"Happy Birthday!"
The shout rang out through the Inn's common room. Crowded with well wishers, the Thebean Arms was filled with noise and music as night fell across Greece.
Hercules turned to his friend in the ongoing revelry, clapped him on the back and asked him what he thought of the impromptu party.
"Great!" Iolaus exclaimed gleefully, and proceeded to get rolling drunk with the band of villagers he'd known most of his life.
Many hours and several kegs later, Iolaus was found relating his mortality to a villager who had long since succumbed to the pull of the ale and passed out across the bar.
"So, I'm another year older; you know what that means?" he queried the comatose fellow. "All my internal organs are another year older; forty-seven fragile organs, two-hundred miles of delicate blood vessels, all those chemical reactions that have to take place correctly every second! Even if I CAN keep it all going, I'll just end up falling on a dirty soup spoon or getting stomped by one of Echidna's kids!"
Iolaus looked glumly, and drunkenly at his companion, who had no comment on Iolaus' present dilemma. It was about that time when a decidedly less drunk Hercules figured he'd best check on his friend.
"Enjoying yourself?" he asked his sidekick.
"Yeah, you throw a great party, Herc!" Iolaus brightened considerably in the presence of the demi-god in his life.
Hercules, realizing that the bash was winding down and Iolaus was so far in the bag he thought he might have to lug his friend up the stairs, decided to make an end of the night.
"Come on Iolaus, time for bed," he said, clapping his friend on the shoulder.
"Bed? A real bed?" Iolaus had forgotten the last time he'd slept on something other than the ground, except for that time he'd slept on...but, that didn't count.
Hercules showed him up the stairs to his room and watched as his friend surveyed his surroundings.
"The best they have, happy birthday," Hercules gestured to the room in general.
The best the Thebean Arms had to offer was a spacious room lit by a few torches in wall sconces, furnished with a large, soft bed, a polished silver mirror and a tall free standing closet. Impressive.
"Wow," Iolaus swayed a bit left. "Wait, you're not staying here too?" he swayed a bit right as his friend backed out the door.
"Nope, I'm in the next room, sleep tight!" Hercules grinned as he shut the door behind himself.
"What'dya mean yer in the next room? Now you're in the hallway!" Iolaus mumbled in a drunken stupor. He giggled at his own perceived wit and did a little dance which landed him in a sprawled heap on the bed. He was still giggling fitfully as he drifted off into a besotted slumber.
Iolaus woke suddenly in the dead of night.
The Inn seemed quiet and he wondered what had disturbed him. Just as he decided it was nothing and was settling back to sleep, he heard it again.
KNOCK, KNOCK, KNOCK.
It was the closet.
Iolaus, confused and cautious, slipped silently to the closet, dagger drawn. He threw open the closet door and discovered...a door to door toga salesman.
"Hi, friend, how'd ya like ta buy a toga!? They're all the rage in Rome this year!"
"Salmoneus?!" Iolaus questioned astoundedly. "How'd you get in there?"
"Oh, nobody told you?" Sal asked. "This is your closet of anxieties, all the things you worry about are in here; thanks for letting me out! Whew! It's crowded in there!" Salmoneus stepped past Iolaus who was still trying to figure out how the portly toga rep. fit into the little compartment.
"Is this the way out?" Sal asked Iolaus and pointed at the room's hallway door.
"Uh, yeah," said Iolaus distractedly, still looking into the now empty closet.
Salmoneus took his togas and his leave. As the door closed behind him shook his head befuddledly.
"How'd he...?" he said to himself. Not knowing quite what to make of the situation, the blond monster-slayer closed the door and went back to bed, glancing sidelong at the closet as he did so.
He was just dozing off again when he heard the closet hiss.
In all his past experiences with closets he'd never heard one hiss. Which didn't mean that closets never hiss, he'd just never happened to hear one before.
Once again he approached the offending furniture and eased open the door.
At first he saw only a sinuous, mottled-brown mass, but one that quickly resolved itself into a full blown Hydra!
The beast reared back its venomous head and made to strike at him. The quick-thinking adventurer was even quicker-moving and snatched a handy torch from its wall bracket and threw it directly at the Hydra's lunging head.
The Hydra and the torch exploded in a fiery flash and vanished, leaving the closet yet again empty.
"Geesh!" the shaken Iolaus muttered under his breath as he shut the closet door and wandered back to bed.
A short while later a giggle emanating from behind the closed door caught his attention. He groaned and rolled out of bed.
This time the opened door revealed about half a hundred young women. Iolaus raised a blond eyebrow.
"Hi," the leader of the tribe said seductively.
"Uh, hi," Iolaus replied cautiously. "Who are you?"
