The main issue they had to find the house of Aunty Lora was that Kalon’s sense of orientation broke when his own abode was out of the line of sight. His mind was overworked, and so was his body. He was thirsty, hungry, and other things that end in Y and are fitting for a lost eleven-years old.
Merely a hundred meters away from the place he had been born in, Kalon was now lying on the floor, prone, panting, bruised, beheld by a haughty Rottweiler puppy that tripled his IQ.
“Who will train who?” Jagger lamented.
“Save yourself, Jagger. Leave me die here, under this merciless sun.”
Jagger sat on the dry dirt road with emphasis. It was more like he had buttbutted the planet. “We got out of home an hour ago. It’s literally around the well up the road.”
“Why is there a well on the road? Someone move it.” Kalon complained, raising his head to look in the direction Jagger was pointing.
“I am going to search for sugar cane. It’s high time to caramelize those floors of your abode.”
Kalon grabbed Jagger from his uncircumcised tail before he could trot away. then, he lifted him
“Hey, that hurts! I eat my body weight in chicken innards daily. Caramelized chicken innards, because of you all. I am not lightweight,” the runner up for the crown claimed by Ysabell’s dress puppyfatted out. Gradually, Jagger felt his inner layers slid one above the other, downwards, “I am going to become a chow fucking chow!”
“Don’t leave me, I need you to cultivate.”
“Put me down.”
“As in ‘on the ground’ or as in ‘out of life’?”
Jagger froze on his dangling position, stopping even his pendular motion. Kalon had just asked something nearly rational. There was some sort of sacrilegious activity going on inside his head. A parallelism to abiogenesis, but with synapsis: brain activity arising from a dead wasteland.
“Ground. I want to walk on my own four feet,” he said after accepting the grim reality.
Kalon placed Jagger carefully on the ground and then turned onto his back to stare at the sky. Then, his body erected itself without aid of an external force, as if levitating.
“How did you do that?”
Kalon shrugged.
“I just fell up and frontwards a bit.”
Jagger scoffed as a puppy does and began running around, nose high, trying to catch a scent trail. After a while of getting no results, he wiggled his little butt towards the wooden steps of the houses and the cobblestones of the only paved road in the town —Or the only stretch of paved road: it was all the same road in the Valelike vale. I am talking about a tangle of curves, a winding disaster result of the village having been planned by the first person who had learned how to calculate a hypotenuse.
When he turned on the intersection, he saw a yellow and black smudge[1] in the distance. A smaller smudge, long and black, oscillated at the fattest extreme of the big one.
“Mommy!” Jagger said, and began trotting in direction to the smudge.
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Kalon stared, mouth agape. The dog had teleported! And yet it had just walked. “Jagger, do you follow a space-time road?”
Jagger turned and glanced at his owner, who was still in the intersection. “What sort of deranged thinking process is going to assail my sanity today? Spite it out.”
“Well, you went from one, zero, one of Roadlike Road to three, four, seven of Roadlike Road in a couple steps. That’s impossible without space magic.”
“No, it isn’t, the road crosses itself.”
“Let me reach you and I will give you a demonstration. Wait there.” Then, Kalon began jogging up the road until he disappeared behind the corner.
Jagger wished to have thumbs to pinch the bridge of his nose.
Kalon kept jogging through the dirt pathway, and he started feeling insecure, being unarmed in such a dangerous and unknown environment: three dozen houses away from one’s own. He thought (Citation needed) that there was something vile about the way the reeds of the ceilings were cut, or how the bricks of the surrounding houses had been laid.
He had to go faster. He had to overrun his pursuers, whether they existed or not. Despite being tired and disheartened by the fact that he could never see his home again, he trudged on with burning lungs and glaring neighbors.
“Why is that moron running?” mumbled a tall, pale, refined lady that sat on her house’s porch. It was Crusadina’s mother. Then she took a golden watch out of her pocket. “Oh boy, look at the time.” She produced a gun —she followed the Road of freedom— out of her cleavage and fired three shots in the air. “That should keep the property prices down another day.”
Kalon heard the roar of the gun and wondered which animal and/or plant and/or fungus could fart that loud. Maybe it was the hunting horn of his pursuers. Who could be? Julian? Julian liked to follow people. Of course, he was a character in a book, but still…
He finally spotted Jagger’s butt swagging away, towards another dog similar to him, and rushed, arms extended behind his body, a secret technique employed by people averse to baths to run faster. Then, he lunged over his puppy weapon, and as Jagger saw the shadow on the ground grow and decided it wasn’t worth to look back, Kalon accidentally changed the direction of his fall, propelling sideways and crashing against a nearby, but luckily abandoned, house. It’s not that he had powers over gravity, no: he simply couldn’t understand how to properly follow the laws of physics.
“This sort of defiance to the heavens is the one I am not willing to put up with.” And then, Jagger kept on walking towards the nearest fellow Rottie. “Hey, you are not my mom.” He told to the dog, that was, you will never guess it: not caramelized.
The Rottweiler shot a haughty glare in the direction of Jagger. She didn’t say anything, because it was a dog and dogs, as you may know, don’t talk. She pushed Jagger away with her forepaw, touching him only with her nails, as if Jagger was, somehow, inferior.
“Listen aunty, I am sure you are related to my mother, you look just like her and smell… well, a bit different, I won’t lie. But heaven punish me if you two aren’t related.”
Clouds gathered high above, thunder rolled, and the gods laughed at the foolish mortal that had accepted such an idiot’s bargain. Then the God of Genealogy kicked down the cloudy door of that particular room of heaven, and sauntered proudly up to the table, where he smashed, with his hand open, a picture of the tree of life. The God of Tribulations looked at it contracting his upper lip, and then at the God of Genealogy. “Come on! He gets off on a technicality?”
The other gods nodded, and the God of Tribulations gave up, dispersing the clouds and making the sun shine over Valelike Vale again.
“Weird,” mused Jagger, staring at the bolt of lightning congealed mid-flight, about a dozen meters above his head.
A growl interrupted Jagger’s contemplation of his almost-death, and a bark followed. When he turned, he saw white, sharp teeth staring directly at him. “Haha, I am bigger than you,” he mocked. He may have been intelligent, but he had the altered perception of a puppy all the same.
The female Rottweiler picked him up from the lose skin of his neck and begun shaking him wildly. Jagger tried to stare at the floor as he reconsidered his actions. Maybe he was a little smaller than her. Just a bit tough. He soon found himself flying through the air, turning with legs extended like a ragdoll. He wished he had been born a cat. And, before hitting the ground, something caught him from his balls, making Jagger howl pathetically and wish for death once more.
That something was Kalon’s rough hand.
“I don’t care who you are, dog, but nobody bullies my weapon!” He said, stepping in to face the angry rottie.
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[1] Most dog breeds have relatively poor day vision, when judging by human standards. In addition to this, they only have two types of cones in their eyes: blue and yellow, so the colors Jagger sees may not match the human-seen colors of things. In other words, don’t assume Jagger is a myopic dog: he is just a dog.