Kalon woke up sporting almost-human features once again, except, as you can imagine, for the intelligence that supposedly characterizes most hominids. He wasn’t surprised, he wasn’t even aware of the fact that he existed, yet. His avatar was screaming inside his head, and that wasn’t particularly worrisome. The room was not his, but his mom had always told him that as long as he was waking up in someone’s room, logic dictated that he would be mostly safe.
He felt a pressure in his chest, oppressive little paws climbing through it and towards his head. Opening his eyes and focusing after a few seconds, he found Jagger coming to what, Kalon interpreted, was his aid.
“Mission failed, I cannot take a crap on his face now,” Jagger told Brunhilda, who, sitting beside the bed, looked at him disappointed.
The puppy jumped off the bed, wishing to explode dramatically midair, but… you know. Instead, he met the wood planks of the floor face first, becoming the proud parent of a loud thud.
Kalon looked around the room, at his bed of brown sheets and at the separate one, cclean and tidy, clearly not slept on. He scratched his head a bit as his brain finished waking up.
“Where’s Samari?” he asked, more out of a sense of something missing, of a crime against the feng shui of that particular space, than of concern for his new friend.
“Samari went with her god…” Jagger said, sniffing. A beat of silence spanned, as if he was being swallowed by the all-encompassing depression that griefs begets, “her goddamn necessity to be a nuisance. She’s annoying people in the main hall. Getting paid for it.”
In a bout of brilliance, Kalon checked if he had his trust loincloth on, and rushed out of the bed. Exiting the room and turning down around the corners, they found themselves on the noisy main hall. Over pine tables patrons drank, played cards, and stabbed each other. Rabid toddlers stalked in dark corners, and under empty tables. Their eyes shone like those of a predator, and they craved the sweet taste of ankles. A cultivator, dressed in golden clothes and sporting a cowboy hat, was flaunting his recurrent customer card, and using it for what his dealer intended. Kalon and the dogs watched with curiosity as he, as he was explaining to his date, cultivated — he followed the Road of Overdosing — sniffing three lines in a row, his spirit intumescing with newfound power, dilating just as much as his pupils. “Wohoo!” He slapped the table, instantly vaporizing it, making his date, who was leaning on it, boil alive in her own skin, the smell of burnt wood, meat and silicone filling the air before being swiftly beaten to death by the stench of sweat and alcohol. “Dammit! Not again!” he grumbled before storming out of the inn, forgetting his bag of cultivation materials on the chair. Nobody commented on it, for that was just an average happening in this place.
One of the undertable children came and snatched the bag of cocaine. It would feed his rabies-ridden brain for weeks on end.
That’s when they spotted Samari, casually passing next to a table of people playing cards. Fat and hairy men laughed and giggled as they dropped their monsters and conjurations on the table.
“A second dancing with your shadow? It’s turn three, dude, chill!” commented a small man with glasses. Samari peeked over the big dude’s shoulders and bit her tongue. She extended a begging hand towards the player and wiggled her eyebrows. After a grunt and some search in the patron’s wide pockets, a couple of diamond coins fell on Samari’s hand. “Pleasuretodobusinesswithyou, sir.”
“Scamper off, rat. You may have bought the innkeeper’s complicity, but if you keep on extorting people in exchange for not revealing their hands, you will be courting death soon!”
“I will make sure to not only court death, but also give him or her an unforgettable wedding night. I have my mother’s charms, after all. Oh, and thanks for your patronage, sir,” Samari said, patting him on the shoulder and winking.
Samari turned her head towards her friends, her eyes open wide, injected in blood. “Kalon, Jagger, there you are!” She then turned the rest of her body, as if swiveling. Samari trembled up to them, her fingers twitching as she approached. “I am securing funds by bullying some nerds.”
“Gods, girl, how much coffee did you drink?” Jagger asked.
“I can sing speed metal songs now,” Samari answered, blinking way more than it was healthy.
“Well, that’s not so bad…”
“Including the guitar solos.”
Jagger wondered if she knew how to play guitar for a second, and then he realized she meant she could sing guitar. “That cannot be good for your health.”
Samari’s tremulous smile widened, “I gave a heart attack to my heart attack and stole its wallet.”
Kalon raised a finger, but Jagger gestured a sad no towards him: Samari was now beyond the point of salvation.
“I can remember the immediate future,” she proudly claimed.
You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.
“It’s okay, Samari, it’s okay, go to bed,” Jagger tried to reason with her.
“No!”
Like a gremlin, the Arcagnostic rushed to the bar, knocked on it to call the attention of the innkeeper and threw a few diamond coins at the mirthful, bald man. They bounced against his apron as he organized a few wine bottles.
“Another! Gimme, gimme, gimme!”
The man swiftly poured a cup of black, steaming coffee that had been so long in the pot that it had developed geological activity. Samari downed it like heavy rain a paper plane. She drank so fast that gravity began sweating due to the sheer effort it was making to pull the coffee down her gullet.
She felt veins coursing through her electricity. For her, in those moments, the bartender and a continent moved at the same relative speed. Even her thoughts were slow, for her. She needed better myelin sheaths. Maybe overclocked ones.
Jagger pulled on her pants to catch her attention again. Her head shifted position at an unnatural speed to look at the puppy. “What?”
“Samari, I have noticed incongruences in your behavior since we met.”
