Samari rose from her comfy, white-sheeted bed in a swift motion, smiled briefly, and then, as dictated by her nature, proceeded to be a nuisance.
“The sun is made of acid!” she shouted in the wake of the night.
Groggily, Jagger opened his eyes, forwent shitting on his sleeping rug, and yawned. “Samari, I have just one petition to make: tell whoever stole your normal nightmares to give them back.”
“But Jagger, the sun is actually made of acid!”
Jagger’s brain spurted in defeat and he went back to sleep.
Kalon jumped from his bed, ready for action, the liquid puppies coming out of his pores and swiftly reforming into his battle dress. “The sun is made of what?”
“Acid.” Samari deadpanned. “You see, pH is defined as the… it’s a number that…” Samari’s brain was capable of many things, but she wasn’t sure it could face the titanic task of explaining chemistry concepts to Kalon without frying on its own juices. “The universe is made of tiny balls, Kalon.”
Kalon’s face twitched as realization washed over him. It couldn’t be. The world couldn’t be made of balls. But Samari wasn’t prone to lying to him. That, or she was very good at it.
“Particles, subatomic particles, and they form these things, atoms. Atoms then gather in molecules, metals o ionic compounds and… “Samari stopped,, noticing the smoke coming out of Kalon’s ears. “Gods in heaven, you are a cartoon character, Kalon.”
“No, that’s just his vital energy running away from his body, unable to handle the stupidity. It’s not actual smoke.” Jagger interceded.
“Anyway, the universe is made from really small balls, and these balls are different between them. And acids have a high concentration of a particular sort of tiny ball that the sun also has. So, I’d bet that, if we dissolved the sun in a glass of water, it would be very acidic.”
Jagger’s jaw dropped. “It made sense in the end, Heavens!”
Kalon raised a finger since its early childhood and until it was a good family index.
“The sun is too big to fit into a glass of water,” He brained.
Samari looked at Jagger, Jagger looked at samari, and then they both shrugged before speaking in unison. “Technically correct.”
Samari puller her sheets up to her head and yawned. “Anyway, Kalon, let’s sleep. Tomorrow we will search for a sect for you and afterwards… well, I will search for a job. Maybe I can wipe the floor of the archives or something…” Samari sounded disheartened, and Kalon, impressively, managed to pick up on it.
He stuck both fists deep in his matters for support, giving him the appeareance of a particularly clueless and paraplegic bonobo. “Why are you sad? We could both attend the same sect. You told me countless times that Arcagnostics are useful to cultivators.”
“That doesn’t mean we can advance in our discipline within a sect. That pile of books is only a tiny fraction of the material I must study and internalize if I want to become half as good an Arcagnostic as my mother was.”
Realizing what this meant, Kalon slumped in his bed. “Then, is this our goodbye, Sam?”
“Unless they reject you on every sect around, yes. But don’t worry: you can visit me by the archives, and I will make sure to drop by the sect now and then to witness your progress.” She made a pause to cover herself in the sheets and turn around. “If they let me in.”
“I will make sure they do. I am no rookie cultivator. I bet I could whoop the ass of several of their disciples.”
Samari fixed her gaze on the glass chandelier that hung, as it’s adequate, from the ceiling. “Well, you know how cultivators are…”
The wall boomed like Jagger on a good summer day. Someone waws knocking on it from the other side. “Some of us want to sleep, Brats! And the answer is stupid!” Came a male voice from the other side. Of the wall. Not from the furry afterlife. That would have been concerning. And talking about the furry afterlife…
----------------------------------------
The mysterious but handsome stranger carefully pushed the wind chimes made from human skulls away as he advanced under the low ceiling. A skink popped from the upper pocket of his Hawaiian-styled… cultivator garments, so to speak. It had been awakened by all the rattling and chittering of bones clashing together.
Stolen novel; please report.
“He must be somewhere around this god forgotten place,” Cutbastra said, his breath whitening, his boots sinking into the frost on the floor.
Regretting his ectothermic nature, Oracle licked his eye in slowmo, and the tongue got stuck to the cornea. “wedd, dhad’s a bubber.” Cutbastra rubbed the reptile’s eye softly with his hand to warm it and aid his working partner. “Thanks. Who in the hellish heavens makes a refrigerating chamber their lair?”
Cutbastra emerged from the sea of macabre wind chimes to enter one of half beefs hanging from thick metal hooks, which he pushed away without difficulty. “A man who has friends in hard-to-reach places. If I want to beat that rogue avatar you told me about, I need to cuck the cultivator inside.”
Against all odds, Oracle, who still lacked eyelids, blinked. “Sorry, what? She’s a widow!”
“And we have come to see a man that can send me to the world of the dead. Without actually killing me, to clarify.”
