Beasts Ascendant: The Chronicles of the Cause, Parts One and Two

by Randall Farmer

  “We need to find Carol some juice, Beast.”

  Beast sighed. Sky was far more insistent than in the old days. He had become almost as insistent as Focus. Were these three the reason Focus had been all agitated in his Dreams, recently?

  Helping the aurora-marked Arm would probably make the Focus not-Focus happy, too.

  Beast caught Sky’s eyes and pantomimed a plan.

  Sky (1/22/73)

  “I’m back!” Sky said. Carol and Lori exited the tent at the sound of his voice and climbed up the snow bank, holding hands. Sky smiled at the annoyed expressions on their faces. They were nearly snowed in after last week’s storm, enough so they couldn’t hunt or search for him. They had flattened the snow around the tent, so that they weren’t totally confined to the rock overhang area. Still…

  “Took you long enough,” Lori said. Carol wasn’t talking, likely too low on juice to do anything but snarl. “What’s with the fur?”

  “Cold adaptation and forty points of dross use. If you fine ladies can bestir yourselves, Beast and I can lead you to a juice-laden Monster. Solve all of our problems.”

  Carol put her parka and snowshoes on without a word. Lori did some fast scrambling herself, and Sky went over to help her take the tent down. Carol didn’t help, not with her juice issues. Nora, the Monster Arm, continued to sleep, and neither Lori nor Carol made any moves to wake her up. Meat drunk – Sky had seen it in Monsters many times. Eat too much too quickly, and like a wolf pack that had downed a caribou, you needed to stagger off like a drunk on a bender and sleep it off. He did wonder what Nora found, though.

  “What’s Beast like?” Lori said. “Are we going to see him?”

  “Possibly. I can’t tell a thing about what’s going on in his bony head, though. He completely lost all knowledge of language, but he got it back after he took a draw. It took me four days to convince him to find Carol some juice, though. I don’t think he’s too happy with the two of you.” Sky cleared his throat. “There’s a hitch, though, Lori. He wants you, and…”

  “Sky, if this is leading…”

  “I don’t think so.” Sky made sure of that, actually. That was Beast’s first idea, pantomiming screwing Lori as payment for getting juice for the Arm. Sky nixed that, and bargained Beast down to something else he wasn’t quite sure of. Perhaps he had best not speak of that. “He wants to talk to you or something. I did tell him that we want him to join our little family.”

  “Talk?”

  “Just talk. Well, you’ll talk, he’ll listen.” Sky paused, and examined Lori, carefully. Then Carol. “Gracious and wondrous ladies, did I ever tell you how beautiful and…” Carol put a hand over Sky’s mouth, and pointed to his back trail. Right. She would be a lot more interested in listening to his voice if they went toward her juice. No mistaking that Carol was an Arm, nope, not at all.

  He started the trek.

  Nine hours and likely fewer kilometers later, though Sky wasn’t sure about the vertical component, Beast’s trail led them to a reeking burrow of sorts, less than a meter and a half tall. They went through the opening, going under a block of mountainside that had fallen down the slope of the mountain. Beast was most likely inside, the covering snow all brushed away and stomped down.

  “In there? You’ve got to be kidding, Sky,” Lori said. “What is this place?”

  Sky shrugged. “First time I’ve ever been here. If Beast’s in there, though, this is where we need to be.”

  “There’s bad juice all over and it’s doing something to my metasense,” Lori said. “Is that Beast’s doing, or this Monster’s?”

  Sky metasensed the élan, recognized the pattern, and hummed to himself. “Beast’s. My old pal has a bunch of new tricks. It’s a metasense warding, based on the way a Chimera marks his territory, but modified. Although I can’t sense the Monster, she smells close.”

  Carol pushed by him, and started to crawl. Sky followed, not sure what Carol metasensed, save that it likely came through her Monster-shaped amulet. The short crawl led them into a low sloping room, about thirty meters long, with a second passage leading farther into the mountain on the other side of the low room. No, not into the mountain, but along the bedrock, still under the fallen block of granite or whatever this huge rock was that covered the fake cavern. Only a hint of light from the entrance broke the darkness, but nothing broke the reek of Monster waste. Digging this place out was Beast’s work, Sky decided.

