by Sean Heslin
The gates revealed a short stone tunnel leading to a large barn-esque building. It was built like a standard hay covered horse stable, only on a vastly larger, multi-levelled scale. Various hootings, tweetings, roarings and yammering could be heard from the many crowded stalls. Rancha was led past various disinterested and/or sleepy gazes coming from the various sentient and non-sentient occupants. Through all the noise and stink, at the end of the main walkway, there was another pair of huge wooden doors, through which Rancha encountered a much more pleasant and far less dung ridden version of the previous. This section had been designed specifically for creatures, and creatures whom were classified as people, who required privacy, space and decent bedding, and above all were capable of complaining loudly if they did not receive it. As well as having the standard wooden beams and straw strewn floors, separate apartment rooms led off from the main hall, each through an individual, elegantly carved door. The rooms beyond looked like what a luxury hotel would look like if it had been constructed for direhorses, with most of the ostentatious amenities a hotel of such a type would contain.
Rancha was tickled to receive such star treatment. “This is much nicer than what I was expecting. Is this a bribe for later?”
“Material wealth is for people who can afford it. I am glad that your material self enjoys such pleasures, for it is my pleasure to provide them.”
“Sure?”
Ihjundas seemed pleased with that response, and turned to leave. “Don’t get heavy, let your spirit fly while you recline.”
Rancha considered this and after some thought translated the sentiment into “Sweet dreams.”
Chapter 5
“Despite continuous protest throughout history, nobody has done anything about mornings.”
- General Zargblatt, on the eve of war, 2134 C.M.
The next morning Rancha was awoken abruptly by a high pitched beeping coming from somewhere in the room. Feeling groggy and distinctly unrested, he raised his neck from the comfortable oversized four-poster bed, to identify what the blazing hellfire it was and hopefully destroy it into mush.
Or at least it had been a four-poster bed when he had dozed off.
Not quite fully awake yet, Rancha stood up, alarmed, and solidly banged his head on the now steel-clad ceiling. His eyes darted about, panicking. The room had redecorated overnight to bolted metal panels with no visible openings. Most of the furniture had disappeared, and a soft glow filled the room from an unidentifiable source.
“Oh. This. Ugh.”
The beeping seemed to register his voice and stopped. Pulling his dignity together, Rancha tried to remember where the door out had been yesterday, studying the wall where it should have been. There were tiny flashing coloured bulbs spaced at irregular intervals across said wall, but otherwise, there were no discernible features that would indicate an opening, or that there had in fact ever been one.
A grinding noise suddenly started from behind, making him twist around sharply to locate the source. The bed, now a flat stainless tray with a probably sprung mattress, was pulling quickly into the wall, and within a few seconds had vanished, apart from a thin slot through which a corner of the oversized bedsheet could be seen peeking out.
Rancha was not a happy urglon. There was too much that did not make sense around him for this time of the morning, so he whimpered somewhat and curled into a foetal ball.
“Awake then?” said an unfamiliar voice.
Rancha bodily twitched, then directed himself to the source of the voice with some trepidation. One of the flat panels halfway up the door(?) wall had sparked into life and resolved its glow into a grainy image of a man. Behind the man, various other people were performing frantic duties, but he seemed ignorant of the activity. It took Rancha a moment to work out who it was that he was looking at. It was Ihjundas, but holding his bearing and features completely differently than the previous day.
“How do you feel?” he asked in a clipped and clinical voice. “You are probably a little disorientated from the changes around you, but I would appreciate if you joined me in the main hall as soon as possible. In a more suitable form if you would be so kind.”
“Yes! But how do I g…” The face had disappeared, the panel darkening again. Rancha sighed and did not bother finishing his sentence, deciding his brainpower was better utilised in attempting to figure out what he was supposed to do now.
‘Suitable form’ the brief message had said, so he dealt with that first.
