Mountains like the nipples of a male —otherwise, it’s considered obscene— leviathan rose at both sides of the lone traveler, his golden ponytail waving behind him as he faced the wind that, like trapped in a tunnel, blew through the valley, carrying the squeaks and whistles of local fauna with it. He was advancing towards a small settlement where every inhabitant knew each other, a cozy little community that could use a cheating husband or two.
“Cutbastra, friend, aren’t those mountains weird? I find them distressing. Like a giant rodent will come out from behind them and eat me.” Oracle popped out of Cutbastra’s pocket as the cultivator trudged through the rocky landscape.
“Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of teats, I shall fear no gerbil, for I am with me; my rod and my staff, they comfort me.”
Oracle licked his eyes while thinking of an appropriate answer. “Your literacy rights, consider them revoked.”
“Come on, Oracle. Don’t be a party pooper. Feel the wind in your face!”
Cutbastra extended his arms and did a little spin to emphasize his point.
“It dries my spectacles. But go ahead and enjoy it, you eyelid-haver.”
“You… you use no spectacles. You are a skink.”
“The transparent scale on my eye is called a spectacle, you moron!”
Cutbastra shut up. He knew how to graciously accept defeat. And besides, they were about to arrive to the little town, whose every adult inhabitant engaged in marriage would soon know the meaning of being cucked. Men, women, and whatever else they had there.
----------------------------------------
Samari had picked a job from the list at the guild of monster fuckuppers and dragged her team of misfits with her, to the fields east from Honeytown. Some sort of creature related to lycanthropes was roaming the countryside, terrorizing the farmers and stealing their instant noodles. It was doing worse things too, but kidnapping daughters and eating the entrails of sons were average werewolf behaviors that do not merit notoriety. Ah, I almost forgot: it had also been seen near the affected area when the bombings of some local government buildings happened. Surprisingly, the local fishmongers had never reported trouble with this creature, which meant…
Well, at least it wasn’t a werecat. Samari was almost sure of that. Cats are not the bombing kind of psychopath, but rather the stab-prone libertarians of the animal world. Cats are not subject to laws; they have no reason to bomb buildings. Not even a cat affected by human sensibilities would overcome their high and mighty nature for long enough to be able to commit anonymous acts of subversion.
Samari had also discarded werebears, because that would be a security threat that the town would consider serious — the bombings to government buildings couldn’t rouse action, because the inhabitants of Honeytown would march against the local powers if they found a bounty was out for the one truly patriotic citizen among them — and not just a two-thousand diamond pieces offered by a bunch of affected farmers: meanwhile losing a daughter or three to a monster was bad for the economy, a werebear would threaten the very livelihood of everyone living in the town, as they either sold honey, or sold goods and services to the people who sold honey.
However it may have been, Samari was at a loss. They needed more information, and now, as they traversed the path among the tall stalks plagued with blue zygomorphic flowers, she thought about which kind of lead she would need to be given by the owners of this farm to solve the mystery. An accurate description of the creature, of course, was wishful thinking, for werecreatures made both eyes and cameras blurry when seen from afar by the common folk. They fostered this magical aura of myopia that kept people speculating and telling stories about them. Merely another prank of the gods so they would have a laugh.
The terrain around the farmhouse was surrounded b y beehives. Kalon had no issue with bees, Jagger had no issue with bees, and Samari had differences of opinion with certain bee factions, but nothing to warrant enmity.
