jamieproctor.ca

Time moves oddly for trees.  By and large years pass quickly, but some moments can hang on forever.
The first rainfall.  The moment when you finally overtake your neighbours and claim the full sunlight for yourself.  Living through an early cold snap that sinks right into your xylem. 

The Eld Pine saw its first offspring of its two-hundredth year clear the forest floor and push infinitesimal needles out to catch the fiery rays of the fading sun, and felt a satisfaction that sunk deep in every root and bit of bark.  It wheezed in long, slow tree joy as the breeze touched them both, and knew that it would never forget this moment.

“Whew, I’m bushed,” announced a passing lumberjack loudly.  He wiped his brow, dropped his fifty-pound pack on the Eld Pine’s seedling, and sat on its roots.  “Jumpin’ Josephat in a jiggery-pokery jumping for joy.  Gosh.  Sheesh.”

He sat there for four minutes panting, picked his nose, wiped it on the Eld Pine’s trunk, and then brushed off his pants and got up.

“I think I’ll put the cabin here,” he said aloud.

“Fuck you.”
“Pardon?”
But there was no noise but the wind in the branches, and so the lumberjack shrugged, went back to camp, returned, made a cabin, stayed overwinter, and was quite dismayed when come spring the enormous pine tree nearby toppled over and crushed his home flat, missing his bed by an inch. 

That was where it all started. 

***

 “I wonder where it all started?” asked Marta Lumbersdotter.

Her sister Jan looked up from the woodpile she lay prone upon.  “Well, that big spruce fell on Mr. Blinsky’s outhouse this morning and we had to come over real fast because he was still inside it; then while we were dealing with that the pine grove chain-topppled each other on top of the cabin one after another, and we had to deal with that because Mrs. Blinksy and the three Blinskettes were stuck in the root cellar; then we’d just finished when little Joey Cornweed came running up the road and told us that it had all been a distraction and the north field was full of maples.”
“No, no, no.  I mean, this.  When THIS all started.”
“Oh.”  Jan looked down her leg.  “Well, uh-”

“When things got so busy ‘round here.”
“-Mar –”

“I mean, I’ve been talking with Little Louise from down in Mirchburg and she said – you know what she said? – she said that they don’t have ENOUGH trees these days.  That they’ve chopped all the ones close to the village and now they need to walk half the day to find anything decent-sized!  When did ours get so crabby?”

“Say, Mar?  I thought you were talking about my leg.”
“What about your leg?”

“Logpile’s resprouted.”
Marta stopped talking and used her eyes.  “Oh.”
“Yeah.  We must’ve left a stem untrimmed.  Thing you can save it?”
Marta picked up her lumbering axe.  “Come on.  Have I missed yet?”
“Only takes one, realLY JESUS CHRIST MAR cut it a BIT close there didncha?”

***

The maple seeds swung daintily through the air, landed amidst the violence and snarl of the helicopter’s rotors, and compressed thirty years of growth into three seconds. 

For a brief moment there were two suns in the same sky above Marbledown.  One was just smaller and angrier and caused the deaths of three people. 

“Fuck in a duck’s cruck!” snarled Thelma-Lee, the deep rasp of her voice audible even over the crackle and roar of her napalm launcher.  “Chopper’s down!”
Hubert looked up from his work, one hand lodged in his first-aid satchel and the other in his comrade’s torso.  “Wait, what?”

“Chopper’s DOWN!” roared Thelma-Lee.  She swung the heavy flamethrower in a quick arc, cracking its heavy barrel across the trunk of an onrushing aspen and sent it groaning to the crumbling sidewalk.  One reinforced steeltoe slammed down on it as the other swung forward and braced, taking the backblast from the next gout of heat as she held down the weapon’s trigger.  “We’re not flying out of here!  We’re walking!  And we’re not walking!  We’re running!  Got it?”
“I got it!”
“Good, then let’s go!”
“Wait, I’m not done-”

“You said you’d got it!”
“Simpson needs-”

“Simpson died four minutes ago you stupid bastard FOLLOW ME!”

Hubert was purple with fury, but he followed her.  He followed her through the shattered concrete and overchurned asphalt and past the flaming bonfires created where big hemlock bastards had crashed through the walls and into the dark dank depths of a parking garage overrun by succulent, creeping moss hard at work undermining the foundations and pillars of a million man-hours of work and out across the pure and unfiltered hell that had overtaken downtown and crushed it to death in roots thicker than buses before the mad dash past burning suburban lawns – grasses killed dead at a hundred paces by the seeping fury of black walnuts – and the final sprint that was the Big Lot, where there was no free parking spot that wasn’t clotted to bursting with burning trees and jagged metal. 

Thelma-Lee threw her empty flamethrower into an ash’s branches without looking, took the last three strides her lungs could force her to, rolled and dropped and stopped in that order, and found herself looking down the business end of a smaller flamethrower.  It looked pretty big from that angle. 

“Holy shit.  Sergeant Thelma-Lee?”
“Sir,” she replied vaguely.  It seemed safest.

“You’re so covered in sap I nearly roasted you.  Get your ass to medical ASAP; we’re pulling out and I want you in good hands and on someone else’s feet.  Mirchburg’s the new front.”
“Get Hubert first.  He’s worse off.”
“Won’t argue,” said the blur that was probably her superior officer.  “But I wouldn’t rush on his account anymore.”
Thelma-Lee looked across the nightmare jigsaw puzzle that had been a cinema’s parking lot, and try as she might she couldn’t see a single sign of her medic. 

She tried harder.  She tried harder and harder until her knees and her eyes gave out and she woke up three days later in Mirchburg and the view outside her window was the same one she’d fallen asleep to.

Hubert still wasn’t in it.

***

“Tell us again of the olden times,” asked Charley. 

“Yes,” begged Little Su.  “Tell us of the days before the Bunker.”
“Ooooh!” squeaked Brii.  “The Sun!  The Sun!  Tell us about the Sun again!  Was it really brighter than a match?  Did it really hurt to look at it?  Did it truly sit in the sky for half your lives?”
“Yes,” mumbled Eld Peggy.  “And yes.  And yes.  And yes.  And yes.  That was where they took their power from, my widdgets.  The tree-ees.  They sucked the sun from the air and it made them fierce and fast and strong and oh they took all of the Old Above apart by bits and pieces.  Only we little diggers here are left.  Only we.  Only we.  Only we.  There used to be more, you know.  More to the Bunker.”
“Beyond the Forbidden Doors?” asked Bitty Bridget in awed reverence.

“No.  Past West.”
“But there’s nothing past west!”
“No,” said Eld Peggy.  “Not anymore.  They took it.  The tree-ees do not come down here in person, oh no.  But their fingers are deep and strong and they come farther than you’d-”

She cocked her head and frowned.

“What?” asked Little Su.
“Shush,” said Eld Peggy.  And then: “oh no.  Oh dear.  All of you get everyone and go through the Forbidden Doors.  Take any food you can carry on the way but do not stop running.  Now start running.”
Charley picked up Eld Peggy.  She protested but had no strength to stop the younger woman, and in her darkest depths she was thankful for it when she saw the first roots burst through the bunker walls behind her.

***

The last ape vanished across the river, and for the first time in centuries no words were spoken aloud in that place.

Branches stilled, moved by nothing more than the wind.  Leaves rustled without purpose or malicious intent.  Roots reached for water alone. 

“What was THAT all about?” asked an old, old, old, old hickory. 

A gnarled elm, its trunk scarred by flames in ages past, shook gently as a rainstorm passed.  “I never asked.  I think an evergreen started it.”

“Conifers, eh?”
“What was that?” inquired a nearby sequoia. 

“Nothing.”
“Nothing.”
“Good.”
And then there were no more words at all.  Just woods. 

“I’m SO excited,” said Gracie.

“I know,” said Harry.  One arm was at the wheel; the other clutched the car door as if afraid it would fly away without him. 

“I mean, you’ll get to see the family!”
“I’ve met your family.”
“Yeah, but like, REALLY see them.  The great goose is when the town really comes alive, y’know?”
“Sure,” said Harry. 

“And I mean you can feel the difference in everyone.  You’re going to love it so much.”
“Yeah.  Hey, where do we park?”
“Oh just up ahead and turn right.”
“That’s a field.”
“Yeah!  The McClures let people park in it during the great goose.”
“This is a new car,” said Harry in a very patient and understanding voice that was more filled with hate than any mere venomous sneer. 
“Oh it’ll be fine, it’s all clean!  Come on, we’ve got to get in before the lines are too long if you want to grab a big sausage!”
“Pardon?”
“You’ll see!  You’ll love it SO much!”

***

The lines were thirty deep and two wide.

“Oh good we’re still early!” said Gracie.

“Great,” said Harry.  “You can get us these.  I’m going to go get us beer.”
“It’s a little early in the day for that, and-”

“Three hour car drive, it’s late enough for beer.”
“Okay sweetie.  What do you want on your sausage?”
“Nothing.”
“Plain?”
“I don’t want one,” said Harry.  And he was off, trudging into the dewy post-dawn greyness of a drizzly day in a coat that was NOT a rain jacket.

Nobody was selling umbrellas. 

“Getting a bit damp happens,” said Gracie when she found him again an hour and forty-nine minutes later, sitting on a particularly uncomfortable rock underneath a fall-dappled tree.  “It’s all part of the fun.  Here’s your sausage!”
“I don’t want a sausage,” said Harry. 

“It’s a local special.  See?  They hollow out the baguette and put it right in there.  All home-made, delicious!  And it was only five dollars.”
“You have mine.”
“It’s got onions in it.”
“I hate onions.”
“You’ll love them like this if you try them.  And all the rest, I’m sure – there’s like a thousand things to do here!”
“Great,” said Harry.  “Great.  Great.”
The tree bent gently in the wind and dropped a bucket of water on him. 

***

A thousand things were indeed available at the Galviston goose festival.  Provided you were willing to count each of them a few times each. 

