VII

If Rick were a toy, he’d believe it. He is handled roughly as the air changes from smog-clogged but with a breeze to stuffy smog-clogged with the stench of tar pitch. He is barely hanging on to the outskirts of his physicality as they attempt to secure his arms. And he has no plans of trying to take over control, not yet anyway. While his body rages, he can stay aware enough to listen in on what’s being said around him. For a little while, anyway, until the effort gets too much.

“Why tie him up? Truly a useless endeavor at this stage,” says a squeaky female voice with much annoyance.

“The mistress’s darts contain a neurotoxin. They wear off and we don’t want this giant fool rampaging on deck and getting us in trouble with the Boss, do we?” These words are said by a gruff voice with a bit of an oink to it. Before this, it was just a lot of swearing and huffing and puffing as they put him where they wanted him to be. Now he gets a bit of personality and a sense of intelligence. They both sound stupid and more interested in avoiding trouble than doing a good job.

Gruff Oinky has stubby fingers covered in sharp thick callus-tipped hoof-like nails. Every twist he makes with the rope, his hooves scratch at the underside of Rick’s forearms. As he completes the knot, his-self is quite happy not to be feeling pain in this state.

His-self allows his physicality to test the rope. He flexes and the rope stretches easily and he knows he can break it like a piece of string; if he wants to. So he does, easily. Oops.

“Crap, he just broke the rope.”

A foot nudges him, “You awake, fat man?”

He pretends to be out, hoping to find out some info. The one thing he knows for sure is you don’t tie someone up if you plan on murdering them immediately.

“The Mistress shot you with a neurotoxin. Don’t try to do too much, or you could really fuck up your nervous system. Especially as old as you are.”

“Where’d an ugly, stupid asshole like you get a neurotoxin?” is what he wanted to say, but nothing came out right except neurotoxin.

The slap was so loud that his-self flinches and he barely manages to contain his physical rage.

“How dare you insult me. I have more smarts in my shit than you could have even after feasting on sweetbreads for a week.”

Instead of crying out or answering, Rick goes quiet.

“What’s a sweetbread? Gruff Oinky asks.

Stupid Lady laughs soft and menacing and says, “But of course we have neurotoxin. We have everything. We rob the greatest city on Earth every night at our leisure. Neurotoxins? They are sold like sand in Pit City. Most everything is. Including brains and air-ships. With limitless cash, we pirates be,” her screaming laughter is filled with ridicule.

Before Gruff Oinky or Rick can fully comprehend all of Stupid Lady’s words, he feels a soft tiny hand grab the meat of his shoulder in a strong pinch. If he were physically able, he would have said ouch, especially as a cold syringe is plunged into the fold of skin.

Instantly a swirling blackness batters at him in addition to a strong shift of mood. His reality instantly becomes a game of is he dreaming. Is he dreaming that his skin is melting from his body revealing overlapping steel scales being riveted down into one another? They sizzle, exposed to the hot steamy air as they are. His nervous system pulses and throbs with endless agony, but to the beat of a song he thinks he knows. My Sharona? His teeth complain in squeaks and pain under the strain of a clenched jaw. Is his tongue a hideous slug too big for his mouth? It tastes like pus and rotten food and squirms like it is angry and wants to murder his teeth. Are his hands and feet always going to be hideous spasming claws? How are the bones of his arms and legs being twisted and pulled like taffy and not snapping into a million pieces? So many questions and he feels them all in their grotesque painful glory!

Discomfort is not the opposite of comfort, however, but the absence. So he allows himself some comfort and allows his physicality permission to pass out fully.

The time between that moment and the one he reawakes in is brief, too brief, and it almost feels like no time has passed at all. But when awareness returns, he is back in his physical form. His eyes are open and he thinks he is dreaming but the pain is still so alive that for a moment he thinks he is a part of it and not that it is a part of him.

He wants the blackness to take him again.