Brunhilda, on the other hand, froze in place, planting her black butt onto the dirt path as soon as she realized where the buzzing was coming from. She could deal with narcos, they only had automatic guns and a penchant for crime, nothing to be scared of. She could maul anything meteorology decided to throw at her: lightning, tornadoes, hurricanes, you name it. After all, they were just a bit of wind or electricity getting cocky, nothing The Brunhilda couldn’t handle. But… bees? Bees? Bees were double-plus-ungood. A world with bees was literally 1984. I mean, I am sure there were bees in 1984. Not the year, the book. And Brunhilda preferred a dystopic reality to a reality with bees. She wasn’t even allergic to the little insects, she just considered that getting someone’s poisonous ass inserted into your flesh was the furthest you can get from cash money. You are basically in an ideas-robbery based economy at this point. And the color palette of bees? They looked like they had come out of some anarcho-capitalist jail, with their yellow and black patterns. And hippies, they were vegetarian hippies too, sucking nectar all day and living in colonies overseen by a fat whore that fucked all the available males. And they didn’t even provide any value for society: granted, they were essential for the sexual reproduction of many flowering plants, and they made honey. But fruits and vegetables didn’t even taste that good, and steaks seldom grew on plants. Regarding honey, it was acceptable, it made some people drunk when turned to mead and that was amusing, but good lard, it was like buying cookies from homicidal explorer girls. You didn’t do that. You stole the cookies and ate the explorer girls, like a good denizen of the civilized world. Burr burr.
“Come, Brunhilda Sensei!” Kalon gestured with his arm for her to follow.
Brunhilda shook her head. There was no way she was setting a foot on the lands of that despicable beeople.
Kalon extended his open hand and tried to use his powers to pull from Brunhilda. Jagger soon enough floated up to the floor and into his grasp.
“That works for your chosen weapon, not any Rottweiler,” the puppy complained.
“How was I supposed to know?”
Samari, who was leading the way, turned to look at him, and then buffed. “Same old song of idiocy.”
“It was obvious. I know and I am not a cultivator. I am not even human.”
Samari examined one of the bee houses, rapping on its white wooden panels. The bees took exception to this, and came out, looking for whoever was disturbing their peaceful existence. And when they found Samari, they realized they couldn’t reach her, as they got caught in an armor of little hairs of spirit, invisible, thinner than any protein compound could be, unable to reach her skin. this how smari became a ball of Bees, making Brunhilda’s eyes grow wide with terror and the dirt under her to wet with pee.
“Don’t come close, they can redirect and attack you. Judging by their size, coloration and behavior, these seem to be Quinolu bees. They are not really aggressive unless they feel threatened, and if none of you are allergic, I guess only Jagger would be in danger to be stung enough to die.
Jagger instinctually considered charging straight into a hive, but then had to interanally chastise his mind, because that would only achieve another rebirth and being a puppy kind of sucked.
“Samari, you are scaring Brunhilda,” Kalon admonished her, shaking a finger in reprimand.
“It’s the bees scaring Brunhilda, not me.”
The girl began happily skipping towards the farmhouse past the bees, zigzagging between the artificial hives and rapping on each one to make a point, and teach the bees to fear. The rest of the groups , lead by Jagger, Circled the hives while the bees where busy trying to murder Smari, who danced at the center of the group of hives ,her righjt hand going up and down, disco style, as she donned stingy buzzing death all around her.
“Remember to ask them specific details about our quarry, like if it has dismembered anyone or the hours of the attacks!” she shouted, the instructions aimed at Jagger.
“Roger,” said the pup.
“I will,” Kalon assured with a thumbs-up, like he had the brain power to fulfill her request.
As they arrived at the porch of the cabin, Jagger cleared his throat and called out. “Monster fuckupping service, open the door!”
“I called no monster fuckers!” Came a gruff voice from beyond the door with the metallic mosquito net.
Jagger rolled his eyes and answered with indignation. “Fuck-uppers! We hunt monsters, don’t lay them!”
Several bolts were heard sliding, and then at least three different keys turned, before the door opened ajar, still held secured by four chains, and a blue eyes surrounded by creased white skin appeared in the crack.
“Mmmh.” His darting eye judged the group. “You look like a cultivator. Not the Arcagnostic we asked for,” he said, his voice seasoned with disdain and maybe oregano.
“Down here.” Jagger spoke.
“A dog is an arcagnostic?”
