The walls of Ludopolis were much taller up close than they appeared. They were gray, they were stone, they were walls, and they were intimidatingly large, much larger than Lisa’s house in Airy Zone by my estimation. That is all I can say about them. I am sure a more informed human could expound about them using lots of more advanced human words, like “barbican” and “bartizan” and “marzipan” but I am a dog. I am not completely sure about that last one. Let it suffice to say that the outer walls and the dry moat seemed an effective and intimidating defense against—let’s say boarsquirrels and whatever other unguessable chimeric creatures threatened the inhabitants of the city.
We made for the southernmost gate (again I continue to use cardinal directions, but their application during my time in Exe were dubious). I craned my neck to see the obscure figures peering down at us from the tops of the walls, but the bright, late-morning sun made it impossible. The gate itself was many times wider and larger than the simple barrier doors at Fort Weepus, towering half-ovals of a woodgrain I did not recognize. The doors were decorated with a different ancient, carven face on each, worn by the elements and scarred by sieges. Were these religious icons of this place, heroes from its history? They were thrown back, and the unidentifiable countenances, which appeared to have once been friendly and smiling rather than stern and warning, regarded one another across a gathering crowd. However, the bared teeth of a raised portcullis, orange with rust but heavy, hung near the top of the open oval. Not being able to see what mechanism kept it suspended caused a low level anxiety within me. I could not bear to think about what would happen if it dropped inadvertently (purposefully?) upon the heads of the people.
I say “people,” but… well, here is whom and what we saw gathering at the gate.
Brace yourself, it’s a lot.
A silent, self-assured space knight bumped into Commander Zideo walking brusquely toward what may or may not have been a line, hood hanging behind a fur-lined mantle and ballistic-proof shoulder armor. She took no notice of us so far as I could tell, but her floating cube turned and looked at us, saying “Rude!” in a pleasant voice before returning to the folds of her dusty, whipping cape. A gun larger than Lisa’s toaster hung at the space knight’s hip, and Addrion made no move to stop her. (In fact, I think she enjoyed watching Zideo get run into, a thought which would have enraged me at the time.) The space knight joined a sometimes-line, sometimes-not-line of persons. Some were human, some were not, and I do not say “citizens” for reasons that will become clear.
The space knight took a place in the sometimes-line next to a brawny man whose head was some kind of annelid, the kind of worms that sometimes appeared after occasional rains in Airy Zone. (I had seen few myself, but news of them was conveyed to me via the evening Howl, particularly by other dogs who had lived further east.) The worm had eyes and a mouth, which strongly clashed with my understanding of worms, and exchanged words with the space knight’s floating cube. The worm smelled like delicious slime.
Ahead of them, a flock of men dressed in dark clothing, each with a symbol on his chest that varied greatly but recalled to me the shape of a bat. (I chased cornered one of these in the house once, to Lisa’s enormous displeasure.) Similarly, each of the men had two points atop their head, evoking the ears of a bat. But there was no hiding their humanity from me—even if their scents of musky human skin did not give them away, their proportions did. It struck me that their bat uniforms must be required of them for work, just as Lisa had to wear specific clothes for her daily labors outside the house, which she did not prefer to continue wearing when she got home in the evenings. Or perhaps it was a religious affectation. Though they dressed similarly, the bat-worshippers were of such vastly differing appearances that I surmised they must have been not just from different worlds, but different realities. Some were tall and broad of shoulder, their capes at once shiny and dark. Two of them had their gloved fists up, as though the need to strike with his fists may arise at any instant. Another was slimmer, with more subtle ear-points. A tightly clad woman wearing goggles pawed at his shoulder and chest. Yet another seemed made of reflective plastic blocks, his belt packs and chest delineations merely painted on. He reminded me of a toy. Still another was one of those flat people made of light, like our late purple cowboy comrade from Fort Weepus, but with three colors instead of one: gray, purple-gray, and black. He and the toy stood half as tall as the others.
There seemed to be some contention among their group, but nobody wanted to vocalize it. Rather, they brooded at one another. The bulky toy took a few steps away to get a better look at the length of the line, which fanned out into a crowd at many places as it led across the drawbridge, which rattled and strained under the weight of many feet.
Some kind of fox with great green eyes and a wrench gesticulated impatiently with a small, silver robot. One wide-eyed person I understood to be human, but who seemed to have been created in a hurry and had far less complexity to their appearance than my human, approached Zideo. She seemed to recognize him as a similar kind of creature, and she put a hand out on his arm. The woman wore a hoodie like the one that was, no doubt, laying on Zideo’s office floor at this very moment. She had tennis shoes and shorts, and a green diamond floated over her head.
“Sul sul,” she said. I growled to let her know what I thought of her invasion of my human’s space. “Fro… neeshga.” Her oversized eyes moved to me, and she took a step back, but persisted. “Depwa woka a human, neeshga? can depwa help bow?”
