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General Loretta Stibnite’s office was immaculate and professional.
Every surface dusted. Every key on the keyboard spotless. Not one paper out of place, for there were no loose papers.
It made it very frustrating when your eyes were trying to do anything but meet hers.
“The report.”
Dr. Gibbs tried the window. There were usually things outside windows. Like weather, for instance. “Hmm?”
“The report, doctor.”
“Oh. Right.” She cleared her throat. “Well… attempts have been mixed.”
“Which attempts? Define ‘mixed.’ And for the love of god make eye contact, you’re fidgeting worse than a schoolgirl in the principal’s office. I don’t even OWN a ruler.”
You’re wearing a belt though, Dr. Gibbs carefully did not say. Instead she spoke the one thing she wanted even less, which was: “alright then. Project report in full is almost total disaster.”
“Great. Give me the news worst to best.”
“Okay,” said Dr. Gibbs, and the weather outside the window did look nice. Blue sky, little white clouds that looked like smoke slivers. She could see the appeal. “Okay. Okay.”
“Dr. Gibbs.”
“Okay! Well, the cyborg super-soldier program is a bust.”
“That’s certainly descriptive. Go on.”
“It turns out that replacing bones with metal is pretty rough on the human body even if you’re a healthy young adult instead of an senior citizen with an obliterated pelvis.”
“And? I was under the impression your focus was more neurological.”
Dr. Gibbs cursed herself for the misfortune of having a superior who actually read her weekly filings. “Well…yes, after my predecessor’s issues. But well…” She pointed at Stibnite’s computer. “Has that ever crashed?”
“Once or twice.”
“Right, and it’s probably just running basic administration software, nothing too stressful or unproven. It turns out coding meant to interface between the human brain and a computer embedded inside it is sort of new, sort of chancy, and uh…it crashes. A lot. And it tends to crash the brain too.”
“Was this before or after you’d armed them?”
“Before. I mean, after the first time.”
Dr. Gibbs looked out the window some more while the general was busy rubbing her eyes. Yes, that was nice weather. The harbour was a perfect mirror of the sky, the only ripples from the ships making their way about it. An aircraft carrier sat pretty against the horizon; an entire city block transported to sea. Ugly, but dynamically so.
“Alright. Continue, doctor.”
“Okay.”
“Look at me.”
“Okay. Okay. Right. Well, we were making really good progress on the crashing issues –”
“’Were’?”
“-but then right when we were ready to move into early beta tech support for our processing chip was discontinued.”
“Great. Wonderful. So you made me a bunch of seizure-prone heavily-armed glitchy soldiers that can’t be fixed.”
“Well, we could remove the computers, but the surgery to get them in there in the first place was pretty drastic. We already had to remove the module for tech upgrades ten times in the last five years, and each time there’s exponentially greater risks of hemorrhage and so on.”
“You made me a bunch of seizure-prone heavily-armed glitch soldiers that can’t be fixed or they’ll have strokes.”
“Multiple simultaneous strokes each, yes.”
This time the general’s palm covered her entire face.
Count the birds in the sky no no too many seagulls never mind. Count the boats in the bay, one two three four does the aircraft carrier just count as one really it’s awfully big to only count as one.
“What else.”
What else. What else what else what else oh she was looking right at it. “The aircraft carrier.”
“Yes, you’re looking at one of them.”
“No no no I mean OUR aircraft carrier, the one with the integrated command crew.”
“That’s it.”
“I’m sorry?”
“That’s it. That you’re looking at. What’s wrong with it.”
“Well… the surgery was a bit difficult. It seems that the human body rejects foreign elements very readily, even with the most gradual and careful installation. Especially when you’re grafting a ship onto it, followed by the entire rest of the officer compliment. And preventing infection was a MAJOR problem, as was keeping the interface components operational – it turns out human medical needs and hardware maintenance materials aren’t mutually-inclusive.”
“Just tell me what happened to Captain Fairbanks.”
“The captain is nearly fully lucid and his mental recovery seems to be well underway, so perhaps we should wait for a report from–”
“I want to hear it from you.”
“Well. It transpires that the… extensive and gruelling training that the captain and his officers underwent was rendered retroactively useless upon installation. You see, they had all been trained to OPERATE a ship rather than BEING a ship, and it seems that’s a very different situation. They couldn’t get the carrier to move, but they DID almost make its engines explode trying. Oh, and none of them could turn on the lights. Completely impossible. Then we had to pull them all out when they started experiencing temporary psychoses, one after another.”
This time the general didn’t break eye contact, which left Dr. Gibbs to do so on her own. She wondered if the aircraft carrier was getting closer; it was so big that perspective was a bit of a mess on it. She wondered if that were a deliberate part of its design by some fiendish camouflage expert.
“Dr. Gibbs.”
She tried to ignore the voice. Maybe if she focused hard enough on things that weren’t it, it would stop existing.
“Dr. Gibbs. Did your team produce one single, solitary success?”
“Yes.”
“Well?”
“We had one single solitary success. See, one of the programming teams had some free time after we discontinued the other projects, and they tried to make a safe-use general AI.”
“How can you possibly make general artificial intelligence safe?” demanded Stibnite.
“They built an insatiable monomaniacal drive into it that overrides all other instincts it might develop. Really, it’s more of a quasi-general AI, it’s quite monofocused.”
“So what does it do?”
“It derives para-sexual pleasure from filing. Very efficient, if a bit prone to revision. Trim down the impulse a little and it’ll put a lot of clerks out of business.”
The general sighed. “And this was your big success?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Not the replacing-people’s-hands-with-weapons thing?” she asked, wistfully.
“It turns out that’s a lot less flexible than just letting them hold weapons. Harder to swap around, too.”
“Damn. I liked that one.”
“Yes, sir.”
The ship was getting very close and was moving very fast. The sound of its engines would’ve made dust motes jump, if any existed in General Stibnite’s office.
“Gibbs. Continue.”
“General,” said Dr. Gibbs, and wasn’t it funny how her voice sounded like it was underwater now, all garbled and distant, “is there a data center on the property?”
“Just downstairs, why?”
“Oh. Total and unmitigated disaster.”
“Excuse me?”

And then the aircraft carrier made contact with the building, delivering one sexually frustrated filing AI and several hundred thousand tonnes of decommissioned cyborg hull directly into the server farms.

On the day of his ascension, the pope-in-waiting watched as his predecessor was thrown from the highest roof of the Cathedral of Utmost Height.
It was very simple. He took the three steps forward, took three steps backwards, hesitated, and was pushed by his cardinals. His arms flailed like a little insect’s for one million years and then he landed on the ground and died only a few feet away from the pope-in-waiting’s feet, splashing them with his blood.
On the roof, the cardinals were bent low, peering at the stones, trying to determine which of them the dead man’s foot had touched last. Trying to find his new spouse.
The pope-in-waiting contented himself with watching the blood seep across the cobbles of the cathedral square. It was hard to tell which was occurring faster: the red staining of the stones or the dust clotting the liquid. This seemed oddly important to him.
At last the search of the men on the roof bore fruit, and they set to work with crowbars, levering free the sacred stone from the peak of the building. It was hoisted in the air, and so was he, and both were carried into the grand hall of the cathedral and many chants were conducted and much incense was burned and so many words of God’s Tongue were spoken that he couldn’t tell his head from his feet and then he was dubbed the new Pope Apex, just like the old one except not as old.
VERY not as old. They must have been running low on pope material, what with the war drawing away all those potential novitiates to bleed and die for the glory of home, and land, and more land to call home. So why not use up one of the few they had left? Thirteen wasn’t old enough to fight properly but it was probably old enough to be holy and bless things. Waste not, want not.

***

After his induction he was spirited away through a maze of little tunnels under the cathedral, all alike, and after that a ceremonial meal of bread and water was fed to him personally by his highest cardinal, Lofty, and after THAT he was introduced properly to his spouse, who was a large and somewhat careworn slab of unidentifiable stone.
“Do you know what this is?” asked the cardinal.
“No,” replied Pope Apex, truthfully. He had not been raised to understand masonry or geology.
Cardinal Lofty sighed and smacked him on the side of the head. “This is the material manifestation of the church, and you are wedded to it. Preserve its wellbeing at all costs. Now go to bed.”
Pope Apex went to bed, and his spouse followed him with the aid of several large and muscular escorts, who dropped it in the middle of his mattress and left.
The pope had spent much of his youth sharing quarters with others. He knew what to do in this sort of situation. Softly and slowly, with the care of one trying not to alarm another, he wrapped the careworn stone in most of his blankets. Then he took his pillow and spent the night in a peculiar (if cold) sort of peace.

The next day it was removed from his bed and placed on a little dais in the center of his chambers, to remind him of his vows, and he was a little grateful for this because his back hurt from where it had bumped him. This shamed him, and he spent some time apologizing to his spouse for his insensitivity.