Especially when he sees three of the smallest people he has ever seen in his life cleaning viscera off scalpels and other implements of surgery. Two tiny human males who look identical to one another, except one wears a red jumpsuit and the other wears green. He does not recognize either. Both have bloody aprons covering their fronts. They have bandoliers of wrenches and screwdrivers that cross over their chests and around their waists. A hammer is tucked into a holster on Mr. Green’s hip. The hammer looks like it has skin and hair flattened into the head. It looks mushy and on the verge of dripping free. The wicked-looking chisel on the Mr. Red’s left hip still shines red from his efforts.

The third person is the blue-eyed female version of the curly-headed thing that had its head popped up from the coverall. She glowers darkly, and though she doesn’t look older than the males, something about her demeanor suggests she has many more years of experience built into her meanness. Her nose is a bit less bulbous from the coverall twins, but her eyes are just as large. She wears a stained doctor's coat, the pockets of which are filled to bursting with various bits of tubing, wires and scraps of metal. Her pink hair is pulled into two ponytails that bounce on the top of her head as she stirs a bubbling concoction with the end of an ash wood rod long enough for her to use as a staff. It takes a minute to realize that there is no fire under the cauldron yet it boils angrily.

Then extreme and utter agony comes from his left arm. He looks and knows immediately that he should not be having any pain whatsoever. Especially from his left arm, because it appears he no longer has a left arm. Once Rick completes this realization, he loses all sanity. He was doing good keeping it together up till now. Maybe it was all the acid in 70s that prepared him for there being a giant city beneath Manhattan run by little criminals. He was even okay coming into Workforce and seemingly set in the path of a giant lizard with no warning. But all he wanted was to trade a bit of work for some chicken and a sixpack and it cost him his arm. The scream he utters is primal and loud and reaches beyond the smog-cloud hiding the rock ceiling separating all this crazy from the real world far above.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

It echos off and rebounds over and over again for a long time before disappearing.

“What the fuck?” Stupid Lady turns and notices him awake, “Fucking morons! He’s awake! Knock his ass out again, I’m not ready for the fucking questions,” she screams in a voice that could belong to Sunset Park Cafeteria worker. Memories of the middle school assault as Gruff Oinky seems to be pointing something at him. Oh, it’s a stun-gun he decides just as his mind again floats away into nothing.

This time he is only away for what feels like a single moment. He decides he has to still be dreaming until he tries to move. The agony ripping through every muscle and joint makes him moan loudly and shed a few tears involuntarily.

Stupid Lady runs over, “Don’t move. You could undo everything. You aren’t completely healed.” Her voice is squeaky and high-pitched and hurts Rick’s ears.

He means to ask, what happened, followed by, who are you, but both questions come out as one and Rick manages, “What are you?”

“Rude! Don’t sit up. I’ve got a medicine that’ll ease the swelling and make it hurt a lot less. You need to heal and this is going to hurt, but only at first.

He hopes she’s right as she moves back over to the magically bubbling liquid and removes a glass syringe that looks well-used and could have fallen out of the 1920’s. She thrusts it down in the brown sludgy liquid and pulls back the stopper. Steams fills the syringe as the sludge follows. After squirting a bit out with an audible squelching noise, she puts a giant needle on the end. She nods to someone behind him and two sets of hands press down on him and with one quick movement, quicker than he can defend against, the needle is plunged into his right thigh. He feels the temperature of the boiling liquid first, then its thick clumpiness as it is pushed into his quadricep. He would scream because he really really wants to, but instead, he decides not to give her the satisfaction and takes it.

Once the stopper has completed its journey she pockets the syringe in a pocket of her dirty doctor coat and looks at him impressed.

“Now you can sit up.”