“I don’t speak whatever this is,” said Zideo. She babbled on, more insistently, glancing back to her group of similarly under-articulated humanoids—a man in businesswear, a woman in a sari, and another woman in an evening gown, all with green diamonds above them.
“Move along,” snapped Addrion, although whether to the civilian or to Zideo was unclear. She spoke rapidly now, and grasped the air towards him. “Neeshga,” she kept saying. I moved physically in between her and Zideo, who recoiled. “Neeshga!” I snarled the kind of snarl that always works on humans. I hate to be like that, but I wasn’t sure where this was going. She took sufficient steps back and let us go, unwilling to lose her place in the sometimes-line.
I scanned the line, an ungraspable flurry of color and shapes without the slightest uniformity, the purest chaos of humans and animals with human-like features. Some looked as real (for lack of a better word) as Zideo, others as fictitious as sketch, or an ambulatory amalgamation of glowing squares with no semblance of sentience. The sun began to beat down on the line.
Then I smelled him—brethren. Kin. Our heads instantly turned towards one another, and we wagged our tails in unison.
He was a wolf, and although I had never seen one in person, all dogs are born with a vague impression of the difference. What’s more, he was unlike any creature—canine or lupine—that I had ever seen before. Instead of the organic, furry contours that constitute the shape of all dogs except for the chihuahua, he was made out of cubes.
Rather, his gray exterior was a dull, matte finish. He was made of boxes — gray cubes and elongated rectangles, that added up to the gestalt shape of a wolf. Up close, the creature was unrecognizable as such. But from a distance, the posture and wagging tail and other mannerisms captured the shape and motions of a highly recognizable fellow dog.
He stood beside what I took to be his own human, also made of boxes. An angular torso, a perfect cube for a head, and the rough idea of hair and facial features playing out across its few surfaces. He held some kind of weapon, or perhaps a tool for prizing apart rocks, like the T in human English, but with both ends sagging downward. His shirt was a single bland color, at least, as far as I could discern with my limited, canine palette, not the tie-dye pattern of Zideo’s shirt, which confused and excited the eye.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
The languages of wolf and dog are mutually intelligible, although I struggled to quickly recognize each word through his rustic, benighted accent. Between that, his limited vocabulary, and the fact that his organs of speech were all surfaces and ninety-degree angles, rather than the smooth and organic contours of my own mouth and tongue, I had a very difficult time indeed in understanding him. It took much of my focus to parse his lupine dialect. All of this, I am sure, appeared to the others to be nothing more than sniffs, growls, huffs, and barks.
“Fur brother,” said he, the common address between our kind.
“Fur brother,” I replied in echo. A complex ritual of sniffing ensued, having established that neither of us posed a threat to the other, or, more importantly, to the others’ human.
“You are different,” I observed. This may sound blunt to human sensibilities, but dogs have little need of conversational pleasantries. After all, we invented the sniffing of butts.
“And you new,” he said, reacting more to the scents he observed than to my words. “Fresh. Come from… elsewhere. Place of strange smells. Unique. Old. Cold. Muddy.“ He sniffed again. “Electrical. Excitable.”
“And you… you are from a place… with no dirt?“ I sniffed. “Your fur has never been wet.“
He sat down, contented with my relatability and motives. “You surprised. Many things, I think, you not know.”
“Indeed,” I replied. “I have been here less than a day. Where are the houses? Where are the dog beds? Why are the humans the way they are?” I nodded toward his human. “No two people look the same. I mean no offense, of course.”
The box wolf made the slightest implication of a nod, an enormously gracious gesture, since, as you know, head height is closely associated with social rank among our species. “You miss many things,“ he said. “All people here, and the people like animals, and the animals like people, come from own lands. Where their kind were many.”
“Were?”
He snorted. “You miss many things,” he repeated. He shook his head, not the side to side motion that humans use to disagree with one another, but the circular twist that flaps our ears up and down. “I only say what I see. One day… sitting happily, in my master‘s cave. Then, big thunder. Ground fall to pieces. World fall to pieces.”
It seemed to match what the Compendium had said, but it had previously been too abstract to be understood… or believed. Now I had the eyewitness account of an actual dog, rock-solid proof.
“You kept your human, though."
“Mm,” he acquiesced. “Through no valor.” He looked up into the sky, pointed his snout at the moving mountains in the horizon. “It just… happen that way.”
A shiver crept down the length of my back, ruffling my fur. It was not the good kind brought on by a hard back-scratch. The thought of being helpless to save my human brought back unpleasant memories of the night before. The feeling of separation, as helpless as a bad dream.
“You feel it?“ he stared at me, and knew his answer. “Something happen soon. Something big. Only real dogs know.”
“Zideo, get your animal,“ said Addrion, now, far ahead. My human snapped his fingers at me to join him, which I gladly did, with nothing else really to say to that box wolf.
“Keep your nose open,” called the box wolf.