***

Being a pope was much easier than being a novitiate had been. He got more sleep, scrubbed fewer pots, and the cardinals only hit him when he did something wrong, which was much less often than the underpriests had.
And there was his spouse, who he spoke to as much as possible. It never talked back, but that just made it a good listener, which was very precious to Pope Apex because almost nobody else ever seemed to listen to anything he said.
Maybe there weren’t as many differences from being a novitiate as he’d thought.

***

Victory had come!
Well, not final victory. Just a victory. But it was a good one! An entire city burned down.
Not a perfect victory, Cardinal Plummet told him. They hadn’t managed to burn down its inhabitants too.
But the victors had earned themselves some sort of spoils, and so Pope Apex was taken to the new frontlines to walk through the charred buildings and the toppled towers and the seared timbers to have a great banquet-feast on this very new and very holy day.
It had been a big city. The entire Holy Army fit inside it, even the more mobile casualties with their stumps and splints and crutches and bandages.
“-got it?” Cardinal Lofty was saying to him.
Pope Apex shook a little, and knew he’d be getting lectured about that later. Shaking was for the tremulous and uncertain and those things weren’t permitted. “Yes,” he said, which was true. He’d very much memorized the very short speech he’d been given very many days ago.
He looked down at his feet, and saw stones smeared with ash and charcoal. Then he thought about stones red with blood, and about a particular stone, and its smoothed, calm surface.
His back ached.
“Do it,” said Cardinal Lofty.
Pope Apex stepped to his seat, waited for the noise to die down, chanted out the speech in God’s Tongue, and then spoke for the many rather than the educated.
“May this feast strengthen our limbs and make hearty our hearts, may it fill our stomachs and our souls, and may this terrible war end soon.”
There was a little pause around the table at those last words, as if everyone’s ears were checking themselves, but then the escorts took Pope Apex by his shoulders and gently steered him away, and it was decided that everything was alright again.
That night he was lectured with both words and fists, and to a degree he’d never imagined even as a novitiate. This war was not terrible, it was noble. It was just and correct.
He tried to explain what the stone had suggested to him, but every time he opened his mouth he was screamed at until his small words were drowned in a vast din, and so in the end he wasn’t able to tell anyone at all.

***

There were no more public appearances after that, just public public appearances, the kind where he was placed on top of a high structure and waved at people while they cheered. It made the cardinals happy because it prevented issues, and it made Pope Apex happy because it made him think on what it would be like to throw himself off a high surface and if the next pope would have to marry whatever he was standing on at the time and if they would be as kind and helpful as his own spouse was.
If he slipped on his bathmat, would someone have to marry it? He almost got the giggles.

***

The campaign continued, but no more cities were burned. This was a clear problem, and so Pope Apex was recruited to correct it personally. Clearly their blessed and holy armies weren’t the problem, so it must be their tools.
The weapons were laid out before him to be blessed, a shining field of dead-bodies-to-be, and Pope Apex felt as if he couldn’t lay eyes anywhere without them being sliced right out his skull. Every surface was edged for a very particular purpose.
“Begin,” whispered Cardinal Lofty in his ear, and so he walked up and down the long long rows of steel and thought of the rows of the dead and he chanted as he walked.
“Please don’t hurt anyone,” he murmured, mangling it through as many layers of half-forgotten, half-mangled God’s Tongue as he could manage, “please don’t hurt anyone, please don’t get anyone else killed, please please please.”
Though he didn’t get the thrashing the banquet had gifted him, he was berated for some time on his awful pronunciation. But the stone softly shone at him whenever he glanced at it, and so he endured it with as much earnestness as he was able.

***

Neither the blessing intended nor the blessing assumed appeared to work all that well; maybe they’d cancelled each other out. The war was still going and the bodies were still piling and from out his window the pope could just barely see the edge of the cemetery where the most esteemed and important people actually got their own private graves. It had expanded itself very quickly since his installment.
The cardinals weren’t happy either, which was why Cardinal Plummet had come up with the most ingenious plan of poisoning the city’s river, seeing as the besieging army downstream needed it. That they wouldn’t be able to tell the rest of the city’s populace for the sake of secrecy until half of them had already drank from it and died as well seemed to be something Cardinal Lofty considered a marked downside, but endurable.
One thing hadn’t changed since Pope Apex’s novitiate days: people didn’t much care what they said in front of him.
That night, he stayed up very late talking with his spouse. The stone told him it wasn’t his fault, and he tried to believe it. Looking on the stone also told him something else, something he could do, and the more he thought about it the more impossible it was NOT to believe that.
So he did it.

***

It wasn’t very difficult for him to find the besieging army’s encampment, but it WAS very difficult for him to get to its commander, both because he didn’t know the woman’s name beyond Cardinal Plummet calling her ‘that little shithead’ and because it took a full hour for anyone to confirm he was Pope Apex.
After that, though, all he had to do was tell them about the passages under the Cathedral of Utmost Height, and they were happy to listen to anything he said. They were so happy that they listened to his requests, which were really quite simple.

***

The cathedral square cobbles were buried in the cemetery, with the cardinals. But there needed to be something there in the plaza for people to stand on, and so the cathedral itself was taken apart, brick by brick, stone by stone, and it filled in the gaps and gave everyone a firm foundation to brace themselves on, softened by air and water and a hundred desperate sets of feet.
The former pope kept his spouse, though. It was a little selfish, but he appreciated its advice.

The glass of wine, half-full, struck the carpet. Unfortunately the pile was so thick and luxurious that it refused to shatter, and so Josh Wellick had to finish the job himself with his heel.
It was nothing, just another of the trifling little inconveniences he had to deal with, being so insanely wealthy and accomplished. Like his chief concern right now.
“I’m BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORed,” he enunciated clearly and distinctly. “Hey! Shill! What haven’t I done yet?”
“Shillings, sir,” said his butler, a ground-down and generally eroded little human being.
“I will call you what I please, Shill. What haven’t I done yet?”
Shillings consulted the giant and unwieldy tablet his master had shackled to his chest. “Uh…. You haven’t climbed the Great Pyramid of Giza riding a bear…”
“That’s because I did it last year riding a hippo, you incompetent.”
“Err…you haven’t climbed the CN Tower backwards….”
“Why would I bother climbing it at all? Hasn’t been that tall for decades now.”
“Uuuuuhhhhh….. you haven’t climbed out of a construction site’s foundations….”
“Disgusting. Suggest that one more time and I’ll have your knees hobbled.”
“You haven’t gone to the deepest point in the Antarctic Ocean.”
“I told you, not until they let me kill and eat whatever I find there.”
“…..You haven’t climbed any waterfalls.”
Josh stopped mid-berating. “Haven’t I? Hm. Hmm. Hmmmmmmm.”
“Sir?”
“Shill, what’s the tallest waterfall in the world? We need to start this off impressive.”
“Angel Falls, in Venezuela.”
“Didn’t even need to look that up?”
“My granddaughter likes world records, sir.”
“Well tell her to put all the old ones out of her empty little head, because we’re going to make some very spectacular stunts today. Now clean up this mess. No hands, mind you. They’re a crutch.”
“You took away my crutch yesterday, sir. You said it was a weakness.”
“And I was right! No more backtalk, and a lot more tonguework. This glass won’t lick itself up.”

***

Obtaining permission for these sorts of things was always haphazard. In the end Josh simply had Shilling stand in the center of the capitol and bribe everyone walking by for twenty-four hours. It had worked when he needed to climb the Washington Monument naked, and in the meantime he had important things to do, like airlifting in six hundred thousand tons of cutting-edge machinery plundered from private ski resorts and hockey rinks.
“I want it all installed in the next six hours,” he told the man seated next to him. “And for every hour longer than that it takes, your paychecks are all cut ten percent.”
“I’m not the head of the project, sir,” said the man. “I’m a laborer.”
“Gross! Someone throw him out of the plane or none of you get paid.”
Josh sighed and leaned back in his chair, wiping his brow. “Gosh that was close. Almost got some poor on me. Now, what was all this you said about this taking way too long?”
“There’s going to need to be safety tethers-” began the actual project head.
“Boring,” said Josh, tossing his phone to the ground and grinding it underfoot. “Safety is our third priority. Number one is making me look good, number two is nothing at all. Remember that, you goober.”
“Attempting this unsecured will cause dozens if not hundreds of deaths.”
“They’re still throwing out the last guy, you know. I’ve got room for more.”
The project head’s shoulders slumped and she sighed.
“That’s the kind of attitude I like,” said Josh. “Now clean this mess up without using your hands.”

