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itsjustagamerp2012-03-06 07:27 pm
itsjustthemads) wrote in itsjustagamerp2012-03-06 07:27 pm
Experiment #14 - Battlefield Earth - Chapters 1 and 2
Battlefield Earth - Chapters 1 and 2
By L. Ron Hubbard
Hughes: *settles down comfortably* Okay, who wants to bet that we do not get any battles in this and it doesn’t take place on Earth?
Squall: ...I’ll take you up on the latter.
Hughes: Suit yourself. But I’m still calling it now.
Zidane: Do you mean in the whole thing or just this little bit?
Hughes: This little bit. Usually they aren’t cruel enough to give us the whole thing. *looks at his two riff buddies* You guys haven’t done this before, have you.
Zidane: *smirks* Squall here doesn’t know what a sense of humor is. We’re trying to teach him, but it’s a slow process.
Squall: *facepalm*
Hughes: Well this will either be a great lesson or a slow, agonizing example of what NOT to do. *chipper* So let’s get started!
“Man,” said Terl, “is an endangered species.”
Zidane: Okay, I’m starting my own bet now - the number of times during this that Squall is going to facepalm. Or even think about it, because now that I’ve said it he’s going to try not to do it. I’m thinking at least seven.
Hughes: *looks at Squall and back to Zidane* I’ll take that and say more than 10 times.
Squall: ...(Does it really matter that much?)
Zidane: *knows that look* One!
The hairy paws of the Chamco brothers hung suspended above the broad keys of the laser-bash game. The cliffs of Char’s eyebones
Zidane: *apparently doesn’t know whether to be appalled or just confused* Did... someone’s eyebrows eat their skull?
Hughes: *sings* The eyebone’s connected to the...wait, the eye isn’t a bone.
Zidane: Apparently this one is. Three sentences in and these guys are already more creepy than Kefka, that’s a record.
drew down over his yellow orbs as he looked up in mystery.
Hughes: *as Char* Wait, I need to be in the Western section, not Mystery.
Squall: I’d be more worried about his missing eyes.
Hughes: Maybe that’s the mystery.
Even the steward, who had been padding quietly about picking up her saucepans, lumbered to a halt and stared.
Terl could not have produced a more profound effect had he thrown a meat-girl
Squall: ...meat... girl?
Hughes: You know a girl...made of...meat. *he trails off as he realizes the implications of that and just sighs* This is going to be painful.
Zidane: I’m reminded of a certain singer... Actually, that’s even more appropriate than I thought!
Squall: *also sighs*
naked
Zidane: YAY-
into the middle of the room.
Zidane: Damnit, getting my hopes up. *settles back to pout*
The clear dome of the Intergalactic
Hughes: *cue Beastie Boy’s “Intergalatic”* Planetary
Squall: Intergalatic
Hughes: Planetary. Planetary, Intergalatic.
Zidane: *rapping* Don’t you tell me to smile, you stick around I’ll make it worth MY while, got numbers beyond what you can dial, maybe it’s because we’re so versatile-
Squall: ...That’s enough, Zidane.
Zidane: *pouts again* Just taking away all my fun. And two.
Mining Company employee recreation hall shone black around and above them, silvered at its crossbars by the pale glow of the Earth’s single moon, half-full on this late summer night.
Hughes: Darn, apparently we ARE on Earth.
Zidane: Pay up.
Hughes: I’ll pay up after the riff.
Terl lifted his large amber eyes from the tome that rested minutely in his massive claws and looked around the room.
Zidane: All right, are these guys crabs or something? Or maybe an Antlion? I could buy that one.
Squall: Probably Death Claws.
Zidane: Yeah, that makes sense - at the same time making this worse.
He was suddenly aware of the effect he had produced, and it amused him. Anything to relieve the humdrum monotony of a ten-year duty tour in this gods-abandoned mining camp,
Hughes: You know, most people relieve boredom by playing cards or something...but I guess creating awkward moments at the local watering hole works too.
way out here at the edge of a minor galaxy.
In an even more professional voice, already deep and roaring enough,
Zidane: And Boss could kick your ass with that “professional voice.”
Terl repeated his thought. “Man is an endangered species.”
Squall: We heard you the first time.
Hughes: Oh no! We’ve looped back to the beginning of the book!
Zidane: Somebody unstick the record needle, quick!
Char glowered at him. “What in the name of diseased crap are you reading?”
Zidane: Apparently this book.
Terl did not much care for his tone. After all, Char was simply one of several mine managers, but Terl was chief of minesite security. “I didn’t read it. I thought it.”
Hughes: I’m not sure how security guard ranks above a manager.
Squall: I think they mean head of security, not just a guard.
Hughes: Still, aren’t those typically two separate divisions anyway. I mean, I guess it depends on if this is a---you know what, I’m not over-analyzing this.
Zidane: Why not? It’s more entertaining than this crap.
Squall: He’s got a point.
Hughes: Yeah, but the sooner we get through it the sooner we can leave. If I start waxing on about it now we might be here awhile.
Zidane: Wax on, wax off, wax on, wax o-
Squall: *smacks Zidane*
Zidane: Ow! *grimaces* Three.
Hughes: He smacked you, not his forehead.
Zidane: Close enough.
“You must’ve got it from somewhere,” growled Char. “What is that book?”
Terl held it up so Char could see its back. It said, General Report of Geological Minesites, Volume 250,369.
Squall: ...That’s what prompted the thought?
Zidane: Well those other 250,368 volumes were just so thought-provoking.
Hughes: I found volume 148,275 to be the best of the collection. Though certainly volume 59,776 had it’s merits.
Like all such books, it was huge but printed on material that made it weightless, particularly on a low-gravity planet such as earth, a triumph of design and manufacture that did not cut heavily into the payloads of freighters.
Zidane: ...This was so important you had to spend an entire paragraph on it why? *he’s starting to develop an eyetwitch*
Squall: It’s going to be on the quiz.
“Rughr,” Char growled in disgust. “That must be two, three hundred Earth-years old. If you want to prowl around in books, I’ve got an up-to-date general board of directors’ report that says we’re thirty-five freighters behind in bauxite deliveries.”
Hughes: Oh! Oh! Can we read that report instead of this?
The Chamco brothers looked at each other and then at their game to see where they had gotten to in shooting down the live mayflies in the air box.
Zidane: ...What.
Squall: *no words*
Hughes: Pretty sure it doesn’t matter. And we’ll be here awhile if we question every irrelevant thing the book brings up.
But Terl’s next words distracted them again.
“Today,” said Terl, brushing Char’s push for work aside, “I got a sighting report from a recon drone that recorded only thirty-five men in that valley near the peak,” Terl waved his paw westward toward the towering mountain range silhouetted by the moon.
Zidane: Oh good, I long for a good towering mountain near a moon. Where’s Cecil when you need him? Oh hell, even Kain.
Squall: Go ask Golbez.
“So?” said Char.
Hughes: I keep asking that same question of this book but it hasn’t answered me yet.
“So I dug up the books out of curiosity. There used to be hundreds in that valley. And furthermore,” continued Terl with his professional ways coming back, “there used to be thousands and thousands of them on this planet.”
Squall: ...Are you talking about books or people?
Zidane: Do you think they care?
Hughes: I’m still trying to figure out what WE’RE supposed to care about.
“You can’t believe all you read,” said Char heavily. “On my last duty tour--it was Arcturus IV--”
“This book,” said Terl, lifting it impressively, “was compiled by the culture and ethnology department of the Intergalactic Mining Company.”
The larger Chamco brother batted his eyebones. “I didn’t know we had one.”
Zidane: ...*that eyetwitch is significantly more pronounced now* ...I know I have basically no right to say this, but are we seeing alien mating rituals here? That sounds like a crab-Antlion-Death Claw prostitute trolling for johns on the freeway!
Squall: How do you bat bones?
Hughes: Very carefully?
Char sniffed. “It was disbanded more than a century ago. Useless waste of money. Yapping around about ecological impacts and stuff like that.”
Squall: ...“Useless.”
Zidane: I’ll show them useless. *starting to climb out of his seat* You don’t go messing up entire planets and not pay the consequences-
Hughes: *pulls Zidane back down* We can have a nice rant about ecological impact and ramifications against planets later.
Zidane: *reluctantly gets pulled down* I beat the hell out of the last guy who did it, I’ll do it again no problem.
Squall: (Do you even know where to find the author?)