He does so and it is easy and pain free. In fact, all pain is gone except for the hot lava medicine but even that quickly fades as the concoction joins his body's chemistry. He feels so good, he is able to test his constraints and finds himself no longer tied. Instead, a single steel cuff circles his left ankle, attached to a chain secured in place with four bolts to side of the airboat. Before he can explore this situation further, a glint of shiny metal catches his attention. The glint is from the corrugated steel covering his left shoulder. He tries to lift the arm. It goes CHUG, as if many little pneumatic hoses just filled with fluid. His arm shoots up in response. He turns his palm, CHUG, and instead of the appendage that has sat at the end of his arm his entire life, instead is something that looks like it belongs in a Tim Burton movie. It is built out of bits of odds and ends. Strips of metal. Coiled and woven copper wire. He taps on it with his right still-human hand. The arm doesn’t sound hollow but is so rusty in places there are small holes through which he can see wires and mechanics. He makes a fist, CHUG, and his fingers join together into a ball, ready for the next order.

Rick nods at the strength flowing there, strength similar to what he had before but different in that he could ramp up that strength as much as he needs. He decides to test it and puts the new hand on the chain and pulls. The movement hurts a bit but he manages and the wood he is bolted to begins to creak and bulge.

Both of the male gnomes approach, one pulls out a blowgun and moves it to his mouth.

“No, no, mister wait. If you break the ship, the arm I built you won’t do shit when you fall from the sky. Believe me, the fauna down there can’t wait to munch on tenderized human. They don’t get it very often and have to be sick of flattened gnomes.”

He stills, thinking gnomes? And about falling from a great height and screaming for almost a minute before dying. He nods and lets the chain go.

“I have more medicine for you. It should help with the pain and, well, everything else also. She taps the syringe in her pocket. Not pleasant but if don’t let me treat your attachment, you’ll just die and all my work will be wasted. So chill the fuck out,” Stupid Lady says calmly, as if she has the situation well in hand.

Rick does chill out. Surprised that he believes her.

Looking around the hold of the galley, he sees twenty or so aeronauts working on dismembering the carcass of the giant lizard he battled. It has already been skinned and disemboweled, and its meat was being stripped from bone.

“We will split the profit with you of anything off it we sell. Dragon parts have much value. We have much thanks to offer the fools who hired you.”

“What was that thing?”

“A green lizard. A nasty beast. They usually don’t get this far up without being stopped by the lack of carbon dioxide. Nasty things don’t like air. They are the problem of the dwarves further below.”

“Dwarves?”

“Lazy good for nothing but mining ore and fucking each other. Stupid things don’t even know female from male, it’s just dig, orgy, dig, orgy. And the baby dwarves just keeping falling out dwarven wombs. Gnomes don’t let them into Pit City. Ugly things belong below the oxygen line."

It explains the mystery of why the tracks are covered in shit.

“Shit! I’ve been shoveling shit!”

“Dragon shit.”

“Is that supposed to make it better?”

The two males look at each other and shrug their shoulders.

“We have more important problems to deal with. Mainly that you can never leave.”

“What do you mean, I can’t leave.”

“You are a slave now. A member of the Mistress’s crew. You see that arm? It’s a gift and a curse. It puts dragon blood into veins. Once you taste dragon blood," she holds up the filthy syringe, "you need it, bad. Just trust me, if you go without a shot of this stuff you’ll beg me to fix you up. But don’t worry, I got you covered,” she concludes, waving her arm at the steaming cauldron.

“Most likely you will never die, though,” Mr. Green offers.

Rick smiles, “really?”

“No. Stop telling tales, Cogsdale," Mr. Red replies giving the gnome in the green coveralls a scathing look.

Stupid Lady turns back to Rick, “You will probably die someday. Maybe tomorrow? It all depends if our mistress still has need for you, or not. And right now, she needs you.”

"Why? What need could you have with an old man who sleeps on the street? I don't even have a driver's license."

“Your son is meddling in our affairs and we need you to stop him.”

“My what?”

“Your son, you know- the Emperor of the Under World, he is trying to bring dwarves, gnomes, hybrids, and humans together. And that can't happen, our mistress likes things the way they are. Chaotic. Makes for an easier shopping experience if you know what I mean."