Empirical Gnollage: Installment 64 [https://squirrel.dogphilosophy.net/Installment064.png]
The road northwards very quickly degraded to barely discernible path through the swamp where the ground was slightly smashed down and a little less overgrown with weeds the further they continued. Before long, the annoying flies began to be joined by even more annoying mosquitoes.
“This is making it very difficult to think,” Al complained, swatting vigorously as they rushed through a wetter area, hoping the bloodsucking insects would diminish when they reached less damp terrain.
“What are you trying to think about? All I can think about right now is trying to keep my blood from being sucked,” Wikwocket answered, performing her own dance of swatting.
“Fire,” Al answered her.
“I think this place is too wet to burn,” Wikwocket said. “Unfortunately.”
“Maybe these accursed mosquitoes aren't, though. You keep nagging me about magic fire, and after today I've decided to agree with you.”
“It's about time!”
“It shouldn't be too difficult for me to figure out, I've mastered a couple of tricks that involve conjuring fire from things that are meant to be on fire, and conjuring sparks from nothing. It's a bit of a conceptual climb to combine those to just conjure substantial amount of fire out of nothing, though.”
“Oh. You want to borrow my rope?”
Al looked back at Wikwocket riding on the cart, and squinted suspiciously at her.
“Ha!” she said, “For a moment there, you thought I didn't know what a metaphor is, didn't you?”
“No, I just didn't expect to hear a joke like that from you. Usually it's old men who tell jokes like that.”
“It's not my fault if most men need a lifetime of experience to catch up to my wit!”
Al shook his head, and returned to his thought-experiments. Then, out of sheer annoyance, he began trying to conjure showers of fiery sparks in the direction of the various flies and mosquitoes that kept buzzing around him. It didn't seem to do much good, but it did occasionally drive them off for a few moments.
Gruntle - or at least the cloud of flies and stench with a gnoll inside that was presumably him - cautiously moved away, out of shower-of-sparks range. Al appreciated the reduction in the offensiveness that resulted, even if it was very small. He began to wonder if there might be any way to at least improve Gruntle's condition without trying to force the issue of an actual bath. They'd traveled for more than an hour when a possible approach presented itself. The pathetic excuse for a “road” that they were traveling along made its way up to a slight rise, which paralleled a wide sluggish, muddy stream, with abundant cat-tails growing up out of it. On the other side of the stream was an area of tall grasses.
“I don't actually know how long its going to take us to get where we're going. We might have to find somewhere to camp for the night. I wonder if there is anything we can eat hiding in the grasses over there,” Al suggested, and was gratified when Gruntle immediately stepped down off of the road and into the stream to wade across. Flies took wing to avoid drowning, and the water rose to the level of Gruntle's chest by mid-stream. It was hard to tell immediately, but it looked like the water might have at least rinsed away some amount of the filth. The gnoll slipped into the grasses, crouched down, and moved quietly out of sight.
Gruntle re-emerged several minutes later with a disturbingly stiff deer-carcass over his shoulder, and waded back across the stream. He bit into the deer's neck to hang on to it while he used both hands to climb the few feet back up out of the stream and onto the road. Then, he dumped the unfortunate cervid onto the cart. It was frozen in a sleeping pose, legs underneath and neck twisted to the side to rest its head against its body, and hardly bent or flexed at all as it was dropped. The skin was pale, and the shape of the ribs, spine, shoulders, and hips were easily visible. Al moved closer to examine it with morbid fascination.
“What did you do to it? The poor thing looks practically mummified!”
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“Found it like that. Dry. Still smells like meat.”
Closer examination revealed numerous tiny injuries - very small puncture wounds and places that looked like bites made by three tiny teeth. There were also the deep, rough puncture marks in its neck where Gruntle had bit down on it to hold it. No blood dripped from them.
Al swatted more vigorously at the mosquitoes.
“Did these accursed vampire-bugs drain all of the blood from the poor thing?” he wondered.
