“You never know when someone’s going to come up behind you silently when you least expect it and take a nice big fat juicy chunk out of your neck.”—A Perspective God

"Leeloo Dalas. Multi-Pass."—Leeloo

Follow or Die!!!

As the sun shone brightly, bright and yellow with bright hints of the morning orange, a gentle wind caressed the landscape. The grasses rustled and the birds chirped merrily.

Rays of light shot through the forests as dust motes and the occasional leaf fluttered to the ground.

It was summertime, so not many leaves fell—just the occasional leaf to litter the animal paths, and the paths of dwellers in the terrariums of the world.

 Meanwhile the incessant knocking of hammers and the rhythmic zipzip of saws could be heard echoing across the landscape.

The cabin was almost fully constructed.

By early evening, Chibo threw up the last lantern, a yellow-orange globe marked with black calligraphy. The light the lanterns gave off was soft and inviting.

Chibo would have turned the corner, to get a good look at the perspective of the cabin he had Sharra had erected, but the gods of perspective would not allow it.

They never did.

“We’re done,” Chibo said happily.

“Not yet,” Sharra said, as she continued hammering away. The interior of the cabin was almost constructed, save for the back interior wall. Because of the perspective gods, the interior wall was all she needed to erect for there to also be an outer wall.

As it stood now, the landscape, darkening in the evening shadows, could be seen through the house. She hammered away, erecting the beautiful interior woods across the wall.

Bellow a knee-high border of stone had already been put down on the back wall.

“There’s no need to worry about the interior,” Chibo said. The zombies can’t get in through the back.

The perspective gods would never allow it.

“I know,” she said. “but we need the house to be nice.”

Chibo went inside and closed the door. “I know, but let’s just survive the night first.” He erected a fire in the house. The smoke did not fill the interior, and without being asked his opinion, Sharra began hammering at the roof.

“What are you doing?” Chibo asked in horror. The flying monsters will get inside!”

“I know,” she said, glancing back at him with an incredulous smile. “Just give me a second. She used her pickaxe to mine away the interior molding, then cut through the roof completely. “This will just take a second.”

“The fire is here,” Chibo complained. “There’s no need for the house to look pretty.”

“Yes it does.”

The zombies came, making dead noises, their long lost sentience coming out in snarled as nothing more than the pleas for food—for meat.

For adventurers.

“They’re at the doors!” Chibo said.

“And there’s the flying ones outside too.”

“Then hurry—“

“It’s done.”

She had just closed the opening as the bloodshot eyeball attempted to get in, the sound it made hitting the roof tiles was that of a wooden board, thick and dense, knocking against another.

Why a wet and squishy eyeball would make such a sound when knocking up against solid objects was anyone’s guess, but Chibo had always wondered.

The perspective gods…

It was always them.

“See?” Sharra asked. “We have a chimney now.” She smiled. “Much better.”

Chibo looked at her with a flat stare as the zombies pounded against the door incessantly.

“All you care about is being safe.”

“We’re new here—we need to be—just for tonight, okay?”

She looked at him.

“Come on,” Chobo persisted as he fashioned a wooden sword at the work table he had constructed. It would do nicely in combating the zombies. It was useful for swinging in long arcs, which would allow him to defend himself from all angles—against flying monsters, but as well as flanking ones.

“All right,” she said with a nod. “I need one of those swords.”

“I’ll make you one.”

Perhaps that would distract Sharra long enough from her aesthetic crafting to not endanger them.

“Do you need the wood?”

“Yes,” Chibo said. “I used all of mine while I was....”

This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

So... hungry...

Food—meat—was all he could think of, as the world twisted and stretched out before him. But something was in his way. He pounded against it, his forehead slamming over and over and over and over.

The meat... it was inside.

He just needed to get to it.

His forehead hit the barrier again and he clawed at it, the noise of hunger and anger from his mouth wholly not his own—at least, it didn’t seem like it came from him?

Because of the perspective gods, Bob and his friends, Mack, Zack, and Sharla appeared as one, except for when one of them slammed against the barrier a little too hard and was forced back.

“It’s really ugly, still,” Sharra said. “I’m going to build a second level.”

“No!” Chibo insisted. “Are you trying to get us killed?”

“It’s fine.”

“This isn’t a game,” Chibo rebuked. “If we die, that’s it. There is no do over.”

Sharra sighed. “Can I at least dig down?”

Chibo glanced about. “I guess it couldn’t hurt. Just be careful, okay?”

“I am. Now help me until morning. This place looks like a grave, still.”

Chibo sighed. He never understood why aesthetics were so important to Sharra. She had often said a dreary existence was one of misery, though. As long as there was life, safety and food, Chibo could sympathize somewhat, but right now, at night, with the monsters pounding on the roof, with them at the doors, safety was paramount to Chibo, and he meant to keep it that way.

Luckily the perspective gods only allowed enemies to approach from so many directions, otherwise, this house would have taken Chibo and Sharra ages to construct.

He glanced down. For some reason he could see through the floor. Really, not “through,” but yet he was fully aware of what was happening under the hardwood floor Sharra had constructed previously.

It was off, how the perspective gods made one view the world. Did they see things different? Or did they experience everything just the same?

In any event, Sharra was full on working on a mud basement now. The angles were square and the space was dark.

Chino tossed some torches he had constructed out of the ingredients he got from mining trees (who “mines” trees, anyway?)and killing the jellies.

Their slimy exteriors were highly flammable.

Why they didn’t simply catch fore when hopping near their torches, was a mystery.