There were carnival games, which Harry said were a waste of money.  Gracie won him a little teddy bear, which he quietly threw out when she was in the toilets. 

There were toilets, arranged in neat rows and rows and rows.  Harry went in the bushes and was accosted by an irate parent for being next to the playground. 

There were playgrounds and bouncy castles for the young and for the parents to have a quiet smoke.  Gracie asked Harry how he felt about kids again, and he pretended he was suffering from earwax buildup again. 

There was a first-aid tent, well-stocked.  Harry slipped the guy a twenty to say he’d cleaned out his earwax, and got a lollypop into the bargain.  He gave it to Gracie, and that kept her mouth shut until they reached her parents.

There were Gracie’s whole family, cousins, uncles, aunts, nieces, nephews, parents, siblings, grandparents, great-uncles, great-aunts, and god-knows-whats, all of them loud and happy and cheering and urging them to get into the good seats they’d gotten right at the front of the pier, overlooking the corn barge.

There was the corn barge.

“What the hell is this?” asked Harry.

“It’s the corn barge!” explained Gracie. 

“Great,” said Harry.  “When are we eating it?”

The Great Goose touched down at the other end of the lake. 

***

It was a small event in the grand scheme of things, but in the local scheme of things that meant a brief but spirited twelve-foot swell that set the corn-barge slamming against the docks like a gong, a gale that stripped the red-and-orange leaves from the trees, and Harry’s heart nearly stopping in his chest. 

“WONK,” said the Great Goose.  It paddled gently forwards, crossing the entire lake in about four seconds.  “WONK.”
“Holy fucking shit piss Christ fuck,” said Harry. 
“Language,” giggled Gracie.  She nudged him.  “I told you this’d be great!  How you like the Great Graviston Goose Festival now, eh?”
“How does nobody KNOW about this thing?”
“WONK,” said the Great Goose, who was investigating the corn-barge cautiously.  It rearranged all its feathers three times. 

“Well, we try to keep it zipped.  Nobody wants it getting popped by a hunter, right?”
“With what, a fucking cannon?  Jesus Gracie.  What the hell is wrong with this place?”
“Oh, nothing you haven’t already seen,” she said airily. 

“What if it gets cranky?  We’re leaving.”

“Sure!  It’s about done now anyways.”  Gracie’s little hand smoothed down the back of his jacket one last time.  “Anything else?” she asked.  “Another sausage?  More popcorn?  A beer?”
“Just shut up for a moment,” he muttered.  His eyes felt like they were too big for his skull. 

“Alrighty!” she said, and gave a little shove with that little hand, helped by a few anonymous arms from various cousins, uncles, aunts, nieces, nephews, parents, siblings, grandparents, great-uncles, great-aunts, and god-knows-whats. 

“Farewell, sweetie!” she sang out. 

“Hooray!” cheered the crowds.

“WONK,” thundered the Great Goose.

“mmlrooph,” mumbled Harry through litres and litres of corn, buried head-first. 

“WONK,” replied the Great Goose.  And then it reached down and bit Harry and twisted, and it bit Harry and twisted, and it bit and twisted and bit and twisted until there wasn’t really anything left.  It nibbled aggressively at the corn bin for twenty minutes before a rapturous audience, ruffled its feathers, shook its wings, and – filled with spite and maize – produced a single, glorious pellet of barely-digested poop. 

Then it said “WONK,” and took off again. 

The feces were carted away and praised and prayed over and spread over the fields for a good harvest, that sort of thing. 

Crown Princess Madeleina Von de Compte Schwanmept Rupert Twissy (third of her name) sat on a broken stalagmite, scratched her shoulders under the shawl she’d made of half her best gown, gazed upon the broken and jagged stones of Kalamity Peak, and pondered upon the pros and cons of being violently abducted by a dragon on her eighteenth birthday. 

Well, she didn’t have to wear her best gown anymore.  The damned thing had almost stifled her to death before the dragon’s claws had pierced several of its mainstays, gaffs and booms as she was plucked up from the Tsaress of Ammygdala’s garden. 

The dragon’s name was Rxixghorashclaclajermorashahexamalcrar.  Madeleina had asked her if she could shorten it to ‘Rxix,’ or better yet, ‘Rix.’  She had been denied this. 

Learning how to fend for herself on the greatest of the Shattered Trinity peaks had been exhilarating.  Madeleina had never imagined herself so happy to snap a rabbit’s neck with her bare hands, or so cunning at finding fresh wild onions growing in the finger-deep soil in the lee of a boulder. 

So on the whole things seemed to almost be more good than bad.  But the way Rxixghorashclaclajermorashahexamalcrar kept offhandedly informing Madeleina she was going to eat her… well.  She could do without that.  It made the whole affair a bit sour to her mouth. 

Oh right!  That reminded her.  It had been five minutes (counted by heartbeats; Madeleina had always had a nice even pulse since she was a child), and it was time to flip the little rabbit steaks where they sizzled on the flattest stone she could find, placed close enough to the fire that the flames almost licked it salaciously. 

The second side would move much more quickly. 

Onions, onions, little green onion sprouts, and the biggest safest mushroom she’d found (bless her childhood tutor and her odd fascination with fungi), all sizzling merrily away in what little fat she’d scraped off the sides of the poor rabbit.  Good thing they were well away from winter. 

Browned all.  As good a crust as she could make without iron.  Bless the days she’d spent eavesdropping on the kitchens, bless her father’s inattentiveness to her studies when she was a child, and bless the palate of Rxixghorashclaclajermorashahexamalcrar be fond of coneys. 

And as she thought of the devil, so she appeared.  There were many words and many ways to conceptualize the arrival of the dragon, of her scale and of her scope and of her span and so on, but perhaps the most clear way to encompass her in the moment of her landing was a single word that wasn’t a word at all, and that word was

WHOOOOMP.
“Now what have you been up to this time?” asked Rxixghorashclaclajermorashahexamalcrar.  She sniffed, a surprisingly delicate affectation, but then again Madeleina  had learned after four or five escape attempts that she had a nose that made a bloodhound look like an elder with a head-cold.   “Smells burned.  Promising!”
“The onions are CHARRED,” said Madeleina  with a severity that she took from her chaperone and knew full well would have no effect. 

“Synonyms, synonyms, synonyms,” chanted the dragon.  “And who is this for?”
“Why, you,” said Madeleina .  “In hopes that you’ll find something tastier for your plate than Crown Princess.”
“I have no plates.”
“Palate, then,” said Madeleina .  “Go on.  It’s just finished.”
“Don’t mind if I do,” said Rxixghorashclaclajermorashahexamalcrar, and she scooped up the meat,  the mushrooms, the onions, the rocks they were cooking on, the entire campfire, and very nearly Madeleina if she hadn’t fallen over backwords, then she tipped the whole lot into her maw and swallowed once. 

“Hmm,” she said.  “Hmm.  Mpph.  Ack.  Well, a bit crunchy and tasteless.  Promising hint of warmth, but not much substance to it.  I think I’d rather still eat you, sorry.”
“You weren’t meant to eat the stones,” said Madeleina crossly. 

“What, surely you didn’t intend  for me to consume the meat alone?” said Rxixghorashclaclajermorashahexamalcrar in astonishment.  “That little thing?”
“It wasn’t a small rabbit.”

“Princess, princess, princess,” said Rxixghorashclaclajermorashahexamalcrar solemnly, shaking her head that was bigger than a plough-horse, shark-jagged teeth still shedding crushed granite.  “There ARE no big rabbits.”
“Perhaps there are no big Crown Princesses either,” said Madeleina. 

“Big enough,” said Rxixghorashclaclajermorashahexamalcrar, as she eeled her way down, down, down into the dark chasms of the cave, where no light would disturb her nap.  “Big enough.”

***

The next day, Crown Princess Madeleina Von de Compte Schwanmept Rupert Twissy (third of her name, and may there be others after her), went hunting. 

And the next day.

And the next.

And the next day she went again and finally found something, which (bless the slow digestion of dragons) was just in time.  It was an elk come up the mountain slopes to feed on the little summer meadows in full flower downslope from where Rxixghorashclaclajermorashahexamalcrar did her business (volcanic ash was a wonder for plants it seemed), and it was majestic and alert and entirely unprepared for a very small but targeted landslide. 

Madeleina had learned a lot of very specific geological facts in her time on the peaks.  Where to put her feet and when had been number one. 

Digging the elk out was hard, but it was nicely tenderized and not too badly mangled.  She dragged it upslope an inch at a time. 

There were no scavengers.  Predators kept well out of the way of a dragon’s scent. 

The liver, the kidneys, the heart, all separated and chopped and minced as best as she could with a knife made from a stone-sharpened snapped femur, then boiled in its stomach, in a wooden bowl filled with fire-heated stones. 

The meat of the flank and the haunch and the shoulder and the ribs and EVERYWHERE, cut free in flaps and sliced and scorched senseless on the thinnest, flattest, hottest rocks she could find. 

The application of what few herbs she could pluck from the meadow that probably weren’t poisonous, along with a very few, very small, very hot little peppers that she’d sampled herself and determined to be as close to human-inedible as any fruit could be. 

It wasn’t a feast, but it was more than she’d have ever thought she’d managed, with less than she’d ever dreamed of having. 

“I smell meat,” said the dragon’s voice, rich and thunderous and wrapping around Madeleina like a velvet blanket.  “And blood.  And oh my that’s a LOT of blood.  Are you going to be sick?”
“No,” said Madeleina, who’d scrubbed off as best as she could in the little cave-stream. 

“Good.  Now, what is this?”
“Elk haggis,” said Madeleina.  “And elk…” Steak?  Roast?  Rump?  Chuck?  Shoulder?  “…bits,” she decided on. 

“What’s haggis?”
“A bit of everything.”
“What a good idea,” said Rxixghorashclaclajermorashahexamalcrar, and she plucked up the haggis and the roasted meats and put them all in her mouth, moved her tongue in a curious manner, swallowed, and spat out the basket. 