“They're going to do that to us if we don't hurry up!” Wikwocket insisted, slapping another mosquito on her neck. Haunch gave a groan of discomfort and sped up, tail swishing frantically and shaking his head.
“Every place has its purpose, and there is a certain existential beauty in that,” Bote said, their own efforts to deter blood-sucking insects spoiling their usual cheerfully-stoic attitude. “I think perhaps I would also prefer to consider the beauty of a place dedicated to exsanguination in a more abstract and less immediate context, however.”
“Yeah! How much further do we have to go? I think I've had enough of this particular experience for a while,” said Wikwocket.
“I'm afraid I'm not sure. I know Hell's Bathtub is supposed to be just beyond the southernmost city, which I assume is Southwall. The signs pointing this way indicated both Southwall and Hell's Bathtub, and there weren't signs for anything else. Usually there's something within a day's walk along a road from one place to another, even if it's just a small inn or something. We might not reach a populated place before dark though, this road looks pretty bad. I say we keep going as quickly as we can until we find someplace that looks decent and dry enough to set up a camp, and then try to stop until sunrise. Otherwise, we might end up stumbling through this horrible terrain in the dark.”
Al would have been pleasantly surprised by the lack of snide comments about his poor night-vision if he hadn't been distracted by his ongoing efforts to protect his precious vital fluids from insects. Even Gruntle, who usually seemed to hardly notice these sorts of discomforts, was occasionally swatting at particularly annoying bites. At least the dunk in the swampy stream seemed to have removed most of the obvious filth. The thick coating of mud, blood, and insect-monster ichor had drastically diminished, leaving only a few inches-long glistening vertical streaks hanging down.
Al recoiled in horror as one of these streaks contracted and writhed in response to one of Gruntle's mosquito-killing slaps.
“Gruntle! You've got leeches!”
The gnoll looked down at the slimy wormlike attachments on his body. He poked one curiously with a short claw and watched fascinated when it retracted itself into more of a fat slug shape.
“They should be removed carefully,” Bote warned, “if distressed, the leech may leave corruption in the bite.”
“Yeah, we had a little bit of survival training in the army. You can't just grab them and…,” Al started, but then to his horror Gruntle grabbed the leech he'd prodded, and pulled. It stretched to nearly a foot long before popping loose, leaving a small, bleeding, three-toothed mark. Then he threw it into his mouth and bit down on it, chewing a few times before swallowing. Al was left speechless with disgust, which only intensified when the gnoll did it again with another leech. The third time, Al snapped out of his shock when Gruntle yanked another off and tossed it into his mouth, then let out a distressed yelp. Gruntle made a few awkward and apparently unsuccessful chewing motions then opened his mouth to paw uncertainly at the inside. Al rushed to see what was wrong, and saw that the leech had reattached itself to Gruntle's tongue.
“Gruntle, calm down, we'll help,” Al demanded, “Bote, what do I do?”
“Use your fingernail to separate the mouth from the skin, then you can pull it away,” Bote calmly advised. Al reached into the gaping gnoll's jaws and did as described, and the leech was easily detached. Al threw it as far as he could from them.
It would not be until much later that day that Al would fully realize that he'd just put his face right in front of - and his hands into - a gnoll's jaws, but for now there were other concerns.
“Just hold still, Gruntle, we'll get the rest of them off of you,” insisted Al. Bote joined him in the process, and Wikwocket even helped remove one of them, “just for the experience” as she put it. Al groaned when, as they worked through the leech-removal, he found a speck like a half-detached scab stuck to the skin under the fur of Gruntle's lower back, and realized it was actually a tick.
“Great. Ticks. We're going to want to check ourselves over when we find a place to stop for the night. If Gruntle's got them, we've probably got them too. Is there anything in this swamp that is not out to suck our blood? If we find an Inn on the way I don't think we should stop, because it's probably run by a vampire.”