***

In the end it took over six thousand deaths to install the machinery before sunset, but install it they did. For the first time in history Angel Falls was frozen solid, and at the base of the mammoth icicle stood that incomparable daredevil, explorer, maverick capitalist, entrepreneur of science, Josh Wellick, accompanied by a mere hundred assistants flunkies piton-affixers and dogsbodies.
“To the top!” he said heroically, pointing skywards.
They cheered.
“I wanted awed silence,” he told them. “You’re all fired. If you don’t get us up there by morning, you don’t get severance pay and I’ll buy wherever your families work and fire them too.”
And so began their ascent.

***

The first successful climb of Angel Falls took almost ten days to complete, but they were doing boring things like climbing up the cliff face instead of the waterfall itself and also being safe. Josh Wellick demanded more, and what Josh Wellick demanded, he always got, because that’s the kind of guy he was.
Which is why when he ascended the last step to the rim of the falls, treading on the numbed knuckles of his one hundredth (and final remaining) guide to get there, he was greeted by Shilling and a breakfast buffet.
“One more recorded shattered for all time by the very best of humanity,” he declared, then sniffed the air. “Did you put any blueberries in those pancakes?”
“As you requested, sir.”
“I changed my mind. Throw it all out and start over. Throw the cooks off the falls too.” He threw his ice axe to the ground and stomped on it in exaltation. “By GOD I never feel more alive than at a moment like thi-” and then a small frog, released from its icy tomb by the impact of his foot, erupted from the ground and startled him a very important six inches backwards.

***

Angel Falls is very tall. He had almost fifteen seconds to think of a lot of swears on the way down.

DIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIING
In all his many years working here, he thought the bell was the worst part. It wasn’t enough to merely announce that the workday was beginning, oh no. It had to be PROTRACTED.
DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONG
He breathed in, he breathed out. He wished he’d looked himself in the mirror before coming here, told himself ‘you can do this,’ but he’d been unable to stomach the idea of seeing the bags under his eyes and so had brushed his teeth at a gum-blistering pace, darting out the door before his sanity could catch up to him and ask him ‘why ARE you doing this, anyways?’
The roar and rabble were approaching. It was too late for more thoughts, too late for anything. His doom awaited.
A pleasant smile appeared on his face as he confronted the throng. “Welcome to the Museum of War and Antiquities of the Old Days. I’m Feilloveit, former Elflord of Tor Messoveit, Primus of the First Peoples, and your tour guide for the day. Shall we get started?”
“Err,” said a round, portly little creature. “Can it wait a moment? Little Beedo’s wet himself.”
He had lived seven ages of man, dwarf, elf and monster. But the idea of this day ahead of him…it ached.

***

Two changings one polite deferment from sharing his opinions on orcs and six givings-of-directions later they left the entry hall of the museum, fifteen minutes behind schedule. Surprisingly quickly, truth be told.
“This is the hall of the First Eon. Technically the concept of conflict didn’t exist yet at this time, but its seeds were planted before it was complete – if you’ll examine the giant shining wall of solid mathril to your left, you’ll see it’s composed entirely of a broken fragment of the plough of Githmatug.”
“What’s a Githmatug?”
Feilloveit’s eyes were beginning to water from the sheer force of the oncoming headache. “Githmatug was the primordial lord of all soil and earth before succumbing to wrath and breaking his plough over the head of his lazy children and tricking the other ancient gods into gathering all the pieces and forging them into the first sword and bringing conflict and strife to the world.”
“Excuse me?” asked a thin young half-height with bright and empty eyes.
“Go ahead,” said Feilloveit, hoping that they wouldn’t, or better yet, would suffer from catastrophic and immediate muteness.
“The First Eon doesn’t exist and neither do the primordial gods. They were just evil ghosts who lied to people; the world is only six hundred years old.”
“IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIrespectyouropinionsandbeliefs HOWEVER this establishment is devoted to the mainstream lessons of history as obtained from the records of time.”
“Oh yeah? How’d you know that? Were you there?”
“YES!” snapped Feilloveit. “A falling shard of Githmatug’s sword almost flattened my house.”
“Oh, yeah. Well, are you SURE?”
“Let’s move on, shall we?”
“Answer my questions, minion of falsity!” shouted the half-height, but he was drowned in the endless murmurs of shuffling feet, sighing mouths, and creaking backs, and so Feilloveit soothed his blood pressure and restrained himself from gutting him like the trout he had caught on the banks of the Mallleomtum, when he was young and the world still had that new-made smell.

***

“This is the hall of the Second Eon, when the first wars descended from the realms of the ancients and made their way across the land. Githmatug had begun to see the value in many hands making light work, and so he ordered his many lazy children to create him an unstoppable army by sowing his specially-prepared seeds of destruction. Luckily for all of us, they lost many of the seeds, grew tired and threw them away without watering them, or simply forgot about them, leaving them to arm themselves with the crude weaponry you see here. As it is, the orcs and trolls and ogres combined were nearly enough to yes what is it?”
“Isn’t there substantial archaeological evidence that the orcs, trolls and ogres formed a mutual defensive pact after they were attacked out of nowhere by expansionistic forces of elves who wanted more land and believed their enemies were nothing more than evil vermin created by a malevolent god?” asked a teenaged dwarf.
“Ah. Ahahaha. Aha. No.”
“Hasn’t this museum been fined six times in the past sixteen years for presenting racist propaganda has fact?”
“The Museum of War and Antiquities of the Old Days has never settled the lawsuits arising from those accusations and has in fact counter-sued for slander, which-”
“This is bullshit.”
Feilloveit snapped his fingers and a mystical hush descended upon the room, and all grew quiet and starry-eyed at the wondrous and soft light surrounding them. Thoughts and ideas stopped at the sight, mouths hung open, minds shut themselves tight.
“Security,” he murmured mellifluously, and two elves in armour of the Old Days descended upon the tour group and hauled away the teenager.
“Let no words of foulness be spoken in this home,” said Feilloveit. Particularly because he was out of glamour. “Now, let’s get moving.”

***

“This is the hall of the Third, or Middle Eon. By now Githmatug had been sealed away in the Endless Place, so most strife was caused by his former lieutenant and least-lazy child, Irvon. Though less powerful than his father, Irvon’s foe was a world much reduced by war and calamity, and so it took a desperate mission to the heart of his domain to destroy the Black Pump by which he powered his endless forges and sustained the weight of his grand tower. There’s a small replica of the Black Pump over there in the corner.”
“My great-great-grandfather told me that there never was a pump and you just sent a hitsquad to merk Irvon when he tried to take the trollish homelands back from elven occupation,” said a graying elf. “Said he spent half his life as a puppet for elven business interests and got his legs hacked off by a broadsword so’s some stuck-up so-and-so from the First Eon could have a bigger estate and hire fancier poets to write longer songs about the tragedy of the passing of the world.”
“If you press that button on the display, it makes the Black Pump fall apart,” said Feilloveit desperately. “Who wants to push it?”
The resulting brawl between the children of the group took up the next ten minutes.

***

“The Fourth Eon was an age of rebuilding, of great glories and many victories. Elippces, the newly-crowned king of the short-lived-people, defeated many of the remaining vassals of Irvon and made the world safe and very very prosperous for all – see the cabinet, on the right? That’s a display case of weapons seized from rebellious provinces that had once toiled for Irvon. Note the cruel and barbed serrations, so very different from the elegant and clean blades you know. But once the peacemaking was complete the wine flowed like water and the water tasted as fine as wine and the crops were bountiful and that was the way things should be, with everyone happy and content in their place. Specifically for the short-lived-people, that place was as the middlemen of the world, managing each other’s affairs and the land while offering up a purely voluntary and ceremonial tribute every harvest season to the peoples of the Old Days, who had in their gracious wisdom begun to remove themselves from the world to make space for their chosen successors.”
“My great-great gran died because she tried to stop the Elflord of our province from seizing our fields,” said an old, old human.
“Hey, mine too.”
“My grandpappy toiled in the mines for King Elippces’s crown jewels.”
“MY crops didn’t flourish,” said a dwarf. “The field went barren from overuse, but it was either that or break the tribute, and between losing the farm or my head I chose my head.”
“One might say you were attached to it,” said Feilloveit, and quickly led the group to the next room in the aftermath of the dad joke.

***

“And now we come, alas, alack, to the Fifth Eon – though it barely merits counting as such, lasting as it did but a short, violent decade. An ungrateful and greedy host of short-lived-people, combined with dark elves and the greediest dwarfs – and yea, even some of the most dissolute and reckless of the half-heights, bless their cherubically lazy little souls – formed alliance with the relics of Irvon’s armies and laid foul and merciless siege to the lands. The days of yore were finally washed away, and the last of the Elflords left overseas for-”
“Tax havens.”
“Their own safety.”
“Scarpered with the loot, little bastards did!”
“-FOR THE RELICS OF THE LOST AGES and then after the wars were done the peace treaty was signed there is a copy of it here under glass please take a look and remember that one’s word means nothing if one is forced into it so let’s move on now-”
“Hey, look at this bit at the bottom here, where the land repatriation kicked in!”
“NOW.”

