I woke with cold metal beneath me, rising and lowering to an unsteady rhythm. Green hair clouded my vision, and I filled my nostrils with this human’s familiar scent: the sweat of an athletic body cooped up in metal, rubber sealants and joint covers, as well as softer padding.

I felt such an unusual comfort on that innately uncomfortable shoulder that I did not move for some time, letting the woman whose height dwarfed Commander Zideo’s and Helmgarth’s transport me. A stinging cut down my back, the work of the Shlomp who had grazed me, burned in the cool, dry air, but she was careful to cradle me without touching it. What really stung was knowing she carried me while she herself was injured.

Ahead of me, which was behind us, the patchwork woodlands through which we had “auto-scrolled” were already shrinking, a checkerboard of amber and brick red draped across that silver river like a bristling caterpillar. Though I did not know where we were aside from somewhere in the Golden Plains zone, I was filled with relief to see it behind us and withdrawing into the horizon.

It is nearly impossible to maintain dignity and to conceal one’s emotions when one has a tail. Mine began to swipe left and right, and Addrion, surmising that I was awake once again, gently set me down in the low grass.

I padded around tentatively. The dizziness and nausea were gone. “Feeling better?” she said. Her smile was, for a moment, radiant. I think she realized it, and looked away, wiping at some unseen moisture from her nose with her gauntlet, which was once again shaped like her hand and undamaged. Her normal sternness remained.

How could I sufficiently articulate my gratitude? She had saved my life. Hoping to impress her, I sat as prettily as I knew how, my butt on the ground and my chest out. Her arm twitched, and I sensed the first micro-motions of a person who is about to bend forward to pet me. Instead, she played it off, and scanned the horizon for… what? Threats? Distraction?

“We’re a little lost,” said Addrion, “but this is the direction they went.” She checked a device on her wrist, then shrugged and added, “Generally.”

All around us, the tops of autumn hills crested like waves of cocoa and milk chocolate, which will read very differently to a human audience than to a canine one–humans will doubtless find it cozy and appealing, while it is the siren’s song for dogs.

As Odysseus says, “there is nothing more shameless than a hateful belly, which bids a man perforce take thought thereof.” Then again, we must not sell ourselves short–self control may not be our strength as a species, but endurance is. “I’ve been doing this for too long, plus dog is too strong,” as DMX once said (a patron saint among dogs and all their kin, insomuch as a human can be), almost certainly in response to the bard.

A wind picked up, from hat might as well have been the east, ahead of us. Brown grasses bent. My nose reacted almost without my command. I sniffed and a vision of the patchwork lands around us formed in my mind. Rodents scurried, of what variety I could not be sure. A hundred different grasses and shrubs, perpetually? becoming stiff and brown for their long winter’s nap bobbed the sleepy tempo of the winds. There was a town nearby, or some humanism gathering, as I detected blood and sweat and sawdust. There were other creatures, too, musty and crude, but I had no idea what they might be. All of this was nearly crowded out by the decomposition of corpses of birds and rodents, of which humans are typically happy to be ignorant.

There, behind it all, a thread of unshowered, live-with-mom Streamer, so faint it might have been my imagination, except that it was buoyed by a tinge of smoke and leather.

I thrust my nose into the grasses below us, for to a dog, each blade is an antenna passing along a signal from its source. I snuffed and snorted and went about my work. He had not passed here, but near here. The tang of “somewhere to the right,” the cloying draw of “somewhere to the left.”

“You got something?” asked Addrion, but I was too far into the trance of my work to answer her, and also… y’know, words. The grass sang to me like a chorus of antiquity, told me the major movements of what had transpired. They had passed not far from here. At the top of a hill, we saw two parallel grooves where heels of boots had scored the grasses. My nose led me downhill, drawn by the queasy smell of fresh seafood. A piranha with great big X’s for eyes lay dead, too stubborn to live. I don’t know how better to describe how unusual it was to see it lifeless in the middle of dell. It was literally a fish out of water.

We pressed on past a stagnant creek, my nose surely closing in on my human. My nasal cavity filled with a familiar scent of dried meat, and my nose bumped into the strip of jerky, which I deduced must have fallen out of the hole in Helmgarth’s backpack made by the fish. I say “familiar,” but that is understating it–everything I have ever smelled has its own unique olfactory signature, though the difference may be slight. Admittedly, it is hard to tell one bite of kibble from the next, but I can tell the difference under the right circumstances. So believe me when I say that this was not any one of Helmgarth’s jerkies, but the precise one he had already given me when we were sent out from Pengoon Peaks. Without understanding of human sciences or the way this world worked, I let the explanation simply be a mystery tied somehow to his regenerating backpack, which I had seen burst in the avalanche but which had miraculously reset itself when Helmgarth became a new man for the second time.

“Well, this one’s easy,” said Addrion, pointing to an orchard. A central row of apple trees had been violently excised, a trail of leaves, splinters, and pulped apples beneath them. You didn’t need a superhuman nose to guess that the Shloomp plowed through this area, and I winced at the thought of my sweet, brave human dragged through all those branches. They had made rough new entrance in the side of an abandoned cottage at the end of the orchard. The far wall had exploded its innards into the yard, a mess of shredded bedsheets, table legs, shards of window glass trailing for half a mile.