While urglons were blessed with the ability to change their species, somewhat regretfully the urglons could not also change their basic template. If they were weedy and uninteresting examples of urglons, they would be weedy and uninteresting humans as well. Or racooties. Or yapi birds. Or whatever else they turned into. They had been given this ability when they had been forcibly created, to suit their prospective roles as the ultimate in adaptable workbeast, by a team of well-meaning, well-paid and well-threatened genetic sorcerors centuries ago. The team had only been instructed to make sure that the cheap workforce they were bubbling up from raw ether could do anything required without question. They were never told anything about making them pretty.
Rancha was not as poorly endowed as some of his brethren, so his shape changes were not quite ugly or boring, but then they were not exactly beautiful either. When he became a podgeon he was of a variety capable of racing and covering long distances, not the usual fat, flying vermin. When he became a Letherbeast, he did not suffer from the discoloured hide that so many of those nice chaps sadly endured.
His human form was difficult to describe with any accuracy, which he had always considered a bonus in his line of work. After a few seconds of grunted effort, he shrunk back into the kind of person that is always in the corner of a kitchen at parties or in the middle at a theatre. He was a non-descript crowd filler, who if he was ever witnessed committing a crime, would be described with a shrug, a handwave and a 'Y'know'.
Rancha checked all his wiggly bits were where they were supposed to be and moved on to the next part of the task.
One major difficulty Rancha, and shapechangers in general, had with species shifting was the minor matter of clothing. Urglons, like most of the animal kingdom, went about their business unashamedly naked. After shifting, less hardy shapes such as his human form were particularly vulnerable to the elements, as well as a certain amount of pointing and laughing. Rancha with a measure of hopelessness looked for the various pouches and bags that were usually attached to his dorsal harness whenever he went travelling, but they were nowhere to be seen, presumably tidied away in wall cupboards that were now indistinguishable from the walls themselves.
Growling under his breath, Rancha tugged at the corner of escapee bedsheet until he had dislodged the whole thing from its slot and he could fashion it into a makeshift toga. It was not especially flattering, but better than nothing if he was to be wandering about in public. People were funny about genitalia if it vaguely resembled the kind they had.
“How to get out?” he muttered to nobody but the gods.
Rancha cracked his knuckles and applied himself vigorously to escaping out of a door he could not find. There was a lot of ground to cover, as the room had been designed for the huge creature he was, rather than the squishy, small creature he was now. The new, lower viewpoint offered no new input so for a whole fifteen minutes he poked and prodded the mostly featureless wall where he believed the exit to be, with no success. Having reached the far corner, Rancha thumped the next wall out of sheer exasperation. Being metal, it hurt rather a lot. Cursing loudly, he fell back against the wall he had started with and cradled his sore hand. One of the panels on the wall that he had thumped started to glow red, which surprised Rancha enough to make him quickly scuttle away, turning around just in time to see a large section of the wall simply disappear, leaving a hole to the outside.
Rancha took a deep breath and adjusted his sheet. He ventured forth to engage with item four on the agenda: Find the main hal
l. He immediately encountered problems with this short-term goal as soon as he stepped out into the corridor, as he was nearly run over by a floating, glowing metal something travelling at high speed. Jumping back into the room, he was not surprised in the slightest to see the wall reseal itself, so he had to spend another ten minutes trying to find the appropriate panel to open it again.
“Fnugging great big lumps of fnugging, hairy...” he muttered in a continuous tirade as he once more freed himself from the room and started wandering the corridors in what he vaguely hoped was the right direction.
A low humming Dopplered behind him indicating another metal thingy was approaching. Rancha stepped neatly to the side of the empty corridor to let it pass, or at least to crush him less on the way past. To his immense surprise, it slowed and stopped. A translucent portion on the top swung upward revealing the tanned balding features he had been hoping to see.
“Ihjundas! Am I glad to see you!”
