Episode 29

If you had asked Sharp what plans he had for the weekend yesterday afternoon, he wouldn’t have listed being trapped inside an experimental wormhole laboratory as one of the items at the top of his list. He certainly wouldn’t have followed up with, “Oh! And to be eaten alive feet first!” Yet here he was. All his mouth and wit were useless before the hollow, gaping tunnel of teeth his feet would soon be entering.

He tried to smack at the tongue with Cattleya’s oversized cricket bat to break its grip on his legs, but the multiple arms with their one-too-many elbows and tentacled fingers were doing a good job of keeping his aim off. If he stopped hitting the arms away, they’d shovel the rest of him into the creature’s mouth along with his feet, but as he continuedkeeping the arms at bay, its tongue dragged him slowly towards the portal.

Don’t panic! Think! Think!

Sharp’s only hope seemed to be to wait until just before he was turned into snack food, then to cram the cricket bat into the mouth in between the teeth, stopping the creature from closing its mouth. It was a terrible plan. So much could go wrong.

He swung the bat down on his leg where one of the tentacled hands had latched on. If he could ignore the pain, he might be able to crush the tentacles and make that hand inoperable. He hit the two appendages on his right, then lifted his bat for the killing blow to his leg.

“Give me that.”

Cattleya reached out and took the bat away from him. She growled a deep and feral warning at the creature and whacked at its arms with swift and violent strikes. She swung with such force that she severed the tentacles in one arm and damaged the others, leaving them limp. The creature howled and began to pull Sharp in faster, but Cattleya leapt over Sharp and while standing firmly on its tongue, she smashed the bat into the creatures eyes, then she set to shattering its teeth. The tongue let go as the creature recoiled, pulling itself back from the opening. Sharp was never so happy to be suddenly pelted with cold, wintery rain.

“Are you alright?” Cattleya asked Sharp with concern.

Before he could reply, the room began to shudder as the gateway prepared for its next transition. At that moment, the creature lurched towards the opening again, this time targeting Cattleya with renewed energy from its rage and pain. This time even more appendages came through the portal, but it was all for naught. The portal rippled, and the sounds of bird calls filled the room as a warm breeze blew over them from the beach beyond.

The appendages on their side fell to the floor with a sloppy splurtch. Cattleya poked at them with her bat.

“I wonder if these are fit for consumption,” she mused out loud.

A chorus of “ew” came over the intercom, and Sharp laughed long and hard. He was alive and never happier.

“Thank you. I mean it.” He gathered himself off the floor and stood up to face his savior, but she looked away with intense displeasure.

“What’s up with you?” he asked.

“It’s not you. Well, not on this occasion.” She sighed and looked at him squarely. “I have been so confounded by this abduction that I allowed you to treat me as helpless maiden in distress.”

“You are a princess.”

“No, not yet. I’m one of several people in line for the throne. However, that is beside the point. I am fully capable of swinging my own bat. I didn’t require your protection, but I let you sequester me in a closet. And consequently, you almost died.”

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

“Huh. You’re right,” Sharp replied while putting his hand thoughtfully under his chin. “I could have just let you fight off that beast the whole time and stayed safe inside the closet instead! Why didn’t I think of that? That’s a great idea, Cattleya. I’ll let you handle the next monster.” Sharp grinned.

“Wait a moment. I dislike the direction this conversation is heading.”

Sharp kicked at one of the arms on the floor with disdain, then turned to the observation window.

“You won’t hear me complaining about too many beaches again,” he called out. “That was a close one. Are you the ones who got the power back up?”

“It wasn’t us,” replied Kyle.

“It must have been Novell.”

“Mr. Hikoboshi, I’ve been meaning to say something.” Isabelle put on her boss voice. “You are overly familiar with our CEO. It’s ‘Mr. Jackson’ to you. To refer to him as ‘Novell” is disrespectful.”

“No, sorry. It’s just ‘Novell’. We’re friends, and I was supposed to be eating steak at his house this afternoon. Not ending up as dinner for whatever the heck that thing was.”

“You’re friends with the CEO?” shouted out Syd. Besides him two women that Sharp didn’t recognize nodded as if understanding something for the first time. One looked Korean and the other looked like a boisterous Hispanic talk show host.

“Hi,” the boisterous one spoke. She dressed in bright, festive colors and had silver, spiky hair. “I’m Phoebe. I supervise the data analysis team. You mean to tell us that you are friends with our CEO, but you work in IT? It’s kinda hard to believe, but you did used to be a CEO yourself. So…”

“Novell and I go way back. He offered me this job when my last one didn’t pan out. But if he had told me I’d be repairing smart toilets for a living, I wouldn’t have taken it. He knows me, so he kept that part from me on purpose. At any rate, I can’t call him ‘Mr. Jackson’. It’s too weird.” Sharp felt uncomfortable saying more. Some of the lab workers were starting to get agitated again.

Turning away from Syd and his crew, Sharp waved to get Kyle and Isabelle’s attention. “Let’s assess what you need from me to get things up and running again in here. Meanwhile, I’ve got figure out how to block that portal so that nothing tries to come through again. We need a larger door, and the last one has retired on a beach somewhere.”

Isabelle herded her co-workers back to their stations, and Sharp turned to face the entire WMD lab. Between the wormhole vortex and the hurricane winds, the lab was in was in complete shambles. Cattleya was over by the portal investigating their new source of protein, and Sharp wondered with a grimace how well tentacles went with maroons. If they were going to survive, they’d need to find food wherever they could. He needed to get use to the idea. He’d also need to organize the lab, fortify the portal, and figure out what tools he had on hand to get the wormbox up and running again. It seemed to be the key to the portal. He wasn’t exactly sure what their link was, but it was the logical place to start.

─── ·⋆⋅🚪⋅⋆· ───

The fourth portal change since their toothsome visitor revealed what appeared to be an ancient religious site with two rows of vertical stone slabs gathering in an arch up to a point at the top of a hill. Sharp could have commented on the veritable palette of flowers blanketing the foot of the hill, or the sleek and tall, majestic stone rectangles with deeply carved, circular designs that jutted up into the pastel sky.

“I bet if I pushed the top one over, I could knock both rows down.”

Cattleya gave a muffled “Moo hoo hoo” which Sharp politely made no comment on.

“Much akin to giant dominos,” she said after she stopped laughing.

“You have that game, too? I wonder who gave it to who?” Sharp asked while sweeping debris from the floor out onto the flowers. “Ours is played with black tiles with white dots on a table. It’s popular with children and the elderly, though some people like to set hundreds of them up into complicated designs that they then knock down.”

Cattleya scrunched her face in confusion.

“Ours would not fit on a table. They reach up to my knee in height. We place them strategically in an open colosseum as warriors engage in mortal combat. The contestant who tumbles the dominos releases wild garviks, which they must battle. It’s a harrowing contest resulting in a significant loss of life. It is also very popular with young and old.”

Sharp had nothing to say to that. He remembered her growl as she attacked the beast and could imagine how dangerous a match of dominos must be in her world.

He picked up an armful of branches that had been blown into the lab and tossed them out into the field. Instead of landing with a soft thud, he heard the distinctive sound of wood clunking on metal. Something was buried underneath that carpet of flowers.

All I have to do is venture out into the strange, mysterious field, likely filled with deadly garviks or who knows what else, to find out what it is. Easy.