“The Splinters of Babesi have a single hand, but I would lie if I didn’t call them good at manipulation. Common sense dictates they shouldn’t be: they are clumsy, stupid, childish. And yet— Parvov calls. The refining room is on fire. Classic Splinter of Babesi moment right there.”
—Doratev, in the record where one can feel his exasperation.
A Thinker babesied around one of the tunnels of the Dachshund’s dwelling. The oversized skull of a Parvov model had been hollowed out and now served a second life as a helmet, three of the four orbits filled by tendrils, and the only one remaining serving as a peephole though which a lone eye took in the world. Purple scales reflected off the light of the puppies, and a white cape consisting of three living Sampreys tied together by their own hairs drooled to her left.
She approached the point of the collapse, the chamber from which her friends had run away scared and howling. In the middle of the titanic crater a ball of fur, each hair of it as long as Babesi, snored loudly. And the snoring crackled. And it engendered green thunder that impacted the walls of the crater, with all its amputated tunnels, and caused avalanches of rolling puppies, the fluffy sediment gathering at the feet of the slumbering Tribulator.
Babesi lingered at the edge of the destroyed tunnel, where it met the crater, and enlisted a line of ostensibly brave and definitively confused Retriever puppies that showed more interest in stepping over each other than on facing the invader. One of them yawned with purpose.
“Guys, that baddie is destroying our home, we need to do something!” Babesi tried spurring the ferocious army to action. One of the puppies tilted his head before falling on his side, over all his structural brothers. Then he came back to his feet, resolute as he was, and let a wave course through his whole body.
Babesi lowered her voiceboxes in a frown. “Fine. I will deal with the meanie on my own. And if I perish, it will be all your fault, humph!”
One of the puppies thought the talking hose in front of them needed to start spewing water soon.
Babesi took the leap without hesitation, coiling like a spring to cushion her landing at the bottom of the crater. She squealed in joy as she dropped meter after meter, passing by the broken entrances of one tunnel and another, the puppies of the wall trying to paw her or her Samoyeds, Samoyeds that howled in fear because they were tied to a complete maniac. She ventured further into enemy territory, hiding behind mounds of collapsed puppywalls. In the first mound she recognized Temptation, in the second, Hypsodont, in the third, Calligraphy. They seemed happy to see her, but the truth was that happiness had long ago become their default state.
The howls of the Samoyeds alerted the Pomeranian, that raised his head from its resting position, nested in the intersection between his thigh and trunk. Sylvan lightning stirred from the scars, put all of Tribulator’s hairs on end for just a second as the mutant dog yawned in an attempt to dispel the drowsiness. The creature tasted the stale flavor of his own saliva as the world came back to him. He rattled his teeth, overcome by a tic he had had since the tide of aberration, and let out an exhale of warm breath through his flaring nostrils. Then his magnificent eyes like blazing copper salts drifted across the dogscape, and landed upon the source of the ruckus. The little, howling and befuddling source of the ruckus, it must be said.
“Sir, could you please not destroy the home of my subjects? We toil day and night to upkeep the tunnels and it’s not cool when you crash through the ceiling, digging through it all, and make a big hecking hole in the middle,” Babesi chided, her hand over her head, a finger wiggling accusatively.
Amongst all the things the Pomeranian had expected to face in his long and tortuous existence, he couldn’t say that an anguilliform loudspeaker with airs of monarch was included. Partly because he, in all his glory, was a dog, and dogs aren’t known to speak out their mind often—at least, intelligibly.
Incisors short and serrated, fangs so grooved and stormy, premolars with throbbing silvery veins and even carnassials cloaked by endemic, lime clouds. All of that and more encompassed the snarl of the Tribulator as the energy welled from his chest, through the long neck, and gathered around the eternal smile of the jowlless. Through the mist of his lenses Babesi was but a blotch of blue behind the yellowish lightning that ignited his stare.
Babesi scratched the skull of the Splinter on her head as she squinted to examine the eyes of the creature that was ready to attack her. “Are you a blind, doggy?” she asked after noticing the cataracts.
The puppies around her stirred, came out of their mounds of debris and waddled over to her. And for the first time since they had spawned, they showed teeth so white and sharp. But not against Babesi. Their growls where aimed at he who dared threaten the one who had given them names. Even if those names were Colander, Hypotenuse, and Till. The Goldens and Labradors didn’t fear a death that couldn’t come for them, not when it came to defending Babesi. More and more dogs spanning from tiny creatures a month old to the oldest dogs in the layer, clocking at nearly two years and already presenting adult sizes, gathered between Babesi and the Tribulator, creating a veritable barking and jaw-snapping barrier.
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The frayed ears of the Tribulator pulled back as he set his split legs upon what technically qualified as extremely coarse grained gravel. He was surrounded by creatures thousands of times smaller than himself, and yet he could barely see them as more than frantically yapping blotches, and that counted only for the few ones that weren’t the color of sand.