“Well!” she said in a pleased way.  “That’s certainly better than raw, I’ve got to say.  Now I see a use for this cooking besides satisfying your sad little stomachs.”
“Would you like more?” asked Madeleina. 
“Not quite as much as I’d like to eat you,” sighed Rxixghorashclaclajermorashahexamalcrar.  “But it was close!”
“Really?”
“Well.  Maybe not THAT close,” admitted the dragon.  And she curled up quite tightly and went to sleep immediately with a satisfied little grunt. 

***

Four days later Crown Princess Madeleina Von de Compte Schwanmept Rupert Twissy (third of her name, god willing, not the last) had found four tough little mountain potatoes and a long-dead grouse that had perished in a crevice out of reach of fox and crow and stoat but not, alas, of ants. 

She watched the sun rise and had never seen anything more fully in her life, hungry and cold and depressed as she was.  It spreads its rays across the Shattered Trinity, and across the far green lands her father ruled, and all the way to the world rolling away beyond her sight and past. 

It was a lovely place.  Pity she’d not get to see more of it.   Pity she’d never learned more about foraging, or hunting, or cooking.  Pity that Rxixghorashclaclajermorashahexamalcrar wanted to eat a princess so badly.  But there was precious little space in that sunlight for pity or regret or the future so Crown Princess Madeleina Von de Compte Schwanmept Rupert Twissy (third of her name) cleared her throat and said the following:

“I, Crown Princess Madeleina Von de Compte Schwanmept Rupert Twissy (third of her name), hereby renounce my title, my peerage, my stature, my family, my crown, my birthright, and all other particulars.”

She shut her eyes tight for a minute, then risked opening one a crack.

The sunrise was still very pretty.

So Madeleina sat and watched it for a long, long time until the stones behind her crackled and crunched and ground away under the great rolling gut of a dragon’s passing. 

“Hmm!” said Rxixghorashclaclajermorashahexamalcrar sharply.  “Hmm!  What have YOU been doing?”
“Nothing much,” said Madeleina, truthfully. 

“Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm,” said Rxixghorashclaclajermorashahexamalcrar.  “That doesn’t SMELL like nothing.  You’ve done something.  Come on, tell me.”
“I’ve renounced my title,” said Madeleina.

“Oh wyrmtitties,” said the dragon in the crossest voice Madeleina had ever heard.  “No wonder.  Ugh, you’re all off now.  Nothing there but hard work and sweat.  If I wanted peasant I have villages close by, and I never have and never will.  Bah.  Bah!”

“You… wanted to eat me just for my title?” asked Madeleina.

The dragon snorted and the ceiling shook.  “Certainly,” she said.  “It’s where all the sweet and spice comes from.  Fancy living and soft lives and cushy money make for tender flesh, you know – but nothing adds to flavour like wealth and power.”
“Then why take me?” asked Madeleina.  “You plunged down to my father’s first summer ball of the year!  The gardens of Borjeport are SWARMING with the titled gentry!  You could’ve had a double handful of earls and countesses for breakfast every day for the past two weeks!”
Rxixghorashclaclajermorashahexamalcrar looked at her.  “You mean to say… there are nobility that aren’t princesses?”
“Yes.”
“Or royalty in general?”
“Yes!”
The dragon stared into the sun.  “Perhaps…” she ventured cautiously “even the untitled can live like nobles?”
“Some of them.”
“And they will be at these summer balls?”
“Absolutely.”
“Wonderful.  I’ll be home tonight.  Feel free to be about your business.”

WHOOOOMP.

Madeleina, first and probably last of her name (she’d never been very fond of it, or the grandmother who’d insisted on it), watched the dragon fly until her wings faded away in  the vast blue of the morning sky. 

Well. 

Perhaps it was for the best that she’d never been terribly fond of high society. 

I looked out my bedroom window.  First mistake of the day. 

Up above me, the skies poured down vaporwave rainwater, broken only by the passing shelter of a zeppelin’s underbelly.  Down below people shook hands and spoke of shares and futures as they stepped over the bodies of the corporateless in the gutters, and there was a McDonalds in every hand.  And across the interstate I saw the face of some gutless unshaven slob staring back at me in the reflective glass of a skyscraper. 

Just another day on the mean streets of the 20^th century, where freedom reigned and there was a world war around every corner.  I took a long drag on my breakfast cigar.  GMO marijuana, of course – the real stuff was hard to come by ever since the Cuban embargo kicked in – and I brooded on how sick I was of this life with the help of this morning’s paper.  Hitler, Mussolini, Archduke Ferdinand, and Vader… I was sick of war.  I’d done my time back in the trenches of Vietnam and now I couldn’t sleep for memories of the A-bombs going off inside my brains. 

My doorbell rang, my door slammed open, and in walked Trouble, first name Big middle name Time.  She was a platinum blonde flapper with a suit whose shoulder pads could’ve cut the eyes from an unwary passerby or a handsy coworker without blinking. 

“Mister Bogart?” she inquired. 

“Just ‘Schwarzenegger’ is fine,” I told her.  You don’t stand on ceremony when you’re talking to someone from C-level.  This was a corporate class dame if I’d ever spotted one, and she had the hard and spiked look in her eyes of someone who’d clawed their way into it by force rather than birth, who’d placed coke plants with her own two hands and personally funded disinformation on smoking health hazards.  In her mother’s day she would’ve harpooned whales. 

“Good.  I’m here for a delicate situation, and a little bat told me you’re just the man for it.”
“Then you can call me by my maiden name instead,” I said.  “’Discreet.’”

“Wonderful.  There’s been a murder and the police aren’t investigating it.”

“Who’s the victim?”

“My husband.”
I didn’t frown, but it took concentration.  I’d been sent on  a lot of wild pigeon chases by spouses too desperate to believe that a loved one’s death was an honest accident.  “Any suspects?”

“Oh, I killed him,” said the C-level airily.  “I just need you to prove it.”

My cigar stub vanished somewhere into the 50-yen shag linoleum carpet.  I didn’t notice.  I didn’t care.  I barely managed my first question, which was “huh?”
“I’m Vice President Hunter S. Margaret Atwood,” said the dame with a smile you could’ve sharpened a bowie knife on, “and I’m delighted to make your acquaintance, Schwarzenegger Discreet Bogart.”

***

First things first, I ziptied her to a chair.  She helped. 

“Spill the beans, sister,” I told her.  “What’s your angle here?”
“Why, I have no angle whatsoever, Schwarzenegger,” she said innocently.  “Simply report my deeds to the police with enough evidence to support my claims.  They’ve denied me so far.  I will hire you for a retaining fee of a hundred Euros a day, plus expenses.”
A man could get pretty far on that money.  But there was something at work here I didn’t trust.  “Why’d you do it?” I demanded.  “President George Roosevelt was the highest in the polls since William Churchill.”

“Oh, I loved him so,” she said.  “But it had to be done.  This country’s new wars will not be over worlds, or even stars like Mr. Vader believes, but over temperature gradients.  I knew the field was too important to be left unattended.  So did my husband.  But we…disagreed on policy.  And now that he’s dead, I myself am president of the United Nations of Americas.  There’s just one problem…”
“No body?”

“No body!” she spat at me.  “The slippery pigfucker tripped and fell down the garbage disposal in our kitchen after I slit his throat.  And until he’s proven dead, I’m the vice president.  Only the president can declare a new war!”

“Damn,” I mused.  “Profit preserve us, this is a pretty pronounced pickle we’re facing here.  Did his x-files survive?”
“No.  The disposal left only meat and mangled polyester.  Not even his credit card was left intact.”

This was getting intense.  “I’m going out for a smoke,” I told her.  “Be back in a minute.”
Then I stepped outside my door, pulled out my matches, and lost consciousness. 

***

When I woke it was in a murky haze that reminded me of Vietnam, where I’d left so many of my friends behind in Flander’s Fields. 

“Rise and shine, gaijin” said a man’s mouth next to my ear in a heaven Texish accent.  I tried to turn my head and couldn’t because I was tied down at wrist and ankle. 

“Welcome back to the land of the living, Mister Bogart,” sneered the voice, which I’d heard a hundred hundred times on national radio. 

“Thanks for not killing me instead,” I said.  It was a bluff: the ache in my skull had brought last week’s hangover back from the grave twice as strong and twice as vengeful. 

“Don’t mention it, hombre,” said the voice, and its owner walked around in front of me and sat down on a backwards-facing chair like he was in a video about to warn high schoolers not to inhale LSD. 

There he was, two hundred pounds and six foot five, in a cowboy hat and a thousand-dime suit: ‘Big’ Billiam Gates, the biggest carbon-lord the fossilized fuels industry had ever seen.  Personally pulling a pair of wire cutters out of his pocket to fuck me up.  Some people would’ve killed to be in my position. 

“So, what’s gotten a bee in your bonnet, Billy?” I asked. 

“You’ve been in cahoots with the vice president,” he said.  “I bet I know what lies she poured in your ears.  Told you all about the glorious future of temperature warfare, didn’t she?  Told you about how she’s going to make a grillion dollars for every Amersican man, woman, and dog by sending the thermometer industry through the stratosphere and to the moon?”

“No,” I said, half-truthfully.  It didn’t matter.  One of the many things Big Billiam had enjoyed for much of his life was not having to pay attention to anything anyone said to him. 

“Well, that putz is full of shit and full of smarts.  Yeah, the future isn’t in world wars or space wars, and it even has a role to play in temperature.  But she thinks it’s gonna be cold.  Ice cold.  She’ll have us packing parkas and stuffing stockings and winterizing roads until the end of time.  Me?  I’ve seen the way we’re headed.  My Model-T and Windows XP are just the start: the whole world is going to run on a carbon economy sooner or later.  And when we do that?  Things are going to heat up.  She wants a cold war, but I say things are going to get HOT.”
“You’re insane,” I told him.  “Nobody’s going to happily sign up to cook themselves and  the  entire rest of the planet to death just  so you can make a few bucks.”
“Believe what you like, schweinhund,” he smiled.  “With you here the vice president will never ascend to the throne…and will never start her cold war.  Instead, me and my friend  here will get our way.  Isn’t that right, comrade Reagan?”
I would’ve gasped if my lungs weren’t fluttering desperately for air.  Instead I could merely stare, wide-eyed, as the leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of the California stepped into the room. 