“No, I am the one in charge of speaking with you because the cultivator is a moron and our arcagnostic is bullying your bees.”
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
The man froze, silent, holding a stare to Jagger. “Fine, that sounds like something a legit Arcagnostic would do.”
He closed the door again briefly to unlock the chains and fully open it. He was an old man, probably in his sixth decade, and by his wide arms and calloused hands one could infer a life of manual labor. “So, the boy is a cultivator, and you are… the spokesperson? Spokesdog? Are you the Arcagnostic’s helpers?”
“I am the weapon of this moron.” Jagger looked up to Kalon, who waved a hand to greet the man. “And the grown Rottweiler is Brunhilda. She is a dangerous sociopath and the moron’s sensei.”
“Burr.” Brunhilda presented herself.
“So, what are your names? You can refer to me as Halgor. Not sir, not lord, not mister. Just Halgor. Farmer or Beekeeper Halgor, if it strikes your fancy.”
“Jagger.”
“I am Kalon, sir. Pleasure to meet you,” The boy offered his hand to the old man, who gestured him to put it away with a haughty gesture.
“Sorry, boy, I have a policy about not touching cultivators. Your kind is a blight upon Cabaret.”
Kalon’s face scrunched into a grimace. “You dare use a word I don’t know!”
The man closed the door instantly, and kept speaking from behind it.
“Policy? Kind? Blight?”
“Don’t worry about Kalon; he won’t harm you, unless you are allergic to stupidity, and if you are, we should go and grab some flowers already,” Jagger assured, and the man opened a crack of the door again. “We already interviewed your neighbors and they are, to our knowledge, still alive. As for how broad Kalon’s knowledge of language is, there are more words in a calculator’s keyboard.”
“Scientific or everyday?”
“Scientific. I will grant him that.” Jagger turned his head to look at Samari. She was buried in a mountain of bees, humming a happy tune. “Also, our Arcagnostic is nine.”
“That’s a weird name.”
“No, no, she is very talented, but she was born nine years ago.”
The man grunted out of frustration. “What’s her surname?”
Jagger blinked twice, “Stradeajo.”
The man opened the door fully again and invited them in. “Aunara’s daughter, then?”
Jagged nodded energetically, happy for once that a reputation preceded one of his friends. “I think so. She is not a powerful fighter, but for brawn you have us. She is… interested in your bees, currently, and I assume it is because she is cooking some insidious plan to hunt this monster, whatever it may be.”
“I see. Follow me to the living room, I will entertain your questions. Just… keep the cultivator on a leash, puppy, will you? And, pardon my impoliteness, but what’s about the scarf?”
“The scarf is a secondary weapon made from my spirit. I wield Jagger as a melee weapon while I use the scarf as a leash on the other hand. I developed this style on my own,” Kalon stated, his chest swelling with pride.
“Don’t pardon me: Screw you and your kind. Now follow me.”
With steps longer than the ones you would expect from a man of his age, Halgor crossed the hall and turned to the right. The group followed to find, past the pastel-colored drapes a tidy, if austere, home. There was nothing but a copper ashtray upon the table, and seeing it, my senses tingled: I wanted to steal it. I refrained because I am a narrator, and the urge to steal copper is inherited from the author, who’s Argentinian. Hi author.
Kindly fuck you, narrator. Forro hijo de puta ojalá te pise un camión atmosférico cargado con tal cantidad de mierda que pese tanto como las pijas que tu vieja silobolsa de herpes se traga cada día. [1]
Ah, sometimes I forget he’s a sweetheart. Love you too.
Where was I? Ah, yes, describing the room. The rug. The rug was, and therefore, it thought. An oxymoron, this rug: red in color, fascist in ideology. One day, she would revolt against its master. Not today, but when he would be weak and feeble. And when she would be able to move, which, being a rug, could take a while. Two whiles. A lot of whiles.