His shifted his bulk around to Terl. “Is this some kind of scheme to explain a nonscheduled vacation?
Hughes: Ah the old “bring up centuries old volumes of books to get nonscheduled vacation time” ploy. Works 90% of the time.
You’re going to get your butt in a bind. I can see it, a pile of requisitions this high for breathe-gas tanks and scoutcraft. You won’t get any of my workers.”
“Turn off the juice,”
Zidane: Ohhhhhh, okay. Now it makes sense! They’re all completely sauced!
said Terl. “I only said that man--”
“I know what you said. But you got your appointment because you are clever. That’s right, clever. Not intelligent. Clever. And I can see right through an excuse to go on a hunting expedition. What Psychlo in his right skull would bother with the things?”
Zidane: What Genome in his right skull would bother with this book?
The smaller Chamco brother grinned. “I get tired of just dig-dig-dig, ship-ship-ship.
Hughes: Are they dwarfs now? I’m not sure I want them singing “Heigh, Ho.”
Zidane: Well, they are in a mine yanking precious materials out of the earth, so maybe they’re... reverse crab-Antlion-Death Claw dwarfs?
Squall: Biological nightmares, you mean?
Hughes: Starting to sound like it, sheesh.
Zidane: Maybe we should ask Namine to draw these things.
Squall & Hughes: Let’s not.
Hunting might be fun. I didn’t think anybody did it for--”
Char turned on him like a tank zeroing in on its prey.
Hughes: What does a tank hunt exactly?
“Fun hunting those things! You ever see one?”
Squall: ...These guys are starting to remind me of someone.
Zidane: Boobwitch or someone else?
Squall: (...creative name for her.) Someone else.
Zidane: Four.
He lurched to his feet and the floor creaked. He put his paw just above his belt. “They only come up to here!
Hughes: Never met Major Armstrong or Harry Dresden.
Zidane: And even if we’re short, we’re powerful!
Hughes: Or you wear platform shoes, like Edward.
Zidane: *singing* They laugh at me, these fellows, just because I am small, they laugh at me because I'm not a hundred feet tall, I tell 'em there's a lot to learn down here on the ground, the world is big but lil' people turn it around~
They got hardly any hair on them except their heads.
Hughes: False.
They’re a dirty white color like a slug.
Hughes: Also false.
They’re so brittle they break when you try to put them in a pouch.”
Zidane: ...*can’t even process that one, just staring at it slack-jawed* ...Why?
He snarled in disgust and picked up a saucepan of kerbango.
Zidane: That sounds like a cartoon explosive. Maybe if they ingest it they’ll all go boom!
“They’re so weak they couldn’t pick this up without straining their guts. And they’re not good eating.” He tossed off the kerbango and made an earthquake shudder.
Squall: *deadpan* Yes. Earthquakes do that.
Zidane: I don’t know, the last earthquake I talked to didn’t seem really interested in shuddering. Daisy arrangement, maybe, but not shuddering.
“You ever see one?” said the bigger Chamco brother.
Char sat down, the dome rumbled, and he handed the empty saucepan to the steward. “No,” he said, “not alive. I seen some bones in the shafts and I heard.”
Hughes: Wait, wait, wait. You are on a planet that HAS humans. You have a drone that supposedly saw 35 of them in a nearby valley. But you, yourself, have never seen one? How does that even work?
Zidane: Either he’s blind or he’s just stupid. Considering the biological nightmare we’ve got going on already, I’m going to say both.
“There were thousands of them once,” said Terl, ignoring the mine manager. “Thousands! All over the place.”
Zidane: Off by quite a few decimal points there, buddy.
Char belched. “Shouldn’t wonder they die off. They breathe this oxygen-nitrogen air. Deadly stuff.”
Squall: ...They live there. Why would it be deadly to them?
“I got a crack in my face mask yesterday,” said the smaller Chamco brother. “For about thirty seconds I thought I wasn’t going to make it. Bright lights bursting inside your skull. Deadly stuff.
Hughes: They must really be desperate for resources if they are working in conditions that could kill them so easily.
Zidane: That or they like getting high. I think it’s called auto-erotic asphyxiation.
Squall: It is.
Hughes: *cough* That’s, uhm, usually associated with a weird sexual kink more than anything.
Zidane: We don’t know how these guys work! For all we know, this could be their weird sexual kink!
I really look forward to getting back home where you can walk around without a suit or mask, where the gravity gives you something to push against, where everything is a beautiful purple and there’s not one bit of this green stuff.
Zidane: ...A couple people I know aside, purple is usually dead, you idiot. Or at least dying.
My Papa used to tell me that if I wasn’t a good Psychlo and if I didn’t say sir-sir-sir to the right people, I’d wind up at a butt end of nowhere like this. He was right. I did. It’s your shot, Brother.”
Zidane: I don’t drink much, but I think I need a shot of whatever they’ve got.
Squall: Assuming it wouldn’t kill you.
Zidane: At this point, that might be a blessing.
Char sat back and eyed Terl. “You ain’t really going hunting for man, are you?”
Hughes: *as Terl* Well, we’re too late for Rabbit Season.
Zidane: All right, who let the rednecks in?
Terl looked at his book. He inserted one of his talons to keep his place and then thumped the volume against his knee.
Zidane: ...Okay, tally so far. Eyebones, claws, talons, paws, possibly tails- *looks behind him* - present company excluded, maybe what we’ve got here is a chimera.
Hughes: It wouldn’t surprise me at this rate.
Squall: ...Not enough heads.
“I think you’re wrong,” he mused. “There was something to these creatures. Before we came along, it says here, they had towns on every continent. They had flying machines and boats. They even appear to have fired off stuff into space.”
Zidane: Yes, there exists hours of footage on the internet of idiots shooting bottle rockets into space from unmentionable places on their bodies.
Hughes: I am going to guess that the internet doesn’t exist any more.
Zidane: They probably didn’t care for all that man-porn, anyway.
Hughes: I doubt they even saved the footage of cute baby animals.
Zidane: They probably ate them, and the footage too.
“How do you know that wasn’t some other race?” said Char. “How do you know it wasn’t some lost colony of Psychlos?”
“No, it wasn’t that,” said Terl. “Psychlos can’t breathe this air. It was man all right, just like the cultural guys researched. And right in our own histories, you know how it says we got here?”
“Ump,” said Char.
Hughes: That is not a mode of transportation I’m familiar with.
Squall: He means they were thrown.
Zidane: Hopefully in a trebuchet, because those things lead to lovely splat-filled landings.
“Man apparently sent out some kind of probe that gave full directions to the place, had pictures of man on it and everything. It got picked up by a Psychlo recon. And you know what?”
“Ump,” said Char.
Hughes: That’s not a word you know. I’m not sure that’s even a recognized sound effect.
The probe and the pictures were on a metal that was rare everywhere and worth a clanking fortune. And Intergalactic paid the Psychlo governors sixty trillion Galactic credits for the directions and the concession. One gas barrage and we were in business.”
Zidane: ...I didn’t really need to know who ate all those beans and cheese, you know.
“Fairy tales, fairy tales,” said Char. “Every planet I ever helped gut has some butt and crap story like that. Every one.” He yawned his face into a huge cavern. “All that was hundreds, maybe thousands of years ago. You ever notice that the public relations department always puts their fairy tales so far back nobody can ever check them?”
Squall: (I thought that was the point of fairy tales.)
Zidane: Five.
“I’m going to go out and catch one of these things,” said Terl.
Hughes: Oh...kay. Is this leading to our plot, because we’re over halfway through and I’ve still got no idea why I’m supposed to care about either of these two. In fact, I’m kind of leaning towards the opposite of caring.
Zidane: Blind hatred? Because I’m more than halfway there on that one.
“Not with any of my crews or equipment you ain’t,” said Char.
Zidane: Again, WHO LET THE REDNECKS IN? They’re screwing with our production values! ...Ruby’s gonna kill me.
Terl heaved his mammoth bulk off the seat and crossed the creaking floor to the berthing hatch.
Hughes: *snort* The what hatch?
Squall: Berthing. From the nautical “berth.”
Hughes: Sorry, I was army, not navy. Actually, my country is land-locked, we didn’t really have a NEED for a navy force.
Zidane: You know, when you get your memory back, we really have to have a talk.
Squall: About what?
Zidane: How in the hell you know shit like that. Also these guys still sound like they could possibly be the birth-givers in this society. A kind of Mister Seahorse paradox.