“Indeedy it is old chap pip pip,” he said.  “Jolly good.  Arigato much for having me toodle-oo over here.  I say I say what shall we do with this fella here wot wot?”

“He knows too much,” said Gates.  “Let’s throw him out for the thylacines.  A last meal before we raise the temperature and it floods all of Australia, eh mon ami?”

“Fuck you,” I said weekly as I was wheeled over to the door.

“Dasvidaniya, ya son of a bitch,” chuckled Gates. 

And then the door flew off its hinges.  Behind it stood fourteen RAF SWAT officers, armed to the teeth with punji sticks and mustard gasses.  At their head stood the smirking figure of my old boss. 

“Alright, gentlemen, what seems to be the problem here?” asked FBIA director J. Edgar Nixon. 

One more inch, just one more, and I’d have worked my left hand free off the cuffs.  My right pocket protector held a PDA, a pen, and a pen that was actually a knife.  Any of them would be better than nothing at a time like this. 

That was when the white phosphorous bomb went off.  With a roaring groan, the great mass of the CN Tower began to slide away beneath our feet, suspending us over the bottomless abyss of the Grand Canyon.  My entire life flashed before my eyes from infancy during the Boer War to the icy plains of Northern Vietnam in my tragically cut-short teenage years to the freshly-constructed Death Star taking shape even now in the skies above New York and I knew that I’d seen too many wars…

…but if I acted fast, I could still stop this one before the Y2K crash. 

TO BE CONTINUED IN VOLUME  XXXIII OF 20^th CENTURY ACTION STORIES!  REAL HISTORY!  REAL ACTION!  REAL GOOD!

Katie’s day was off to a bad start already: she was awake, and there was some godawful radio in her ear chirping happily about how fabulously the war was going and wasn’t that peachy.  She groaned, scratched herself in unspeakable places, found coffee, stared at the coffee, tried the coffee, discarded the coffee, put on a halfassed impression of a normal human being’s clothes, and went to work. 

“Hey girl,” she asked as she got into the lab, still sleep-grimy with an uncleanness no sanitization protocol could fix, “how you doing?”
The frizeen said nothing.  Not a mandible-click, not a thorax-chirr, not even a deep-abdomen pulse. 

Katie’s own pulse lurched.  “Oh come on,” she said.  She pulled up diagnostics at the terminal.  “Oh come on come on come ON fuck’s sake not AGAIN” and it was again. 

All vital statistics were regular, even, and relaxed, and her patient was no longer present. 

“Come ON!”

Sixty times.  Sixty times in three months.  At this rate she’d never get through a full vivisection. 

***

Humanity and Frizeenity had gotten off to a bad start, but in an inevitable and blameless sort of way.  Humans were humans, and the frizeen looked sort of like giant bugs with glowing eyes, and there were centuries of poorly-written novels that explained how that could only ever end one way.

So there was war, and bombardments, and tactics, and manoeuvering, and bold gambits, and lots and lots of money and time and effort being spent in odd places.  One of those odd places was Katie, who was supposed to be a veterinarian and was now some sort of complicated auxiliary or draftee or something or other.  Her knowledge was being used for the good of the many, and since a surgeryAI could put a higher primate back together nigh-flawlessly nowadays that good was principally dissection of the enemy, where nothing had ever quite been found that could replace the ingenuity of the human being.  

Katie and her ingenuity did a desultory exploration of her patient, skipped the hard parts, washed herself clean of the odd purple jelly that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere within the average frizeen, and went to lunch for breakfast. 

She wasn’t the only one.  Table 40C was occupied by the only person in the building as annoyed as she was.

“Hey,” said Katie.

“Hey is for horses,” said Gloria, without looking up, “and if you ask for it too much you’ll start to whinny.”

“That’s stupid.”
“My grandmother told me that.”
“She was stupid.  My job’s stupid.  Everything’s stupid.  Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid stupid stupid.  Did they make eggs this morning?”
“Yes.  Scrambled.”
“Fuck I want fried ugh damnit.”

Gloria still hadn’t looked up.  She was apparently reading the future in her coffee.

“You looked like you’re reading the future in your coffee,” said Katie.

“God, I wish.”
“Morning that shit?”
“Completely.  And you?”
“Yes.”
They shared a sigh and so much more. 

“They just…slip off,” said Katie.  “But nothing changes!  Biologically speaking.  Organs keep running, basic brain function’s there, but nobody’s home and everything stops reacting properly.  And I can’t tell you what’s causing it.  Not a hormone, not a protein, not a neural impulse, not an invisible goddamned unicorn.  There’s no signal.”
“I can’t tell you what’s causing it either because I can’t tell you anything new and I haven’t told you anything new for the past six months,” said Gloria.  “And you know it.”
“Yes,” said Katie.  “That’s why I complain to you.  You’re the only person here whose job is even more shit than mine.”
Gloria slowly and delicately flipped her the bird.  The fingernail shone like a diamond in the orange light that peered through the cafeteria windows. 

“So, how is it?” replied Katie to the finger.

“The what.”
“The more shit than mine.”
“Same as it is.  I go over the texts, I get myself hopped up on false hope, I get in the interrogation room, I start asking the real tough questions, and they get all confused and then stop replying  and then we break out the direct neural stimulation needle complex and then they turn off.”

“I thought you got a full library after Kepple Beta got seized.  Nothing new in there for you guys?”
“Nothing new.  Just the same old nonsense.  Everything’s religious with these jerks – can’t go two paragraphs in the middle of a textbook on lichens without stating the oneness and immortality of all life in the universe – but there’s no angle in there.  I’ve brought in forty kinds of religious thought and they just stare at me.  They’re the least evangelical fundamentalists I’ve ever met, and I can’t believe I’m saying this but I HATE it.”

“Psych major, psych major, psych major,” sang Katie deliberately off-key.

“Dog-prodder,” said Gloria.

“I worked with cattle mostly.”
“Whatever.”
Breakfast or lunch or whatever arrived and Katie ate some of it but the real meat of what she’d needed had been someone else’s irritation.  The day didn’t feel so bad anymore.

***

The scalpel slipped in, the inner lung-plating slipped aside, and the patient slipped away with a little sigh.

“PISS FUCK”

The day felt so bad anymore. 

Katie’s hands were tired and her mouth was dry and her head was hurting and the assistants were wheeling in subject number sixty-two and something in her said ‘sure, why not.’

“Give me the gurney,” she said.

“Pardon?”
Katie took the gurney, and took it to the halls, and took it at a run. 

***

General Gracie Goodman was old and tiny and shrivelled and lived by spite.  She reminded Katie of her mother, her father, and possibly her aunts. 

“This day’s a mess,” she complained bitterly.  “I had a full half-hour extra for lunch before the physics department filled my line up with complaints and the finance department told me the entire Enormous Quark Splitter would have to be refurbished from scratch and the MPs hauled you in for vandalism and you yelled at everyone that you’d finally found something and just HAD to tell me about it right away.  What was it?”
“It was more what we didn’t find,” said Katie.

Gracie gave her a look that communicated itself fully and entirely. 

“So, my dissections never confirmed an agent behind the frizeen…. Shutting down.  Nothing.  No cause.  And after this morning’s spontaneous test in the particle accelerator –”

“Which you will be docked pay for, for the next ten million years.”
“-we can confirm my lack of confirmation.  Nonconformation.  A living frizeen was bombarded with everything while our instruments measured anything as it underwent its alteration: there is nothing that causes this, no change in state of matter.  It looks like their fundamental being and self are contained in a strictly nonphysical form independent of their bodies.  In other words, or repeating my words, we have confirmed – or at least, confirmed through nonconformation – the existence of the immortal soul –”

“what”

“- in the frizeen,” finished Katie. 

There was a long and brutal silence while the general chewed that over.

“By fuck,” she said at last.  “Do you know what this means?”
Katie did not know what that meant.

“It means,” said the general with violent relish, “that I can ask the folks down in R&D to design weapons that annihilate souls.  Shit in a mustard bottle, your job is a smashing success.  Take the week off from the war and have some fun.”

***

Katie slept in, avoided coffee, and ate a lot of cupcakes.  It helped more than it should’ve. 

The deed was old and carefully-kept, folded once with caution twice for necessity and never ever opened or closed without great need.  The drawer it lived in was well-made and kept out dust and draught and sun so the ink wouldn’t fade and the paper wouldn’t crease and it would stay there until it was needed or the end of time itself.  It had taken my great-great-great-grandparents their entire lives to earn, and they’d taken some pains with it.  They’d seen what happened to my great-great-great-great-grandparents when they didn’t have one. 

It crumpled up in the palm of the faeman’s hand until it looked like last autumn’s leaves.

“Chicanery,” he said.  Every syllable was neat and tidy and tight-lipped, which matched him in every bone. 

The fae were peculiar as a rule, but I’d never heard of one like him before (at least in dress; in ice-pale face and dead-man’s hair he was every inch what I’d expected).  The faeman was dressed in a suit that would’ve sobered a lawyer, had shoes that didn’t shine so much as simmer, and an expression that never wavered or loosened that reminded me of my dear great-grandmother, whose funeral had been attended by three, counting the gravedigger. 

“Pardon?” I asked. 

“No,” he replied without hesitation.  “No pardon granted.  You are unlawful.  A hundred thousand lifetimes ago I dwelled with my kin under barrow we carved, under hill we delved, through glen we shaped, in this place we seized.”  A long slim scroll sprouted from his hand like a mushroom; banded and branded with cold silver and red sealing wax: a deed to make mine shrink.  “A thousand lifetimes ago your meager folk came here crawling and begging and grovelling for shelter.  Your land-deed is purest fiction, and I am under every right to claim my rights against your squatting.  By my right to barrow, and to hill, and to glen.”