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On the other end of that half mile, we found the Shloomp itself embedded in the hard marble of a some ruins or other. It seemed to me that if it could shatter stone, it should break marble. Fortunately, Commander Zideo and Helmgarth were not found squished behind its jagged exterior, although their scents were strong. It just leaned into the wall in a halo cracks, pressing its face into the old marble. “What a ride, if you don’t mind my saying so! No hard feelings, eh lads?” it muttered, sensing our presence. Neither of us were not inclined to respond.

The ruins were sparse, and I recalled the discussion during the founding of the Game Fellows in the sub-levels of the tower of Ludopolis. Perhaps these were fragments of lands shorn from their gameworlds of origin, but without their inhabitants. Or perhaps it had always been ruins. The idea of designed waste made me shudder, but I observed that intentional effect of the Shard powerfully here. Paths made themselves known, and I was gripped with a powerful urge to explore, to leap to greater heights and slide down resting columns. Indeed, coins revolved in tough-to-reach corners, inviting me to try.

That was the first time my sense of the path became an understanding of multiple paths. Here, wherever here was, the urgency of moving from point A to point B was relaxed. I still did not trust the feeling, but could help but feel it.

Ruins gave way to architectures with signs of life. The sound of a crowd’s merriment rose in the distance, echoing between places of business whose purpose remained unclear to me. The inhabitants were not at home, presumably drawn off to whatever festivities lie ahead. I lost Zideo’s scent, crowded out like a whisper in a noisy stadium. Addrion was clearly startled to turn a corner and run up face to face against a group of five Street Toughs, all wearing garb from the 19∞0s, all laughing and joking crudely with one another, although their play was barely distinguishable from assault as they pushed and shoved one another. They did not spare a second glance for us, heading for the crowd.

Well, a stadium is exactly what it turned out to be. We entered from behind the shade of bleachers, where I saw a variety of individuals matched in its diversity only by the streets of Ludopolis. Humanoids and creatures with human-like features milled and laughed, many carrying the greasy foods of a sporting event and red plastic cups that reeked of watery beer or cider.

Street Toughs cavorted in circles with normal citizens from unknown gameworlds, competing in informal tests of strength and endurance in small circles. Scroblins tried to outswear one another. Sorrow Troopers in frowning tragedy masks stood in high places and patrolled the bleachers, sometimes ousting civilians for good seats. Nobody threw food or stones at them, although they gave them a wide berth. Could it be that they were accepted here, and were actually present to attend to whatever sporting event took place? I could not stomach the thought. Addrion’s shoulders tensed and she kept her head down whenever sighting them.

The crowd laughed and jeered and sweated and coveted. A loud pop sounded form the sporting field around which the bleachers wrapped, and Addrion jumped. A race had begun on the oval track within, where a half dozen runners–some forces of the Boss Council, some noncombatants that I did not recognize–hoofed it within their own lanes. They did not have the energy of sprinters, but rather an expectant caution, and I soon saw why. Dark squares in the track opened and insidious obstacles arose.

Mechanical fists hooked and jabbed at the runners, geysers of water powerwashed surfaces clean of contestants. Sudden flat walls of a brittle composite wood jumped in front of them quite suddenly, possibly spring-loaded in the workings beneath the surface of the track. Other, more lethal looking hindrances interfered with their course as well. A pit of spikes opened, into which one mohawked Street Tough plummeted, flickering out of existence on contact and sparing us the sight of a gruesome death.

In time, all of the runners were knocked out or presumably destroyed, with the last man standing (rather, the last trucker-hatted monkey running) vanishing beneath a falling piston, never to reappear. The crowd roared with excitement, some with pleasure, others in horror.

The monkey had nearly completed a full lap, and come close enough to the end that the prize itself was triggered, raising up out of the ground. An aureate light washed over us, like a miniature sun. It was hard for me to make out more than its effectual light from the crowd at ground level. It looked like a sunrise painted gold highlights across noses, cheeks, muzzles and beaks.

“The Radian!” gasped Addrion. She looked down at me, conspiring tacitly. Her green eyes began sizing up the crowd, the distances, hunting for key personages who might stop her if she ran for it.

“Ad–hey there,” came Helmgarth’s voice, a dozen feet away. He was standing next to a tall man, and my heart twisted into a furious knot. It was the hulking, shirtless wrestler mayor who had flicked my ear: DuChamp.

Helmgarth shouldered past laughing Shard residents, nimbly dodging jutting elbows and extended drinks. “You found us,” he said, and there was warmth in his voice.

“Where is that idiot?” Addrion glanced at me, and the crowd around her. “Where is our visiting… commander person?”

This version of Helmgarth had a very specific kind of smile which never had an equal presence on both sides of his face. It wasn’t so much secretive as it was confident, in the sense that he seemed to constantly reassure you that your secret was safe with him. I wasn’t sure what my secret might be, but it seemed to have a powerful effect on Addrion.

Look, I get it, even dogs have “a type.”

I voiced my opinion of the towering, shirtless mayor, snarling as to rumble the ground beneath him. He took a step back, all however many hundreds of lean pounds of him, and it did not suit him. There was no glimmer of recognition in his eye.

“What’s wrong with your dog?” he asked. “Was it something I said?” Then a look fell over his face, and his thick mustache clutched his lips into the shape of an O, reminiscent of Acornite Dylan at the city gates.

“He impersonated me, didn’t he?” he whispered. “That slimy, two-faced, numb-nutted bootlicker of a Boss…”

“Keep your voice down, love,” smirked Helmgarth. “Some of my best friends are slimes.” He grinned broadly and his teeth would have flashed audibly if they could have. “Come on. Let’s find a better place to talk.”