“You’re as crazy as a nebula of crap,” said Char.
Hughes: That falls more under “impossible” than “crazy.”
Zidane: Given their biological failure I don’t want to doubt this race is capable of producing one of those.
The two Chamco brothers got back into their game and intently laser-blasted the trapped mayflies into smoky puffs, one by one.
Zidane: And we will never hear from them again. Byyyyyyyyyyyyyyye! *complete with semi-psycho grin and frantic arm-wave*
Char looked at the empty door. The security chief knew no Psychlo could go up into those mountains. Terl really was crazy. There was deadly uranium up there.
Zidane: And lions.
Squall: And tigers.
Hughes: And bears.
All: Oh My!
But Terl, rumbling along a hallway to his room, did not consider himself crazy. He was being very clever as always. He had started the rumors so no questions would get out of hand when he began to put into motion the personal plans that would make him wealthy and powerful and, almost as important, dig him out of this accursed planet.
Zidane: You’re supposed to be digging your way into the accursed planet, you dumbass. That’s your job!
Hughes: But if he wants to escape he should be trying to escape via space travel, not digging further in.
Zidane: *throws up his hands* Apparently he wants to escape by digging to China! Isn’t he supposed to be older than a bratty five-year-old playing in a sandbox?!
Hughes: Beats me.
The man-things were the perfect answer. All he needed was just one and then he could get the others. His campaign had begun and begun very well, he thought.
He went to sleep gloating over how clever he was.
Hughes: You haven’t caught a man yet, don’t get too happy just yet.
-- 2 --
It was a good day for a funeral,
Hughes: Chapter 1 begins with man as an endangered species. Chapter 2 starts with a funeral. This book is so uplifting and cheery.
only it seemed there wasn’t going to be one.
Squall: Someone must have had a Phoenix Down.
Zidane: Unlike Cloud. Or any of his friends.
Hughes: A what?
Zidane: It can bring you back if you’re dead. Or, really, it can’t bring you back if you’re dead-dead, more like on the verge of being dead-dead, so it’s more like it can bring you back from the brink of death if you use it in time, but they’re kind of awkward and you have to figure out how to feed it to an almost-dead person and usually they’re bleeding out pretty badly because you’re usually using them in the middle of a battle, and I guess if someone gets their head cut off or something it won’t work-
Squall: *interrupting* They’re also rare.
Hughes: *awkward silence* Oh. You know what, forget I asked.
Zidane: *crosses arms, slightly pouty at being interrupted* Six.
Squall: That wasn’t one.
Zidane: Close enough!
Dark, stormy-looking clouds were creeping in from the west, shredded by the snow-speckled peaks, leaving only a few patches of blue sky showing.
Jonnie Goodboy Tyler
Hughes: Bet someone got teased at school for that name.
Zidane: *singing again, dancing in his seat this time* Deep down Louisiana close to New Orleans, way back up in the woods among the evergreens, there stood a log cabin made of earth and wood, where lived a country boy named Johnny B. Goode, who never ever learned to read or write so well, but he could play the guitar just like a ringing a bell~
Squall: Better than Johnny C. Bad, at least?
Zidane: Gotta admit, the purple octopus number is pretty good.
stood beside his horse at the upper end of the wide mountain meadow and looked with discontent upon the sprawled and decaying village.
His father was dead and he ought to be properly buried. He hadn’t died of the red blotches
Squall: Which red blotches?
Zidane: Syphillis. ...What? It has red spots, and no I don’t know from experience, Squall.
Hughes: Well so does Chicken Pox and Shingles but that’s sort of the point I think.
and there was no question of somebody else catching it. His bones had just crumbled away.
Hughes: *wince* Please tell me that was after he had died and not the cause of death.
Zidane: Maybe he was a pudding-man?
Squall: Maybe it was Bahamut.
Zidane: Stupid dragon.
So there was no excuse not to properly bury him. Yet there was no sign of anyone doing so.
Zidane: *pulls out a large piece of posterboard and starts painting a “BURY DEAD GUY HERE” sign*
Hughes: That’s a little insensitive don’t you think?
Zidane: I don’t know who any of these people are, nor do I care. Why are we supposed to get emotionally invested in the death of a character we’ve never seen because he’s related to a character we just met? It makes as much sense as reading this thing sideways! ...Actually maybe that would make it make more sense.
Jonnie had gotten up in the dawn dark, determined to choke down his grief and go about his correct business. He had yelled up Windsplitter, the fastest of his several horses,
Zidane: Ohhhh, the horse is the one who ate all the beans and cheese. ...What’s a horse?
Hughes: . . .A bigger, less brightly colored version of our pony friends on the SoL.
Zidane: Oh. *pauses* You know buddy, a chocobo would be a lot less trouble.
Squall: Wouldn’t bother with the cheese either.
Hughes: Horses don’t typically eat cheese, they eat hay. And while I think I’m going to regret this if it results in another long lecture. What’s a chocobo?
Zidane: *opens his mouth-*
Squall: Giant yellow bird. Good if you want to get somewhere and avoid the monsters.
Zidane: Mine can walk on water and jump over mountains!
Hughes: So somewhere down the line, giant birds became the dominant mode of transportation in your world, while in mine we got large, four-legged animals with hooves. Evolution is weird.
Zidane: Worlds. We’re from different ones.
Squall: *shrugs* It’s not any weirder than monsters on the moon.
Hughes: You have monsters on the---no, nevermind. Let’s just finish this.
Zidane: *just to be a smartass* Not any weirder than genetic clones produced in an ancient factory because your world tried to eat another world.
put a cowhide rope on his nose, and gone down through the dangerous defiles to the lower plain, and with a lot of hard riding and herding, pushed five wild cattle back up to the mountain meadow. He had then bashed out the brains of the fattest of them and ordered his Aunt Ellen to push the barbecue fire together and get meat cooking.
Hughes: Are we still reading the same book or did a chapter from something else get mixed in?
Zidane: Probably some sort of extreme wilderness survival guide. For a whole colony.
Aunt Ellen hadn’t cared for the orders. She had broken her sharpest rock, she said, and couldn’t skin and cut the meat, and certain men hadn’t dragged in any firewood lately.
Zidane: ...You know, normally I believe in treating women like goddesses, but when you’re so so dumb you break a sharp rock, I get to call you names. How do you like that idea?
Hughes: They must be pretty bad off if they have to skin a cow with a “sharp rock” and not a knife.
Zidane: There’s bazillions of sharp rocks out in the world! Just go out and pick up another one!
Squall: It’s harder than you think.
Zidane: *glares at the screen and plants the “BURY DEAD GUY HERE” sign behind their seats*
Hughes: *tilts the sign away from him a bit, giving it a kind of worried look*
Jonnie Goodboy had stood very tall and looked at her. Among people who were average height, Jonnie Goodboy stood half a head taller, a muscular six feet shining with the bronzed health of his twenty years.
Zidane: They’ve never met half the people I know. Or the Emperor.
Squall: Don’t remind me.
Zidane: Then again, he was more gold than bronze.
He had just stood there, wind tangling his corn-yellow hair and beard, looking at her with his ice-blue eyes.
Squall: ...(...Definitely familiar.)
Zidane: ...I feel like he’s trying to describe Jesus. You know Jesus was from the desert, right author? Dead in a millisecond with that pigmentation.
And Aunt Ellen had gone and found some wood and had put a stone to work, even though it was a very dull one. He could see her now, down there below him, wrapped in the smoke of slow-roasting meat, busy.
Hughes: *as Jonnie* Ah, the woman in her natural environment. Now I’ll just sit on my horse and watch and help with nothing.
Zidane: *as Aunt Ellen* I’m so happy to bow down to my much-younger nephew! Feminism has abandoned us entirely and it’s wonderful! *back to himself* Dagger would kick your ass. So would Eiko and she’s six!
There ought to be more activity in the village, Jonnie thought. The last big funeral he had seen was when he was about five years old, when Smith the mayor had died.
Zidane: No one has died since you were five years old?!
Squall: They could all have been from one generation.
There had been songs and preaching and a feast and it had ended with a dance by moonlight. Mayor Smith had been put in a hole in the ground and the dirt filled in over him, and while the two cross-sticks of the marker were long since gone, it had been a proper respectful funeral. More recently they had just dumped the dead in the black-rock gulch below the waterpool and let the coyotes clean them up.