“I do not know, are you?” he of that name replied coolly. “We have been waiting for you to turn up for quite a while, so I decided to take advantage of the current facilities to find you.” He indicated the mobile contraption. “This is a hover-tram that runs on the principle of repulsion between two negative forces which derives from the application of unique…” Ihjundas saw Rancha go poker-faced, took the hint and continued smoothly. “Suffice to say, it is just a better version of a carriage. Enter and I will take you to the meeting hall.”
Rancha gratefully obliged and the lid swung shut behind him. The machine began moving and Ihjundas examined Rancha's 'stylish' toga with a certain detached amusement.
“I had already surmised that you would not have access to suitable clothing at this juncture, so I took the liberty of guessing your current size.” Ihjundas opened a small metal case set into the side of the device. Inside was a garment that appeared to be mostly made of baking foil, with lots of buckles and oddments. It looked very similar to the elder gentleman's, save the gold trimmings. Rancha thanked his friend for the gift and dressed quickly, while Ihjundas, with more faint amusement, obligingly looked out of the window at the rapidly moving scenery. This version of Rancha's friend did have some normal feelings after all.
The flickering view began to slow as the urglon was teasing the final buckle into place. “We are here,” Ihjundas said simply, annoying with his brevity.
The machine stopped with a suddenness that nearly jerked Rancha from his seat and the hatch opened to let in the all too familiar sounds of Master Yansul's whining, floating from a nearby open doorway. Rancha shuddered. “Can we not just stay in this, uh, pleasantly warm capsule for the rest of the day? Possibly take it somewhere else to get snacks?”
Ihjundas was also making a pained expression. “If it pleases you to know, he has not ceased since his arrival. The bed was simultaneously too soft and yet still stiff as a board. The food was far too stringy and yet somehow retaining too much, and I quote, “goop”. The exceedingly hot rooms would for him 'be enough to freeze water'. I debate the wisdom of our lords of summoning Sir Knight here.”
“That’s pretty worrying. Coming from you.”
“Indeed. I am gladdened that he is not staying long. Ah, well. Duty must.” Ihjundas gave a perfunctory wave of his hand indicating that Rancha should leave the carriage. They both braced themselves to walk face-first into the storm. As they entered, one of the attendants stopped midsentence and bowed his way quickly out of the room; the manoeuvre of a smooth street performer if there ever was one. It took a moment for Master Yansul to register the swap in the audience.
“Ack! It's about time you got here you old fool! Who’s this?” Master Yansul pointed at Rancha. “Another of your incompetent lackeys?”
Ihjundas neatly squelched Rancha’s building fury by gently pushing him backwards. “No Perci, he’s the urglon that brought you here, please treat him with a degree of respect else you will not simply have to…What is funny?”
Rancha was suddenly smirking and trying to muffle childish giggles with one hand. “It’s nothing,” Rancha said, waving his free hand urgently.
“Obviously not. What is the issue?”
“No, no. It’s fine. I misheard. Say his first name again?”
“Perci?”
Rancha attempted to maintain a straight face. “Are you pronouncing it with an i not a y?”
Perci himself opened his mouth to issue a protest, but Ihjundas spoke first. Firmly. “I am. Your point?”
“Perci Yansul?”
“Sir Perci Jamil Emmanranph Yansul. Knight. To be exact”
Rancha could not control himself. “Perci. With an i.” Rancha collapsed against a wall, shaking with hysterics. “That's a girl’s name!”
Ihjundas regarded him impassively for a moment, and then acted with a decisively-placed scooting hand, escorting the bright red and shudderingly indignant Perci out into the corridor, where he was bundled into the waiting tram. Closing the lid on the inevitable fulminations, Ihjundas turned his back and the tram mercifully and immediately sped away. Upon re-entering the room he found a misshapen mass of half-human, half urglon desperately trying to compose himself. Ihjundas laid on the thickest stern frown a human face could muster. On seeing this, Rancha quickly melted back into human shape and straightened his outfit, it now being ripped in several places due to the sudden change in the size of the wearer.