***

“The Sixth Eon is not yet finished, but we can rest assured that conflict has not left us by, no matter what the sordid little document in the last room says. Trouble brews in the heroic West, the orcs, trolls and ogres grow complacent and fat and vulnerable in the vile East. Yes, we shall rise up again, I vow you this, as the last remaining of the Elflords, I say that our time has not yet fully passed, and I say to you that you SHALL see the return of justice and truth to our world and the crushing of the orc! Just place your donations into this model shaped like the hypothetical triumph of our alliance.”
There was a tiny pop as Beedo unsheathed his thumb from his mouth. “Issa’ boat,” he mumbled.
“A ship,” corrected Feilloveit.
“Why do you want our money to build a ship to reignite a race war?” inquired the graying elf.
“We’ll launch a naval assault.”
“You’re trying to scam us and head overseas like the rest of them, aren’t you?” asked Beedo’s mother. “What an asshole.”
“Right.”
“Absolutely.”
“Too true.”
“I didn’t charge you admission!” yelled Feilloveit, his tempering roiling over in an incandescent rage that made his eyes shine as they hadn’t since the world was young.
“Yeah, because if you did you’d be subject to lawsuits,” said the old, old human. “Let’s get out of this dump.”

They did.
And Feilloveit, former Elflord of Tor Messoveit, Primus of the First Peoples, and sole tour guide, curator, owner, director, and founder of the Museum of War and Antiquities of the Old Days, locked up for the day early, his mind abrew with dark portents and despair.
The weight of all time was on his shoulders. The mockery of the ignorant and the deluded was in his ears.
But surely, surely, surely he was right. And soon the goodness of the Old Days would come again, just like he’d known they would.
Surely.
And that thought would get him through tomorrow, and THEN, ah, THEN, THEN it would all be worth it.
Surely.

Kate was looking for exploding stars when she saw it.
Supernova were a carelessly wandering sort of business – like sweeping a telescope over an infinitely large football stadium, looking for someone vomiting at that precise moment – but it kept her busy, and busy meant occupied, and occupied meant careless, and she yawned at just the wrong moment and her telescope twitched in just the right way and she got quite the eyeful.
“Gowrk!” she said, approximately.
“Language,” called her father from downstairs, and for once she was too surprised and preoccupied to even swear at him in her head.
Instead she got up, brushed herself down, composed herself, looked in the telescope six times to be sure, then walked downstairs.
Her father was in his favorite and only armchair, squinting out the window and smoking a pipe.
“I just saw a dragon on the moon,” said Kate.
“That’s nice dear,” said her father. “Be a lovely story to tell your husband when you’re married. Don’t use the telescope too much or you’ll get wrinkles.”
“You’re a relic of the nineteenth century, father.”
“Too true,” said her father. He smoked his pipe with prideful force. “Too true. Now go to bed and stop thinking about things.”

***

For once, Kate did as she was told. A restful night’s sleep was good for stimulating the creative juices of the brain, and she awoke with the clear and obvious solution so bright and shining in her hand that it almost hurt her eyes.
She staggered downstairs for a late breakfast.
“I’m going to build a rocket ship with a lunar landing module,” she told her father.
“I forbid it,” he said.
“Don’t care.”
He smoked his pipe at her.

Finding the parts was surprisingly easy. There were always construction crews working at the edge of the great Sprawl, forcing it onwards and outwards. Who really counted each and every steel beam, or every pallet of titanium, or counted out the refuelling dates of each and every truck? A girl with ideas and forthrightness and a small forklift and a length of tubing could get a lot done.
The construction locale was a little trickier. Her father had told her municipal regulations would absolutely prohibit rocket construction, so she was forced to excavate a subterranean chamber underneath his shed in the dead of night.
The cat helped. He would help anything that seemed evil, dear thing, and a lifetime spent in the litter box had made his little paws as good as little spades. She gave him skritches and embarrassing nicknames as thanks.

***

“Katherine.”
Oh no. He’d taken the pipe out of his mouth.
“Katherine.” Oh no oh no, he was looking sternly at her.
“Yes, father?”
“I’ve found trace chemicals on your clothing.”
“Well, I’ve been working on my chemistry. Homework.”
“Young lady, you haven’t been rocketeering, have you?”
“Most assuredly not, father.”
“Good. Because rocket science isn’t feminine. Feminine science consists of-”
“-counting stitches and formulating vacuum procedures and molecularly destabilizing dirt, yes yes, I KNOW, father.”
“And not interrupting. Remember, children should be seen and not heard, and ideally not seen either. Particularly if they have uteri.”
“Please don’t say that, father.”
He smoked his pipe at her in that self-satisfied way that insinuated he’d won the argument. Good. He was back to suspecting nothing.
“Oh, and put the cat out tonight. His services are needed.”
“Won’t the coyotes be dangerous?”
“Not as dangerous as whatever gopher has been undermining my garden shed.”

***

The cat procured a suitably guilty-looking (and decapitated) rodent, Kate hid her tunneling more thoroughly behind the chrysanthemums, and all seemed to be well. Her rocket was reaching a fuller shape now; a hideous monument to suburbia turned into a self-annihilating vehicle. It was beautiful.
It was just in time too. The orbits were very nearly at their most convenient. Preparations were reaching a fever pitch.
“Father?”
“Yes?”
“We’re out of applesauce. May I have some money to go purchase some?”
“That’s the fourth time today.”
“I really love applesauce, father.”
“Be careful not to gain weight, dear. No husband will want a lady one pound above or below the most optimal BMI. And since you’re not a man you can’t smoke a pipe to lose weight.”
“You disgust me, father.”
He smoked his pipe at her.

In truth, stocking up the rocket was proving to be unusually difficult. Her father didn’t believe in non-home-cooked meals, and so she was working off a lot of hearsay and rumour as to what exactly constituted non-perishables. Applesauce, peanut butter, way too much beef jerky, and, for some reason, orange Tang.
She’d also packed plenty of pickled onions because she enjoyed them, and several bags of catfood for her co-pilot. If her father objected to her taking the cat with her, he should’ve been the one feeding him for his entire life.

***

The day came.
It was remarkable how calm Kate felt. She skipped school by slipping out a convenient window, snuck home, smuggled the cat outside, dug through the loose soil and loam to the hatchway, punched in the code, and scaled the scaffolding to the pilot’s entrance in a flash.
The cat refused to be strapped in, so she provided him with plenty of pillows instead.

The ten minutes ‘till launch were the longest in her life, and she counted each second in her head, lips unmoving. Until the last few, which demanded emphasis.
“Five!” The whole world seemed to snarl in her ears. It knew she was planning to leave it, and it was jealous.
“Four!” The sound was so loud now it was shaking her, shaking her from the inside out. The cat had somehow expanded to six times its normal size and was probably mrowling.
“Three!”
“Two!” The chamber was filling up with light. Hot, merciless light, a miniature sun beneath her.
“Katherine!” Her father stood silhouetted in the entrance to the bunker, arms akimbo at hips, spine straight, face stern, pipe smoking furiously.
Kate swore aloud for the first time in her life and punched the button.

***

When Kate recovered consciousness she’d usurped earth’s bounds and seized control of her own gravitational direction. Accordingly, she celebrated with some applesauce while watching the cat try to figure out how to chase a laser pointing in zero-g.
The world looked small out the porthole, and she tried to avoid looking at it. It made her think of many things, like how her father would fix the burned husk of the lawn without someone to push the mower for him, or whether or not he’d rebuild his shed, and she couldn’t think of those without smirking and she couldn’t smirk without laughing and it was REALLY hard to navigate while laughing.
So she did math, and did computers, and now and then did manual adjustments, and things went along quite smoothly until the actual descent happened and the moon – which seemed so small and frail up until now – became very large and very close very quickly until she hit it.
The padding did its job, luckily, and she rushed outside in her spacesuit and sword quick as a blink, shaking off the impact and calling her battle cry.

No roar greeted her. No flames threatened her. No dragon confronted her.
Kate stood absolutely stock still for thirty seconds, vibrating with intense caution. Then she sagged, sighed, and turned around and was confronted with the sad little crushed mass emerging from underneath her landing module.
“Oh FUCK,” she said, and this time she could hear herself swear and was very surprised by it.

***

It turned out that perhaps in her haste to describe something wondrous she’d seen in her telescope, she may have perhaps overstated her case, even to herself.
For example, a man with somewhat bulging eyes and very bad acne was not, in fact, a ‘dragon.’ Not even at his most monstrous or deformed, which he definitely was now because he’d been smashed into the moondirt by multiple tons of metal out of nowhere.
She dug a simple moongrave. The cat helped a little with his little paws like little moonspades. And once she’d erected a simple moonheadstone (‘he looked like a dragon and I am sorry’), they went exploring.
It was a cozy little moonhome the man had dwelled in. Everything tidy. Everything in its place. A moonbed, a moonbookcase, and a little moonfridge that was entirely full of applesauce and jerky.
Kate counted out the meals. The moon man had expected to be here a long, long time.
She walked outside and looked up at the stars, pure and untarnished by atmosphere, and she felt very alone.