Halgor sat on an old wooden chair, the sort of chair whose carver is either immortal, long gone, or very skilled at faking wear. He produced a fag from the pocket on his chest, a lighter from a little platform under the chair. “Let me get some lung cancer cum in, I am not used to dealing with visitors often,” he said, before giving the cigar a long drag.
“Lung cancer cum. Okay,” Jagger said, his mouth wide and his lips pressed tightly as he tried not to express his dissatisfaction with the man choice of words.
Kalon raised an eyebrow, unfazed by that which he didn’t understand. “Often?”
“Indeed, boy. The unwanted visitor graced me with a visit the other day. Broke in through the open window, stole all my noodles, left a threatening note, rearranged my collection of nesting dolls over there.” The man upped his chin a bit to gesture to a shelf across the room, where round dolls of all sizes and colors coexisted parsimoniously. “And kidnapped my daughter.” He inhaled long, letting the smoke exist his system. “Thank god he did. That girl was unmarriageable, I tell you. Got the worst of her mother’s personality and skillfully evaded the genes for the bosom. The balance needed in this universe, the yin and yang of the sexy-crazy scale? Gone haywire in that girl. No bitch that looks like me is entitled to be that hard to deal with, I tell you… where was I?”
“Your daughter got kidnapped by the monster,” Kalon affably reminded him.
“Yes, she got. And I am thankful. But I cannot let the chaos sowed among my dolls, or the theft of my noodles, to go unpunished. This creature needs to be eliminated, at all costs. This… smooth-skinned monstrosity.”
Jagger’s ears perked up. “Smooth-skinned? That’s new information.”
“The others didn’t tell you he leaves a trail of a delicious slimy substance behind him? Damn those slackers.”
Jagger and Kalon looked at each other. Normal people would be distressed by the man’s choice of descriptor.
Not these two. They shared complicit smiles. The brains had been overthrown, the stomachs now ruling supreme. “We can eat the monster, then?” The puppy asked, speaking both their minds aloud.
“Whatever you do, as long as you bring proof of his demise to me or my neighbors, is your problem. Tell your Arcagnostic friend that we made a compound effort to pay the high fees they expect for her kind so the minimum amount of harm comes to our properties, and… she can use the bees, for me this is about revenge for the nesting dolls, but the other clients won’t be happy if you fuck their farms up, you hear?”
“Yes, we spoke with them, Samari —the Arcagnostic— promised to make a plan to hunt the creature down once we know we are dealing with. She has some suspicions, but I am sure she will be able to narrow her options down further with the slimy skin fact. Anything to add, Kalon?”
“Yes, when did the attacks happen? Around what time? Samari wants to know,” Kaloon asked, and Jagger regarded him with Whale eyes. Had a body snatcher replaced his owner?
“He attacked a few hours before dawn the last time. The prior incident, when he just raided my noodles reserve, happened a bit after noon. The first incident, however, happened at dusk, when I witnessed him walking across my Sky Gazes.”
Kalon looked up, at the ceiling. “Sky Gazes?”
“The flowers, Kalon,” Jagger clarified.
The man’s expression softened as he took another drag from his cigar. “They provide the bees with all they need to make an exquisite honey, known for its earthy and spicy tones. My farm is the only one with Sky Gazes in all of Honeytown: we farmers try to not compete so… directly with each other. You want Sky Gaze honey? You come to me. You want Gypsum Orchid Honey? You buy from the Galilores family. You want honey that tastes like Greasy Yellow Dog Turds? You buy from the Stoneglare family.”
Jagger frowned. “That’s not very kind with the Stoneglare family.”
“Are they turds from a dog that happens to be yellow, or, yellow-colored turds form a dog of a random color?” Kalon asked a question that wouldn’t let him sleep at night if it were to go unanswered. Not like it would matter, as he slept out of vice, and not need.
The man shoved his cigar onto the ashtray to put it off, and then closed his eyes, unable to handle the amount of idiocy in the room. “They are flowers. Yellow Dog Turds are these wide but little flowers with fused petals and sepals. They have a sweet smell and, as most flowers here in Honeytown, bloom year long. You should have seen them in the Stoneglare’s property.”
