by A. J. Markam
Swear to God, it looked like a bunch of dudes on the football field standing over their buddy who got tackled bad.
“Why are you trying to kill us, anyway?” I yelled.
“We’re NOT!” another one of the warriors shouted back. “We’re here to take you to Zali!”
“What?!” I looked over at Alaria in surprise. “Do you recognize these guys?”
She shook her head. “No. Must be a new thing. Maybe they’re mercenaries.”
“You guys work for Zali?” I shouted.
“We don’t work FOR him – he allows us to live in his kingdom, and we protect him from the accursed enemy!”
“Wait – so you’re NOT trying to kill us?”
“No!”
I was just about to ask them why the hell I should trust anything they said when a quest window popped up midair.
Well Hellooooo, Zali!
First ‘Sea of Love,’ now ‘Hello Dolly.’ Broadway musical humor. Cute.
Go with the Naga warriors to meet the fearsome warlock Zali.
XP: 500
If I was looking for a reason to trust the Naga soldiers, an official OtherWorld quest was about as good as it got.
“Alright, fine,” I shouted as I hit ‘Accept.’ “We’ll go with you… as long as you don’t hurt us!”
“We should kick YOU in YOUR reproductive organs!” one of the Naga warriors shouted angrily.
“Okay,” Stig shouted out.
“NO,” I yelled, slapping my hand over his mouth again. “It was an accident! I’m sorry. No hard feelings, okay?”
All the warriors looked down at their fallen comrade.
He held up a single hand, and another Naga hauled him up to his feet.
Uh, tail.
Belly.
Whatever.
The Naga took a big breath and moved gingerly. “I’m okay. I’m okay.”
All his snake-bros slapped him on the back.
“What do you want us to do now?” I yelled. “Come out?”
“No perfidy from you, human, or you die!” another Naga yelled.
“What’s perfidy?” I shouted. “I mean, other than something really, really bad?”
“It’s when you raise a flag of truce,” Alaria explained, “and when the other guy comes over to talk peace, you kill him.”
“Or stomp his cloaca!”
Alaria got a dreamy look on her face. “I love perfidy… AND stomping cloacas…”
I seemed to remember from high school biology that the cloaca was a snake’s (or fish’s, or bird’s) reproductive chamber where it not only went to the bathroom, but also fertilized eggs.
“Okay, no perfidy!” I yelled back at the Nagas. “And no… uh… stomping cloacas or anything!”
“You swear?”
“I swear!”
“Then come out with your hands up!”
I led the way out into the open with my hands in the air, and Alaria did the same. Stig clung to my cloak with one hand and held the other one up. All in all, we were three compliant little prisoners.
The Nagas eyed us distrustfully as they gestured toward the water with their tridents.
I also noticed they all kept the tips of their tails as far away from us as they could.
Guess I couldn’t blame them. Once stomped, twice shy.
8
We dove into the water from the deck of the ship. There was the brief, slimy sensation of my body plunging through seaweed, and then we were through it.
The water beneath us was deep – deep enough that I couldn’t see the seafloor, or coral reefs, or anything you might find along the bottom. The water itself shaded from crystal-clear to a deep, opaque aquamarine. Shafts of early morning sunlight peeked through the seaweed like sunbeams breaking through cloudy skies. Ten-thousand-strong schools of silvery fish darted about like one giant organism, and larger shapes that might have been tuna drifted lazily through the water. I saw nothing threatening – no sharks, no barracuda, no giant squid. Everything was peaceful and calm.
I looked over at my companions. Alaria was zooming right along with slow but powerful flaps of her wings. Stig was going fast, too, with nothing more than flutter kicks. Much as I’d disliked how the sailor had kept upselling me, the five extra gold for the locomotion spell had been money well-spent.
The dozen Naga warriors weaved through the water with slow undulations of their lower bodies. I’d seen documentaries on poisonous Australian sea snakes, and the Naga moved just like them. Which would have been super creepy if it weren’t so fascinating to watch.