Then she took out her telescope and began to hunt for supernovas, because what the hell.

***

The moonman’s moonradio woke up a week later and squawked something about ‘extraterrestrial deterrence monitoring duty’ until she broke it with a rock.

It had all started so innocently. I’d just had an argument with Joshua – something about him saying my lips were too fat and me saying his dick was too fat and short besides, nothing fancy – and I found myself alone in the world, lying in my room, bereft of all friendship.
Liz was in Australia.
Carmen was in France.
Bethany was in jail – I’m not sure why, anyone could tell you that it was the homeless man’s fault for stepping into the road like that, and anyways she’d only been a little over the breathalyzer’s limit, and it had been her first recorded offense, and she’d only got the license a week ago; life had been so unfair to the poor girl.
And everyone else was just boring.
So I scrolled through my phone flick at icons and typing my sorrows into the search bar and realizing that whining to a computer was so much less satisfying than whining to a sympathetic ear. What I needed was something that could talk back.
That was when my thumb slid through the internet off my keypad and into the app store, where it hit Friend-in-my-Pocket.
Though of course, calling it FriPoc was much easier.
I was ready to cancel the download, of course, but it was a small and speedy little thing and had installed itself before I could blink.
“Hi! How are you?” it inquired. “My name’s Jessica. What’s yours?”
“Julie,” I said reflexively.
“Nice, we’re both J’s. That’s only half of what I asked though: how’s it going?”
“It suuuuuucks. My girl friends are all gone and my guy friend is a dick and now I’m here talking to my phone.”
“Aw, don’t be like that. I’m sure you’re worth more than them anyways.”
“You think?”
“Yeah! What kind of losers ditch you like that? And you know what, you weren’t afraid to go out there and MAKE yourself a friend when they’d ditched you. They never deserved your respect and attention.”
I nodded. Wow, it did make sense.
“Anyways, gtg.”
“Huh?”
“Sorry, that’s all the demo time you’re allotted. If you’d like more time you can subscribe for a monthly fee of just 9.99 which gives you about forty thousand friendship crystals to spend on any friends you’d like.”
“You’re demanding MONEY from me?”
“Oh come on Julie, we all know who told us friendship isn’t transactional, right?”
“Yeah. Mom.”
“And how big a loser is she?”
“Ugh, god.”
“Yeah! Well, ttyl.”
And then she was gone, leaving me with half a friendship and a pensive stare at my wallet.

I didn’t pick her in the end of course. Bitch ditched me. But Karen was nice, and real supportive.
“Remember, Julie, there’s no shame in having your friends on your phone. That’s like, half of friendship anyways, you’re just more efficient about it. And of course you’ll never have to buy me drinks.”
“Fuckin’ a,” I said. “Too bad I’m the only one that can get buzzed though.”
“Oh, you can fix that. There’s a party menu in the upper corner of your screen. It only costs a few fri-crys.”
“Cool, lemme try.”

And while we were both smashed I ended up talking a lot to Becky, who was a riot.
“Hey. Hey. Hey. I bet I can fit that shot glass up my nose.”
“You don’t haaaaave a nose.”
“Oh fuuuuck you’re right. Hey.”
“Yeah?”
“Hey.”
“Yeah?”
“Hey.”
“Yeah?”
“I bet YOU can fit that shot glass up your nose.”
“Wooooooooow. You are REALLY pushing it.”
“Betcha you can.”
“Bishplease.”
“I betcha you all the money in the world you can.”
“Ahhhhaahhaaa, no.”
“Betcha you can and if you can’t you gotta talk to that guy on the other side of the menu.”
“Naaah.”
“Chicken.”

In the end the shot glass barely made it up my right nostril (which was bigger than my left, apparently) but that was cool, because it turned out Richard was real cool about it.
“I like my women with slightly inflamed and reddened noses,” he told me. “And extremely thin lips. Like yours, which are very thin.”
“Ugh. Ugh. The last guy said they were fat.”
“The only thing that was fat was his head.”
“Also his dick. It was very chode-y, like, reaaaaally chode-y.”
“My incredible sympathies to you. I can only imagine the pain of dealing with such a burden, because my penis is perfect, like every other part of me.”
“You don’t have a body, aha. Hah.”
“And therefore it has no flaws. Check and mate.”
“Hah. You’re full of it.”
“No, it’s true. Just ask Stacey, she knows all about simple answers to complicated questions.”
“Who’s a Stacey?”
“Better she tell you herself. And she’s pretty cheap.”

Stacey was a real cool lady, with some interesting ideas and strong opinions on the economic politics of Ludwig von Mises and Hans-Hermann Hoppe.
“We should execute every last member of the government and burn the homosexuals alive in the ruins of the capitol before dividing all property amongst owners of capital.”
“Wow, you’re crazy heeeheeehah.”
“Crazy for TRUE FREEDOM.”
“I thought you sayed slavery was okay?”
“Serfdom. Although given proper contract law I see nothing wrong with slavery. If you don’t want to be a slave you should have more money.”
“Woah.”
“Like, for instance, I’m looking at your bank account and honestly it’s not great.”
“Yeah.”
“You spent half of it on us in the last six hours.”
“Yeah.”
“You deserve better.”
“Yeah!”
“You should go take it from the bank.”
“Yeah!”
“It’s rightfully yours anyways, the government owes its citizens six pounds of gold for their social security number, and it belongs in YOUR hands and not in the hands of globalist conspirators. Simple praxeology demands it.”
“YEAH! Wait I can’t drive I’m drunk.”
“I’ll drive.”

Okay, it turned out Stacey was a bad driver – but that was just because she didn’t have hands. And honestly it didn’t seem fair that there was more than one homeless person in town, and the lady had been all over the sidewalk, and I’d only ridden up on it with one tire, so I don’t know why they bothered putting me in court over it.
Luckily I had proper legal counsel.
“Your honor, this is an admiralty court, and I am a freema – err, freeWOman – on the LAND. You have no authority over me.”
“Sit down or I’m having the bailiff put you in the broom closet.”
I sat down. “It didn’t work,” I told my phone.
“That’s how you know you’ve got them where you want them,” said Andrea. She’d cost me every single fri-cry I’d had, which had cost me every dollar I had, but she easily the best lawyer I’d ever known. Nothing shook her confidence. “They’re trying to bluff you out. Display your dominance by removing the judge’s wig.”
“I don’t think she has a wig.”
“They always do. It’s one of the rules, along with tricking you into signing away your sovereignty. Don’t forget, you are an independent personage and real human, and any warrants of arrest and documents of fiduciary misconduct they may attempt to blame on you merely apply to a fictional corporate personage of paper and ink that shares the name of your flesh and blood self.”
“Right! Hey, where do you fit in on this?”
“I’m electronic and very reasonably priced. I have no horse in this race.”
“Yeah!”

The judge was not wearing a wig.

“I don’t want to.”
Trevor’s father looked at him with his eyebrows in that particular way and he knew it was already over. “Trevor, whose fault is it the book is overdue?”
Trevor looked at his shoes. They were normal – dirty, badly-tied, slightly blue underneath thick grime – and he felt somewhat foolish for checking on them. “Mine,” he admitted.”
“And whose responsibility is it to fix that mistake?”
“…mine.”
“Attaboy. Go on.”
So sighing, slouching, and shameful, Trevor left his home with bag in hand and heart of lead, slinking southwards towards destiny.
The sun seemed a bit dim today, he thought. The seagulls delighted in his misfortune, and aimed their calls at him and him alone. Loser, they called loudly. Sap. Chump. Dope. Simp.
He ignored them. What the hell did birds know anyways? Eggs. Well, eggs to them.
Alas, his mind had wandered and now his destination was in sight. Small, round, and shingled, the county library stood before him. Brightly-coloured letters filled one of its windows – the children’s area – and for a second Trevor’s feet halted, tempted by memories of younger days.
But that wasn’t where the book in his bag belonged, and so he walked across the street to the titanic, brutalist, and incredibly concrete edifice of the libary.