  The Monster, one of the long sinuous dragon-form critters, not imprinted by Beast, appeared recently subdued. Beast must have beat on her head to knock her out, because she lay half on her side, groaning.

  “Carol, we need to do this together,” Sky said. “Lori will monitor the both of us, knock us out when you’ve taken…”

  “I can interrupt my own draw, thank you very much,” Carol said, her first words since he returned to their company. Right. This wasn’t Arm, and it wasn’t a decade ago, back when their little crew of Transforms haunted the wilds together – Arm, Crow, Focus, Beast, Mother, Father, and the others. Arm had been Armenigar. Focus was Anne-Marie, now known as the Madonna of Montreal, the first Focus in the world. Sky had been Crow, and of course, Beast still was Beast. The Transforms were long gone, dead years ago.

  Carol picked Sky up, and dragged him over to the injured Monster. “Start doing whatever you need to do, because I’m doing this now.”

  Carol started her draw, and Sky grabbed her shoulders. Yes, she was low, but not as low as he feared. Not even under a hundred. The psychology of the situation messed up her thoughts, making her think she needed to be out hunting when there was no prey around to hunt. That and the fact she likely hadn’t been this low on juice for quite a while, being such a successful Arm and all that.

  This was so much easier than in the old days. Carol drew slowly from the Monster, slow enough to allow Sky to remove most of the dross and tainted chemicals that would become élan or worse. Slow was good. In the old days, the best he had been able to do was shunt off the worst of the Monster draw, and take enough dross to allow him to clean up Arm later. He would invariably miss some, which would cause problems later, and leave Arm cursing and foul. After fifteen minutes, Carol turned to Lori. “I’m ready to start feeding this crap to you,” she said. “How much do you want?”

  “I can take forty points, but thirty is enough to make me…” Lori said. Thought. “Give me forty. I can sequester the juice so that it won’t overstimulate me. I can’t hold any more than I normally could without edging into Monster, but I can mitigate the effects of being over my optimums. I’ve got some juice pattern uses, and…”

  Carol growled, and of all things, Sky heard a distant basso profundo snicker at Carol’s growl. Beast, closer than Sky predicted. “I need to get this over with as soon as possible,” Carol said. “I don’t care how good Sky is at the Guru business, drawing from a Monster is still torture for me.”

  Lori walked over to Carol, and they linked arms. Juice moved. Ten minutes later, Carol took her hands off the Monster. “Gaah!”

  “I’ll second that,” Lori said, shaking her hands. “I thought you were filtering this poo, Sky?”

  Sky examined the results of his first cleansing pass, and started up some automatics to prematurely age and then gather up the dross. He would be happy for months from this, if he didn’t end up using it for some emergency. Which he suspected he would. He hadn’t done a perfect job on Lori and Carol, but he would be able to clean off the dross he missed on the two of them with only a few hours of work. Much much better than the old days. He smiled, thinking impossible thoughts of just staying out here, living off the land and the Monsters. With Beast and Nora, it wasn’t as if they would be in any danger from even the worst of the standard issue Monsters, and the Old Ones would never come near.

  “Ladies, if you move away from the immediate locale, you’ll find your discomfort will vanish. Follow me,” Sky said, leading them up and past the unconscious Monster, into the next chamber of Beast�
��s cave. An élan marking guarded the entrance, likely potent enough to keep the draconic Monster out. The next chamber was Beast’s private place. One of his homes.

  Beast himself waited for them in the larger chamber. Sky used a little of his newly acquired dross to generate a faint light. Both Carol and Lori stopped when they saw Beast.

  Beast was worth the pause. He had gained control over his shape years ago, and he was vain enough to make himself attractive. In his own eyes, at least. Beast sat in an incongruous teddy bear position, but as they came into the chamber, he stood and stretched, showing them his impressive and engorged male member, normally retracted and invisible amid the white fur. Sky smiled a wide grin. He always thought of Beast as the most impressive Major Transform he had ever seen, and the latest embellishments made Beast even more handsome and impressive.