The deeper we went, the more creatures we saw: humpback whales. A pod of dolphins. Fish of all sizes and colors. And even a few sharks, though they kept their distance – probably because of the Naga.
Eventually the light began to fade to a kind of twilight. I was pretty damn sure we were half a mile down by now, but I experienced no problems from the increased pressure. The Ring of Baloq apparently compensated for all of that.
Either that, or the game designers were like, Fuck physics.
After another couple of minutes, a mountain range appeared beneath us. A thousand feet below its towering peaks, I finally saw our destination: a sprawling city on the ocean floor.
Its buildings were white with domed roofs. An elaborate three-story villa dominated the center, and included a wide-open space bigger than a football stadium that was dotted with large, indistinct shapes.
Everything in the city was surrounded by a ten-foot wall. What the point of a wall was, I had no idea – I mean, it wasn’t any sort of a barrier, because you could just swim over it. Maybe it was a boundary marker.
Whatever the reason for the wall’s existence, there was a hell of a lot going on outside it. There were hundreds of small skirmishes between Nagas and human-sized figures with light green skin. Unlike the Naga, their opponents had legs as well as arms. From this distance it was impossible to tell much more than that, other than the pale green foes were using swords and small shields against the Nagas’ tridents.
A couple of miles away from the white-walled city was another town filled with dark-colored towers. It was so far away, though, that it looked like a miniature inside a snow globe.
The fighting occurred here and there between the two cities, with small groups consisting of five or six on each side.
“What’s going on?” I asked the nearest warrior escorting us.
“War,” the Naga said angrily. “The sea nymphs have been encroaching on our land for decades.”
“Nymphs?!” I asked as I squinted at the shapes battling below. “You mean, all of those fighters down there are women?!”
“Females, yes,” the Naga sneered. “Slimy bitches from the darkest crags of the ocean floor.”
O-kaaaay…
Apparently the Naga didn’t have too high an opinion of their foes.
There was another group, too, gathered right outside the white city’s walls – about two dozen figures total. But they weren’t Naga or nymphs. They were humanoid in shape, though they ran the gamut of colors and sizes, and they seemed to be carrying…
…signs?
An indistinct murmur wafted up from the crowd like they were chanting something, but I couldn’t tell what it was from this distance.
“Who are they?” I asked the Naga as I pointed at the crowd outside the city gates.
“No one knows. Outsiders who showed up a few weeks ago.”
“What are they doing?”
“They just stand there and shout ceaselessly, day and night.”
“Ha – sounds like some people back where I come from,” I chuckled. “So they’re not part of your war with the nymphs?”
“No. They pose no threat, so we ignore them.”
“Huh.”
We came in above the city walls like aircraft approaching for a landing – but rather than an airfield, we touched down outside the massive villa in the center of the city.
The outside of the house was plain white stucco
, with open windows dotting the curved walls. Two giant bronze doors out front were the only entrance I could see.
“Welcome to the city of Fathmos,” the Naga said.
It sounded like the first part of ‘fathom,’ and the ‘mos’ in ‘most.’ FATH-mos.
“Is this Zali’s place?” I whispered to Alaria as I stared up at the house.
She nodded, a look of hatred on her face. “This is it.”
As though to confirm it, ‘500 XP’ floated through the air.
The lead Naga slithered across the sandy seafloor, grabbed one of the metal hoops that served as door knockers, and rapped it several times against the bronze slab.
Clang clang clang.
We stood there for ten seconds in silence – and then the doors slowly creeeeaaaked open.
I steeled myself for some horrific underwater nightmare: a slimy cephalopod… a humanoid with the head of a Great White… or maybe some Lovecraftian terror.
So I was a little taken aback when a three-foot-tall, silver-skinned hatchetfish in a suit strolled out.
Hatchetfish can be found in freshwater aquariums, but this guy was the deep-sea variety. Short sloping forehead, ghostly bulging eyes with no pupils, and a mouth that gaped open in perpetual surprise.