And as the faeman held his deed the barrow groaned under his heels and the hill shuddered and the glen’s trees reached out long and fine so that they covered the sky from me.  My house wasn’t big, and it looked smaller still in this shade. 

“Now begone,” he said.  “Three days you have to forsake your false deed and gather yourself and begone yourself.  Past that, there will be consequences.”

“I will appeal,” I told him.  And he didn’t laugh at me, because I wasn’t sure he could.  But his mouth made the smallest smile you could think of. 

***

I took my crumpled deed in my pocket and I walked down to the town hall, where the mayor was working very hard.  People were giving him money and papers and he was taking the money and giving it to someone else and signing the papers and giving them to someone else. 

“I would like to protest against my eviction,” I told the mayor politely after a few hours. 

“Give it to me and go away,” he said without looking.

I gave the deed to him. 

“Yes, yes, yes, excellent,” he muttered, and folded it up very very small and handed it to someone else. 

“This isn’t money,” they told him politely.

“Hmmph,” he said.  He folded it up very very small again and handed it to someone else.

“This isn’t a signature,” they said deferentially.

“Hmomph,” he harrumphed.  Finally he looked at it himself. 

“Well, that’s a deed,” he said.  “How dull.  What’s the problem?”
“I would like to protest against my eviction,” I repeated.

“Ugh, that’s boring,” the mayor said.  “So tedious.  Well, tell them to stop it.  Who is that, anyways?”
“A faeman,” I told him.  “Tall, with a suit.  No joy in his face, but dangerous shoes.”
The mayor jumped so badly his chair popped apart.  “Oh NO,” he said hastily.  “Fae matters are a legal matter for the courts, not for the civic authorities.  Precedence, you see, loads of precedence, laid down in tomes of legality and criminality and generality long long LONG ago.  Go somewhere else to handle this, to someone else, who will do something else.  Go away now please please please before anything happens.”
“I have three days-” I began.

“Good.  Don’t be standing near me when this happens.”

I went home and ate onions and potatoes.   

So.  That was a day wasted.

***

I took my crumpled and creased deed down to the courthouse in the city, which was made of large grey bricks and filled with large grey men and held a judge with a large grey wig atop a high bench. 

“This seems to be in order,” he said.  “Who is this alleged landlord?”
“A faeman,” I said.  “With a suit, and painful shoes, and a frozen pinched face.”
The judge turned greyer than his wig, lost six pounds from fright, and threw my deed back at me with shaking hands that tore little strips out of it sixteen times sixteen.  “Precedence favours the fae,” he said.  “Best be gone with you.”

“What precedence?” I asked. 

“Who knows!” he said.  “But they cite it, and they site it, and if you gainsay it then they SLAM it.  Get out before you drag us into it and under it!”
“I,” I said.  Then the bailiffs picked me up before my thought was finished and put me outside to finish it, where there was no point.

I went home and ate carrots and peas.

So.  That was the second day done for.

***

I took my crumped and creased and torn deed to the homes of my relatives, asking aid from cousins to uncles to aunts.  But when I told them of the faeman they all turned away, turned down their eyes, turned their voices low and sad and told me I could have a place to sleep at their homes until I could get my feet under me again. 

“Precedence favours him,” they told me.  And so on and on I heard. 

I didn’t go home because I’d eaten everything in the house and had been too busy to harvest more from my garden.  So on the evening of the third day I wandered, and when I was too tired to wander I laid down, and I closed my eyes, and I cried a little bit, and when I wiped my tears away I found out of sheer stupidity I’d used my deed.  Crumpled, creased, torn, and tear-stained. 

“This doesn’t mean anything to anyone,” I said.  And I threw it down on the dirt, and I stomped on it and at it as if it were my worst enemy, and when I was done there wasn’t anything left but specks and fragments that could’ve come from a bird’s nest or a mouse-house or an ant’s crumbs. 

Then I went home, and the faeman was waiting.

***

He was even longer and harsher in the twilight.  His face gleamed and his shoes still rippled, but everything else about him was smeared dark and vast by the darkness that seeped from the sky, from the great shadow of the deed in his hand.  It looked like a sword. 

“Three days have passed,” he told me sharply.  “I will take your deed now.  And if you hesitate I will take it and take more than that, and if you deny I will take it and everything and everything else.”
“I don’t have it,” I said. 

“How unfortunate,” he said, and that horrible little smile took his mouth again.  “For whoever takes it is a thief in equal measure.  Tell me, who is your accomplice.”
“Nobody,” I told him.

“Lies, lies, lies,” he chanted solemnly.  “Your case is now plagued by false testimony.  I demand of you now, by the barrow, by the hill, by the glen: WHO HOLDS YOUR DEED.”

Everything shook or I did, and it shook words out of me.  “The dirt,” I gasped. 

“What,” he said.  There was no question, just a demand.

“The dirt, and the soil, and the wind, and the air.  It meant nothing to anyone.”
It was the oddest thing.  As my head swam the faeman was all that was fixed in the world to me, solid as a rock in my eyes.  And with each word I said his face changed and changed until it was contorted in a perfect rictus of horror.

“What did you DO?” he shrieked. 

“I threw it away,” I said.  “It didn’t mean anything to any-”

“It’s not ANYONE that’s the problem here!” he screamed in my face.  “Oh no, it’s not ANYONE.  No ANYONE can gainsay me!  No ANYONE has place over me!  I am the first owner!”

“But-“

His arm shot out and his deed slapped me sharp across the face as fast as a snake.  It made my skin hiss and I bit my tongue. 

“You voided your deed, and gave it to the land,” he said.  He wasn’t looking at me, and he wasn’t talking to me either.  I’d seen that face on people before, but nobody’d ever warned me of what it’d look like on a fae.  “But it doesn’t mean anything.  It was a false deed.  Precedence is on my side.  Ownership is on my side.  The land is on my side.  It is mine.  It is mine.  It is mine.”

The trees reached up. 

They reached up, and up, and up. 

And the sky reached down.

And down, and down, and down. 

They clasped above our heads and I felt like a puff of soap bubble above the sea.  Around us the soil sighed, the dirt breathed. 

The faeman was very still, except for his mouth, which was moving faster than anything I’d ever seen.  “-precedence,” he was saying.  “Precedence favours me I retain ownership ownership is for persons not places things cannot own themselves belongings do not belong.  You are mine.  You are not you.  I am the lord of this land.  I am the lord of this land!  I AM the lord of this land!”

Sound left, and the faeman stood there, proud and upright and with fiercely shining shoes.

Then the barrow fell in with a sigh, and he fell with it and every stone after him, until nothing was left but an odd dent in a perfectly normal hillside.

***

I moved in with one of my relatives anyways.  Staying there wouldn’t have been frightening, but it wouldn’t be right.  I had no desire to infringe upon another’s space, not after it had been taken up so fervently. 

It was the greatest show on earth.  It was the highest-stakes gambling history had ever seen.  It was the ruination of nations, the menace of all men, the last-ditch absolutely-desperate attempt by the greatest powers of human history to come together and solve a problem that had defeated all of them alone.

A tall serious man with tall serious hair climbed to a tall serious podium.  Six dozen translators watched him like hungry hawks.

He coughed.

He snorted. 

He spat, then cleared his throat.  “’Scuse me.  The bidding for the first Interintraglobal Proposal to Permanently Solve All Parking Issues is now open!”

Paddles flew.  Spittle sprayed.  Blood was shed. 

“Applesoft bids to replace the north pole with a giant helicopter that will fly cars around, instead of letting them clog the highways!” screamed some nerd in a t-shirt.  “Seven septillion dollars!  It’s the future”

“Exxon-Mobil-Standard-Nestle will drain the entire Atlantic for use as garage space!” hollered an emaciated and wan-faced old coot, driving his cane deep into the spine of the CEO in front of him.  “Imagine the amount of space that can be reclaimed in the suburbs!  A hundred billion trillion million dollars!”

“McDonalds will donate one out of every seven hundred pennies we make for one year towards funding solutions for individuated parkers in need of parking,” wheedled a sack of flesh in a half-sack suit.  “No charge…. Although we WILL be wanting tax rebates for our time and charity and effort.”

“I will pave the entire horizon of the Earth for one hundred dollars.”

That got people’s attention, and as sure as if a giant drain had opened up in the floor all other noise swirled away into nothing.

“How?” asked the auctioneer.

“The power and wonder of imagination,” said the bidder serenely.  He was an older man with an older man’s beard and a warm smile somewhere in there. 

“How much again?”

“One hundred dollars – in advance, if that’s alright.  Oh, plus expenses.”

“Sold!  To the old coot!”
“Constructioneer, if you please,” he corrected.

“Sold to the constructioneer coot!”
“Ah, much better.  ”

***

The one hundred dollars were crisp and clear and as freshly-made as a dewy daisy, and the constructioneer took them down the street to an orphanage and purchased six children at a nickel each.

“No bulk discount?” he asked. 

“Each of our children is a priceless little tootsie-angel in their own special way,” declared the manager.  “And we don’t do refunds either, so no bitching allowed.”

“No worries, no troubles, it’s fine.  C’mon kids, we’ve got a job to do!  Have any of you ever wanted to be construction workers?”
Feet were shuffled, eyes were averted, no hands were raised. 

“Perfect!”

***

It was a very simple procedure.

“Up and at ‘em!  Just a little hike!  You can be malnourished later, we’re almost there!  Last stretch!  Don’t lag too far behind, Suzy!”
“Stacey.”
“Sure!  C’mon!  C’mon!  C’mon!  We’re here!”

It was an unpretentious little hill at the edge of a modest little parking lot – wedged full of cars criss-cross-cranny-crammed atop one another, naturally.  The spring thaw had been unkind to it; and most of it was exposed sand, mud, and sad. 

