Chapter 10

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After my nightly escapades, Peb and I, with our cloaked wrapped baggage of armor and gears, rode our mechanical centaur home. Oona was asleep when we entered, beside the wicker basket where the baby was bundled. She was sleeping upon an invention I had made when I had researched binding stones with air. It was an air grass-clothed balloon with the buoyancy of an air mattress.

She was snoring and fidgeting as we went in. Compared to the deep sleeping baby, Oona was a hellion in sleep as well as awake. Granted, there weren’t many good places to sleep in the main compartment of my laboratory, so I just shrugged. Peb and I began to deposit all the pieces from the tied cloak bundled into categorizing sections that I had planned out earlier. When it was mostly done I felt tired so I told Peb that he can rest up until morning; because by then we will have plenty of work to do onwards.

Peb gave me a glum nod, half-asleep throughout the whole endeavor. Oh typical Peb who was gravel to his nature, slipped off away with a shimmer in his pocket. I eyed the shimmer of metal as he walked off. It was probably a loose circular steel rivet that had fallen off the chain mail. I shrugged it off as a payment for the troubles of waking him and asking him to toil in this godforsaken hour.

He will probably bind the steel into stone. I wonder what properties that binding would make? I was peaked at the notion, but I was also tired...so very tired... I walked into the nearest compartment near the main hall and then slipped into a grass made cot, falling exhausted and unconscious from the whole enterprise.

Like how dreams usually start with no start but instead the middle of a scene that I could not remember attending. I was inside a giant grass mecha fighting an alien winged titan in a city landscape made out of trees and bark. Green foliage had covered the wood and cement beneath, as I dueled the alien winged titan with a green lightsaber. Shrieking its cry for the last time, it died.

With the battle over, I exited my grass mecha into an audience below. They welcomed and congratulated me. Elandris was there, giving me a displeased yet grateful look. Both my parents were there, old and new. They all huddled up to greet me and hug me to my surprising glee.

“Ma, pa…”

Suddenly, the titan shrieked, crying awake from its death. My eyes fluttered open, with the whispered words for my mother and father, but the sound of the shrieking cry did not stop. I got up fast from my cot and hurriedly ran out of the small compartment of my laboratory into the main section.

The baby was crying out loud in the middle of the night. Wait, it’s not the middle of the night, as I looked through the opened passageway into the orange light of morning. A curse under my breath, I ran to the wicker basket. Oona was awake at this point, panicked at the baby below her. She hovered over trying to calm the child down by waving her hands up and down.

“Ssshhh! Quiet!” Oona spotted me then. She then gave me the most grateful and sincere look I’ve ever seen across her when she noticed my movements towards the child. I took out my Harmonica and jumped atop onto the edge of the wicker basket. Remembering Amelia's melody of last night, I played the tune.

It calmed the baby down with its familiarity, but barely, the baby was still sibilantly crying but lower in octave. It must need something. “Milk!” I shouted out loud. Great, now I just need a cow to milk then give to a child through a small bottle with a rubber pacifier… Pacifier! That's something that I could make. Didn’t I experiment with the use of rubber, from bark sap into binding with a stone? The stone had the altered properties of rubbering, textured, and soft for alteration.

I ran to the compartment that had research written on a sign above. Exiting it, I held a stone the same size as I was. I ran to the workshop table to the side and took out a saw as the baby continued his cry. I was in a rush, but I managed to create a rubbery pacifier for the baby to chew on. It was no mother’s nipple or will give any milk, but it’s something the baby can chew on, while I stress in panic what to do next.

With that done, I did a running jump into the cloth wicker basket. The baby ignored me by closing his eyes shut as he shrieked for his mother’s attention. With a mouth opened, I shoved the pacifier into the baby’s mouth. The baby was surprised at first by the rubber textured taste that was clenched between his gums. He was about to spit it out, but instead, he chewed on it then sucked from it.

The baby kept sucking onto it without any luck for milk, but the action felt familiar and soothing to the baby’s little mind. Quiet was the reward for my impromptu invention, and what a marvelous reward that was. I then recalled my dream and my parents.

“My parents!”

“Where are you going?” Oona shrilled, losing her relieved expression after the pacifier. “You’re not leaving me here alone with the baby?”

“Please just for a few hours,” I begged.

“Where are you going?”

“To my parents,” I said, a bit panicked at the thought. They must be intensely worried about me. The last thing they saw of me was riding atop the leviathan out from the grove into green meadows. Grabbing my glider, from where I left it, I headed back to the elemental stone rooms to get a few more combusting stones to save some more time on the journey.

