One, two, three, the outer arch of the foot meets the floor before the inner does. Hands up, fingers snapping, Mariana following while throwing her dress around. She had mastered the subtle ears movements faster than a Chosen One figuring out a sword.
Side to side with his son, Mateo watched and cheered for us. The pageant drew near and in the deftness of my feet and the calculated steps of her paws rested the chance to end the world.
Mateo had ordered a couple of adequate shoes for me. They were confectioned by his favorite shoemaker, an old and decrepit master of the craft who lived in a town that, in Mateo’s words, couldn’t smell worse. They were made out of excellent leather. It had belonged to a bull that had sired about seven and a half calves. As for what part of the bull, most of it had been extracted from the posterior half of the animal, and held the personality of said bodily parts. Even before reviving them it could be felt: my footwear were absolute jerks.
“I have met bullfighters that danced better while they squirmed on the floor due to the gnashes my horns opened on their abdomens. And guess what? The blood, bile and intestinal waste smelled better than your feet,” said the right shoe.
Even when I kept on tapping against the floor, they refused to shut up.
“Is he agonizing? Having a seizure? Trying to attract a mate? Agonizing during a seizure-induced courtship display?” asked the left shoe.
“I think the leftie doth ponder too much,” replied the right one. I found it endearing, how their intolerance extended to each other. Meanwhile, my belts had their own concerns to worry about.
“So, what is garooing?” asked one of them.
“Jumping like those weird Australian bag horses do, that’s why they are called like that, because they can do it,” replied a second one for the umpteenth time.
“Yeah, but how would you describe it in a dictionary?”
“The act of imitating a weird Australian bag horse in their way of displacement.”
“Ah, makes sense. So… why can they garoo?”
Practicing with all those conversations going on over me was a challenge I was glad to take on. To the voice of Jorge Rojas I danced, turning over my own axis, taking Mariana’s paw now and then to help her with a figure, enjoying a flexibility I thought lost to the years.
Mariana seemed to be either enjoying herself or about to explode due to anxiety. Fifty-fifty.
Mateo jumped from his vantage position behind the throne and, who would have guessed, gravity worked this time around. He landed gracefully, considering the height he jumped from. His right ankle, however, decided to protest due to inflation taking away his acquisitive power. Too many tarsals and metatarsals depended on him to give them up. Long story short, the ankle struck, and went on strike. The rest of Mateo, due to reasons concerning physics and its caprices related to botching your stunt, quickly met the hard, black floor.
“I think I broke something,” whelped the scrambled noodle of a ruler.
We, naturally, kept on dancing. His HP bar was mostly full, so he wasn’t in danger. We could ignore him as he tried to get up. His son was, judging by the sound of his steps, slowly descending the stairs to aid him. Cornelio, being the delicate community of eyes he was, couldn’t risk a paralyzing headache for hurrying up. So he took his time, and descended one step, then another, as Mateo called desperately for help.
After thirty solid seconds of agony, he called his pit bulls and they piled up on top of each other without question, creating a makeshift crutch for him to clamber. He looked pissed off, with his brow twitching and his face a grimace of pain.
“Why didn’t you help me?” he criticized us as he headed for the first aid kit in the bathroom.
“I am your best friend here. I would lose that title if I helped you,” I said.
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“Cunt.”
“See, you regard me as you would a best friend, rascal.”
“Walter, he is in pain,” Mariana showed a rare sliver of empathy.
“Did you deactivate your stupidity?”
“No. The mining server is getting updated and I got kicked. Kicked, can you believe it? I am stuck being intelligent for a while. I hate it.” She got grumpy, curled around an imaginary axis and stared at nothing for a few solid seconds.
“Weren’t you saying we should help him?”
“No. I am angry. I said he is in pain. Stated a fact. Simple as.”
“Sometimes, Mariana, I worry about how cruel you can be,” I expressed my concern to her before approaching and patting her head.
“You raised me,” she deadpanned.
“And I am proud of it, girl. You are the best Golden Retriever a jerk like me could ask for.”
“Owww, thank you.” She nuzzled my cheek playfully. “We need to keep practicing another while, alright?”
“Right, I want to go back home, where my stupidity is ensured.”
And so, between clapping, circling and tip-tapings, we successfully ignored the plight of our benefactor.