“Alrighty.  Back to back, please.  Wait, you too, you two.  And you other two!  All of you!  Back to back to back to back to back to back now, chop chop!  There we go!  Now hold this in your left hands – your LEFT hands.  I don’t care if you’re a southpaw, Andre.”
“Why are we holding lumps of asphalt?  And it’s not Andrew, it’s And-”

“It’s fine!  Are you all ready?”
Vague mumbles.

“Good!  Are you all steady?”
Shrugs and nods.
“Great!  Are you set?”

Noncommittal noises.

“Now hold your pointer finger on your right hands across your eyes and block out the horizon in front of you GO.”

They did.  And the constructioneer chuckled warmly. 

“Excellent!  Now hold your asphalt that’s in your LEFT hands up behind your right fingers.”
They did.  And the constructioneer giggled happily. 

“Wonderful!  Now drop your right hands.”
They did.  And the constructioneer chortled merrily. 

“Beautiful!  Now drop your left hands.”

They did.   And the asphalt wasn’t in their hands anymore.  It was very, very, very, very, very far away. 

“And we’re done!” said the constructioneer.  And he laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed until his cheeks and his beard and his warm smile were all red as a cardinal’s crown.

***

Reconvening the delegates of the first Interintraglobal Proposal to Permanently Solve All Parking Issues took more time than expected.  For one thing, many of them had already gotten up to leave.  For another, every single axis surrounding the planet was now covered in pavement

“I have paved the horizon, thus circumferencising the planet with the aid of six nickel-priced children and their imaginations,” said the constructioneer proudly.  “Well ahead of time and very under-budget.  Please shower me with applause.”
The sound of vigorous clapping echoed throughout the vast halls.

“Alright that’s enough.  Now, my expenses: everything.”
“I’m sorry?” asked the auctioneer.

“Everything.”
“All the… money?”
“No, everything.  Everything ever.”

“But… but… you said that the children only costed you a nickel each!” exclaimed a vice-president with an unearthly wail.

“A nickel each for the children,” corrected the constructioneer, kindly but firmly.  “The imagination of a child is priceless.  And I will be reimbursed as such.  Really, I’m within my rights to demand this six times over.”

“We shan’t,” said a president. 

“We won’t,” said a prime minister.

“Nix,” said a premier.

“Oh yes you will,” said the constructioneer.  “After all, you only have a few minutes left.”
“I hardly think losing out on a little sunlight will snuff out the planet in a few minutes,” said the world’s most famous political cartoonist, with the world’s most derisive snort. 

“That won’t be the problem,” said the constructioneer.  “But you’d better hurry if you want a spot.”

And he smiled his big warm smile. 

Thirty seconds later every human being on earth with a driver’s license was dead.  Primary causes were road rage, pedestrian collision, parking-lot fistfights, and ferocious rear-enders. 

***

The constructioneer dug up the horizon’s pavement and put some tulips in.  He felt he owed it to the neighborhood. 

“I want to be a doctor,” said Julie.

“I want to be a writer,” said Tim.

“I want to be an economist,” said Larry.

“I want to find dinosaurs and giant apes and forgotten peoples and evidence of aliens landing on the planet in younger days,” said Montgomery. 

“Write something shorter in the text box that makes more sense,” said their teacher, unscrewing the lid on her third thermos of ‘tea’ that morning.

So Montgomery wrote ADVENTURER on his what-I-want-to-be sheet, and he received a B- for it. 

***

When Montgomery was seventeen, a passing hurricane kept his family grounded on vacation.  Into the storm shelters they all went, and as the wind whined and wailed and roared outside he gazed hungrily at the sheets of rain that tore and ate at the forests beyond the reach of the emergency lights. 

“Tomorrow,” he said, “I will find my dinosaur.”

“That’s nice,” said his mother.  “Now pass me the can-opener.”
“We’re all going to die,” said his father. 

And Montgomery was right and his father was wrong; for everyone lived until the very damp dawn of the next day, when Montgomery prowled the surf and the wreckage and the foliage for hours and hours and hours and at last – triumph of triumphs – he pulled aside a half-fallen tree and was eyeball to eyeball with the beady red-ringed and brown-eyed stare of a dinosaur, crouched protectively over its nest. 

“Hello!” he said.

“AIIIYK!” the seagull said.  And it bit him. 

***

When Montgomery was twenty-one, he spent his summer hitching illicit rides on cargo ships carrying containers of anything to anywhere for anyone.  It was cheap, even if it was a bit lonely and most of what he saw was empty blue. 

“Somewhere out there, or maybe in here,” he told the crew he negotiated and bribed and wheedled with, “is a giant ape, unknown to the world.”
“Yuh,” they said, counting the money.  “Yah.  Yep.  Uh-hm.  Yes.”

So Montgomery took this as permission and scanned the horizon with binoculars and prowled the decks with powerful microphones and tapped on every wall for secret compartments and poured over shipping manifests and once or twice cracked a container open for a quick peek inside. 

He found furniture.  He found timber.  He found metals.  He found plastic shaped into funny little animals.  He found more water than he could ever have imagined in a million lifetimes.  And at last, as he stumbled back to his berth exhausted and empty-handed, he pulled open the door and there before him, rising up to the ceiling and staring back at him with the calm gaze of those who have every right to exist, was a great hairy ape the magnitude of which he’d never seen; stooped, broad-shouldered, heavy of gut and impossibly bipedal. 

“Gracious god,” said Montgomery.

“Wrong room,” said the able-seaman, and slugged him amidships.

***

When Montgomery was thirty-six he spent the last of his grant on a mad dash to the wilds of Papua New Guinea, where he annoyed many people by talking to them very loudly and slowly instead of using any form of interpretation.  This approach, the final step of his self-published ‘Montgomery Method,’ did not produce results. 

“I was so sure,” he sighed, “that it was maybe this time.  Oh well, perhaps the next.”

So Montgomery went home on an economy flight that stopped over for sixty hours in a place called Burnside, where he was turfed out to make his own way for the time being.

“Is there a hotel you could recommend?” he asked the flight attendant.

“Eh,” she replied. 

From street to street he wandered, but the only places he could find were murderously wealthy, with entire lobbies and carpets designed entirely to warn prospective guests of the price ranges at work within their walls. 

“Needs must,” he muttered.  He thought far back to his childhood, and the wise things his mother and father had taught him.  He girded his loins.  He consulted a map.  He even – god forbid – asked directions.

And so it was that he found a hidden place unseen by human eyes in many years, cobwebbed, abandoned, and forgotten.  A place to rest, and more besides.  This was what he had sought and failed to find in New Guinea – in Egypt, in the Andes, in the Rockies, among the shallow waters of Greece and in the burning deserts of central Australia. 

Montgomery’s subsequent paper, On the Rise and Fall of the Burnside YMCA: an Archaeological Microstudy of a Vanished People, was surprisingly well-received.  He still got in a lot of trouble about the grant money, though. 

***

When Montgomery was fifty-five, he spoke with conspiracy theorists and alternate historians and people with little divining rods.  He read self-published books.  He analyzed ancient folktales.  He read the interpretations of old petroglyphs, and then reinterpretations of those, and reinterpretations of THOSE. 

He also looked at many blurry photos of things in the sky that looked like trashcan lids.

Finally he left his home without notice in the dead of summer and stepped off the plane into a flat dry heat that smelt like burnt lightning.  He hired a car, he hired a driver, and they slept in shifts as they went for miles and miles and miles off the road, into the dust and the crags of the badlands, into sunlight so hard it hurt. 

After a week they found nothing and turned around and as Montgomery stepped out of the car with a full bladder, town nearly back in sight, his urine washed the dust from an innocuous-looking stone and revealed something that he’d been looking for without knowing for half a lifetime. 

The meteorite was small and crushed and old, very old.  And of course it was contaminated by lots and lots of human DNA.  But it was still laden with little funny things that could’ve been maybe trace fossils left by bacteria or maybe traces of extraterrestrial sugars or maybe not, and that stirred up the whole damned panspermia debate in astronomy all the hell over again. 

***

When Montgomery was seventy-seven, one of his organs protested unexpectedly and took the rest of him on a short and eventful if well-trodden journey, and he entered the most mysterious land of all.  His funeral was a little muddled – which his family agreed he would’ve wanted – and the burial happened more by luck than design.  In the milling mob, some few of his old classmates found each other.

“Bit of a surprise,” said Julie.

“Him going first?” asked Tim.

“No, it taking so long.”

“Well, he got plenty of exercise,” said Larry. 

“Not much of that for the rest of us – least of all an economist,” said Julie.  “How’d you stay so trim?”

“Oh, I gave up on that after undergrad.  Went into forestry.  I climbed more than I walked for thirty years.  At least a doctor gets to sit still now and then, eh?”
“Flunked medical school, got into politics, still a sitting senator,” said Julie.  “But yes, I do get to sit all I like.  Sometimes more than I’d like.”
“I should be writing this down,” said Tim. 

“What, you going to use us as material?”
“No, no, as affirmations.  Had a nervous breakdown halfway through my second novel, got into psych work.  Don’t have the biggest degree but it helps the community, you know?”

“Yeah,” said Julie.

“Yeah,” said Larry.  “Never know where life’ll take you, huh?”

“Seems so,” said Tim.

They watched the funeral some more.  One of Montgomery’s grandchildren had found the headstone and was trying to get it to stand up straight as two aunts directed him. 

“You know,” said Tim, “I have the feeling it all mostly worked out for him like he planned.”
“Yeah,” said Larry.

“Yeah,” said Julie.  “Do you think HE knew?”
“Oh who the hell could say for sure,” said Tim. 

The tombstone fell over again.

“Lunch?” asked Larry. 

“They hired a food truck,” said Tim.
“Good,” said Julie.  “My feet hurt.  Let’s go for it.”

So they did. 