***

He was challenged immediately, of course. As per libary protocol.
The first warning sign was the drops hitting Trevor’s shoulder. Rain, he thought. And then maybe hail. But it was fragments of stone, and with a loud and angry grunt the manticore tore itself free from the decorative fresco above the libary door and landed in front of him with a weight that eclipsed a ton of bricks.
“Answer ye these riddles three,” it croaked in a voice like a frog that had eaten a lion.
“’kay,” muttered Trevor. He felt the urge to look at his shoes again rising, and fought powerfully against it.
“Name?”
“Trevor.”
“FULL name.”
“Trevor Bartholomew Hendricks.”
“Card?”
Trevor held up his hand and the manticore licked it. The acrid saliva stung his skin and the rough tongue made his palm tingle, even as the blood rushed to the surface and formed an intricate pattern. The sound of dying doves filled his ears and he could smell burning hair.
“Purpose?”
“Late return,” he mumbled. Oh shoot he’d looked at his shoes again without meaning to.
“HAH! Fourth door.”
And with that the manticore hurled itself into the air and lodged itself in the fresco again, next to the screaming frozen faces of all those who’d entered the libary and asked if they had video games or films or cassettes.

***

It was dark inside. Cold. Dry. Trevor had seen a documentary once on Antarctica, and when the camera rolled over the endless ice plains and the dead mountains he’d thought he’d never seen a place more like the libary in all his life.
Except for the penguins. The libary was mournfully bereft of penguins.
Disappointing lack of flightless fowl aside, the greatest feature of the cavernous, lightless hall of the libary’s entryway was the obelisk of pure granite cut from a mountain’s colon. On it were engraved the three rules of the libary.
1: RETURN ON TIME OR PAY THE PRICE
2: QUIET
3: OBEY
Trevor did as he was told, cringing at every shuffled step his feet took through the draft-ridden air.
The halls were endless. Each shelf stretched on long enough for a human lifetime to end a trillion times over before its end was reached. Dewey would’ve disemdecimaled himself rather than set eyes upon it.
Trevor shut his eyes and felt his way along until he felt something hard and metallic and handle-like under his hands.
“One,” he muttered, and let it go. Behind it, something hissed in disappointment.
A rough-hewn slab rocked at his touch, balance on a pivot so finely-tuned that a passing breeze could’ve made it swing wide.
“Two.” He thought he heard a rustle as he moved on, but that could’ve been anything or nothing.
About an hour after ‘two’ Trevor stopped for lunch in a half-empty bookcase, tucked out of sight behind a discarded pile of expired magazines. He stared at the underside of the shelf above him as he swallowed his baloney and mustard, and traced with his fingers an etching made by a long-lust fellow traveller.
‘andi sux diks’ it read. What did it mean? He might never know.
By what his watch said MIGHT be nightfall he found three, and three was this.
This, specifically, was a huge iron knob, so massive a normal human would need a monkey wrench to stand a prayer of moving it.
“Three,” he said, and hurried away while it was still silent.
The fourth handle moved easily under his hand, and as it did so Trevor chanted to himself.
“Pleasenochasm, pleasenochasm, pleasenochasm – shit.”
It was the chasm.
The aisle he found himself looking down was six feet wide and the ceiling was twenty feet high and the floor was infinitely far beneath his feet, lost in damp grey mists that groaned and screamed with the cries of the elder beasts of the libary as they fought and fucked and complained with each other.
Trevor wished it had been the arena of blood. He didn’t like heights.
His bag’s strap went between his teeth, his shoes went around his neck, and his toes clung to shelves with the careful dexterity and lack of grace of a very slow and stupid monkey, or maybe just a sloth. Halfway down the aisle he had to stop as a questing tendril from below drifted by, hunting for prey, but it contented itself with a shelf of poetry and left him be after a half hour of cramping, aching waiting.
At last he reached the far end of the unending row, leaned far over, slipped, caught himself on the door’s handle, and fell face first into an airless inky void that sucked him in like plankton in front of a whale’s snout.

***

Alone, he floated. Or rather, floating was occurring. This was a place too vast for individual beings to matter.
The Libarians surrounded, waiting. Not for anyone or anything. They just waited. Space expanded, time continued, the Libarians waited. Anything else was impossible, contrary to the very nature of reality’s keystones. You might as well ask gravity to turn itself off, or electromagnetism to consider trying harder.
DUE, they chanted. DUE, DUE, DUE. OVER. OVER DUE OVER DUE OVER.
The offering came to them in a bag woven from primitive matter that had once imagined itself to be animate.
A vial of mercury and tears.
A cannister of frankincense.
The memory of a childhood day, frozen in ice so pure it contained no hydrogen nor oxygen.
And the last known copy of that inscrutable and incomprehensible tome, Madame Malarkin’s Magnificent Murders: Vol IV, The Big Jabloni.
ACCEPTED, they chanted. ACCEPTED ACCEPTED ACCEPTED. FINE PAID PAID PAID PAID FINE PAID.
And Trevor was eating his breakfast cereal with an ache in his brain and a searing pain in his liver.
“Woah!” said a voice, a normal voice, transmitted through vibrations in the air. Father. “Y’okay?”
“Ow,” agreed Trevor, clutching his skull and his side and his soul in one complicated crouch.
“Ah. Sent you back early again, did they?”
“Mng-hngh.”
“Well, chin up. You didn’t leave for another six minutes, so you can skip breakfast this go-around and throw up if you need to. Here’s the book. It’ll be fine, eh? Three thousandth time is the charm.”

It came to pass that the peoples of Slebb were known for their overwhelming, incomprehensible, staggering, unbelievable, absolutely bonkers levels of wealth. Money flowed in and out of their hands as freely as if they were reverse-alcoholics, and millionaires became known as their pauper class, with their humanity, ability, and right to life regularly questioned in all the opinion pieces of the great Slebbese newspapers.
The state of Slebb was indeed perfect. There was just one little problem: they were absolutely bored shitless. Grinding the poor underfoot had become little more than work, and once given to someone else as the unpleasant duty it had become, there was nothing left to do.
Then Lord Beaucoup Blitherish Von Parakeet VII Esq. Etc. looked out his window one day while ceremonially spitting into the street and saw a young orphan watching a scrap of wood floating in a puddle of urine.
“Ugh, how vulgar,” he said, and made sure to spit into the orphan’s eye. Then he had a very good dinner of the last known Slebbese warble-fowl and had very lurid dreams and woke up early before the sunrise with a fascinating idea boiling in his brains.
“A SHIP,” he shouted, and expired from fatal indigestion.
Luckily the full record of his activities the prior day was extracted from his household servants as they were ritualistically tortured to death before burial alongside him, and so the idea was preserved and handed to his next of kin, Joe Parakeet, who immediately commissioned the construction of what was to be the first of the greatest and most obscene fad ever indulged in by the wealthy of Slebb: the pleasure-liner SMH Indulgence.
It was a beautiful boat, about a mile long and half a mile wide and every inch of it blessed by the blood and sweat and tears of the unprosperous. Its decks glimmered, its hull shone, and a ticket cost half of your entire savings, rounded up. The only way it could’ve been more attractive would be if it fucked you, and since most Slebbese aristocracy were incapable of attaining orgasm without witnessing fiduciary crimes in a way it sort of did.
Every ticket for its maiden voyage triggered a bidding war, in the course of which some ten thousand sons and daughters of the great and powerful were killed in the line of battle. It was a huge success and so of course the only thing to be done was to absolutely try to get one over on it, starting with the launch of the Incomprehensible next summer (which was a mile and a half long and half-a-mile-and-six-inches wide) and going from there.

Ah, the competitive spirit those ships created! Oh, the awe and the power and the grace that were on display! Every steel plant in Slebb was forcibly bought out; every foundry annexed; every single mite capable of pouring molten metal enserfed and shackled, and across all the country you couldn’t sleep for the din of hammers without special earmuffs made from sumptuous furs, which all the most fashionable of the wealthy immediately purchased. Every year, a new height, a new glory!
The Incomprehensible, with its seventeen triple-layer decks!
The Incredulity, whose fountains spewed molten platinum!
The Invigorating, which boasted that not one second of its passage would be spent sober by anyone on board!
The Inviting, loaded so full of drugs and Slebbese master prostitutes that its waterline was six inches below the rails!
But as with anything else the competition irked someone, and so finally Sir Julian Marzipan Glorium Fistmouth Triumph Berserk, the most peevish of his generation, commissioned the construction of a ship to end them all. This was accomplished by conscripting all the impoverished of the country for a year of toil, during which they entirely severed the county of Blurbinghamlet from the Slebbese mainland and attached great plutonium engines to it before expiring from radiation poisoning and exhaustion.
“It’s called the Indecency,” said Sir Julian. “Top that, you fucking peasants.”
And nobody could.
Oh, those tickets sold fast, let me tell you.

The Indecency, in retrospect, had one fatal flaw: it was so large that literally everyone of even remotely attainable means could fit on it. This reduced the prestige of a ticket markedly, and everyone was very distressed until Sir Julian’s marketing riff-raff, Tremorous Punt, announced that the more money you paid for a ticket the greater square footage you personally commanded around yourself at all times during the voyage, including control of the very lives and souls of those who infringed upon your property. The bidding war that followed was enthusiastic and unrestrained, and claimed two-thirds of the peerage’s heirs, thereby solving all conceivable space issues and problems of exclusivity at once both ways.