Half out of cold and half out of realization, Oracle froze for a few seconds. “You are going to go into the furry afterlife and fuck a dead man?”
“It’s the only way to secure victory. Everyone can be cucked, Oracle. The challenge of my Road is finding out how.”
He emerged from the sea of half beefs and entered one of turnstiles hung upside down, much like the cow halves or the skull-based ornaments. “Fuck, I forgot my wallet.”
“You have the GDP of an entire continent stashed in your pocket dimension.”
“Yes, but if I open it here the heat released will put my friend’s personal economy in jeopardy by fireworkchairing his electric bill.”
“Skyrocketing.” Oracle corrected.
“Same thing.”
Cutbastra braced himself and crawled under the firm arms of the turnstiles. Some of the straight metal tubes decided to stop behaving like gentlemen, and prey to temptation, slapped the chiseled buttocks of the cultivator. Cutbastra turned immediately, sending the offending turnstile to the afterlife by cutting it in two it with the outer edge of his hand. The upper half of the machine, still alive and bleeding oil and sparks form the clean cut wound, fell to the cold floor, unaware of what had happened. Then, it all went dark for the turnstile, as the machine’s self got sent to the final horny jail.
After emerging from the final trial —the bunch of butt-slapping machines— Cutbastra walked once again like a man, and approached the fat guy on a desk, at the far end of the refrigeration chamber. The man was ddressed in clothes adequate for a motherfucker that lives inside a fridge: a sticker from a banana adorned his forehead, his wife beater was the happy host of several tomato sauce stains, his boxers boasted the scars of many battles with time, and had developed the ability to draw lines in quarts when they scratched it. It wouldn’t be long until they overtook topaz on the Mohs scale, too.
Oracle moved his head slightly, feeling something crack inside him, to look at the man. It was not what the expected a master of life and death to be. He looked more like a trucking capybara that had renounced his aquatic nature and never embraced the concept of a bath.
“Yo, Horancio.”
The man raised his gaze from his erotic magazine about girls in sexy, well isolated eskimo suits, and, after a second of appraising his visitor, went back to it. “Do I know you?”
“I fucked your wife once.”
The man closed his magazine and gave Cutbastra a second, long look. “yeah, that cuts the universe of potential identities in half.”
“Cutbastra, Road of the Homewrecker? I fixed your TV before fucking your wife.”
The man’s face lighted up with a frost-white smile. “Of course! Thanks to you I could watch the Fifth International Volleyball Championship!”
“Bingo! Now, old friend, I need a favor…” Cutbastra noticed that his little elongate friend had hardened unexpectedly. “Two, actually: a way to safely thaw a lizard, and to be sent to the Furry afterlife to look for someone’s husband… and fuck him.”
The man’s hairy hand found his bearded nose bridge. “Do you know how many of my clients come trying to get into some Realm of the dead to screw a particular inhabitant? It’s three fourths of all my visits!”
“Can you thaw my skink at least?” Cutbastra gestured at the heat-bankrupted lizard. “He needs to import warmth to live. His national industry never took off.”
The obese man grinned, and pulled a glass with a green, watery fluid from under his gray metallic desk.
“Always prepared?”
“I live in a cold room. Dip your friend into this.”
“Is this some sort of potion?” Cutbastra asked. wondering why the substance remained liquid in such environment.
“It is a brew with peak performance.”
Cutbastra dipped the stiff skink in the glass, and soon enough, Oracle returned to the world of the moving.
“What is this?” The skink said, taking a deep breath. “Are you idiots dipping me in coolant? That shit is ethylene glycol. Propylene, if I am lucky.”
“It’s green, so it’s environmentally friendly,” Horancio pointed out. Oracle began thinking he was better out frozen.
Cutbastra fished his friend out of the glass and stashed him back into his pocket. “Well, with that out of the way… send me to the Furry heaven so I can cuck a rogue cultivator and defeat her?”
The man scratched his ear, and, consequently, his beard. “So you need to fuck a dead furry to save the world from his wife, correct?”
Cutbastra extended his fingers and made a “more or less” gesture by swiveling his hand from side to side.
“Ah, what the hell, only this world has volleyball. Give me a couple hours to prepare the ritual. Feel free to stay in the meantime.”
“We would prefer to take a walk outside. I need to stretch my legs,” Oracle came up with a very credible excuse.
“And I need to go water my Martina beauties,” Cutbastra provided a far less credible —but not necessarily false— one.
“Yeah, yeah, I know. You little bitches cannot stand a bit of chill. Come back in two hours, and... Cutbastra?”
He turned only his head, and didn’t stop slowly walking away, back into the forest of hanging turnstiles “Yes?”
“My wife misses you.”
Cutbastra closed his eyes and smiled proudly. “They always do.”