“I know, I complained about the spirit puppies being crushed, but I cooked another set of spirit-made puppies and then Kalon was the one to more-or-less care. It’s not incongruent. Needless cruelty is different from the preparation of foodstuffs. Delicious cruelty is perfectly justified,” she explained in about 1.7 seconds.
Jagger nodded. As a dog, he had to agree about food trumping morality.
“Your wisdom is to me a distant lighthouse guiding me to the shores of the dumbass sea, Samari.”
The cocaine cultivator got back into the inn, recovered his cocaine, produced a stripper out of his pocket dimension, made her bend over, poured a line of fairy dust on her right buttock, snorted it up and fell to the floor, victim of a seizure.
“Ha, looks like a brother is breaking through!” Kalon announced proudly.
The other patrons, those who were either sober enough to care or drunk to the point of having to care, turned their heads, and rooted for the frothing man. This included the stripper, that stopped beating the ankle-biter that had ruined her fishnet stockings to death just to cheer for her abuser. Once a cheerleader, always a cheerleader.
Flakes of cocaine from all over the continent felt the call of their new monarch. They rushed out of noses, lungs, bricks, pockets and bags, elevating in the air, floating up the skies to meet with their kin. The sweet melody of ethereal banjos followed the drug on their upwards and forward journey. And among clouds of water formed clouds of the psychostimulant, an insult to all those poor bastards who had been deprived of their hard earned fix. These gatherings of cocaine began drifting lazily, drawn in a spiral —they avoided straight lines due to past traumas— towards the eye of the storm, towards the follower of the Road of Overdose. With every passing second the clouds accelerated, soon reaching match speeds as they travelled to their final destination. So exaggerated was this dash, so violent this charge into servitude, that the drug descended like a tornado around the inn, entering via every door, window, keyhole and, for an absolute lack of a better-fitting word, crack.
And once inside the inn, it flooded towards the nose of the cultivator, seeking to enter his respiratory system like it was Black Friday and the alveoli were on sale. Tons upon tons of cocaine rushed past scared bystanders, rabid children, and an orphaned girl that had been rendered immune to its effects by virtue of having more stale expresso than cytoplasm inside her cells, intruding the man’s nostrils in droves. The cultivator flailed his arms and called for a mom (most likely his own mom, but it remains up to debate in academic circles, triangles, squares, and dodecahedrons).
Samari borrowed an old man’s walking stick to poke the cultivator in the ribs as this all happened, impervious to the drug storm around her. For her, the savage gusts were but a gentle breeze, exfoliating her delicate skin and gathering into the most expensive little dunes the people there had ever seen.
Eventually, all cocaine found its way inside the cultivator, and the man focused his stare on the ceiling, before sitting up suddenly and looking at his hands. His fingers vibrated so fast they seemed webbed. His body had formed a covenant with the drug, and now he could feel the presence of all the cocaine that existed in the universe.
“Wahoo! I feel the power! I am flying higher than an eagle on a space mission!” The man then snapped his fingers, and out of his nose drifted a white smoke, that soon took the form of a giant, floating credit card. He rode in his new board, grinded its way through the edges of the tables, pulled off some sick kick flips on the way out, and went onwards to the horizon, ready to travel the world and forge his legend.
Taking advantage of the situation, Samari Raided the coffee pot, consuming it like ambrosia. Immediately after, she started a fifteen-minute-long screaming fit, that woke up everyone that managed to sleep through the cokestorm, and made Jagger do the impossible, by convincing Kalon to do the intelligent thing and cover his puppy ears with his hands.
By the end of the fifteen minute, Samari collapsed on her side, drooling, half of her brain sleeping, the other half awake, like a dolphin. The half awake and sleeping, however, changed each second, so she opened an eye and closed the other, and then opened the second and closed the first, and so on and so on.
After checking she remained alive and it wasn’t a mere gas leak that kept her moving and trembling on the floor, Kalon took he rin a potato bag carry and got her into her bed, the dogs looking at him like it was unusual for him to show kindness.
“Why do you care about Samari, Kalon? What’s your rational for it?”
“She is my friend now, Jagger, and friends do this kind of thing for each other. Like you care for me during fights, finding ancient artifacts to defeat our foes!” he picked up Jagger and hugged him tightly, feeling the warm skin of the puppy against his bare pecs. “I love you, Jagger, you are my best friend.”
Jagger wanted to whine, but he resisted the temptation. “I…hold you dear too, Kalon. I would wait a couple days to eat your body after you die.”
“Guh?”
“Burr,” Brunhilda explained.
“Ah.” Went Kalon. “I see, so that’s a dog’s greatest show of affection.”
Brunhilda closed her eyes. Sometimes, her pupil understood things pretty well “Burr. Burrrrr.”
Kalon let the kicking Jagger go and went on to embrace Brunhilda. “I don’t hate you anymore too, Brunhilda sensei.”
“Burr.”
“Well, what are we going to do with Samari?” Jagger pointed out, as the girl was now suffering a sort of wave-particle duality of sleep, snoring and talking in dreams exactly at the same time.
“We let her sleep,” Kalon said, and then went back to the main hall, entrusting his friend to the care of Brunhilda and taking Jagger with him, because he wanted to celebrate the occasion of a fellow, seemingly good-hearted cultivator breaking through.