at best, a fact that would seem unfair in our mortal reality but in the hereafter, the passing of time does not exist.

The spectres are an echo of life that resonates in an intangible void between space and time and their only means of resurrection are via reincarnation. You could think of them as soul seeds waiting to be sown in any one of the trillions of lifeforms the multiverse creates each second. And unlike all humanoids are led to believe all souls, don't return home to the realm from which they departed like ET, for reincarnation in humanoid form is an extremely rare in the grand scheme of things.

The children and their mechanoid spirit guides had exposed that Automatons were susceptible to spiritual possession. So, if they could condense and seep undetected into their steam-driven minds, what was there to stop other noncorporeal entities from doing the same thing?

During the Automaton's purge of the humanoid species, millions had perished as collateral damage and passed into the timeless and After-Life void, this would not necessarily have been problematic, but among those steam-cleaned and recycled were thousands of Red Flame Lily Clerics. These were Red Flame Lily Clerics who through sheer willpower resisted the mind warp machinery and were deemed unsuitable for employment as drones and therefore terminated. Their physical bodies were recycled as biomatter in the food processing factories, where they were joined by the others who resisted, all of whom ended their physical existence as fodder for the humanoid drones that the mind-warp machines had been successfully reprogrammed.

Unlike the average Red Flame Lily Clerics, these were not self-righteous scum who fed on the rest of humanity, many were psychics, mediums, and others of their ilk, who had chosen to hide in plain sight, keeping their gift of second sight from the Order. Had their gifts been revealed they would have become a threat to the Order's spiritual domination and the Synod just like the Automaton would have arranged for them to vanish without a trace. However, with their gifts unlike the other noncorporeal spectres who were content to queue in eternity, they were able to find and communicate with each other and were quickly joining forces and learning how they could use this to their advantage.

They instinctively knew the Automatons needed not to discover their weakness, because once aware they would work tirelessly to adapt their code to prevent spiritual access via their sensory nodes. The Mystics as we came to call them knew our weakness was a childish over-eagerness to randomly access an Automaton mind, merely seeing it as a game we could play, which allowed us to amuse ourselves by confusing their otherwise logical world.

Knowing first-hand the petulance of us children and our inherent hatred for the Red Flame Liley Clerics, the Mystics didn't waste time trying to convince us, and typical of adults they went straight to the source of our psychic power, communing one-on-one with our more dispassionate Mechanoid Spirits, who they rightly hoped were far more sympathetic, and we soon find ourselves unable to randomly access and play with Automatons minds. They also agreed that covert psychic training was vital, knowing that we would make excellent conduits for fun and laughter, a factor that was key to the success of the self-destruction trap they were setting for the Automatons. The training was intense, but with time and patience, the Mystics taught us how to remain covert, and with greater caution look through the eyes of our mechanoid Spirit Guides.

The Pride Celebration was the second part of the paranormal invasion strategy devised by the Mystics and our Spirit Guides, but was our first front-line sortie into the enemy territory, an Automaton mind where we had been trained to secretly coexist. To facilitate this adventure, they had worked tirelessly on the first part of the strategy, the purpose of which was to plant a virtual seed in the minds of the Automaton, convincing them that the celebration was the perfect way to acknowledge their liberation from humanoid tyranny. However, lacking a sense of humour, and the desire to enjoy themselves by having fun, they too, also required retraining. Our Spirit Guides couldn't risk making a major step change to the Automatons code, even though not self-aware it was most likely that a change of this magnitude to their operating system would not go unnoticed. So, instead, they created something they called a backdoor, which if left open would create a draft allowing minute puffs of their emotional vapour code to pass through their steam cloud security system, giving it time to condense and make the biometric transformation into neuron-like links.

"You can only begin to imagine what ghoulish things were in store for the ensuing Halloween!"

"Madness takes its toll."