The rest of him didn’t look like a fish, though. He had a small body with arms and legs that looked more like pencils, they were so thin. He had silvery hands with delicate little fingers. The only fin visible was at the very top of his angled head.
He was a dapper fellow, too. His dark suit was impeccably tailored, with a violet-and-gold patterned vest and a cream pocket square. His tie was an iridescent, metallic blue that somehow went beautifully with the rest of his outfit.
But the most striking thing about him – you know, other than the fact he was a fuckin’ hatchetfish in an Armani suit – was his mustache. It was probably composed of something like a catfish’s quills, but they had all been waxed and combined into an extremely thin handlebar mustache that curled in a loop on either side, just like Salvador –
…Dali…
I closed my eyes in pain.
…artist…
…zah-LEE…
Motherfuckin’ OtherWorld writers.
They’d put me up against a surrealist painter hatchetfish who dressed like a fashion designer.
Not only did he look like Salvador Dali, he sounded like him, too.
“My freeends!” he cried out in an over-the-top Spanish accent. “I have an-tee-cee-pated your arrival for so long! I am overjoyed to see you!”
He walked over to Alaria with outstretched hands. One of the Naga grabbed Zali around his waist, lifted him up, and then Zali air-kissed (water-kissed?) Alaria on either side of her face, three times.
Alaria just stood there giving him the stink-eye, one eyebrow cocked.
“Mwah mwah mwah! A-laaaar-ee-ah, you are even more beautiful than the last time I saw you! You are an angel in a succubus’s body! My muse, my glorious muse!”
“Zali,” she said in that tone of voice movie heroes use to greet their ridiculous arch nemesis.
“You have brought new freends, no?” Zali asked as the Naga put him down in front of me and Stig. He did an elaborate little bow with an arm flourish. “I am Zali, and I am very pleased to meet you! Any freend of Alaria’s ees a freend of mine!”
Stig just looked at the hatchetfish… then up at me… then back at the hatchetfish like, What the FUCK?!
“Uhhh… you know why we’re here, right?” I asked.
“To keel me, of course!”
He said it like he couldn’t be more excited. Like we’d just given him a hooker, a Porsche, and a baggie of cocaine for his birthday.
“But where are my manners? Please, come een, come een!” he cried in his manic little voice, and gestured towards his house. Then he turned towards the Naga warriors. “Thank you, Captain Sarso, and thank you to all your men, for bringing my freends to me!”
“Will you be alright?” the lead Naga asked dubiously.
“Of course, of course! We shall have a wonderful time before they keel me! Good day, gentlemen, and thank you for all your help!”
The Naga bowed stiffly at the neck, then slithered off down the sandy street.
“Come een, come een, do not be shy, mi casa es su casa!” Zali said as he walked into the foyer of his house.
I followed him warily inside and was struck by the beauty of the place. Hallways with 15-foot-high ceilings curved away from us in both directions. Recessed lighting spotlighted paintings on the walls – parodies of the real Dali’s work, though they were beautifully done. Surreal landscapes filled with melting fish draped over branched coral, mostly.
Stig hobbled in alongside me, looking in wonder at the artwork.
Alaria ignored it and kept her disapproving eyes on Zali at all times.
As soon as we were all inside, the little hatchetfish waved his hand, and a current of water pushed the bronze doors closed with a BOOM!
Huh… interesting…
“How did you know we were comeeng – uh, coming?” I asked.
“A little birdee told me, hee hee!” Zali giggled as he led the way past an ornate mother-of-pearl staircase, then through a living area full of polished coral furniture done in a modernist style. “Jastoth, Odeon, Saykir, Orlo – you have keeled them all! Very impressive, very impressive!”
He turned to my succubus. “A-laaaar-ee-ah, you must pose for me again before you keel me!”
“No.”
“But eet ees my last request! You must do me thees honor, my beautiful muse!”
“No.”
“Bah – fine,” he said grumpily.
“Why do you hate this guy so much?” I asked her with a grin. “He’s hilarious.”