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The note was slid under the door of my room, presumably by Mateo. It contained a simple message, coded in elements of the periodic table:
Wolfram 2 Molybdenum 92 16 Thorium Darmstadtium Thorium Radium Yttrium Tellurium 2 16 20 15 53 16 Thorium 4 Francium Potassium 53 lutetium 11, Sulphur 8 Tellurium Yttrium Deuterium 8 (element posterior to carbon) Indium Tellurium Rutherfordium Helium Rhenium.
“Mariana, given you use telepathy and I am sure the seer cannot hear that if you use it in a private channel, decipher this. Just tell me what it says.”
I let the note on the floor of my room and she, still drowsy, stared at it, drooling a few drops of saliva into the note.
“KSJAFJFKHKHGHJJVJAVNCKVKDJFDAJ,” she declared. The dumb had returned.
I put her back to sleep with a playful belt-and shoes-aided roundhouse kick and tried cleaning the note. Under the magical “orb” of red light that gave my room the villainous atmosphere I deserved, I stared at the note and prepared my brain for the chore. And I used square quotes on the word “orb” because, if you looked the shiny balls up close, you could notice you were dealing with rapidly spinning, luminous empanadas.
I started replacing the elements for their symbols in my mind. I didn’t remember them all, but getting most right could make for a readable message.
W, He, Mo… maybe uranium? U, S, Th, What the fuck was the symbol for this one? It had to have D plus something, Th, Ra, Y… Whe Mousth D?thRay… Te, He, S, Ca , P, I, S, Th… Te HeSCaPISTh… good lord the grammatical evils that chem do… Be,Fr,K, I, Lu?,Na… BeFr KiLuna… , S, O, Te, Y , D, O, N, In, Te, Rf, He, Re?… SO TeY DON InTeRfHeRe.
In proper words: We must destroy and/or Death Ray (same difference) the escapists before killing the moon so they don’t interfere.
Great, it had my least favorite word when it came to tasks: we.
It was a welcome surprise, the fact that I cried way less than the expected amount while decoding the message.
And yet, this was a heavy burden. I understood why Mateo suddenly cared about our enemies: Fernando’s display of power had been brutal, and, at the same time, it felt like the tip of the iceberg. Furthermore, he attacked us while on the castle, and a home invasion is a surefire way to spur the paranoia of the occupants of said abode. And, if they could spare Fernando before the last ditch effort, who knew what kind of monsters they had in their ranks? They had one or more trumps up their sleeve. I tried to imagine what their powers could be, but the possibilities were infinite: we had a dog who summoned empanadas with a perturbing efficiency as weapons of war, Mariana and her jack-of-all-tradiness-fuck-balance approach to the game world, Fernando and his memory warfare, monsters shaped after short stories of Borges and Cortázar. There seemed to be no easily discernible pattern that could aid in the prediction of the enemies we could face. It was obvious not even Mateo, who had lived in Planet for decades by then, knew the limits of magic. We waded through the waters of uncertainty blind as a happily married male anglerfish.
Suggestions of betrayal crossed my mind. I knew some things about Mateo and his daughters, things the escapists always knew. And by working with them and applying a bit of malicious compliance failure would reward me with an easy way out of this world. It would have been in my best interest, save for the fact I didn’t trust Mateo to be able to kill the Last Demiurge without my help, and that it would make said deity my enemy.
And what if I died here? That question remained unanswered. Would it all end? Would I be a step further from home? It seemed so simple when I arrived to the castle: “You have a superpowered dog, Walter, just destroy a big dumb rock with it and we go back home”. But now, little by little obstacles popped up making the straight line into a tangled mess of detours: for each step forward, we had to take ten to the side.
I stood from my bed and silently went out the door. My belts trembled, for they knew what was coming. I wasn’t exploiting my full potential as a necromancer, and I needed power. In some creative usage of my necromantic abilities the unique skill had to be hiding, waiting to be found. I would be attacked by an Escapist on the dog dancing competition, or shortly thereafter: it was a place they knew I would be, and full of people I didn’t know. Any of its members with a dog could even participate to keep another eye on me and wait for the proper moment to take me out. I needed the multiplier or special powers that would come with the awakening of my skill.