Zidane: ...Oh.
Hughes: ...Lovely.
Zidane: At least it’s efficient?
Well, that wasn’t the way you went about it, Jonnie told himself. Not with his father, anyway.
Zidane: No, the way you go about it is in drag. You’re not dressed properly for such an occasion young man!
Squall: ...
Zidane: Seven!
He spun on his heel and with one motion went aboard Windsplitter. The thump of his hard bare heel sent the horse down toward the courthouse.
He passed by the decayed ruins of cabins on the outskirts. Every year they caved in further. For a long time anybody needing a building log hadn’t cut any trees; they had just stripped handy existing structures. But the logs in these cabins were so eaten up and rotted now, they hardly even served as firewood.
Zidane: ...At least you’re feeding the termites?
Hughes: How does this keep getting MORE depressing? We started with man as endangered for goodness sake!
Squall: Concentrated effort.
Windsplitter picked his way down the weed-grown track, walking watchfully to avoid stepping on ancient and newly discarded food bones and trash.
Zidane: Has no one ever heard of garbage disposal? This is how you get fungus feet!
He twitched his ear toward a distant wolf howl from up in a mountain glen.
The smell of new blood and the meat smoke must be pulling the wolves down, thought Jonnie, and he hefted his kill-club
Hughes: He left his stun-club and peace-club at home.
Squall: And his gun-club is out of bullets.
Zidane: But it’s still a club, Mister I-Have-A-Weapon-That-Disobeys-The-Laws-of-Physics.
Squall: It makes perfect sense.
Zidane: That’s because we’re not done with your brain yet.
Squall: *raises an eyebrow*
Zidane: *winning grin*
from where it dangled by a thong into his palm. He’d lately seen a wolf right down in the cabins, prowling around for bones, or maybe even a puppy or a child.
Hughes: Well that’s reassuring. You sound like you care about as much for the bones as the child.
Squall: I’m more concerned about him not being able to tell a puppy from a kid.
Zidane: No, that one makes sense. They both make a lot of noise and can’t stop peeing everywhere and won’t leave you alone when they want attention.
Even a decade ago it wouldn’t have happened. But every year there were fewer and fewer people.
Hughes: Have more sex.
Zidane: SIGN ME UP!
Squall: *sighs*
Zidane: ...Eight.
Legend said that there had been a thousand in the valley, but Jonnie thought that was probably an exaggeration. There was plenty of food.
Squall: Enough for more people, perhaps?
Zidane: But then they’d have to SHARE!
The wide plains below the peaks were overrun with wild cattle, wild pigs and bands of horses. The ranges above were alive with deer and goats. And even an unskilled hunter had no trouble getting food. There was plenty of water due to the melting snows and streams, and the little patches of vegetables would thrive if anybody planted and tended them.
Zidane: *once again singing* Almost paradise~ We’re knocking on heaven’s door~
No, it wasn’t food. It was something else. Animals reproduced, it seemed, but man didn’t. At least not to any extent. The death rate and the birth rate were unbalanced, with death the winner.
Zidane: *as Death* A WINNAR IS MEE!
Even when children were born they sometimes only had one eye or one lung or one hand and had to be left out in the icy night.
Zidane: ...Okay, so this might be a little mercenary, but why don’t you raise those “deformed” kids to do something useful instead of killing them? Like maybe tend those vegetables or something, that’s not so hard.
Squall: I think it’s more mercenary to kill them.
Monsters were unwanted things. All life was overpowered by a fear of monsters.
Hughes: If you’re having trouble with your population, I really don’t think you can be that picky.
Zidane: These people better never go to my world. I think the Burmecians would scare them into premature heart attacks and kill them unintentionally.
Maybe it was this valley.
Squall: Shouldn’t have made camp in Death Valley.
Hughes: Especially when the Valley of Sunshine and Rainbows is just over there.
Zidane: But the view from here is so lovely!
When he was seven he had asked his father about it. “But maybe people can’t live in this place,” he had said.
His father had looked at him wearily. “There were people in some other valleys, according to legends.
Zidane: That movie wasn’t all that great, you know. I wouldn’t listen to it as gospel if I were you.
They’re all gone, but there are still some of us.”
He had not been convinced. Jonnie had said, “There’s all those plains down there and they’re full of animals. Why don’t we go live there?”
Squall: Good question.
Zidane: Don’t tell me the misogynistic staring rock is the only one with common sense. ...Wait. *side-eyes Squall* You’re not a misogynist, are you?
Squall: ...No, I’m not.
Zidane: Good. Nine.
Jonnie had always been a bit of a trial. Too smart, the elders had said. Always stirring things up. Questions, questions. And did he believe what he was told? Even by older men who knew a lot better? No. Not Jonnie Goodboy Tyler.
Zidane: When you say it like that he sounds like the family pet.
But his father had not brought any of this up. He had just said wearily, “There’s no timber down there to build cabins.”
This hadn’t explained anything, so Jonnie had said, “I bet I could find something down there to build a cabin with.”
His father had knelt down, patient for once, and said, “You’re a good boy, Jonnie.
Hughes: *as Jonnie* Yeah, it’s my middle name.
Zidane: *also as Jonnie* My other middle name is Shirley.
And your mother and I love you very much. But nobody could build anything that would keep out the monsters.”
Squall: Try the rocks.
Monsters, monsters. All his life Jonnie had been hearing about the monsters. He’d never seen one. But he held his peace. The oldsters believed in monsters, so they believed in monsters.
But thinking of his father brought an unwelcome wetness to his eyes.
Zidane: Sweet Cosmos, he’s sprung a leak! Quick, get a patch on it before he shows an emotion!
Squall: ...
Zidane: Ten. You’re just giving these to me, aren’t you?
Squall: One for each crystal.
Hughes: Yeah, except I’m the one winning the bet.
Zidane: Damnit.
And he was almost unseated as his horse reared. A string of foot-long mountain rats had rushed headlong from a cabin and hit Windsplitter’s legs.
What you get for dreaming, Jonnie snapped to himself. He put Windsplitter’s four hooves back down on the path and drummed him forward the last few yards to the courthouse.
Zidane: ...That’s it?
Hughes: And nothing of value was accomplished.
Zidane: ...That’s it? *that eyetwitch is back*
Squall: Looks like it.
Zidane: ...What is this shit?! *aaaand he’s vaulting to his feet, glaring at the screen* That wasn’t a chapter, that was an excerpt! That was MAYBE four minutes worth of reading material right there! I’ve seen soliloquies longer than that! I’ve seen slapstick pratfalls longer than that! Whoever thinks that’s enough for an ENTIRE CHAPTER needs to be drawn and quartered!
Squall: I think I’ve made longer speeches, if it’s only four minutes.
Zidane: EXACTLY! If you can use up your entire stock of words for the week in one go, then a professional author who got paid to write this crap needs to put some more crystal-damned effort into this! THERE WAS NO SINGLE LINE OF DIALOGUE IN THE PRESENT IN THIS ENTIRE SCENE!
Hughes: There was dialogue in chapter one.
Zidane: THAT WAS CHAPTER ONE! This guy’s father just died AND HE CAN’T EVEN BE BOTHERED TO SAY HE’S SAD?! We get barely any pages of freaking introspection BUT HE CAN’T EVEN BE BOTHERED TO SAY HE’S SAD HIS ONLY FATHER DIED?!
Hughes: No, there were two chapters. Also, Zidane, it’s over so let’s just go, okay? You can rant all you want elsewhere.
Zidane: I AM GOING TO RANT RIGHT NOW! WHAT HACK WROTE THIS?! I SWEAR I’M GOING TO FIND HIM AND SHOVE THIS BOOK SO FAR UP HIS NOSE THAT THE SUN WON’T BE ABLE TO FIND IT TO EVEN THINK ABOUT SHINING!
Squall: Zidane. We’re leaving. *reaches over to start dragging him out of the theater*
Zidane: LET GO OF ME SQUALL! I DON’T CARE IF WE’RE STUCK HERE I AM GOING TO FIND THIS IDIOT AND SHOVE HIS OWN FOOT UP HIS ASS!
Hughes: *also helps with dragging, he’s good at that* Yeah, yeah. You tell them Zidane.
Squall: *not letting go*
Zidane: Will you bastards let go of my tail!
Squall: Not until you start walking.
Hughes: *as they leave the theater* And there was still no battle in that book.
