The camel chewed on his straw with a solemnity unknown to the straight-backed beings. Behind him, fresh droppings. In front of him, a shit of another nature, dressed in… yup, liquid puppies. The camel didn’t consider this an affront, despite the boy having intruded his habitat. He considered that, for all intents and purposes, cultivators were like lava. They burnt things nearby and followed a determined path. The camel had never worried about lava —the zoo hadn’t been built near a volcano: the founders suffered of a case of veiled racism against magma chambers— and he wasn’t going to worry about cultivators, either.
Kalon approached furtively: he hid behind his cape of liquid puppies, a single eye peering through a transitive hole in it. If he had been holding a spear, the image would have reminisced one of a hoplite, hiding behind his big shield while he faced a fierce enemy. Except the fierce enemy was a dromedary who had no interest in initiating violence. To Kalon, on the other hand, any animal with a single boob on his back couldn’t mean but trouble.
“Return that breast to whence it came, demon!”
The camel grunted long, loud and clear. In other words: it went asterisk STOCK CAMEL SOUNDS asterisk >:@.
Talking about stocks, the innocent bystanders one consisted on a little girl, her bigger father, a little mom, her little and frail father —this is what happens when manlets like your dad breed, reader. I have insulted your mom enough already. I need to equalize. — and a Bernese Mountain Dog that lived in the zoo because nobody had the emotional strength to evict her.
The dromedary calculated how much it would set him back regarding water reserves, and spat in an arc, the drool going over Kalon’s cape and splatting squarely onto his face. He glanced sideways, to the ponchoed guanaco across the dirt path that separated both of their habitats, and who hung around the fences to observe his hunch-backed cousin.
Kalon spat, tried to take the drool off of his face by scooping it to the sides with his hands, but a dromedary’s saliva is like the idealized central bank reserves: thick and hard to get rid of.
He created a handkerchief out of liquid puppies and used its soft fur to rinse the foul substance away.
“Guh” he articulated with utmost eloquence. “This horse is weird.”
“It’s a camel, retard!” shouted the little girl.
Her father gave her a corrective of the slapping kind. “No, no, dear, we don’t use that word.” The man cleared his throat. “You monastery-brained oligophrenic! Your brain cells isolate themselves to meditate for a thousand years instead of working like honest people and making you think! Which, if you did, would make it clear to you that you are dealing with a camel!”
The little girl hugged her father legs “Daddy, you are awesome.”
“Don’t mention it, Cheap Condom Betrayal.”
Kalon felt slightly slighted. He jumped the fence out of the camel’s enclosure accepting defeat. A good cultivator knew when to give up in his attempts of scratching a horse’s neck. And it wasn’t even a horse! The nerve of reality!
The god of tribulations watched from his hospital bed. As long as Kalon existed and created problems for himself, he would live. Thrive, even. But he couldn’t shake off the feeling of the stake from his mind. The stake would forever haunt him and his pierced colon. As intended by yours truly, goes without saying.
The boy, drool-faced, sat on the middle of the path and lowered his head. Animals were not his thing. Except Rottweilers. Rottweilers were pretty much his thing, and only his. Sure, some people bred them, but he was the sole walker of the Road. Maybe, one day, he would take on a pupil. The non-eye variety. A pupil with eyes, most likely, but not a literal hole in the eye.
He wondered what his friends could be up to in the Archives until one of the zoo employees, a young woman with her hair tied under a green cap, began poking him with a cane. “Young man, I need you to move out of the way, young man.”
“Guh, fine. Where can I learn about…guh, what was that Samari said, Avatar?”
“Evolution,” the avatar reminded him.
“Evolution.”
“The guy in charge of the aquarium loves to chitchat with visitors about all things biology. His monologues are unavoidable once you catch his attention, though, so be warned. Now, get out of the way, please.”
Kalon obliged, looked onto his map for cultivators, failed to understand it, and, after orienting himself by looking at the gigantic signpost with symbols that appeared on the map, he followed the arrow with a caricature of a fish drawn on it.
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Samari and Jagger had stablished a mutually beneficial relationship while they waited: Jagger’s chest worked as a pillow for the girl, and Samari’s head as a weighted blanket for the pup.