"We're the fifty daughters of the mad king whose name Despoena can never remember," she explained with a wiggle of her hips.
"Uh,...oh,..I think you're looking for Hercules," Iolaus replied.
"Oh, he's not here?" she asked, losing all of the svelteness that she had been concentrating on.
"No, he's in the next room," Iolaus informed them matter of factly.
"That's the last time we let YOU navigate, Barbarella! It's the wrong closet!" she shouted back to her sisters. They grumblingly piled back into the closet and shut the door behind them.
Iolaus, becoming more and more confused, became very confused when he turned around to see a large-nosed penguin standing by the bed staring up at him.
Iolaus blinked at the penguin, who in turn, blinked back. Apparently the tubby waterfowl had wandered out of the closet whilst he was conversing with the fifty or so Amazons who took a wrong turn at the fireplace.
The little fellow waddled over to the door, let himself out into the hall and shut the orifice behind him.
Iolaus stood for a moment, looking wonderingly at the door, shook himself violently and went back to bed.
Over the next several hours he was visited by several of his very favorite anxieties in fairly quick succession.
Squishing noises heralded the arrival of a large, grape covered woman who had once stomped him into a vat of wine grapes and proceeded to make him quite an interesting shade of purple that he was only able to get rid of after an extended session at the local sandblaster's club.
An excited giggle preceded a long tentacle that wrapped itself around his neck just before he received a big, wet kiss from Echidna and Typhon's youngest child.
"Obie?!" Iolaus gasped as he detached the little bugger from his face. "Wow, talk about foreshadowing!"
After the squidlike youngster squiggled out the door a bright sparkle shot out from around the closet door.
Half expecting some sort of fire within, he opened the door yet again.
"Hiya, Sweetcheeks!"
"Aphrodite...?!" he looked at her in wonder. She was dressed in what could only be described as a pink nitie, her long blond hair tumbled about her shoulders. She carried a club and a golden apple.
"Hungry?" she asked and offered him the apple.
"Uh, no thanks," he replied, remembering all the trouble that last bit of golden fruit had caused.
"How about I show ya some new moves?" she asked excitedly, swinging the club from side to side. Iolaus jumped away quickly.
"Maybe later..." he muttered, watching the club carefully.
"Oh, well, you never know what you're missing..." she said and disappeared in a shower of sparks.
"Oh, yes I do, and it involves at least SOME sleep!" he mumbled to himself.
Iolaus sat on the bed, head between his hands, waiting for the next anxiety to attack. He'd been waiting for a while and finally laid back on the bed.
"I guess that's all of them," he sighed and closed his eyes.
There was a thump from the closet. Iolaus sprang from the bed, wound tighter than the watch springs that wouldn't be invented for several hundred years.
"Blast! This is getting ridiculous!" he exclaimed as he opened the closet door again.
The slim figure of a woman faced away from him, her long reddish hair hanging in waves to the small of her back. He recognized her as she turned towards him.
"Gabrielle?! You're an anxiety?" he asked astonishedly.
"Sure," she said and took hold of his arm and steered him toward the hallway door.
"Let tell you all about it..."
Nearly an hour later, Gabby was still telling him all about it and explaining the ego and the Id and something called psychosis and philosophizing on the whole closet perspective.
They were back downstairs in the Inn's common room, which at that point wasn't so common anymore.
The wall with the fireplace was the same as when he'd staggered up the stairs with Hercules, but the opposite side of the room had been remodeled since then.
It now consisted of a hardwood bar, complete with brass railings and plush, padded barstools and little papyrus napkins.
The innkeeper too had changed from a fat, slovenly fellow to a tall man whose hair was thinning in the back (and everywhere else). He wore a funny short sleeved shirt that said, "Save the oceans!" in roman lettering and kept posturing in front of a blonde waitress that didn't seem to want to have anything to do with him.
Behind the bar hung a large drawing of a really-big-flying-thing-with-big-metal-wings-and-people-inside. Iolaus couldn't quite place where he'd seen one of those before, but he felt quite sure he had.
The room in general was crowded with beasts and warriors of every description, including a stoned orange cat, and some kind of hound/deer cross that looked like a sausage with antlers.
The penguin was, at present, playing with Obie. Or rather, the other way around. Obie had ahold of the buoyant waterfowl's large proboscis and was rather gleefully swinging the herring-breathed avian about his head while the orange cat played "Greensleeves" on its hairy armpit.
Other than that, the room at large seemed to be getting along just fine, and there was the leftover hint of joviality from the birthday party.
"Are you listening to me?" asked Gabby, piquedly.
"Huh? Oh...yeah," he replied, bringing his wandering attention back to her. Zeus, was she boring!