All bark and no bite, the Pomeranian’s neck coiled as it took a step back. He was confused: the lightning in his mouth bounced frantically around his snout and down his throat as he held a frightened, rumbling snarl. After his long search he had finally come across a comfortable place to sleep, and now the sea itself rejected him.
“Calm down! He’s just a puppy like you all are!” Babesi commanded, unheeded by then army that had come out of the woodwork to defend her. “And he’s bad in the eyes. Poor doggie.” Two beams of electricity arced from the scared dog’s eyes, sweeping across the army of Retrievers, sending several of them flying a few meters despite their best efforts to stay grounded.
And, as it is known, dogs and loud noises don’t mix very well, so the defensive force soon disbanded as the pooches pranced away with their tails shamefully tucked between their legs.
“Hey, you, don’t scare my friends!” Babesi shook her tail wildly, her fist curled into a cute ball.
The huge, split paws of the Tribulator kept lapping at the edge of the crater, incapable of finding a vantage point amongst the friable puppy till. It took him about a minute to perk up his ears and turn: the barking had stopped, only weak whining and a blathering violet blotch remained .
When he turned his head, Babesi gave the back to him, stood on her tendrils gaining the aspect of a dewinged dragonfly with too many legs, and began flailing about like an Ankylosaurus fresh out of bath salts.
Had the Tribulator been able to appreciate Babesi’s movement, he would have found himself bemused and amused. But he simply returned to his central position at the bottom of the hole, yawned, and proceeded to ignore her. She wasn’t worth spending another drop of energy. And since he had left the Pomeranian hills that would come to be known as the Perra Australis Pomogen, he had been unable to properly nap.
But when the dandruff settled and the thunder stopped coursing through his still silky fur, when his breathing slowed down and a snore or two slipped in, that’s when they stirred. Until then they had rested. Until then they had waited under the matted lumps of hair, concealed by the dreads of their symbiont. Until then they had come out to hunt whenever the Tribulator had crossed the path of a Splinter or several, and some of them had paid dearly for it. And now another soul beckoned for their teeth.
Leathery wings spread, and one by one the Bloodhounds took air. Their instincts edged them to the hunt, to seek out Babesi despite their prior experience with the crew of the Corship. Enslaved by the thirst for crystallized anima they circled over their still prey, who beheld them with a single shining eye hidden behind a sharp husk.
“Ah, these don’t seem friendly.” Babesi blinked and the soft light of her core began spilling through her scales. “Come, doggie doggie, come!” She called mirthfully as rosy vapor welled from deep within her soul.
The smoke spread and cast a starfish-shaped shadow on the underbelly of the predators. Their fangs were still bared, their eyes still injected in blood. Every single one of the assailants intended to swoop upon the shinning dot cradled in smoke.
And the first did. The breath of the sea caressed its wings as it dropped with its claws extended and jaws wide spread. Life was good for the mutated bloodhounds.
But what was the meaning of good? Was it still good if he had missed? Missed what? Tail!
Babesi sideslithered another attacker, a bitch this time. She moved silently, careful to not catch back the attention of the confused dogs as they inhaled the essence of her mind. They jittered. Invoked new names with their unintelligible blather. Beat a wing and not the other. Retched as they kicked the air and pursued their tail for only just a second, before getting distracted with anything else. And their eyes glittered as tranquil pools of joy.
Mirth. They defined said word as they suffered from utmost executive dysfunction. Their attention spans obliterated, figments of them resurfacing only when they focused on some baffling task born out of randomness.
In their pink-colored utopia they forgot the hunger and the bloodlust. Guffawed like hyenas and licked the puppies underfoot, and the puppies licked them back. Chanted out guttural wails along their peers, hopped over the stomachs of their siblings.
As they took in more and more of the gas, the situation began to change. There were so many things to do, and so short was the tide. They had no time. They had never had time; they would never have time. And if they had no time, they couldn’t do anything but sit idly, fidgeting with their own paws, their stares focused on any of the puppies that conformed the ground.
Ground from which a hand came out, long fingers curling around Babesi’s scaled tail. At first, Babesi turned her head with shock, but after processing what she was seeing, she squealed in glee.
“Lyssy! Lyssy is here!” She shouted carelessly, untowardly as she enjoyed the cloak of her pink exhale. Then she got sucked down by the strong tug of her sister, and ended up eye to eye with the devourer of pain, there, stuck among the shining dogs. “Lyssy!” She shrieked again, disembarrassing herself from the Splinter’s skull and embracing her sister’s horrible head with all of her tentacles.
“I missed you too, Babi.”
Dirofil couldn’t believe the image his psycholocation relayed to him. Only a few meters above him, Lyssav was kissing.