Finally, they got called and hastily rushed to their feet, leisurely walking towards Wing Eight, as instructed. Two statues of angry men holding considerably less angry spears guarded the entrance. They weren’t alive, but that didn’t make their carefully detailed appearance —down to the creases of their skin and the veins on their arms— less imposing.
A construct of plates of gold rolled in like waves from the long catwalk that hung bravely over darkness. The shapeless mound, once fully gathered, rose in front of Samari, each piece assembling, showing the little, golden ferrets connecting them like little wriggling chains. They crawled over each other, climbed up to the top as they formed four chunky feline legs, followed by a well-rounded feline body that ended in a stumpy tail for the posterior end —thank gods the tail was on that end — and a long neck ended in a rounded head on the , that’s right, anterior end. It had large, round eyes made from silver plates, and it seemed dead inside. As much as me when I realized that this was, indeed, a fucking gwords.
The cat, as tall as a chair, looked over his shoulder and snorted. “Did you have to come on Monday?” It asked, clearly annoyed with the visitors.
“Excuse me?” said Jagger.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
“Depending on the day of the week I represent a different breed of cat. On Mondays, I become a Manx. And I hate being a Manx! I like having a tail, I like being a slender or imposing figure, not this pathetic excuse of a feline. Wish it was Sunday, because that’s Maine Coon day. Maine I don’t give a fuck day. It’s just another Manx Monday.”[1]
“I just want to access a vault,” Samari protested, jaded by bureaucracy and whatever this cat’s problem with a short tail was.
“And I want to be a Maine Coon, sweetie.” A pawse. “Aren’t you a little young to have a vault.” The cat construct checked the data stored in his spirit lattice. “Aunara Stradeajo? There’s no way you are my maker. You do hold a certain resemblance, however… were you washed in hot water? Did you shrink?”
“Wait, are you Tabbyas? Mom told me a lot about you!” Samari perked up, like a child seeing their little sibling for the first time. One of those that aren’t weirded out by the rosy mass that cries and shits for a living.
“Mom? Oh, you must be Samari. Your registration may have been fumbled due to the shared surname. If you allot me a wee while, I can correct the data and we can open a vault for you.”
Samari shook her head. “I am here for my mother’s vault.”
The g… golden… the AURIC FELINE said, “Did she grant you special permissions?”
Samari shook her head again. “Take me to the Vault, Tabbyas, and I will open it. Mom won’t care: she is dead.”
“Oh dear. Not our maker.” The cat looked downtrodden, but soon enough straightened his back and bolstered a professional air, “In such case I need to check if she left a petition to delete her vault after her departure.”
“You won’t, Tabbyas. I will enter my mother’s vault. And I am tired of explaining it to people. I can, be assured I can.”
“You could only enter Aunara’s vault by being her nigh-perfect clone, child.” The cat regarded her with wide open eyes then, while Samari’s face reflected her disgust at such a statement. “Oh dear. She went ahead with her deranged plan, didn’t she? That’s why you look so much like your mother.”
Jagger nuzzled Samari’s leg to call her attention. “You grew in a test tube?”
“What? No! I grew in Aunara’s womb. And I… owe you an explanation. Right, Jagger?”
Jagger blinked and began licking his paw with disinterest. “Beats me. You never told me you were not a clone so I see no lack of honesty on your part. Irrelevant facts and all of that.”
“Miau, you talk!” The cat finally realized. “I mean, ehem, it’s not impossible for a dog to talk, but it’s rather unusual.”
“Lead me to my mother’s vault.”
“Do you fear heights? We need to cross the bridge to reach the vaults and the fall is… shorter than eternity, I would bet.”
The cat was not exaggerating, because when they stepped past the doors, Samari stared down and the darkness below, reflection of the roof of night infinitely high above. Every minute or so a scream poured from above and a falling man passed them by, rapidly leaving them behind to continue his terminal-velocity fall into eternity. The man was followed by a bunch of trash: bottles, the opened packs of snacks, and empty boxes of cigars. And turds. Some dried off.
“That’s Ken. He fell from the bridge once. I extend him a basket with food and water each week. Sometimes I, in my infinite kindness, include tobacco. He only screams whenever someone visits, though, so ignore him. He’s an attention seeker.”
“Saveeee meeeeee,”[2] the little falling bitch insisted.
Samari clicked the floppy disk symbol of her mind. “Done.”