“I'm sorry,” he said, bowing his head to his old mentor. “I know it’s not actually funny, but it's been a rough couple of days and...” He trailed off into a cloud of unspoken apology.
Ihjundas glared at him for a few moments more. Rancha felt his bad glands acting up again and a full-body blush of shame coming on, but then Ihjundas' face split in a conspiratorial grin.
“You know. He has seven older sisters and his father was expecting another...”
They both laughed themselves hoarse.
Eventually, surfacing for air, Ihjundas examined a timepiece. “We had best progress before people wonder what has become of us,” he said with a wheezing croak.
Rancha nodded through his teary eyes, wondering vaguely why he had been laughing so much and finding it unfair that he had to stop, when the walls started to vibrate and take on a hazy aspect.
“What the..? What is it?” shouted Rancha over a high pitched keening that filled the air, while he quivered in time with the scenery.
“It's come early!” yelled back Ihjundas. “It's not due again for another week! Holy Yurmuth I hope it doesn't...”
The whining abruptly climaxed. There was a blinding flash of off-colour light, accompanied by the sound of metal screaming. The world dissolved into silence.
Chapter 6
“We gotta get two hundred dungbeasts forty thousand miles in three days and you wanna do what?!”
- Trader Blinz on the first leg of his epic journey being greeted by his young son at four in the morning, hopefully holding a sledge and a pair of shears, 1032 C.M.
Time passed in darkness, then, the man with the interesting hat woke up to find he was minus his hat, his staff and his dignity. He found after a brief assessment that his hands and feet were bound, and had a very sore back from being dragged along the ground, attached to a small piece of board for an unknown distance and length of time. The rope restraining him was connected to a sturdy harness, which was in turn strapped around the waist of a wrinkly man-sized brown creature who was making an impressive turn of speed despite only having one apparent leg. Was he a drangl? Yes, a drangl. His head felt full of sharp wool. Another mental check and the man remembered his own name, which he usually claimed to be Yrinzametaphicalogispolymoboincat The All-Powerful, but to his very few friends was Yrinmet for short. To everyone else that he did not like, it tended to be 'Argh'. Through his fuzzy head haze, he surmised that the situation was “not good” and wondered what he could do about it.
It was at this point he attempted to speak and discovered he was also gagged. Sighing, then yelping when he discovered bein
g dragged and sighing deeply at the same time hurts quite a lot, he tried to chew through the loosely tied piece of cloth. This attempt was given up in short order when it was found that the gag tasted worse than a pile of excrement that had spent a week under the armpit of a bodybuilder. Yrinmet was sorely tempted to throw up from this, but choked the bile back down, deciding that vomiting while the cloth was blocking was his mouth was probably another very bad idea.
He thought for a moment as his back continued to be rubbed raw.
To alleviate the mild lumbar sandpapering, Yrinmet attempted to sit up whilst still being dragged, and received an even sorer bottom for his efforts.
Another session of thinking.
He tried a shimmy of shoulders and legs to loosen his bonds, but gained another awkward scrape along the ground for his trouble, possibly an indecently placed laceration that time.
Nothing, he decided, was for it but to lie back and hope that the movement stopped long enough for him to try and escape some other way. Judging by the rapidly passing scenery that grim eventuality was not going to happen any time soon. He did not recognise this area all too well. He was sure he was still in the same forest as his tower, given the examples of plantlife that flashed past, but bearing and distance were much a mystery from his current vantage point.
A clonk on the head caused him to remember that he had extensive training in the Art, to which he frowned inwardly at his brain for keeping that particular fact from him for so long.
He concentrated his inner power, which took far more than the usual amount of concentration due to current circumstances and attempted to issue forth a blast of heat from his eyes, to sever his bonds and make good his escape. He then whimpered as he seared the tip of his nose into an ugly blister.