Walter Williams lay on his back staring into a night sky swimming with stars and wondering whether he still had a face. That he couldn’t feel his face was not the source of his concern, because he could not at that moment feel much of anything, his entire body simultaneously numb and tingling. His concern stemmed instead from the fact that he could not imagine that anyone could still have a face after that much fire jetted into them through a hole in the world.
“Does Reeve call those portals?” Walter said and found his voice as dry and creaky as the spine of an old book that hadn’t been taken off the shelf in decades.
“I believe she does,” Leaf said from somewhere to his right, her raspy voice nearly indistinguishable from his.
Walter raised his head to look down the unimpressive length of his scorched body and, beyond his feet, saw the trunk they had only just managed to wrestle through the portal before one of the balls of fire landed on the other side and bathed them in a jet of flame, destroying the portal in the process. The trunk lay on its side, and thin wisps of smoke rose from a half-dozen locations on its charred but otherwise intact surface.
“I had hoped to save this trunk from its imminent destruction,” Leaf said. “I had not intended to remain with it, unable to return to Thhia. I thought the portal stronger than that, but the fiery bombardment was of a magic I have not before seen.”
Walter lowered his head to the ground and stared once more into the sky. “Do you know if Bunce is OK?”
A paw batted the side of his head gently, and he arched his neck to look into the beady eyes of the honey badger. As far as Walter could tell from his position, the dirty white band that ran through Bunce’s hair from head to tail was singed as black as the rest of her.
“Oh, good,” Walter croaked and then coughed. The skin of his chest and stomach felt as though they might split from the motion. “Oh my.” He took a few slow, shallow breaths. “And is Reeve’s catpanion OK?” Walter chuckled softly, wincing as he did. “Heh. I didn’t even mean to say it that way. Good word, though. But I think she was standing right in front of the portal when—“
Bunce disappeared from Walter’s view, batted aside by a much larger and less gentle paw, and Nyx took a step forward to occupy the space in which Bunce had been standing.
“Oh…dear…” Walter said.
The American cheetah’s fur had been singed so short that she looked like a hairless cat—a stocky, two-hundred-pound, soot-colored, hairless cat.
Walter had always found Nyx intimidating. Now, on top of her usual intimidating presence, he thought that the great cat looked as though she did not appreciate her new appearance and might be in a foul mood until the fur grew back.
“If it grows back…” Walter said to himself. He quickly cleared his throat. “I’m glad you’re OK, Nits.”
“Nyx,” Leaf corrected him quickly, but before she could finish the word, Nyx batted Walter, and he saw new stars. When he eventually rolled to a stop, he found himself next to Bunce, who was using her teeth to clean dirt from between two paws.
Walter sat up painfully and crossed his legs under himself. He called his UI to him and swayed slightly as it zoomed to fill his view. “There must be something I can do,” Walter said quietly, “to settle down this kitty…,” he looked between the windows of the UI and found Nxy still staring at him, “eh...great cat, great great cat, until we can find Reeve again.” Walter’s head began weaving through the air as he searched for a skill that might be useful with Reeve’s companion. “Companion…,” he said and smiled. “She’s a Companion. Just like Bunce. Maybe if I just use the same skill I used when I first met Bunce…” Walter’s smile faded as he remembered the first few times he met Bunce as well as their first few interactions as fledgling companions, all of which had ended in him dying. More accurately, him being killed by Bunce. “Maybe not that…,” he said.
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His head began weaving again. After a minute or two, he gripped the sides of his head with both hands. “Just move the eyes,” he said to himself, remembering some of Reeve’s guidance. “Ah, that’s better.” His eyes moved over the overwhelming number of UI components, randomly at first. Soon, he tried running them down each column. Then, side to side. Then, in a spiral, beginning in the middle and spinning outward. “Colony of Choice?” He said after some time. He squinted against the brightness of the UI in the dark night and tried to read the small descriptive text beneath the skill he’d never noticed before, which he suspected was something new that he’d acquired only after making it to Level 4 at the end of his first little adventure in the game. “If I had my reading glasses,” he said, then laughed. “Now Walter, you’re not middle age in here. If you can’t read it, probably no one can read it. Best just click on it to open it and see what it says.”
Leaf, who had also risen to a cross-legged seated position to survey the extent of her burns and other injuries, and who had made no attempt to follow Walter’s running conversation with himself, jumped to her feet and pulled her silver cudgel from her black cloak in response to a cry of alarm from Walter.
“Nononono!” Walter shouted as he rose panicked to his feet. “Turn off! Turn off!”
“What see you?” Leaf said. She looked around them but found no signs of danger. The bailey was silent save for Walter’s cries.
Nyx padded toward Walter, who began waving his hands frantically in front of his face.
“Walter! Speak!” Leaf said.
Walter ceased the frantic waving and turned toward Nyx. “I’m sorry! It was a misunderstanding!”
Nyx stopped just short of him. The great cat lowered her furless head a few inches to stare into his eyes. She growled.
“I’ll fix it,” Walter whispered.
A loud thump caused both Walter and Leaf to turn their heads toward the trunk, which had rocked onto one edge before falling back to rest flat on the grass.
“Goodness gracious!” Walter shouted. With a pronounced limp, he began running across the lawn toward the trunk, the grassy blades he trampled becoming brittler and more blackened as he approached the scorch-marked location of the now-gone portal.
“I cannot help you if you do not explain your distress,” Leaf said. Her voice, usually so quiet and lyrical, was elevated slightly and betrayed frustration even through its dry rasp.
Walter reached the trunk only a second after it completed another hop. Sliding to a stop on the grass, he looked for a moment at his hands, then the trunk, then his hands again, finally craning his neck to look over his shoulder.
The trunk jumped suddenly and twisted with enough momentum to land on a different side. The increase in the trunk’s activity pushed Walter to a decision. With his right hand, he grasped the iron handle that hung from hinges in the middle of one end of the trunk, registering as he did that it was still warm from its bath of fire. Broadening his stance, he looked at his thickly muscled forearm, thanked himself for investing so many strength points there and in his massive calves, and yanked the trunk upward and toward his back.
The trunk did not move, and Walter crumpled as his still grossly underdeveloped thighs, hips, and core muscles were overwhelmed by the force of his arm pulling him toward the ground.
The trunk hopped and nearly landed on Walter’s face.
Finding a new level of panic, Walter jumped to his feet, grabbed the handle with both hands, and pulled against it not to lift the trunk but instead to swing himself forward past it. The torque produced by his upper body easily overcame his modest body weight, and he swung in a shallow arc along the side of the trunk and then up into the air, leaving the trunk behind him on the ground. The handle of the trunk left his hand, and for a moment, he stared once more into the stars, which prompted his thoughts to return to the question of whether he still had a face, and then he landed on his back in the grass where the trunk had been.
Walter took a couple of barely controlled breaths, each a pair of stuttering inhales followed by a slightly longer exhale. After a few seconds, when his breathing began to settle, he smiled. “Hammertime,” he said.