  Think polar bear, as far as basic skeleton was concerned. Add to that the hind legs of a flightless bird, thickly feathered and huge, and a lizard’s front legs, covered in iridescent red-tinged scales, ending with clawed paws that would be better suited on a gorilla, save for the scales. Beast possessed fully opposable thumbs these days, one of his better new changes. Beast’s head was vaguely that of a polar bear, save for the lion’s mane of off-white hair and the four bone spikes – two up and one to either side – straight off a dinosaur skeleton. He kept his bear teeth, but he now sported eight serrated canines, instead of a bear’s normal four. “Huh huh huh huh,” Beast said, happy grunts, and dropped his hands to the ground and loped toward them. Like a bear, Beast could move as a biped or a quadruped, depending on the situation. His fur was off-white, save for thin forest green stripes ringing his neck just behind his mane, stripes duplicated, larger, down his body, and on his stubby tail. His muzzle was gray, and gray hairs mixed in with the off-white in his mane, as well.

  Carol moved forward past Sky, a glazed expression on her face. Oh, shit! Sky realized he was feeling high, himself, with all that new dross inside. The Arm’s draw might not have been pleasurable, but away from the messy dross she was feeling her juice, which was high. Sky knew what came next.

  “You’re going to be nice, aren’t you?” Carol said, to Beast, in her bedroom voice. Beast nodded his head, and Carol started to strip.

  “I’m not sure this is the brightest idea…” Sky started to say, until Lori’s hand covered his mouth. Her other hand passed over his crotch, and pressed. Right. How many points of juice did Lori take, anyway? Far too many…and she missed him.

  Well, this would make a hell of an icebreaker, Sky decided, before giving up on all that useless thinking stuff.

  ---

  “How’d you do it?” Carol said. She lay with her head in Sky’s lap, random clothing and bedding from their packs underneath and on top of her. Around the corner, in a natural chimney, a small fire blazed, warming the area marginally, and more importantly, drying some of their musty and damp clothes.

  “Do what?”

  “The fur thing. You’re a Crow, not a Chimera.”

  “Oh, that,” Sky said. He watched as Lori taught Beast sign language. The lesson only irked him a little – he hadn’t thought of trying to teach Beast to sign. Lori had needed nearly two months to teach him to sign, but Beast learned fast. Something in Sky’s brain resisted this sort of learning, and he was fairly sure the foible was just him, not a Crow thing. He had needed to use every trick he knew about his mind to master it, and went through an incredible amount of dross in the process. “It’s one of those subjects I would rather not talk about.”

  “I had fur once, after I went through withdrawal. Fur would be sort of useful out here.”

  “On an Arm?” Sky shook his head. “Large body changes are an élan effect. Enough of that and you’ll end up like Nora.”

  “So, is that what it is on you? Monster as well?” Carol eyed Beast, still wary. Even after she and Beast gave them an impressive show of mature Major Transform sexual acrobatics, she remained wary. Justified, too. If he remembered correctly, her worst experiences with Chimeras had been with Enkidu, in a similar situation. Worse, Beast was to Enkidu as Carol was to, well, Betsy Wetsy. He quickly banished the thought, as he wasn’t supposed to know about Arm Whetstone’s little nickname.

  Sky nodded. “Until Hank taught me about hypnosis and auto-hypnosis, the little changes like that were only marginally under my control, with dross constructs. With the hypnosis tricks, I control them now.”

  “I wouldn’t think being a Monster Crow is any healthier than being a Monster Arm.”

  “I don’t think it is. I haven’t found anyone interested in seeing if they can de-Monster me, though. Crows flee when I even mention my little issue, although I should try Shadow again, now that he’s got his Mentor confidence going. I’m not even sure what it would take.” He shrugged, an overblown Gallic motion. “Maybe not even a Crow Mentor could de-Monster me. It’s hard to see your own juice structure, you know.”

  “I know you’ve been fixing mine while we’ve been out here,” Carol said.