Another unknowable and imperturbable fact of the perspective gods.

Shara continued mining, collected the squares of mud in her bag of seemingly endless space.

Chibo jumped down into the space and started constructing elevated ramps. First they were jagged and blocky, like a set of stairs, but he smoothed them out.

“What are you doing?” Sharra asked.

Chibo looked at her. “I’m making elevated ramps for the pool.”

“It’s going to be a pool down here?” she asked incredulously as Chinbo continued laying down wood and smoothing it out.

“Yeah, why not?”

“I was thinking about sleeping quarters.”

“No, we can’t build those yet.”

“Why do you want it to be a pool?”

“I like water.”

She sighed. “Now you care what we build, even if it’s useless.”

Chibo said nothing as he finished constructing the ramps. The floor above them, the floor of the cabin, was gone. They had mined it away mostly.

He needed to jump up, so he decided to place some other materials that would allow him to jump and land atop them.

It was almost morning, but Sharra couldn’t stand the dirt and the mud above them. The pool room as Chibo had decided it would be—she shook her head—was elongated, and far larger than the cabin space.

She couldn’t stand the mud above the pool. But the zombies and other flying monsters were still out there. Morning would be here soon, but she just couldn’t wait.

They wouldn’t ever know. They would just keep bashing their heads against the door while she replaced the dirt behind them with some nice wood planks—like decking.

Yeah.

She mined them away.

“What are you doing?!” Chibo shrieked. “They’re going to get through!”

“I’m just going to replace the dirt with a little bit of wood and—“

The ground behind Bob opened up. He snarled, his caustic breath—which he couldn’t smell and never thought of anyway—wafted out of his maw.

He hopped over the hole and onto the other side, where he could walk and fall in, to consume the living and writhing meat within.

Meat!

“Ahhh!” Sharra screamed. “They’re getting inside!”

Brandishing his wooden sword, Chibo said, “I told you not to open that up!”

The other three zombies turned and poured into the hole. Chibo opened the front door to do battle with them—to flank them.

Sharra screamed again as she swung her pickaxe at the zombies. “They won’t die!”

“Your sword! Use your sword!”

One of the zombies had not jumped into the hole. It hopped back over, and Chibo smacked it with his sword, once, twice, three times.

The wood crushed through the flesh and blood and bone exploded. The zombie fell to pieces, wet and hot. Chibo’s boots stuck to the viscous fluid on the ground as splinters of white bone looked back up at him along with the eyeless skull.

Where the eyes had gone—

Wait, eyes?

Chibo turned at the sudden feeling of something stalking him—that sixth sense you get that—wait, there was no sixth sense in the land of the perspective gods!

It hit him in the face.

Hot and wet, like the twice dead zombie, but this was no death throe, this was a vicious eyeball of hate and malice that rammed into Chibo!

The impact knocked him off his feet and he fell.

Fell.

Chibo fell for far too long, which meant he only could have fallen through the ground and into the pool area!

“Ahhh!” Sharra screamed.

“Attack them!” Chibo bellowed. “fight!”

A snarl.

Boots stomped.

Sharra swung her pickaxe and suddenly one of the zombies exploded into a pile of bone and blood and hot gore all over Chibo’s face.

But that was the last of his worries, as clawing hands and stamping boots moved toward him—over him.

“KILL THEM!” he screamed.

The hands overtook him and he felt the hot breath, the teeth, gouge into him.

He screamed.

“Ahhh!” Sharra screamed along with him as she fumbled with her sword and pickaxe. She attempted to bring out her sword, but in the confusion and screams, she dropped both.

The flying eye came in through the sky and attacked Chibo. He exploded into pieces of hot gore exactly like the zombies, and out of nowhere an engraved stone appear.

Sharra had no time to read that engraving as the monsters—as one, turned on her. Her eyes widened.

She turned to go into the cabin through the hollowed out floor. She jumped, jumped again and made it.

Through a sigh of sudden relief—

Something hit her from behind, the sound of which was wet and gooey, but also much like two boards knocking together.

She flew through the air and landed on her face, her hands slapping against what little floor planks remained.

“NOOO!” she screamed, realizing the other flying monster must have gone in through the door Chibo had left open when he had exited he cabin.

Monsters bellow.

Monsters behind.

“FUUUCK!”

At the end of the night, when the sun suddenly rose, the golden rays shining on the cabin and the beautiful morning appearing with that of the chirping birds and the soft rustling of grass, a cute fluffy rabbit hopped by.

There was a cabin there.

How Bunny knew what it was, was a mystery in this strange world of the perspective gods.

Bunny saw his friend Goldy, walking along and realized a morning rain had begun. He waved, and Bunny nodded.

The cabin was empty, the back door open.

Apart from the missing planks, walls and other materials, the cabin was clean—pristine, even.

Oddly there were two tombstones inside, one on the top floor, one on the bottom.

Why had they not buried their relatives outside?

Humans were so strange.

Bunny read the inscriptions.

The first on the top floor read: SHARRA WAS GANG—

Bunny coughed. He couldn’t bring himself to finish reading the obscene words.

The other stone in the basement, even though Bunny wasn’t inside, read: FUCKIN’ HARDCORE MOTHER—

And of course, he had to stop reading there.

These humans, who liked to come to the world of the perspective gods were vile-foul-mouthed-adventure-seeking-death-worshipping-sex-addled weirdoes!

Bunny hopped along faster, deciding to leave this place behind. He turned to Goldy. "Follow or die!!!"

He gaped at Bunny.

Fish were always dumb.