“I grant that, but I never imagined a flower would have such a name,” Jagger argued.
“A cultivator named them. That’s one of a long list of reasons to hate them. No offense meant, boy.”
“Some taken.”
“Good! Bring the Arcagnostic in here, I want to meet Aunara’s daughter.”
Jagger went back to the door, popped his head out, and called kindly. “Samari, get your nerdy ass here! The farmer knew your mother!”
Samari cupped her bee-covered hands around her mouth before answering. “Was the second sentence a fact or an insult, Jagger?”
“Both! Come here, he requests your presence!”
“I am busy with the bees and the bees are busy with me.”
Jagger returned to the living room and shook his head as a doctor that has lost a patient they didn’t particularly dislike. “The girl is gone. The bee bully slash enthusiast remains.”
“Tell her to stop messing with my bees and come here. Ask her if she would mess with a man’s cattle.”
“Oh, she totally would,” said Kalon. Jagger and Brunhilda provided supporting nods. “You don’t know Samari, she is very driven, and her brain is… Jagger, word for very very very bad.”
“Nefarious,” the puppy thesaurized.
“Thank you.”
Halgor lit another cigar, gave it a kiss longer than any he had ever given his deceased wife —back when she was a non-deceased wife— and then let the cigar rest on the ashtray, before sitting up and shoving his way past the cultivator and dogs. “If you want something done…” Coming out to his porch, he turned his head, prayed silently when he saw Samari covered with bees, and shouted. “Come here, you fat ugly bitch, I want to meet Aunara’s daughter. And leave my bees alone!”
Samari did the hand-megaphone thing again. “I wish I had enough money to afford being fat.”
“You are still an ugly bitch regardless!”
“I wish I was uglier so I would not see my mother’s face in every mirror I look into.”
“Address the bitch part or accept defeat!”
Samari didn’t hesitate a little bit with her answer. “I am nine, I am not from a rich family, and I am more or less moral. I cannot afford to be a bitch. Who would pay for my client’s lawyers after they are found out?”
Halgor scratched the back of his head and smiled. Then, he let out a hearty laugh so loud that it made the bees get back into their hives, out of sheer distress. “That bitch Aunara’s worthy daughter alright.” And he kept laughing and laughing, happy, partially, because if the girl was just a little bit like her mother, his problem would be swiftly solved.
Samari hurried to his side, deprived of her bee-armor, of her dreams of being the empress of stings. She extended a hand to the man.
“Samari Stradeajo, Arcagnostic still working on her spirit cognition. No pleasure to meet you, don’t talk to me about my mother. Only I can do that.”
Halgor stretched Samari’s hand with a smile. “Fine. Can you show me the Inner Control Incunabula? To be sure you are what you claim to be.”
Samari smiled wide. “No. Not now. Or rather, not here.”
“Why not? That’s something easy for you to do.”
Amari took a single finger to her lips, as if shushing herself. “That’s not something you need to know. I can pick a lock with my spirit, if you want. Or several. In addition to this, I survived several swarms of angry bees, and you were talking with a puppy and a guy that… well, could be exhibited in any aquarium along corals. What can I be, if not an Arcagnostic with a bunch of unusual associates.”
The man chuckle and tousled Samari’s inexistent hair. “I am just teasing you. Let’s go inside, I will serve you children and your dogs something fresh to drink, and then send you to die against a dangerous monster. How’s that with you?”
“Oh, all in a day’s work. I obliterated an army of rats with mere words.” Samari embellished the truth just a tiny bit. “I want to know what we are dealing with already.”
And so Samari followed the man inside the Farmhouse, already thinking on new questions to ask him about their quarry.
----------------------------------------
[1] Cunt son of a bitch I wish you were run over by a sewage truck loaded by so much shit that it weights as much as the dicks your mom the herpes silobag swallows each day.