  “Gilgamesh gave me a list,” Sky said. List actually didn’t do Gilgamesh’s orders justice. His old friend and rival had listed over three hundred and fifty different juice structure adjustments he thought ‘his Tiamat’ needed. Sky didn’t agree with all of them – some, he thought, gave the Arm character. “I fixed a few little things, here and there, but not anything major. For one thing, for all I know, you might like their effects. For instance,” Sky said, outlining what appeared to be a set of standing waves on Carol’s arms, at least to his metasense, “these here I think may be what you use to augment your metasense to pick up dross.”

  “I got those from dross contamination?” Carol said.

  Sky shook his head. “No. They’re withdrawal scars.”

  “What are we, Sky? I mean, if withdrawal scars are giving me one of my better unique capabilities, then what are the limits? What could someone do…” Carol winced. “I’ve seen it. Focus Schrum experimented with and extensively used withdrawal scarring. The Hunter’s Law is withdrawal scarring. Withdrawal scarring is a way of amplifying our Transform capabilities.”

  “Yes. Transforms, especially Major Transforms, are far more malleable than we would like to think, and it’s rather easy to imprint other people’s juice structures on us. For instance, I’m not ever touching anything in your juice structure that mirrors Lori’s juice structure.”

  “Good,” Carol said, and just watched Lori and Beast sign to each other. The hand conversation let Sky work on item thirty-eight on Gilgamesh’s list, which he did, slowly and carefully. As far as he knew, the only effect of this defect was to degrade her ability to draw juice by a tiny fraction, less than a tenth of a percent. “We’re all Monsters, aren’t we, Sky?” Carol said, a few moments later. “There isn’t any real dividing line between Major Transform and Monster. It’s fake, something we dreamed up for public relation purposes.”

  “Likely.”

  “Then what’s the morality behind what we just did to that Monster dragon? She wasn’t hurting anyone. She’s as much a Major Transform as we are. My juice structure’s been shredded in the same way as we did to that dragon. We killed her, the her she was earlier today. When she recovers, she’ll be someone else.”

  Sky didn’t want to think about that, nope, not at all. “You’re the Arm. You tell me. How about the Monster in Toronto, though? How many would she have killed if left alone? How much havoc would she have created?”

  “Too much. But still…hell, Beast signed that he’s not coming back with us.”

  “Huh?” Sky rolled out of the way as Carol leapt up to stalk over to Beast, then followed at a discrete distance. Nope, he didn’t want anything to do with an aggro Arm.

  “I do not fight like,” Beast signed. “Peace like.”

  “Well, that’s just too bad, as the ‘peace’ being offered may not like you,” Carol said, stalking up to between Beast and Lori. She put her hands on her hips and got into Beast’s face. “As soon as we can
get you fixed up to the point where you understand what’s needed, we’re going south. The Hunters have declared war on anything resembling civilization and the Progenitors agree with us they must be stamped out. The Hunters are trouncing all my friends. We’re going…”

  “Wait!” Lori said. “I’m not sure Beast understands…”

  “Hell,” Carol said. “Beast. We’re here to rescue you, take you back to civilization, and convince some of my friends to bring you up to speed on modern Transform life. You’re supposed to be able to switch to human form and back, and lead others like yourself who call themselves Nobles. We’re counting on you. There are Crows, like Sky, who can teach you how to become human again, and still retain the ability to flip back to your combat form.”

  “Stay here peace. No fight like,” Beast signed. Beast stood on his hind legs, towering over them all. “Auroras want peace, not war. You crazy Arm. Go fight self.”

  Carol drew herself up, and did the predator thing. The Commander, the leader. Sky found himself echoing Carol’s leadership, as did Lori. “We need you, Beast. In our family. You’re Sky’s friend, you understand family. We have friends of ours, other Transforms, people we need to protect. The Hunters, who are withdrawal scarred beasts like yourself…” Carol paused to gather her words. “If the Hunters win, they’re going to kill or enslave all the Focuses, including the Madonna, who you knew of as Focus. Anne-Marie. Under my command, we can…”

  Beast moved fast as lightning. Carol lay flat on her back, pinned by one paw.