The inconceivable diversity of different shaped people and animals, sentient and otherwise, held my attention as we approached the gate. We received many glares and hard looks, which I had no trouble interpreting from even the strangest humanoid. The line soon lost its order, what little it had anyway, and ballooned into a crowd, an unruly river of characters who seemed on the verge of mutiny. Their collective body language and smells of anxiety told me that people only thing standing between us, and a full-scale humanoid riot was whatever was at the head of the line.
It didn’t take me long to comprehend the objects of their impatience, although it was a little difficult to understand what I was seeing. All eyes were turned towards a human and a potted plant standing beneath the portcullis.
The man had blue hair of improbable size, a triad of broad blades sticking off of his hands, and an open vest revealing a sinewy torso with tattoos. The tattoos were not nearly as intricate as my human’s, which were art itself and stretched down the length of his arms and much of his chest and back. While Zideo’s body art depicted human “logos” and certain cartoonish characters, this man’s lines were sharp and terminated in points. He faced others shoulder-first when addressing them, a dramatic position that left his other hand swept back and ready to strike with the blades. I found it very threatening, but others seemed to take it for his normal demeanor.
The plant beside him was a bulbous green creature whose “head,” an enclosure of green fronds with eyes and a mouth perpetually shaped to form an O, nodded along to the things the vested man was saying, and shook in a negative when others spoke.
Across the man’s vest and the plant’s stalk draped a sash of a fine material that seemed to be a light blue to me at first, almost white. The longer you stared at it, the more colors seemed to twinkle in its depths, like the red-blue shifting of a distant star. It seemed out of place for the guardians of a gate, and could have been cut from a formal dress. The plant wore it as well as a plant can wear something.
The blade-handed man in the vest was having a heated conversation with some kind of green-brown soldier in a dirtbike helmet, and an indigo woman whose clothing seemed to have been forgotten, but whose skin showed circuitry from shoulder to foot.
“Listen,” said the vested man in a cool voice, somehow brushing a lock of hair out of his face without slicing it clean off. “I of all people know the value of cutting.” With this, he swooshed a bladed hand through the air. I winced at the high-pitched sound of metal sliding against metal, and he snipped the air to punctuate his point. “But the line is something you can never cut. Now get back in line. NO, no–I don’t care if you’ve got a world to save. Everybody has worlds to save. And I don’t know if you’ve looked around lately, but that ship has sailed.” He sliced an arc through air, indicating the Shards on the horizon. “Even if your, what was it? If your ring detonates, it can do anything worse than what’s already been–hey! Halt!” He was now pointing the middle of his blade triads at us, and the plant was hopping awkwardly in its brown ceramic pot over to us.
The humanoid guardian backflipped through the air, spinning several times, and landed in front of Commander Zideo. “That’s far enough, stranger,” he said. “Nobody gets through the gate without going through me.”
I expected my human to back away, but he surprised me by leaning even closer to the odd, pugnacious guard. “I know you,” he said. “You’re um… oh, shit. What was it?” He began snapping his fingers in the air again, trying to stir the memory. “Oh god. Oh man. I can see it. You’ve got the cheap spin attack. Quarter circle strong punch.” The vested man cleared his throat, stood up straight, clearly flattered at the recognition. “Ughghghh, what was it? We called you ‘anime Wolverine.’” That clearly did not flatter him. He pursed his lips.
“Oh ho ho oh ho hoo!” said the potted plant.
“Yes, I agree. Back of the line!”
“Luciano!” said Zideo, with one final, decisive snap.
The guardsman softened. He brushed a lock of blue hair back yet again, unnecessarily. “Well… yes. That’s me.”
“Luciano the… the Cuh-something. The cosplayer? The con… copper?”
“Luciano the Cost Cutter,” he said.
“Right! Yes! From QuarterMunchers.”
“QuarterMasters… 2 (19Ω1).” He nudged the plant’s ceramic pot. “You hear that, Acornite Dylan?” he asked. “He knows my…” Luciano the Cost Cutter suddenly turned his head back to the unruly line of people, glowering at him and at us. “...my, err, origin. I bet you can’t name what this little sprout is from.” He stabbed the air down toward the potted plant, whose cheeks were swollen with annoyance.
“Sure that’s… no, I don’t know that one.”
Acornite Dylan turned his “head” up toward Luciano with a look that plotted vengeance. The smugness on Luciano’s face could not have been more plain.
There was a commotion from the line, and Acornite Dylan whirled and swole with… something. He made a hacking sound similar to that which we dogs make when rejecting something we were not supposed to have eaten in the first place. He lobbed a huge seed, little more than a blur, out of his mouth, propelled by the compressed air within his petal-cheeks. It struck someone running from the line through the gate. A moment later, the plastic toy bat-person sat up on the ground tangled in his own cape and rubbing his head while the seed spun to a halt on the ground.
“Runners, pffft,” said Luciano. “Every day we get one. Good shot, Acornite Dylan.” The toy bat-person was compelled, by the point of the potted plant’s seed-launching O-mouth, to return to the line.
“Oh ho o hoo ho oh ho.”
“Right?” said Luciano. He high-fived the plant, palm against leaf, and the two of them lost themselves in laughter.