Squall: You owe me for Earth, though.
*the “BURY DEAD GUY HERE” sign rests behind the seats, looking abandoned and forlorn*
By L. Ron Hubbard
Hughes: *settles down comfortably* Okay, who wants to bet that we do not get any battles in this and it doesn’t take place on Earth?
Squall: ...I’ll take you up on the latter.
Hughes: Suit yourself. But I’m still calling it now.
Zidane: Do you mean in the whole thing or just this little bit?
Hughes: This little bit. Usually they aren’t cruel enough to give us the whole thing. *looks at his two riff buddies* You guys haven’t done this before, have you.
Zidane: *smirks* Squall here doesn’t know what a sense of humor is. We’re trying to teach him, but it’s a slow process.
Squall: *facepalm*
Hughes: Well this will either be a great lesson or a slow, agonizing example of what NOT to do. *chipper* So let’s get started!
“Man,” said Terl, “is an endangered species.”
Zidane: Okay, I’m starting my own bet now - the number of times during this that Squall is going to facepalm. Or even think about it, because now that I’ve said it he’s going to try not to do it. I’m thinking at least seven.
Hughes: *looks at Squall and back to Zidane* I’ll take that and say more than 10 times.
Squall: ...(Does it really matter that much?)
Zidane: *knows that look* One!
The hairy paws of the Chamco brothers hung suspended above the broad keys of the laser-bash game. The cliffs of Char’s eyebones
Zidane: *apparently doesn’t know whether to be appalled or just confused* Did... someone’s eyebrows eat their skull?
Hughes: *sings* The eyebone’s connected to the...wait, the eye isn’t a bone.
Zidane: Apparently this one is. Three sentences in and these guys are already more creepy than Kefka, that’s a record.
drew down over his yellow orbs as he looked up in mystery.
Hughes: *as Char* Wait, I need to be in the Western section, not Mystery.
Squall: I’d be more worried about his missing eyes.
Hughes: Maybe that’s the mystery.
Even the steward, who had been padding quietly about picking up her saucepans, lumbered to a halt and stared.
Terl could not have produced a more profound effect had he thrown a meat-girl
Squall: ...meat... girl?
Hughes: You know a girl...made of...meat. *he trails off as he realizes the implications of that and just sighs* This is going to be painful.
Zidane: I’m reminded of a certain singer... Actually, that’s even more appropriate than I thought!
Squall: *also sighs*
naked
Zidane: YAY-
into the middle of the room.
Zidane: Damnit, getting my hopes up. *settles back to pout*
The clear dome of the Intergalactic
Hughes: *cue Beastie Boy’s “Intergalatic”* Planetary
Squall: Intergalatic
Hughes: Planetary. Planetary, Intergalatic.
Zidane: *rapping* Don’t you tell me to smile, you stick around I’ll make it worth MY while, got numbers beyond what you can dial, maybe it’s because we’re so versatile-
Squall: ...That’s enough, Zidane.
Zidane: *pouts again* Just taking away all my fun. And two.
Mining Company employee recreation hall shone black around and above them, silvered at its crossbars by the pale glow of the Earth’s single moon, half-full on this late summer night.
Hughes: Darn, apparently we ARE on Earth.
Zidane: Pay up.
Hughes: I’ll pay up after the riff.
Terl lifted his large amber eyes from the tome that rested minutely in his massive claws and looked around the room.
Zidane: All right, are these guys crabs or something? Or maybe an Antlion? I could buy that one.
Squall: Probably Death Claws.
Zidane: Yeah, that makes sense - at the same time making this worse.
He was suddenly aware of the effect he had produced, and it amused him. Anything to relieve the humdrum monotony of a ten-year duty tour in this gods-abandoned mining camp,
Hughes: You know, most people relieve boredom by playing cards or something...but I guess creating awkward moments at the local watering hole works too.
way out here at the edge of a minor galaxy.
In an even more professional voice, already deep and roaring enough,
Zidane: And Boss could kick your ass with that “professional voice.”
Terl repeated his thought. “Man is an endangered species.”
Squall: We heard you the first time.
Hughes: Oh no! We’ve looped back to the beginning of the book!
Zidane: Somebody unstick the record needle, quick!
Char glowered at him. “What in the name of diseased crap are you reading?”
Zidane: Apparently this book.
Terl did not much care for his tone. After all, Char was simply one of several mine managers, but Terl was chief of minesite security. “I didn’t read it. I thought it.”
Hughes: I’m not sure how security guard ranks above a manager.
Squall: I think they mean head of security, not just a guard.
Hughes: Still, aren’t those typically two separate divisions anyway. I mean, I guess it depends on if this is a---you know what, I’m not over-analyzing this.
Zidane: Why not? It’s more entertaining than this crap.
Squall: He’s got a point.
Hughes: Yeah, but the sooner we get through it the sooner we can leave. If I start waxing on about it now we might be here awhile.
Zidane: Wax on, wax off, wax on, wax o-
Squall: *smacks Zidane*
Zidane: Ow! *grimaces* Three.
Hughes: He smacked you, not his forehead.
Zidane: Close enough.
“You must’ve got it from somewhere,” growled Char. “What is that book?”
Terl held it up so Char could see its back. It said, General Report of Geological Minesites, Volume 250,369.
Squall: ...That’s what prompted the thought?
Zidane: Well those other 250,368 volumes were just so thought-provoking.
Hughes: I found volume 148,275 to be the best of the collection. Though certainly volume 59,776 had it’s merits.
Like all such books, it was huge but printed on material that made it weightless, particularly on a low-gravity planet such as earth, a triumph of design and manufacture that did not cut heavily into the payloads of freighters.
Zidane: ...This was so important you had to spend an entire paragraph on it why? *he’s starting to develop an eyetwitch*
Squall: It’s going to be on the quiz.
“Rughr,” Char growled in disgust. “That must be two, three hundred Earth-years old. If you want to prowl around in books, I’ve got an up-to-date general board of directors’ report that says we’re thirty-five freighters behind in bauxite deliveries.”
Hughes: Oh! Oh! Can we read that report instead of this?
The Chamco brothers looked at each other and then at their game to see where they had gotten to in shooting down the live mayflies in the air box.
Zidane: ...What.
Squall: *no words*
Hughes: Pretty sure it doesn’t matter. And we’ll be here awhile if we question every irrelevant thing the book brings up.
But Terl’s next words distracted them again.
“Today,” said Terl, brushing Char’s push for work aside, “I got a sighting report from a recon drone that recorded only thirty-five men in that valley near the peak,” Terl waved his paw westward toward the towering mountain range silhouetted by the moon.
Zidane: Oh good, I long for a good towering mountain near a moon. Where’s Cecil when you need him? Oh hell, even Kain.
Squall: Go ask Golbez.
“So?” said Char.
Hughes: I keep asking that same question of this book but it hasn’t answered me yet.
“So I dug up the books out of curiosity. There used to be hundreds in that valley. And furthermore,” continued Terl with his professional ways coming back, “there used to be thousands and thousands of them on this planet.”
Squall: ...Are you talking about books or people?
Zidane: Do you think they care?
Hughes: I’m still trying to figure out what WE’RE supposed to care about.
“You can’t believe all you read,” said Char heavily. “On my last duty tour--it was Arcturus IV--”
“This book,” said Terl, lifting it impressively, “was compiled by the culture and ethnology department of the Intergalactic Mining Company.”
The larger Chamco brother batted his eyebones. “I didn’t know we had one.”
Zidane: ...*that eyetwitch is significantly more pronounced now* ...I know I have basically no right to say this, but are we seeing alien mating rituals here? That sounds like a crab-Antlion-Death Claw prostitute trolling for johns on the freeway!
Squall: How do you bat bones?
Hughes: Very carefully?
Char sniffed. “It was disbanded more than a century ago. Useless waste of money. Yapping around about ecological impacts and stuff like that.”
Squall: ...“Useless.”
Zidane: I’ll show them useless. *starting to climb out of his seat* You don’t go messing up entire planets and not pay the consequences-
Hughes: *pulls Zidane back down* We can have a nice rant about ecological impact and ramifications against planets later.
Zidane: *reluctantly gets pulled down* I beat the hell out of the last guy who did it, I’ll do it again no problem.
Squall: (Do you even know where to find the author?)
His shifted his bulk around to Terl. “Is this some kind of scheme to explain a nonscheduled vacation?