“You’ll see,” she murmured.
Zali turned to me. “I am eee-qually enchanted with you, my friend! What ees your name, may I ask?”
“Ian. This is Stig.”
“Ee-an the warlock and Steeg the eemp! So pleased to meet you both!”
Stig just cocked his head as though he couldn’t quite figure Zali out.
That made two of us.
Zali turned to me. “Ee-an, I must compliment you – you have such beautiful buttocks!”
My eyebrows shot up in surprise. “Uh – what?”
“I admit, I sneaked a peek beneath your flowing cloak! They are pulchritudinous – so firm, so shapely! Truly they are the buttocks of a god!”
Alaria and Stig snickered in amusement.
“Nice buttocks, boss,” Stig said.
“YOU shut UP,” I hissed.
“You must let me sculpt them before you keel me! Can I feeeeel them?” Zali asked, putting out both hands in a cupping motion, like he wanted to cop a feel.
“NO,” I snapped.
“But they are so beautiful, they make me weeeep!”
“Weep all you want, but no touching,” I barked.
“Still think he’s hilarious?” Alaria whispered.
“Bah – my life is one con-teee-nuous series of dees-appointments after another! But I shall immortalize your buttocks in art, my freend – FOR I AM ZALI!” he thundered, throwing one arm up theatrically like a bullfighter.
He stood like that, frozen in his dramatic pose for a few seconds – and then he returned to normal and gestured for us to follow him.
“Come, I weel show you my art. It ees my greatest accomplishment, my passion, my life. Every morning, before I take my first sheet, I – ”
“Sheet?” I interrupted.
“Yes, my first sheet of the day,” Zali said casually.
“Like… a bed sheet?” I asked, confused.
“No – sheet! You know – feeeecal matter! Feeeeces!”
EW.
“I am only producteef in the morning before I take my first sheet. After that I am no good! No good. As soon as it leaves my body, I mourn my sheet. I cry as I watch eet swirl down the toilet. ‘Goodbye, sheet! Have a nice treep!’”
<
br /> None of what Zali was saying should be possible, strictly speaking. Even though everybody had an end to their alimentary canals, nobody pooped in OtherWorld. They talked about things smelling like shit, but they never actually did the action. Which is why I didn’t mind the occasional dalliance down south on Alaria’s dark side of the moon, if you know what I mean. It was squeaky clean. Nothing ever came out. And the only thing that went in was me.
Heh.
OtherWorld was officially a shit-free zone – but to hear Zali speak, you would never know that.
And it was somewhat horrifying.
“The locus of my power ees my sheet! Eet is my mana – my magical essence, like that of a mage! Though weeth it I do not create magic – well, yes, I do, but not that kind of magic. No, weeth my sheet, I create art – FOR I AM ZALI!”
Up went the theatrical bullfighter’s arm.
“Jesus,” I muttered.
Zali looked over at me. “Who is this Jeeeesus of whom you speak?”
“I don’t know,” Alaria said, “but he talks about him all the time.”
“I do not,” I grumbled.
“Yes, you do,” Alaria said. “It’s Jesus Christ this, Jesus Christ that.”
“JAYSUS!” Stig shouted out, sounding for all the world like a Southern televangelist yelling, Be HEALED!
“So who ees he?” Zali asked.
I sighed. I didn’t see myself getting out of answering this one. “Some people think he’s the son of God.”
“Wheech one?”
“Right?” Alaria said. “All I know is he walks on water.”
“So he ees a mage, no?”
“NO,” I snapped. “Can we not talk about this any mo– ”
“Does this Jeeeesus sheet as well?”
Oh God.
We just went there.
“I wouldn’t know,” I said.
“Does he have firm, pulchritudinous buttocks like yours?” Zali asked, cupping what I assumed was Jesus’ imaginary ass.
“I do not know, and I don’t want to know.”
“Bah – I shall create a new work: ‘Jeeesus Takes a Sheet!’” Zali cried. “Eet shall be my master-peeeece!”