Evening’s meal was done and the company-bench had been cleaned and put away in the hall.  The children’s dormitory had been sullenly silent for an hour now.  The last of the surly-lynxes had grumbled themselves to sleep in their dens.  And every single adult was inside and locked up tight and trying to sleep because if anything bad happened they didn’t want to see it coming.

Except for Shorr, the storyteller.  Because she’d woken up a few hours ago, had evening’s meal as her first, and was wandering to the edge of the holdfast, looking for her treestump.

There were several to choose from, but she played favourites.  And maybe it was a little fussy of her to put stock in such things when the light was almost gone from the edges of the hilltops, but her job was stressful and such things that comforted her were things that she insisted on doing.  If they were good for her and harmed nobody, they were good for everybody.  So said her mind. 

That said, she hoped she found that stump soon.  It was getting dark and oh ow ow ow there it was.  Her toe resented her for that.  Well, the rest of her would appreciate its sacrifice.  And none too soon; there was more dark than sky now. 

Shorr sat down on her stump, which by now was as polished and gleaming as if her behind were the world’s softest velvet.  Time has a way of smoothing things like that.  She knocked out her pipe on her boot and she lit it and stared at it and then put it out.  She’d promised her daughter she’d stop. 

So instead of smoking she sighed, and scratched herself, and into the gathering, thickening, smothering dusk she spoke stories. 

She told the tale of Toll the Gecko and the wind calmed.

She told the tale of Little Gret and the bushes ceased whispering.

She told the tale of the Four Brothers and Three Sisters and the glint of light-on-tooth just beyond the edge of sight ducked backwards, slow but sure.

And then she told the tale of the Lost Sun and how the Moon saved her, and the sky was lightening itself already, and her throat was sore, and she was alone in that little shallow valley while everyone else was asleep. 

Shorr’s throat reminded her of her pipe, which reminded her of her promise to her daughter.  So she didn’t smoke, but went and sat by the well and drank it down, down, down instead, cool and crisp.  And she drank more, because her throat was still sore, and a little extra, because it was even worse now, and by the time her daughter was up (first from the children’s dormitory and indeed the whole holdfast to wake, as usual) Shorr was on the ground, coughing and wheezing and making noises that were probably curses but were awful jumbled and came out as mostly-snorts. 

***

A little wheezer was nothing to a child.  To an adult that had gotten it before, less than nothing.  Even an elder who’d escaped the bug for all their years would be at most abed for a few days. 

Shorr had never had it before, but she was strong and healthy and so merely lost her voice for a few evenings, which would be long enough to see the holdfast torn down to shreds and shards and stones. 

Most of them dealt with this by not thinking about it, the oldest solution.  But four of them didn’t have that luxury, so they gathered in the cozy comfort of the decisions-cabinet (one window wide open, to catch the breeze) and drank tea and argued while Shorr dozed in the corner.  It was midday, and she was well tuckered. 

“Troublesome,” said Killy, the firmsmith.  She tapped her giant scarred fists together in the little pat-pat-pat that meant she was thinking.  “Maybe if Nnon sang for the night instead?”
“No,” said Nnon, the singer, and she packed a lot of scorn into that syllable.  “Don’t be dopey; they can’t stand me.  Song is for the songbirds, and those are for the daytime.  Perhaps Shorr could be given emergency medicines?”

“Absolutely not,” said Pruut, the bloodfixer.  “Look at how limp and listless her face is.  I’d have to pack her full to the gills with fillypowder to wake her throat up enough to rasp, and then she’d be sleeping THAT off for half a week.  Borrowing from Petra to pay Polly won’t do us any good.  How about her apprentice?”
“Oh no,” said Killy.

“Definitely not!” said Nnon.

“Might as well give it a try,” said Grar, the charcoal-cutter. 

The others grumbled at that, but it was Grar’s turn to hold the Myturn stick and so they agreed that this was more or less a fair gamble.  Besides, it wasn’t like there were any other ideas coming.   

***

Fli was Shorr’s apprentice in storytelling.  She had a lovely smooth voice that she could make a tree blush, a calming presence, and a firm, reassuring presence.  And she climbed up a tree and refused to come back down. 

“Get down here,” said Pruut.  Besides her, Killy gave the tree another shake.  No good; Fli also had a grip like a barnacle. 

“I shall not,” said Fli politely. 

“Your teacher, your family, your friends, and your fellows have all agreed on this and think you can do it,” said Killy. 

“Nothin’ doin’,” said Fli serenely.

“If you don’t get down here,” said Nnon, packing her voice full of civic pride and determination, “the entire holdfast will end up torn to bits.”
“Maybe they should climb trees too.”

“Get me my sawblades,” said Grar.

“Oh, FINE,” said Fli in bad grace, and down she came. 

“Good,” they all agreed.  And that was just fine until evening’s meal was over and someone asked the question ‘where’s Fli?’ and nobody could answer it. 

“Let’s get her,” said Grar.
“We can look for her or we can find trees for everyone,” said Pruut. 

So they found trees for everyone, and that took a long time they didn’t have, so they were all too busy to notice when Shorr’s daughter walked down to the holdfast’s edge. 

***

Shorr’s daughter walked the path much less surely than her mother, but also more quickly.  Short legs stride fast. 

She took the longest and windingest way possible down to where the ferns grew and the waterfalls grew quiet and plunked down on her mother’s stump, which she recognized from being shown and also because it was as smooth and seamless as a marble from overuse. 

And she said “hi.”

Nothing said hi back.  Darkness does not say ‘hi.’  But there was heightened attention paid, just past eyesight. 

“I’m five years old,” she told the darkness.

The grass breathed in and out, slow and low and steady. 

“Wanna hear a story?  Mom told me stories.  I like the one about the fish.  See, there’s this big fish.  It’s the biggest fish, and it eats anything it wants, and everyone was frightened of it, but then it ate so much it couldn’t fit in the water anymore and the sun baked it and and it stopped working totally and then it was dead.”

The wind rose, dropped, dipped and twirled, then settled into a state of confusion. 

“And she told me about the rabbit-person.  And what the rabbit-person did for breakfast.  See the rabbit person was hungry but was lazy and the rabbit person told her family she was sick and they all brought her food and she ate all of it until they had no food so then then they brought her hot peppers and she ate them and they said it was medicine and they brought her live bugs and said they were medicine and they brought her a biiiiiiiig rock and said it was medicine and she swallowed it and you know what happened?  It stuck.  It stuck in her butt.  Now rabbits have heavy butts and that’s why their back legs are so big and strong.”

Shorr’s daughter frowned for an instant.  “Mom always tells me the stories about people eating too much.  I’ve heard them too many times.”

The shadows lightened a little.  Maybe. 

“Wanna see what I found in my nose?  Here, look.  Look.”
The wind came back, fierce and quick. 

“Okay!  Okay!  Stop it.  Stop!  Don’t DO that.  You know, you know that one time the wind didn’t ever stop blowing?  It did that.  Back in the old days it blew all the time and there was no earth, or water, or animals, or plants, just big bugs with big bug wings.  And they flew everywhere.  But the mosquito queen said she could outwail it, since she was the biggest bug, and she tried so hard with her wings that it broke the wind into little pieces and everything fell down to the ground.  But it shriveled her up.  That’s why mosquitos are so small, and why you should let them have a little blood.  I don’t like that.  Mom says it’s okay to swat them after the first one.  The first one gets blood for being polite.  Are you polite?  Mom says I need to be more polite.  She always tells me the stories about people being polite too.”
Something settled in the brush, far away yet closer than it should be. 

“Okay your turn.  I said your turn.  Come on, I told you three stories in a row.  It’s your turn now.  That’s only fair, right?  Mom always tells me the stories about people being fair too.  Like the story about the old flatsmith with the crooked myturn stick, that always came rolling back to her whenever she made a decision, so it was always her turn even if everyone else watched the stick very carefully.  So she got to do anything she wanted and nobody could do anything they wanted, until her apprentice took a rock, and she reversed the crook in the stick, so no matter what she did it wouldn’t come to her and it rolled away and everyone made decisions one after another except her.  But they didn’t do anything to her, they just made everyone else happy and that made her mad.  I don’t know why that made her mad.  Are you mad?  I don’t think so.  Can you tell me a story?  It’s fair.  Come on, be fair.  It’s fair.  Come on. Come ooooon.”
It was fair. 

So it told her a story. 

***

There was rushing water, and breezes in branches, and pebbles in sand, and bright eyes and brighter teeth, and the sort of urgent, thoughtless patience that formed something more complicated than an imagination. 

***

“Oh,” said Shorr’s daughter.  Except it was more of an exhalation, because syllables seemed too clumsy and indirect for this conversation. 

And she listened.  And she talked back, and in what way she wasn’t sure.

Then it was later and she was gently being picked up by someone and put in her bed even though it was just getting bright out. 

***

Fli was up in a tree, but a different one.  She came down with much protest until someone told her a child without a name had done her job for her, then she came down with much muttering until Killy picked her up and put her in the decision cabinet with Shorr for the rest of the morning.  She was a lot quieter after that. 

Shorr, by contrast, had her voice back by that evening.  She brought her daughter with her, and let her choose the stump, and sat there and for the first time in years she didn’t say a thing all night. 

It was interesting.  And a lot easier on the voice too.  So she brought Pruut, and Pruut brought Killy and Grar, and Nnon brought herself, and well, by then everyone knew about it.  

So everyone came down for the evenings, and some of them stayed till sunup and some of them went to bed early.  Who can say how much anyone learned.

But they all understood one another better.  And that’s important too. 

It’s a pleasure to meet you.

Feeling’s mutual!  Thank you so much for inviting me for this chat today.

You’re a busy institution; I wasn’t sure you’d have time for this. 

Nonsense!  I haven’t been asked to chat in ages and ages and AGES.  Everyone just wants to kick in the door and get it done, you know?  Happy to have a conversation for once.  Love it.