Entering through the grove, I saw a few people point up, hollering my name. “It’s Sink the Tink!” Grasshuggers, hugging, Grass Cultivators cultivating and Grass Singers singing their song. It was a sight for sore eyes to see my Grove again. As I landed it on the soft plain below, Teka came up to me with his grouchy mood. He then opened up with a big smile and then suddenly hugged me.

“Thank you! Leviathan Slayer!” He roared in my ear. I was shocked by the comradery display he has shown me. Throughout my childhood, I thought we were at odds with one another.

“Thank you for saving the grove.” He said in my ears before he left my embrace as I was swallowed a whole by the mob surrounding us, leaving me with a surprised expression on my face.

After the plethora of greetings and congratulations, my mother and father yelp and hurried. They were shoving aside the wee folk aside as they reach to their pod. They both swallowed me up in their embrace when they hugged me. I marveled at the crowd around us. I spotted my friend Wink, giving me a wink, and Sera giving me a shy smile. But, there was a moment in the crowd I glimpsed my human parents' faces in the array, smiling and giving me a wave.

Witnessing this phantasm, my body suddenly collapsed into my fair parents' tight embrace, relieved by the feel.

“Son you did it!”

“Why did you do a stupid thing like that!” My mother scolded, tears glistening down her cheeks. “You had me worried sick.”

Father mightily embraced both of us in his thick arms, proud in our Trio.

After our reunion, we had a feast of lush grass and green vegetables. I was avaricious in my feast, as the crowd around our table was the size of the crowd that greeted us. The fair folk wanted to be near me, a legend in the making. Someone of an oddity in the Grove, who had risked his life diving into the Leviathan’s maws.

Take over exaggerated my performance on that day. He marveled at my daring, my selfless to fight the leviathan alone. I told them a fanciful story of what happened next, a saga for the ages, the Grass Singer will sing. I am by no means a person who exaggerates my claims much, but when there is a time to be the center of attention, why not take it.

As I chewed on tough cartilage of broccoli, an image crossed my mind that had made me halt. It was the tantalizing image of pork meat, simmering by a glare of firestones below it. My chewing stopped with my full mouth gaped even wider. ‘Mother of Bacon!’ I screamed through my mind. I dropped the chicken leg broccoli into the table, disgusted now of what I was eating, and what I was missing.

It has probably gone bad by now. Then it had struck me, all my pain, regrets, and sadness, sparked by the missing taste of bacon. I began to ball out my eyes, sobbing into the jolly fair crowd.

People's mood altered into awkwardness at my display. Which had then began to sadden their expression, as they witnessed my breakdown in the greenery of my celebration party.

“He must have suffered quite an ordeal.”

“It must have been traumatic.” A few people whispered audibly to my ears.

My father and mother noticing this was something different, all told the partygoers to quietly leave and let me have my rest. After they were gone, both my parents huddled up next to me to cradle me in both their arms.

“What's wrong?” My father gently inquired.

And then I told them my story of what had truly occurred yesterday and the harrowing night after it. I told them of the giant man I had to kill, to save a human mother and her child. I told them of her dying wish and the responsibility that was given to me. They quietly listened through the saga of that day, rubbing my shoulders as I continued. I then told them, my love of bacon and meat, that I had missed.

They were confused at first, then shocked at the concept of it. “Eating a corpse of the dead.” My mother gasps with a horrified expression. That's when I shut my mouth, too much information for them. I know they were my parents, but I was not ready to tell them my whole story. I didn’t want them to think of me as an alien who had crossed through another plane of existence. I wanted them to think of me as their special child.

I hugged both of them, to neatly end the discussion any further.

“Where is this human baby?” My father asked.

“What are you feeding it?” My mother pestered.

“Uh. Well, you see...I haven’t fed it anything.” I shrugged in embarrassment.

“What do human babies eat anyways?”

I had this answer on my lips, for you know, I was once...human.

“Uh, milk?” I suggested. Both my parents repeated milk, then an idea sparked into my mother's eyes. “Some plants and nuts produce milk, like hemp grass, or almond nuts.” My mother suggested.

“Carrots? Squash?” I further propose.

“I can talk to my buddies, who cultivate some of those plants you suggest.” My father offered.

With a plan and diet set in mind, we all headed out to do our task. “Where is this place you are keeping the baby?” My father inquired. Well, the time was up, no point dodging the question anymore.

“Uh, my secret place.” I mysteriously admitted.

“Where is that?” Both my parents' expressions both peak at the secret.

“Is that where you've been all day for all these years?” My mother admonished me.

I shrugged and told them the way. After we had gathered all the stuff was needed. We headed out on foot to my secret grove and hickory laboratory.