They followed the cat deeper into the endless bridge, watching his stubby tail point from upper left to upper right, as if he was proudly showcasing himself in front of his owner, in typical cat fashion. Despite the lampposts spread along the way, tabbyas, in his golden shine, slowly became their main light source.
“Samari, do you want to talk more about the cloning issue? How come your mother made a clone and got it inside her tummy?” Asked Jagger.
Samari looked at him like one does at a child making an inappropriate question. “well, putting it simply, she knew the exact combination of her genes the released egg would have, and overwrote the DNA of every one of my would-be-father’s spermatozoids inside her to create a perfect complement for that egg. This is, to include in it every allele of hers that had not made it into the egg’s nucleus during meiosis, and erase every trace of my would-be-father’s genetics.” Samari stopped on her tracks and sat on the middle of the bridge. She closed her eyes and lowered her head. “I am a lie. My mother through a meiotic chromosome blender. In her hubris, Aunara Stradeajo gave birth to herself. She even gave me her middle name as my first, and legally deleted it from her full one, as if she had split in two.” Samari hid a face that she didn’t felt hers in hands she felt stolen. “But this body is all I am. I am forever ‘mommy’s voucher to immortality’. The bitch is dead, and yet she steals my every step, consumes the air that’s mine to breath, hoards the images meant for the eyes of a would be daughter in her second pair of retinas.”
“Aren’t you being a bit exaggerated about this? As long as your body serves you, what does it matter if it is a bootleg of your mom’s?” Jagger tried to be supportive. In the sense your allies in war can be supportive by solving a hostage situation with carpet bombing, but supportive in the end.
“What would you know? You are a dog. Your species often picks up fights with mirrors.”
“So do human teenagers,” Tabbyas chimed in, smiling like a cat does.
In a silence only broken by the resounding drumming of their steps they continued their catwalk. Reaching a point where a little light shone high in the dark, like many had before, Tabbyas planted his golden, detailed (but lacking in detail) butt onto the metallic flooring of the bridge. “It should be here. Show your Incunabula and the analyzing terminal should rise.”
Samari’s hand rose and she raised her spirit, making it dance on the palm of her hand, around her extended fingers, little tendrils of pale light cutting through the artificial night. And the vault saw it. From the murky depts., coiling like a snake and aiming obliquely for the bridge, came the terminal. This silvery spring, its surface ornamented like a snake’s scales, stopped in front of Samari, and it held a little jade bowl on it’s extreme, , which had a curved slot for housing a lid on its side.
“Now provide a DNA sample to the machine. It must be fresh for it to work.”
Samari hawked up the foules of plhegms and released it into the world. The yellowish-green mass threatened to get a life of their own.
Small letters of light appeared over the argentine artifact. They spelled a single, or perhaps married, word. “Seriously?”
Samariprepared to hawk up another one, and the machine closed the lid faster than the eye could see. “Fine!”
The spring retreated hastily, taking the sample with it. This little incarnation of Aunara was One of Those Arcagnostics. Those that behaved like children for reasons unknown to the recognition system of the Archives.
Then, the world around them dinged, making their hears buzz. And Jagger look around frantically. “What was that?”
“Samari got access,” Tabbyas informed , flatly. “Well, do you remember which side you came from?”
Jagger turned so his snout would point at the gigantic Cultivator’s Ambrosia neon sign hanging deep in the darkness. “We follow capitalism back into civilization.”
“The Archives need to keep the lights on somehow, dog.”
One of the stars in the ceiling-sky began shuddering., trembling like the economy when it hears there will be a presidential or mid-term election. From it descended, in spiral, boards of light that emplaced themselves forming a stair. Two shining worms of marble descended by the board sides, forming the handrails.
“I thought these things had elevators,” Samari complained, more offended by the prospect of climbing the stairs than amazed by the spectacle unveiling before her.
“Your mother wanted to keep herself in shape after pregnancy.”
She shook her fist at the heavens. “You have slighted me once again, Aunara, you bitch!”
And, leaving Jagger on the bridge, she began her long climb towards her mother’s vault.
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[1] The Bangles’ banger Manic Monday had to fall eventually. A minute of silence for our brave soldier.
[2] Whomever makes an Evanescence joke gets fucking shot.