Hughes: Ah the old “bring up centuries old volumes of books to get nonscheduled vacation time” ploy. Works 90% of the time.
You’re going to get your butt in a bind. I can see it, a pile of requisitions this high for breathe-gas tanks and scoutcraft. You won’t get any of my workers.”
“Turn off the juice,”
Zidane: Ohhhhhh, okay. Now it makes sense! They’re all completely sauced!
said Terl. “I only said that man--”
“I know what you said. But you got your appointment because you are clever. That’s right, clever. Not intelligent. Clever. And I can see right through an excuse to go on a hunting expedition. What Psychlo in his right skull would bother with the things?”
Zidane: What Genome in his right skull would bother with this book?
The smaller Chamco brother grinned. “I get tired of just dig-dig-dig, ship-ship-ship.
Hughes: Are they dwarfs now? I’m not sure I want them singing “Heigh, Ho.”
Zidane: Well, they are in a mine yanking precious materials out of the earth, so maybe they’re... reverse crab-Antlion-Death Claw dwarfs?
Squall: Biological nightmares, you mean?
Hughes: Starting to sound like it, sheesh.
Zidane: Maybe we should ask Namine to draw these things.
Squall & Hughes: Let’s not.
Hunting might be fun. I didn’t think anybody did it for--”
Char turned on him like a tank zeroing in on its prey.
Hughes: What does a tank hunt exactly?
“Fun hunting those things! You ever see one?”
Squall: ...These guys are starting to remind me of someone.
Zidane: Boobwitch or someone else?
Squall: (...creative name for her.) Someone else.
Zidane: Four.
He lurched to his feet and the floor creaked. He put his paw just above his belt. “They only come up to here!
Hughes: Never met Major Armstrong or Harry Dresden.
Zidane: And even if we’re short, we’re powerful!
Hughes: Or you wear platform shoes, like Edward.
Zidane: *singing* They laugh at me, these fellows, just because I am small, they laugh at me because I'm not a hundred feet tall, I tell 'em there's a lot to learn down here on the ground, the world is big but lil' people turn it around~
They got hardly any hair on them except their heads.
Hughes: False.
They’re a dirty white color like a slug.
Hughes: Also false.
They’re so brittle they break when you try to put them in a pouch.”
Zidane: ...*can’t even process that one, just staring at it slack-jawed* ...Why?
He snarled in disgust and picked up a saucepan of kerbango.
Zidane: That sounds like a cartoon explosive. Maybe if they ingest it they’ll all go boom!
“They’re so weak they couldn’t pick this up without straining their guts. And they’re not good eating.” He tossed off the kerbango and made an earthquake shudder.
Squall: *deadpan* Yes. Earthquakes do that.
Zidane: I don’t know, the last earthquake I talked to didn’t seem really interested in shuddering. Daisy arrangement, maybe, but not shuddering.
“You ever see one?” said the bigger Chamco brother.
Char sat down, the dome rumbled, and he handed the empty saucepan to the steward. “No,” he said, “not alive. I seen some bones in the shafts and I heard.”
Hughes: Wait, wait, wait. You are on a planet that HAS humans. You have a drone that supposedly saw 35 of them in a nearby valley. But you, yourself, have never seen one? How does that even work?
Zidane: Either he’s blind or he’s just stupid. Considering the biological nightmare we’ve got going on already, I’m going to say both.
“There were thousands of them once,” said Terl, ignoring the mine manager. “Thousands! All over the place.”
Zidane: Off by quite a few decimal points there, buddy.
Char belched. “Shouldn’t wonder they die off. They breathe this oxygen-nitrogen air. Deadly stuff.”
Squall: ...They live there. Why would it be deadly to them?
“I got a crack in my face mask yesterday,” said the smaller Chamco brother. “For about thirty seconds I thought I wasn’t going to make it. Bright lights bursting inside your skull. Deadly stuff.
Hughes: They must really be desperate for resources if they are working in conditions that could kill them so easily.
Zidane: That or they like getting high. I think it’s called auto-erotic asphyxiation.
Squall: It is.
Hughes: *cough* That’s, uhm, usually associated with a weird sexual kink more than anything.
Zidane: We don’t know how these guys work! For all we know, this could be their weird sexual kink!
I really look forward to getting back home where you can walk around without a suit or mask, where the gravity gives you something to push against, where everything is a beautiful purple and there’s not one bit of this green stuff.
Zidane: ...A couple people I know aside, purple is usually dead, you idiot. Or at least dying.
My Papa used to tell me that if I wasn’t a good Psychlo and if I didn’t say sir-sir-sir to the right people, I’d wind up at a butt end of nowhere like this. He was right. I did. It’s your shot, Brother.”
Zidane: I don’t drink much, but I think I need a shot of whatever they’ve got.
Squall: Assuming it wouldn’t kill you.
Zidane: At this point, that might be a blessing.
Char sat back and eyed Terl. “You ain’t really going hunting for man, are you?”
Hughes: *as Terl* Well, we’re too late for Rabbit Season.
Zidane: All right, who let the rednecks in?
Terl looked at his book. He inserted one of his talons to keep his place and then thumped the volume against his knee.
Zidane: ...Okay, tally so far. Eyebones, claws, talons, paws, possibly tails- *looks behind him* - present company excluded, maybe what we’ve got here is a chimera.
Hughes: It wouldn’t surprise me at this rate.
Squall: ...Not enough heads.
“I think you’re wrong,” he mused. “There was something to these creatures. Before we came along, it says here, they had towns on every continent. They had flying machines and boats. They even appear to have fired off stuff into space.”
Zidane: Yes, there exists hours of footage on the internet of idiots shooting bottle rockets into space from unmentionable places on their bodies.
Hughes: I am going to guess that the internet doesn’t exist any more.
Zidane: They probably didn’t care for all that man-porn, anyway.
Hughes: I doubt they even saved the footage of cute baby animals.
Zidane: They probably ate them, and the footage too.
“How do you know that wasn’t some other race?” said Char. “How do you know it wasn’t some lost colony of Psychlos?”
“No, it wasn’t that,” said Terl. “Psychlos can’t breathe this air. It was man all right, just like the cultural guys researched. And right in our own histories, you know how it says we got here?”
“Ump,” said Char.
Hughes: That is not a mode of transportation I’m familiar with.
Squall: He means they were thrown.
Zidane: Hopefully in a trebuchet, because those things lead to lovely splat-filled landings.
“Man apparently sent out some kind of probe that gave full directions to the place, had pictures of man on it and everything. It got picked up by a Psychlo recon. And you know what?”
“Ump,” said Char.
Hughes: That’s not a word you know. I’m not sure that’s even a recognized sound effect.
The probe and the pictures were on a metal that was rare everywhere and worth a clanking fortune. And Intergalactic paid the Psychlo governors sixty trillion Galactic credits for the directions and the concession. One gas barrage and we were in business.”
Zidane: ...I didn’t really need to know who ate all those beans and cheese, you know.
“Fairy tales, fairy tales,” said Char. “Every planet I ever helped gut has some butt and crap story like that. Every one.” He yawned his face into a huge cavern. “All that was hundreds, maybe thousands of years ago. You ever notice that the public relations department always puts their fairy tales so far back nobody can ever check them?”
Squall: (I thought that was the point of fairy tales.)
Zidane: Five.
“I’m going to go out and catch one of these things,” said Terl.
Hughes: Oh...kay. Is this leading to our plot, because we’re over halfway through and I’ve still got no idea why I’m supposed to care about either of these two. In fact, I’m kind of leaning towards the opposite of caring.
Zidane: Blind hatred? Because I’m more than halfway there on that one.
“Not with any of my crews or equipment you ain’t,” said Char.
Zidane: Again, WHO LET THE REDNECKS IN? They’re screwing with our production values! ...Ruby’s gonna kill me.
Terl heaved his mammoth bulk off the seat and crossed the creaking floor to the berthing hatch.
Hughes: *snort* The what hatch?
Squall: Berthing. From the nautical “berth.”
Hughes: Sorry, I was army, not navy. Actually, my country is land-locked, we didn’t really have a NEED for a navy force.
Zidane: You know, when you get your memory back, we really have to have a talk.
Squall: About what?
Zidane: How in the hell you know shit like that. Also these guys still sound like they could possibly be the birth-givers in this society. A kind of Mister Seahorse paradox.
“You’re as crazy as a nebula of crap,” said Char.