Then let’s get started, shall we?  Introduce yourself, please.

Hello!  I’m the Plundered Tower on the Edge of Darkness, and I’m a dungeon! 

Now when you say ‘dungeon,’ this brings to mind a wide array of possible meanings.  Please describe which of them you feel identify with personally, if that’s no trouble.

Certainly!  I’m not a dungeon in the traditional sense of being a jail you throw prisoners into – although I certainly contain a few of those, let me tell you!  Rather, I am a dungeon as the place of excitement and intrigue and reward and mystery, existing just one possibly-perilous journey away from a conveniently homely settlement.  More specifically, I’m an overgrown and ruined watchtower some six stories high (and my lesser outbuildings clustered around my base, which are in greater disrepair than myself) left to moulder for centuries, signifying that this place was once considered ‘civilized’ and other such concepts and has now been overcome by the forces of entropy and barbarism.  I’m an ironic mirror held up to the follies of empire – and as such, a subtle advocate for its benefits and a warning against its enemies!  Devious, aren’t I?

Indeed.  What are those enemies?  Are they represented within you?

Oh, of course – I have a wide variety of inhabitants, all of them symbolically rich.  For example, my gatehouse is full of gigantic rats and there’s a huge centipede in my belfry.

Ick.

Oh yes, that revulsion is the entire point!  See, these are household vermin… but on a scale fit for a nation!  My infestation with outsized pests represents the disrepair that the household of humanity has fallen into in my immediate vicinity, and thus expunging them through violence is transformed from the simple killing of animals into a heroic deed akin to cleansing a poorly-maintained house for the benefits of its hapless inhabitants.  A blade-as-a-broom, you could say.

That doesn’t sound like quite the kind of heroism most would sign up for.

Well of course – that’s why it’s all symbolic, to suck people in.  It’s like my biological metaphors for societal outgroups.

Pardon?
I call them BMSOs!  It sounds cute, and it’s a lot simpler than remembering what the hell they’re called.  Kobolds, goblins, trolls, apemen, lizard people, troglodytes, cannibals, gnolls, orcs, hobgoblins, goatmen…nobody can keep all that straight!  And most of them are basically the same anyways.  They’re really just dehumanized embodiments of those that fall outside the boundaries of the society represented by both my original state and the humble little hamlets that adventuring groups come from.  Their bizarre but ultimately superficial quirks hide this ugly symbolic reality behind a façade of manly slaughter and pulp.

What kind of superficial quirks?

Well, there’s a few kinds.  There’s the trivially obvious stuff, like the visually bizarre, biologically gross, and standard slurs – stuff like making them ugly and bestial and caricaturized and making it clear they’re all stupid and filthy and live only to destroy.  That’s easy, and the physical aspects can be used as little motifs to make killing them interesting – orcs having light-sensitive eyes, for instance, not only marks them as disturbing and antithetical to diurnal hominids but also rewards clever adventurers for using terrain, time of day, and careful use of supplies against them!  That’s the sort of shtick that gets people invested – and that kind of thing can be useful in ANY monster, not just the BMSOs.  It can get really complicated with the big ones.

Give me some examples of those – do you have any inside you?

Oh yes; every dungeon needs a big showy finish, or at the very least a motherlode where the danger and potential for reward meets a fever pitch.  That’s where you put your showstoppers.  I’ve got two, an evil wizard and a juvenile dragon.

Which is your favourite?
Oh gosh that’s always such an unfair question – I love them both, of course!  But in different ways, you know?  An evil wizard is like French fries: they’re welcome EVERYWHERE, no matter what.  Cave in a hillside?  Evil wizard, mixing foul potions.  Tower on a cloud?  Evil wizard, besetting the countryside with magical storms.  Magical castle inside a glass orb in a dungeon embedded beneath the continental crust?  Evil wizard trying to erase the concept of free will and become a god and also maybe cross-breeding an owl and a bear.  So versatile, so simple – the concept of an old guy who can command and the universe obeys him, wrapping up the concepts of knowledge and social hierarchy in a single robed crazy bearded scrawny man.  Mine’s a necromancer, I think.  He’s raised the captain from his crypt underneath the tower as a wight-lord, and most of the dead guards from the bonfire-grave as horrible cinderwraiths.  Bless his crooked nose and cracked heart. 

And the dragon?

Well, they’re classic.  Can’t have a dungeon without a dragon – some big ugly monster that loves treasure is a MUST, and if it’s a literal dragon that’s just all the better, the bester!  Also they’re sort of fun because they embody a societal vice but externalize it as originating from OUTSIDE the society.  See, a dragon’s about lustful greed, wrath, pride, and usually a good pinch or three of sloth – but it lives by itself in a cave and indulges all of those just by existing,, which it then inflicts upon the countryside.  All at once it warns you that These Things Are Bad but tells you that their REAL cause is people like you becoming akin to stuff from Far Away, rather than any inherent flaws within your home or town or kingdom or whatever.  And of course they breathe weird nonsense.  Mine’s a juvenile mauve drake, so it spits flans. 

That sounds delicious.

Oh no, they’re molten flans.  Six hundred degrees inside, animate, try to ooze inside your orifices.  There’s a surprising amount of monsters named after foods.

Is there any particular reason for that?
Oh, some.  But not all.

You’ve lost me.

There’s lots and lots of detail within me, but it’s sort of selective and fixated on particular KINDS of information.  Like, I can tell you that molten flans were created by an anonymous mad wizard, and I can tell you that you can find one to six of them 20% of the time if you linger in my ruined kitchen.  But I can’t tell why the hell they’re called flans.  Similarly, I can tell you there’s a tribe of 32 BMSOs lurking in my old stables, where they build crude altars of horse bones to worship my mauve drake whenever they see it fly out to prey upon the cattle of the villagers, and I can tell you they have 2 shamans and 1 chieftain with a magical axe and fourteen women which are noncombatants for some reason and eight young which frankly are just bait to rationalize child-killing as morally and biologically logical, and that their altars contain a single rough-cut agate apiece worth a specific monetary value (more if it’s cut properly; gets people invested in their treasure beyond just looting it).  But I can’t tell you why they’re worshipping the dragon, or what’s led them to take up residence here specifically, or why they’re so fixated on kidnapping and sacrificing villagers every full moon.  The traps are where it REALLY sinks in: I’ve got a secret door behind a bookcase in the captain’s quarters that leads to a secret passage that has another secret door in it (press the discoloured flagstone three times) that leads to a spiked pit and if you pull the eighth spike in it a secret door opens in the pit’s wall to a treasure chest.  The treasure is a cursed necklace.  I have no idea why any of that makes sense. 

I see.  Speaking of treasure, you seem to have an awful lot of it for a long-ruined tower.

Oh, absolutely.  Treasure goes where danger goes, so that sort of thing just happens – basically every inhabitant I’ve got is a magpie, inadvertently or deliberately.  The drake is greedy and hoards anything shiny; the wizard uses obscure and obscenely lavish implements in his blasphemous rites; the BMSOs are festooned with crude trinkets from their victims despite having no concept of money; my graves are filled with valuable pieces of armour and coin just ripe for robbing.  Hell, even my weathervane has an emerald stuffed in the eye of the manticore that decorates it.  Sometimes there’s an explanation, sometimes it’s just…there.  The explanation for each given item of value is nice if it’s there, but it’s not as important as the underlying assumption at work: that places outside your home are dangerous but full of value and that those that dwell there either don’t recognize it or are morally unfit to be its custodians or have stolen it from the deserving folk who are just like you.  Or all three.  Usually it’s all three.  Anyways the important part is that people come to me seeking violence and financial gain. 

And what do they do when they’re done?
Wander off, usually.  That’s the thing about adventuring: nobody really PLANS to retire; they just keep going until they just lose interest.  I’ve seen a lot of folks loot me top to bottom before going home, swearing they’ve got to do this again next week, then never ever coming back.  But there’s always some oddballs that get addicted.  They don’t come back again, though.  They usually just move on to other dungeons.  Fine by me; that’s when I get refilled. 

Are you acquainted with these ‘other dungeons’?  How do you get along with them?

Oh yes and it depends, respectively.  I’m what you call a ‘starter dungeon.’  Just a little bit of danger from a little bit of nasty a little ways away from a little town that’s facing a little bit of a problem from it, filled with a little bit of treasure. 

That’s a lot of diminutives.

It is, but I am!  And I like that, and I take pride in it.  No matter who you are, everyone’s been in a starter dungeon.  Nobody moves on to the Doom-Mines of Far Low Deep Kruuk without passing through me first and finding the ancient rubric in the wizard’s chambers that leads you to its hidden back entrance.  And they know it, and they appreciate it!  Me and Doom-Mines, we’re like THAT, you know?  Just like THAT.  Tight as thieves.  Specifically, thieves stuck inside a magical chest of devouring teeth. 

Are there any other starter dungeons near you?

No.  Not really.  I mean, not that it’s worth knowing.  The Forest of Fruundy doesn’t count.  Is it a dungeon if it isn’t a series of discrete rooms, I ask you?  You know what that place is?  A bunch of random nonsense stapled together with no organization.  Anyone could go anywhere in there and just do ANYTHING.  No rhyme no reason no sense no ORDER.  Stay the hell away from that place.  UGH.

Well, thank you for-

I think it has elves.  ELVES.  In a FOREST.  There’s traditional and there’s unimaginative and tell you what I don’t NEED to tell you what THAT is. 

-spending some time so generously with us today-

And a UNICORN.  What good is a unicorn?  They won’t fight you unless you’re a jackass.  The kind of jackass we don’t encourage, at least.

…Is there anything you’d like to say to all the prospective adventurers out there?

Not even any good treasure on ‘em.  Huh?  Oh.  Yes.  Live nobly, fight constantly, loot everything, and bring your friends.  And tell them to bring theirs too.  Always room for more.

Thank you.

Thank YOU.  Mind the trapdoors on the way out.  They’re under the flesh-eating fungus.