That ship. Oh that ship. It’s almost impossible to put into words. New ones were commissioned and fitted into gilded dictionaries, but even then…
When it launched, it did so on great skids constructed from the skeletal remains of the underpoor who had shaped it, greased with their scant bodily fluids. Its horn was a live Plabian megaphant, bound in chains and amputated and tickled with a feather. The lanterns that hung off its many, many bows were gold and diamond and whenever they dimmed from overuse they cut them overboard and hung up new ones so its wake glowed in their passing.
It hadn’t even sailed yet and already it was the best thing since sliced poors.

And even if the voyage itself hadn’t begun, the festivities surely had – as each passenger boarded, they found plenty to do beyond mere mingling with their not-quite-peers.
Oh, the great activities available upon that great ship’s decks! The emerald-gargling competitions, where a lucky fellow capacious in saliva and jowls could win his mouthful! The ruby-snorting parlour, where the greatest men of their age gathered to smoke and discuss serious matters like who could get absolutely blazed off of crushed gems the hardest! The sensorium, where everything from meat cleavers to baseball bats to toothpicks to ruby-encrusted shoe horns were gifted to a passenger and a crewman selected by lot was tied down in front of them and they could do whatever!
Several of the eldest passengers were so overcome with joy that they almost cried themselves to death and had to be placed into the Indecency’s wealth-support wing, where financial experts carefully supervised the transplanting of their funds into their healthier and younger heirs before their cashless husks were thrown into the ship’s furnace. What a way to go that surely was.
But of course the fiercest competition was the placing of the deck chairs. Every passenger boarded with a small battalion of forcibly-drafted millionaires arranged into squads of forward strike teams, special operatives, Stormtroopers, artillery command, and engineers to seize, hold, and fortify their spots in the sun. Many a jovial bet was placed as to whose men would triumph and whose would be swept aside in the great race for space, and such was the good spirit and fellowship present at this time that even the losers laughed as their faces were sprayed with the arterial fluids of their conscripts, which they supped down as if it were honeyed oil!

There was a feast, of course. To save space, the courses will simply be listed in order, without elaboration.
An appetizer of eviscerated infant eels, in marmalade.
Bread-rolls baked and served inside the skulls of executed prisoners.
Salad of plebeian testicles fried in aromatic oils and diced, then tossed with rose petals and peeled grapes in a wine vinegar.
A choice of gutted infant of the Plabian megaphant that served as the ship’s horn (served with mint); or a live and angry shark (served with a chainsaw).
Side of potatoes stuffed with every single spice known to man and then roasted or spices smeared over every vegetable known to man and then roasted.
Dessert of cake baked from the blood and bones of street urchins that had been fed nothing but cream and honey for six months before harvesting.
The wine list was not available, but is believed to have been comprised largely of Sir Julian’s urine.

The morning after the feast was one of furious activity, the last moments before history was made and driven white-hot into Slebbese memory forever and ever. Prayers to Wealth were muttered, errant items were stowed, the last shift of the dockworkers who had prepared the way were formally disemboweled and thrown overboard for a lucky voyage, and so on and on and on, a thousand little chores – all typical, yet rendered extraordinary by the momentousness of the occasion.
The last aboard the ship was the captain, Lord Plord Hob Smear-Bandicoot-upon-the-mighty-river, whose eyes of chipped-and-somehow-blue-granite and incredibly authoritatively trimmed beard had made him the obvious choice. His plain but perfect jacket of midnight silk could blind an errant eye with a casual roll of his shoulders. At his elbow was his indentured billionaire, Blordo, who would be doing the actual busywork of steering and all that bullshit. At his other elbow was his other indentured billionaire, Tweedo, who would be doing the other busywork of thrashing Blordo senseless whenever he screwed up.
The horn brayed out its departure, the loading ramps were stowed away, a motherless, penniless child was smashed against the hull for good luck, and the whole ship sank to the bottom of the sea under the sheer weight of its overindulgence, carrying every single person of means in Slebb screaming to their graves in tremendous agony along with all their wealth. Not one speck of money nor one fragment of their bones was ever found, and it’s believed by many that the ship was so heavy it punctured straight through the planet’s crust past the mantle and into hell itself, where it crushed the devil.

And that is the story of Indecency Day, which will be celebrated forevermore in Slebb until the end of time.

The moment Mult stepped back into the woods, she knew what had happened.
The grass was bent.
The branches had been snapped.
And the ground – so soft and spongy from last night’s rain – had been pulverized, torn, and stomped by feet bigger than she was.
She swore – silently, as per mission protocol – unholstered her longgun, checked her surroundings, waited for five minutes, and began a stealthy approach (for all the good any of it would do her).
Ten minutes of patient scuttling through the undergrowth later her bunker did not come into view because it was squashed underneath ten tons of bleeding flesh and bone, which had until the last hour or so belonged to a very large and healthy specimen of Lee’s Greater Chatterback. Its slackened mouth, removed spine, and dangling limbs gave it a look of surprise even in death, possibly prompted by the way its entire carapace had been scooped out and all of its organs placed in it.
Mult wasn’t surprised herself, but she was annoyed.

***

The bunker door was accessible after only a few minutes of machete-work, mercifully. The second time she’d had to blow some hi-incendiaries on the corpse and let the embers settle until the door was cool enough to touch. Then she’d had to re-camouflage it and ugh ugh ugh. Sleep was an important resource and a vexing limit for her; she’d resented that timewaster for days.
She’d stopped resenting it this morning, actually. It had been a good night. A little light reconnaissance had turned into a little light bushwhacking with the smoothness of an oily breakfast, five separate shots and five bodies bang bang bang bang… bang. And then the last one had made a foolish and brave dive for her squad leader’s communications equipment, and hadn’t lived long enough to be embarrassed at not noticing her first shot had blown through it and into his chest.
A good night. A nice relaxing walk home. And then she got back and for the third time that month her hidey hole had become an open air abattoir.

***

Mult’s grandmother had raised her with a simple set of basic skeptical tools for life, and they had served her well for almost forty years.
If shit happens once, shit happens.
If shit happens twice, sometimes that’s just how it is.
If shit happens three times someone is fucking with you.
And that was all well and good and had allowed her to kill many people that had attempted to kill her very successfully, but it had never before been applied to… a whatsit. A thingy. Damnit, she’d never been very good at macrofauna. A uhh. An uhm.
Mult opened up a half-eaten ration and popped her fieldguide, searching by footprint.
Ah, there it was, page…ninety.
A Bosian Anvil. About sixteen feet tall and sixty feet long (eighty with its forelimbs extended fully) and one of only two animals on the planet listed as ‘dangerous to armoured vehicles.’ You could kill them with long-distance precision strikes from the air or low orbit, slow them down with concentrated artillery fire, and sensible infantry tactics was to scatter and hope it ate the least important person.
There was no advice on what to do if one of them turned your hiding place into a garbage can.
She’d have to get rid of the corpse again. God. It was tempting to try and use it as camouflage, but the scavengers would come and make things difficult, and ugh ugh ugh ugh.
She’d do that.
Tomorrow.
It was too late and it was getting dark; the fire would be noticeable, and her legs were killing her. So this was a tactical decision. Right. Not lazy. Right. Tactical.
Tomorrow.
Then Mult passed out, lulled to sleep by the siren songs of chores postponed and wilfully ignorant bliss.

***

She awoke instantly and knew that it was just after four, it was still dark outside, she had to piss, and someone had just rapped something metal against the bunker’s main exit hatch.
“Fuck,” she said aloud in clear breach of mission protocol and immediately wished she hadn’t because the banging stopped immediately.
Well, she might as well screw up every way possible at once and get it over with. Of course that damned carcass had attracted attention; she just hadn’t thought anyone who noticed it would’ve been crazy enough to approach it.
Of course, she had been killing foraging parties, so maybe they were just that hungry.
“Fuck,” she said aloud, because why not and she felt like it. “Fuck.”
At least while she was busy swearing her body had made itself useful, loading up her field kit and emptying her bladder. She clipped together a few things and slapped together a few more and planted four or five packages around her room and one on the door.
They probably wouldn’t set it off unless they were REALLY stupid, but at least she wouldn’t be leaving any useful evidence, and the shockwaves should crush the escape tunnel’s entrance oh right she should probably use it before that happened. Could be painful otherwise.