Hughes: That falls more under “impossible” than “crazy.”
Zidane: Given their biological failure I don’t want to doubt this race is capable of producing one of those.
The two Chamco brothers got back into their game and intently laser-blasted the trapped mayflies into smoky puffs, one by one.
Zidane: And we will never hear from them again. Byyyyyyyyyyyyyyye! *complete with semi-psycho grin and frantic arm-wave*
Char looked at the empty door. The security chief knew no Psychlo could go up into those mountains. Terl really was crazy. There was deadly uranium up there.
Zidane: And lions.
Squall: And tigers.
Hughes: And bears.
All: Oh My!
But Terl, rumbling along a hallway to his room, did not consider himself crazy. He was being very clever as always. He had started the rumors so no questions would get out of hand when he began to put into motion the personal plans that would make him wealthy and powerful and, almost as important, dig him out of this accursed planet.
Zidane: You’re supposed to be digging your way into the accursed planet, you dumbass. That’s your job!
Hughes: But if he wants to escape he should be trying to escape via space travel, not digging further in.
Zidane: *throws up his hands* Apparently he wants to escape by digging to China! Isn’t he supposed to be older than a bratty five-year-old playing in a sandbox?!
Hughes: Beats me.
The man-things were the perfect answer. All he needed was just one and then he could get the others. His campaign had begun and begun very well, he thought.
He went to sleep gloating over how clever he was.
Hughes: You haven’t caught a man yet, don’t get too happy just yet.
-- 2 --
It was a good day for a funeral,
Hughes: Chapter 1 begins with man as an endangered species. Chapter 2 starts with a funeral. This book is so uplifting and cheery.
only it seemed there wasn’t going to be one.
Squall: Someone must have had a Phoenix Down.
Zidane: Unlike Cloud. Or any of his friends.
Hughes: A what?
Zidane: It can bring you back if you’re dead. Or, really, it can’t bring you back if you’re dead-dead, more like on the verge of being dead-dead, so it’s more like it can bring you back from the brink of death if you use it in time, but they’re kind of awkward and you have to figure out how to feed it to an almost-dead person and usually they’re bleeding out pretty badly because you’re usually using them in the middle of a battle, and I guess if someone gets their head cut off or something it won’t work-
Squall: *interrupting* They’re also rare.
Hughes: *awkward silence* Oh. You know what, forget I asked.
Zidane: *crosses arms, slightly pouty at being interrupted* Six.
Squall: That wasn’t one.
Zidane: Close enough!
Dark, stormy-looking clouds were creeping in from the west, shredded by the snow-speckled peaks, leaving only a few patches of blue sky showing.
Jonnie Goodboy Tyler
Hughes: Bet someone got teased at school for that name.
Zidane: *singing again, dancing in his seat this time* Deep down Louisiana close to New Orleans, way back up in the woods among the evergreens, there stood a log cabin made of earth and wood, where lived a country boy named Johnny B. Goode, who never ever learned to read or write so well, but he could play the guitar just like a ringing a bell~
Squall: Better than Johnny C. Bad, at least?
Zidane: Gotta admit, the purple octopus number is pretty good.
stood beside his horse at the upper end of the wide mountain meadow and looked with discontent upon the sprawled and decaying village.
His father was dead and he ought to be properly buried. He hadn’t died of the red blotches
Squall: Which red blotches?
Zidane: Syphillis. ...What? It has red spots, and no I don’t know from experience, Squall.
Hughes: Well so does Chicken Pox and Shingles but that’s sort of the point I think.
and there was no question of somebody else catching it. His bones had just crumbled away.
Hughes: *wince* Please tell me that was after he had died and not the cause of death.
Zidane: Maybe he was a pudding-man?
Squall: Maybe it was Bahamut.
Zidane: Stupid dragon.
So there was no excuse not to properly bury him. Yet there was no sign of anyone doing so.
Zidane: *pulls out a large piece of posterboard and starts painting a “BURY DEAD GUY HERE” sign*
Hughes: That’s a little insensitive don’t you think?
Zidane: I don’t know who any of these people are, nor do I care. Why are we supposed to get emotionally invested in the death of a character we’ve never seen because he’s related to a character we just met? It makes as much sense as reading this thing sideways! ...Actually maybe that would make it make more sense.
Jonnie had gotten up in the dawn dark, determined to choke down his grief and go about his correct business. He had yelled up Windsplitter, the fastest of his several horses,
Zidane: Ohhhh, the horse is the one who ate all the beans and cheese. ...What’s a horse?
Hughes: . . .A bigger, less brightly colored version of our pony friends on the SoL.
Zidane: Oh. *pauses* You know buddy, a chocobo would be a lot less trouble.
Squall: Wouldn’t bother with the cheese either.
Hughes: Horses don’t typically eat cheese, they eat hay. And while I think I’m going to regret this if it results in another long lecture. What’s a chocobo?
Zidane: *opens his mouth-*
Squall: Giant yellow bird. Good if you want to get somewhere and avoid the monsters.
Zidane: Mine can walk on water and jump over mountains!
Hughes: So somewhere down the line, giant birds became the dominant mode of transportation in your world, while in mine we got large, four-legged animals with hooves. Evolution is weird.
Zidane: Worlds. We’re from different ones.
Squall: *shrugs* It’s not any weirder than monsters on the moon.
Hughes: You have monsters on the---no, nevermind. Let’s just finish this.
Zidane: *just to be a smartass* Not any weirder than genetic clones produced in an ancient factory because your world tried to eat another world.
put a cowhide rope on his nose, and gone down through the dangerous defiles to the lower plain, and with a lot of hard riding and herding, pushed five wild cattle back up to the mountain meadow. He had then bashed out the brains of the fattest of them and ordered his Aunt Ellen to push the barbecue fire together and get meat cooking.
Hughes: Are we still reading the same book or did a chapter from something else get mixed in?
Zidane: Probably some sort of extreme wilderness survival guide. For a whole colony.
Aunt Ellen hadn’t cared for the orders. She had broken her sharpest rock, she said, and couldn’t skin and cut the meat, and certain men hadn’t dragged in any firewood lately.
Zidane: ...You know, normally I believe in treating women like goddesses, but when you’re so so dumb you break a sharp rock, I get to call you names. How do you like that idea?
Hughes: They must be pretty bad off if they have to skin a cow with a “sharp rock” and not a knife.
Zidane: There’s bazillions of sharp rocks out in the world! Just go out and pick up another one!
Squall: It’s harder than you think.
Zidane: *glares at the screen and plants the “BURY DEAD GUY HERE” sign behind their seats*
Hughes: *tilts the sign away from him a bit, giving it a kind of worried look*
Jonnie Goodboy had stood very tall and looked at her. Among people who were average height, Jonnie Goodboy stood half a head taller, a muscular six feet shining with the bronzed health of his twenty years.
Zidane: They’ve never met half the people I know. Or the Emperor.
Squall: Don’t remind me.
Zidane: Then again, he was more gold than bronze.
He had just stood there, wind tangling his corn-yellow hair and beard, looking at her with his ice-blue eyes.
Squall: ...(...Definitely familiar.)
Zidane: ...I feel like he’s trying to describe Jesus. You know Jesus was from the desert, right author? Dead in a millisecond with that pigmentation.
And Aunt Ellen had gone and found some wood and had put a stone to work, even though it was a very dull one. He could see her now, down there below him, wrapped in the smoke of slow-roasting meat, busy.
Hughes: *as Jonnie* Ah, the woman in her natural environment. Now I’ll just sit on my horse and watch and help with nothing.
Zidane: *as Aunt Ellen* I’m so happy to bow down to my much-younger nephew! Feminism has abandoned us entirely and it’s wonderful! *back to himself* Dagger would kick your ass. So would Eiko and she’s six!
There ought to be more activity in the village, Jonnie thought. The last big funeral he had seen was when he was about five years old, when Smith the mayor had died.
Zidane: No one has died since you were five years old?!
Squall: They could all have been from one generation.
There had been songs and preaching and a feast and it had ended with a dance by moonlight. Mayor Smith had been put in a hole in the ground and the dirt filled in over him, and while the two cross-sticks of the marker were long since gone, it had been a proper respectful funeral. More recently they had just dumped the dead in the black-rock gulch below the waterpool and let the coyotes clean them up.
Zidane: ...Oh.
Hughes: ...Lovely.
Zidane: At least it’s efficient?