Thankfully he was saved by Hercules, who shouldered his way up to his friend.
"Hey, I've got someone here you should say hello to..." Hercules said, and stepped aside to let a tall, dark haired, leather clad woman come past him.
"Xena? You're here too?" Iolaus exclaimed.
"Of course," she shrugged, "you must remember our...relationship?" she asked, and gave him that dark come-hither look that generally melted his kneecaps.
He held up his hands in front of himself to fend her off and quickly backed into a minotaur, who rammed into a human warrior, who tripped over the orange cat and fell on Obie, who squeaked, threw the penguin across the room, and squirted everybody handy with inky black goo.
The room broke into centralized bedlam.
The warrior stood up and thumped the minotaur soundly between the horns with a long, wooden club. The bovine creature addledly threw his ale at Xena, who in turn whanged him up side of the head with her chakram.
Gabby picked up a chocolate cream pie off the bar and splatted the warrior in the face with it. Meanwhile, the brew-ha-ha had spread to include Salmoneus, who was being slung around by a toga-hating sphynx, who was being egged on (literally) by Obie.
Iolaus tossed off first one attacker, then another, and lost track of Hercules. Out of nowhere appeared a blue, scaly-skinned monster with gills, dressed in a long, brown robe.
"YOU! Last time I saw you was Jason and Alcmene's wedding! You jumped to your death off the castle wall!" Iolaus shouted over the din.
The Blue Priest laughed. "You didn't think Hera would really let me die, did you?" he shrieked wickedly and lunged toward Iolaus.
The blond adventurer doubled up his fist and punched the evil creature in the face.
Its head flew off, and skittered around the floor until Obie picked it up and tossed it out the window.
Unfortunately, decapitation did nothing to stop the Blue Priest, (it never had before, why start now?) and the body still came after Iolaus.
Suddenly the roof of the Inn was replaced by the gaping maw of a giant sea serpent! The creature reached down and snapped up the Priest and swallowed him whole.
"Ummm... Thanks?" said Iolaus as he watched the scenario unfold. The sea serpent burped. Apparently Blue Priests didn't sit well in one's stomach.
Iolaus ran on to the next fistfight and succeeded in helping Hercules eject a beefy warrior from the establishment via a window. Since that seemed to work well, they proceeded to clear the bar by heaving warriors and monsters alike out the Inn's various entryways, and also created a few new monster shaped windows in the process.
Several minutes later they found themselves in an empty bar, covered with pie leavings. Somehow a mud puddle had manifested itself in the center of the room and the slimy stuff was everywhere by that time.
Hercules sludged over to his friend and clapped him on the back.
"Helluva birthday, Iolaus," he sighed, tiredly.
"Yeah," replied Iolaus, now more than ready for sleep
"Zeus...NOW what?!?" he groaned and went to the closet door.
Within there was only a tiny mouse, peering onto the corners for crumbs. When it saw him, it squeaked, scurried to the rear of the compartment, and disappeared through a hole in the boards.
Iolaus stared for several moments at the hole. "Okay, what's the deal?" he thought to himself, "No crazed minotaurs? No blue skinned religious freaks trying to kill me? No stoned orange cats or bulbous nostriled penguins? And who cleaned the mud and pie off of me?"
There was a knock on the hall door.
"Uh-oh," he thought, "Now they're using the door like normal folks, and since when are anxieties normal?"
Upon cautiously opening the door, he found nothing more than Hercules standing in the hall.
"Ready to go? I hate to leave this early, but if we're to make Corinth by tomorrow, we'd better get going," Hercules gestured down the hall to the stairs. "Are you okay?" he asked of his sidekick, who was looking a little shaken. "Hangover?"
"Uhh...." not knowing quite what to say, Iolaus stuttered, "I...I-I'm fine."
"Oh, good. Sleep well?" Hercules asked as he started down the hall.
"Yeah...fine," Iolaus replied and took one last look at the closet before following his friend down the stairs.
Some images, characters and other things used in these works are the property of others, including but not limited to Renaissance Pictures and Universal Studios. Everything else remains the property of the artist or author. No money will be made on anything appearing on this webpage and no copyright infringement is intended. This site was created by fans for the enjoyment of other fans.
For information on reprinting text and/or artwork (including privately owned photos, photo manipulations, and other images) from this website, please contact IolausianLibrarians , who will assist you in contacting the original creator of the piece. Do NOT reprint, republish, or in any way link to items on these pages without obtaining permission from either the original creator of the piece or the webpage owner. A written one-time use statement may be issued to you at the discretion of the artist or the author. Please respect the legal and artistic rights of our contributors.