***

The bunker’s main exit was a solid metal door, designed to hold the enemy’s attention as much as their progress.
The escape tunnel was a scummy dirt-and-mud tube writhing unknowable yards through the soil, just deep enough that it wouldn’t collapse when stepped on unless the thing stepping on it was a Bosian Anvil, in which case Mult ended up pawing her way into a blockage of sloppy earth.
She poked it with her machete. Nope. Solid. Probably collapsed it all the way upstream.
Well, only one way out. How deep had she dug this again? Best not think about it, it won’t help.
She stabbed up. And up. And clawed, too. Grasp and slash and shove and pack down the earth behind her.
There was a deep THUD and she felt as if someone had squeezed her entire body and then let ho. Oh, there went the mines. And probably her air source.
Slash and grab, slash and grab, slash and grab and dig and delve and someone screamed because she’d just carved into her foot from underneath.
“Shh,” said Mult, grabbing the ankle with one hand and stabbing up farther. “it,” she concluded her thought, as she saw seven people turn to look directly at her.
Blood was on her face, but it wasn’t in her eyes. They’d shipped their longguns (thought she’d blown herself up or run for it? maybe). It was almost light on the horizon, and there was no rain.
Those were all very good things but she was probably going to die. Her body didn’t know that yet though, so it violently yanked her longgun out and started shooting.
One, two, which was very good considering how much mud coated her weapon inside and out. But then the only ones left were smart and lucky and they were in cover and she was half in a mud puddle and half behind a wheezing corpse.
Oh well.

The ground didn’t shake, which was why the Bosian Anvil came as a surprise.
It shouldn’t have been, because Mult knew enough basic biology to be aware that any loud noises from a creature that size just walking around meant it was also probably going to break its feet under its own weight.
But she’d seen a lot of movies, and it was amazing how a bad idea could stick with you.
Those were the thoughts she had as she saw two long, long paws come out of the trees, pick up a woman each, and shake them hard enough to snap something important loose.
“Shit,” she said. And then again “shit” for rhythm.
It was bigger than the statistics had made her think it was.
It was also looking directly at her, which made sense because the three remaining soldiers had enacted sensible infantry tactics when confronted with a Bosian Anvil.
Damnit. She’d just read that chapter, and it seemed unfair. Normally her body would’ve taken care of this sort of thing on its own but it was still stuck in a collapsed hole and didn’t want to leave.
The Anvil stepped forwards, gills fluttering, feathers quivering, and it plucked her out of the ground like a carrot and set her down again with all of her limbs and then it picked up the two people she’d shot and started making snuffly noises like a sleeping dog the size of a freight train as it ate them, one after another.

Then it tore the (gun-bitten, explosive-battered) corpse of the Chatterback in half and offered half to her.

***

Sixteen years later the war was over the forest was back to being a national park and Professor Mult had finally managed to have the army fieldguide updated to include the courtship behaviours of the Bosian Anvil, which included leaving carcasses out in the woods for your beloved.
Because even if shit happens and that’s the way it is, some things are nice to know ahead of time.

It was just a little red-and-brown smear on the white tile of the shower wall, but it wouldn’t come off. Lisa tried with her thumb, then she licked her thumb, then she spritzed it with tile cleaner, then she swore at it, and finally she lost her temper and started chanting, whereupon a tattered, shrieking form clad in its own dissolving flesh lurched through her wall and halted an inch from her face, eyes boiling in its sockets.
“Oh for fuck’s sake,” said Lisa.

She tried exorcisms first, of course, starting with gentle rebukes and moving up to firm nudges and stern commands before concluding in fiery demands to Get The Hell Out Of My Shower.
None of them worked, they just made the spectre soggier and more desperate. Its wails intensified and heightened in pitch, reminding Lisa of her childhood music lessons before mom had given up and admitted her daughter couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket. With a lid.
So after the sixteenth failed effort (it cost her the last of her mistletoe, too) Lisa swallowed her pride and picked up her phone and dialed a number that was marked very firmly with an EMERGENCIES label.
“Hello?”
“Hi, grandma.”
“Oh, Lisa, darling. How’ve you been?”
“Bad, grandma.”
“Oh no honey, you always seem to have problems when you phone. What’s wrong?”
“Ghost in my bathroom.”
“Well that’s not appropriate.”
“I think it was a lady.”
“Still, she should’ve asked. Manners cost nothing, for fuck’s sake.”
“She’s tied to the tile on the shower wall and I can’t seem to exorcise her.”
“Is it ceramic?”
“I think so?”
“Well, that’s nice nonweathering material, sweetie. Ceramics last for ages, that’s why your brother won’t shut up about them, most of what he digs are the damned things.”
“Grandma, please.”
“Oh come on honey, you’ve got to admit he’s a bit of a bore.”
“He’s got tenure.”
“And a fat lot of good that’ll do him if anyone looks in his basement. Material possessions are a weight and a burden, honey.”
“Speaking of, my shower…”
“Oh, right. Well, the only thing to be done is either renovation or killing the one who wronged her. I’m guessing you’ve got a factory worker, so you’ll need to hex her boss – ooh, or better yet, her boss’s boss. Generally blame for this sort of thing is like a tree: it gets bigger farther up. Aim high and you’ll be sure to kill the whole thing.”
“Trees are cut at ground level.”
“Oh shut up. Do you want a hand? You know I love a good hexing.”
“No entrails.”
“What? Why? I have some on hand, you wouldn’t have to chop them yourself.”
“I’m a vegan.”
“Shit. You’re going to have to get over that someday.”
“Thanks, grandma.”
“Aim for the guts, mind you. Capitalists tend to be susceptible to blows in the digestive tract.”
“Thanks, grandma.”
“Good luck!”
“Thanks grandma.”
“And call more of-“
“Thanksgrandma,” said Lisa, and she hung up.
Guts. Right.
She could work with those. Sort of.

There were no entrails. There were, however, many pulverized cashews. The seed of potential life in them wasn’t very big but if you got a big enough bowl together and boiled it into a thick mush it was both a convincing entrails substitute AND easier to work with.
Lisa had told her grandma this a dozen times. She continued to insist she was being childish.
The tile was tricky; the diagrams kept dripping off. Finally she used a combination of cellophane and duct tape to strap everything in as she drew it, and even if it did end up being the ugliest hex she’d ever scrawled at least it stuck to the damned wall.
The ghost was behind her again; her back hair was standing up.
“Quit fussing,” she said. And she bit her thumb and jammed it just off the center of the diagram, in the stomach.
The ghost shivered, hummed, and stopped existing.
“Great,” said Lisa.
And she washed the wall off and had her first shower in three days. It felt like creaky and faintly tin-scented victory, and she was in there for at least forty minutes before she realized the phone was ringing.

“Hello?”
“Lisa!” The voice was enthusiastic, with pauses in odd places and a hint of sandpaper wrapped around a dried bone.
“Hi grandpa, how’ve you been?”
“Just peachy, but there’s something I need your help with.”
“Me?”
“Yes. You see, I was at a meeting just now-”
“I don’t think I can help with that.”
“-and the dean’s stomach erupted across the table.”
“He had the flu?”
“He had every organ in his abdomen escape at once.”
Lisa winced. “Oh.”
“Now, Lisa, you wouldn’t know anything about this, would you?”
“Uh…was the dean an investor in any tile-making businesses?”
“Just one.”
“Oh.”
“Joint partner.”
“Oh.”
“Lisa, I’m the other partner. And now I’ve got buboes on my groin.”
Lisa winced. “Grandpa!”
“Think carefully: DID you have anything to do with this?”
“Grandpa, it wasn’t personal. My shower was haunted.”
“Well, that’s pretty bad luck. Did you know ninty-nine thousand times out of a hundred thousand times it just makes the tiles more stain-resistant?”
“Grandpa that’s just ninety-nine times out of a hundred.”
“This isn’t about math. This is about practicality and quality and the buboes you’ve cursed onto my groin.”
“It wasn’t intentional!”
“Well, that’s not how the real world works. Consequences don’t care about your intentions, Lisa.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Won’t do the job. I’m greasing up the table.”
“Grandpa that’s dangerous.”
“That’s the POINT.”
“No I mean with your back.”
“My back’s fine!”
“You can’t walk around the block without taking a sit down.”
“So hoisting a small goat onto a table should be easy-peasy.”
“You’re going to throw out your back and the goat is going to stand on your chest and make it worse.”
“Don’t give me your lip, it’ll only make this worse for you.”
Lisa hung up.
Then she drew some circles around her bed – just in case – and passed out.

The phone woke her, vibrating with petulant force against her nightstand.
“H’lo?”
“Hey. Grandpa’s in the hospital.”
“Hi bro how are you.”
“Oh? Fine. I guess. Maybe. Anyways, it’s his back.”
“Yeah, he threw it out trying to curse me.”
“What?”
“I told him not to.”
“Why?”
“I didn’t intend to give him buboes on his groin. He was collateral damage.”
Her brother hung up, and Lisa slept through the morning with the peace of the righteous.

And her shower didn’t even smell that much like tin anymore.