Well, that wasn’t the way you went about it, Jonnie told himself. Not with his father, anyway.
Zidane: No, the way you go about it is in drag. You’re not dressed properly for such an occasion young man!
Squall: ...
Zidane: Seven!
He spun on his heel and with one motion went aboard Windsplitter. The thump of his hard bare heel sent the horse down toward the courthouse.
He passed by the decayed ruins of cabins on the outskirts. Every year they caved in further. For a long time anybody needing a building log hadn’t cut any trees; they had just stripped handy existing structures. But the logs in these cabins were so eaten up and rotted now, they hardly even served as firewood.
Zidane: ...At least you’re feeding the termites?
Hughes: How does this keep getting MORE depressing? We started with man as endangered for goodness sake!
Squall: Concentrated effort.
Windsplitter picked his way down the weed-grown track, walking watchfully to avoid stepping on ancient and newly discarded food bones and trash.
Zidane: Has no one ever heard of garbage disposal? This is how you get fungus feet!
He twitched his ear toward a distant wolf howl from up in a mountain glen.
The smell of new blood and the meat smoke must be pulling the wolves down, thought Jonnie, and he hefted his kill-club
Hughes: He left his stun-club and peace-club at home.
Squall: And his gun-club is out of bullets.
Zidane: But it’s still a club, Mister I-Have-A-Weapon-That-Disobeys-The-Laws-of-Physics.
Squall: It makes perfect sense.
Zidane: That’s because we’re not done with your brain yet.
Squall: *raises an eyebrow*
Zidane: *winning grin*
from where it dangled by a thong into his palm. He’d lately seen a wolf right down in the cabins, prowling around for bones, or maybe even a puppy or a child.
Hughes: Well that’s reassuring. You sound like you care about as much for the bones as the child.
Squall: I’m more concerned about him not being able to tell a puppy from a kid.
Zidane: No, that one makes sense. They both make a lot of noise and can’t stop peeing everywhere and won’t leave you alone when they want attention.
Even a decade ago it wouldn’t have happened. But every year there were fewer and fewer people.
Hughes: Have more sex.
Zidane: SIGN ME UP!
Squall: *sighs*
Zidane: ...Eight.
Legend said that there had been a thousand in the valley, but Jonnie thought that was probably an exaggeration. There was plenty of food.
Squall: Enough for more people, perhaps?
Zidane: But then they’d have to SHARE!
The wide plains below the peaks were overrun with wild cattle, wild pigs and bands of horses. The ranges above were alive with deer and goats. And even an unskilled hunter had no trouble getting food. There was plenty of water due to the melting snows and streams, and the little patches of vegetables would thrive if anybody planted and tended them.
Zidane: *once again singing* Almost paradise~ We’re knocking on heaven’s door~
No, it wasn’t food. It was something else. Animals reproduced, it seemed, but man didn’t. At least not to any extent. The death rate and the birth rate were unbalanced, with death the winner.
Zidane: *as Death* A WINNAR IS MEE!
Even when children were born they sometimes only had one eye or one lung or one hand and had to be left out in the icy night.
Zidane: ...Okay, so this might be a little mercenary, but why don’t you raise those “deformed” kids to do something useful instead of killing them? Like maybe tend those vegetables or something, that’s not so hard.
Squall: I think it’s more mercenary to kill them.
Monsters were unwanted things. All life was overpowered by a fear of monsters.
Hughes: If you’re having trouble with your population, I really don’t think you can be that picky.
Zidane: These people better never go to my world. I think the Burmecians would scare them into premature heart attacks and kill them unintentionally.
Maybe it was this valley.
Squall: Shouldn’t have made camp in Death Valley.
Hughes: Especially when the Valley of Sunshine and Rainbows is just over there.
Zidane: But the view from here is so lovely!
When he was seven he had asked his father about it. “But maybe people can’t live in this place,” he had said.
His father had looked at him wearily. “There were people in some other valleys, according to legends.
Zidane: That movie wasn’t all that great, you know. I wouldn’t listen to it as gospel if I were you.
They’re all gone, but there are still some of us.”
He had not been convinced. Jonnie had said, “There’s all those plains down there and they’re full of animals. Why don’t we go live there?”
Squall: Good question.
Zidane: Don’t tell me the misogynistic staring rock is the only one with common sense. ...Wait. *side-eyes Squall* You’re not a misogynist, are you?
Squall: ...No, I’m not.
Zidane: Good. Nine.
Jonnie had always been a bit of a trial. Too smart, the elders had said. Always stirring things up. Questions, questions. And did he believe what he was told? Even by older men who knew a lot better? No. Not Jonnie Goodboy Tyler.
Zidane: When you say it like that he sounds like the family pet.
But his father had not brought any of this up. He had just said wearily, “There’s no timber down there to build cabins.”
This hadn’t explained anything, so Jonnie had said, “I bet I could find something down there to build a cabin with.”
His father had knelt down, patient for once, and said, “You’re a good boy, Jonnie.
Hughes: *as Jonnie* Yeah, it’s my middle name.
Zidane: *also as Jonnie* My other middle name is Shirley.
And your mother and I love you very much. But nobody could build anything that would keep out the monsters.”
Squall: Try the rocks.
Monsters, monsters. All his life Jonnie had been hearing about the monsters. He’d never seen one. But he held his peace. The oldsters believed in monsters, so they believed in monsters.
But thinking of his father brought an unwelcome wetness to his eyes.
Zidane: Sweet Cosmos, he’s sprung a leak! Quick, get a patch on it before he shows an emotion!
Squall: ...
Zidane: Ten. You’re just giving these to me, aren’t you?
Squall: One for each crystal.
Hughes: Yeah, except I’m the one winning the bet.
Zidane: Damnit.
And he was almost unseated as his horse reared. A string of foot-long mountain rats had rushed headlong from a cabin and hit Windsplitter’s legs.
What you get for dreaming, Jonnie snapped to himself. He put Windsplitter’s four hooves back down on the path and drummed him forward the last few yards to the courthouse.
Zidane: ...That’s it?
Hughes: And nothing of value was accomplished.
Zidane: ...That’s it? *that eyetwitch is back*
Squall: Looks like it.
Zidane: ...What is this shit?! *aaaand he’s vaulting to his feet, glaring at the screen* That wasn’t a chapter, that was an excerpt! That was MAYBE four minutes worth of reading material right there! I’ve seen soliloquies longer than that! I’ve seen slapstick pratfalls longer than that! Whoever thinks that’s enough for an ENTIRE CHAPTER needs to be drawn and quartered!
Squall: I think I’ve made longer speeches, if it’s only four minutes.
Zidane: EXACTLY! If you can use up your entire stock of words for the week in one go, then a professional author who got paid to write this crap needs to put some more crystal-damned effort into this! THERE WAS NO SINGLE LINE OF DIALOGUE IN THE PRESENT IN THIS ENTIRE SCENE!
Hughes: There was dialogue in chapter one.
Zidane: THAT WAS CHAPTER ONE! This guy’s father just died AND HE CAN’T EVEN BE BOTHERED TO SAY HE’S SAD?! We get barely any pages of freaking introspection BUT HE CAN’T EVEN BE BOTHERED TO SAY HE’S SAD HIS ONLY FATHER DIED?!
Hughes: No, there were two chapters. Also, Zidane, it’s over so let’s just go, okay? You can rant all you want elsewhere.
Zidane: I AM GOING TO RANT RIGHT NOW! WHAT HACK WROTE THIS?! I SWEAR I’M GOING TO FIND HIM AND SHOVE THIS BOOK SO FAR UP HIS NOSE THAT THE SUN WON’T BE ABLE TO FIND IT TO EVEN THINK ABOUT SHINING!
Squall: Zidane. We’re leaving. *reaches over to start dragging him out of the theater*
Zidane: LET GO OF ME SQUALL! I DON’T CARE IF WE’RE STUCK HERE I AM GOING TO FIND THIS IDIOT AND SHOVE HIS OWN FOOT UP HIS ASS!
Hughes: *also helps with dragging, he’s good at that* Yeah, yeah. You tell them Zidane.
Squall: *not letting go*
Zidane: Will you bastards let go of my tail!
Squall: Not until you start walking.
Hughes: *as they leave the theater* And there was still no battle in that book.
Squall: You owe me for Earth, though.
*the “BURY DEAD GUY HERE” sign rests behind the seats, looking abandoned and forlorn*