After weeks lost at sea, all of Minimil, all of the world in fact, at least suspected the Right Challenging Handful to be dead, severed at the wrist when they fled from the vessel owned by the Impertinent Insect, also called the Challenging Gnat.
That lousy louse was the instigator of the entire Little Wars craze. The handful had hoped to prevent its adoption by ending his life, but even after his squashing the human dignitaries aboard had already run with it.
Very much alive, the handful had no way of knowing this. All they knew was the constant sway of the sea, and the fragile safety of their vessel. For now they were kept dry in a set of floating canteens, set in a wire rack, that the Scotsman had used to smuggle them aboard. Each was connected to the next, and inside each it resembled a cozy room stuffed into a crescent moon.
The members were as follows:
1) A nameless ghost of a random Christmas past. She served her purpose aboard the gnat’s ship, and vanished from the mortal world. Her disappearance made them just five digits.
2) Mygdenia, the shrunken treasurer to King Midas, immortalized in gold.
3) Yahoo, a Lilliputian Yahoo.
4) Mustardseed, a fairy with intact wings who had crossed from her realm during the Midsummer Night’s Dream. She bears the remnants of a curse from that day, in the form of donkey ears and a few other ass-accessories.
5) Vitruvian. He is an automaton with a wooden shell, built by none other than Leonardo da Vinci. There is a question as to whether or not he should count as two digits, given that the metal armature inside the wooden shell can separate, move, and speak all on its own.
6) And finally Forward Commander Herschel Pflaumen Snaps, a much iterated-upon gingerbread soldier enchanted to life by the scheming sugarplum fairy during the Battle of the Nutcracker.
Snaps was reduced to barely a joint of a digit after their time adrift. He always carried supplies to bake fresh limbs for himself as the old grew stale, but the group had been forced to use them as rations. As an enchanted being he did not need to consume food, and though Vitruvian did not share the nature of his power source, he also did not need to partake.
This still left a yahoo, a woman, and a fairy who were at risk of starvation however, and they were reaching the precipice of said risk. All his baking materials were gone, Yahoo having even licked the powdery remnants of flour and cinnamon out of their bags. All of Snaps’s limbs had been devoured, painlessly, again thanks to the nature of his being, and the icing that was his beard, hair, and eyebrows was all licked away.
He was prepared to die for the comrades that had fought by his side, but for now they all controlled themselves, making do with one crumb a day taken from his shoulders or hips. If they reached his core or the center of his head it would all be over. Mustardseed was the one cradling him most of the time, holding him up so they could all converse, even as her stomach rumbled with new depths each sunrise.
One day out of the many, the waves were moving in their favor. In an attempt to fish, using a wire grappling hook stored in one of his arms, Vitruvian caught something out on the surf. While he wrangled it closer his sides split, and the armature hopped down the neck of one of the canteens to inform the others.
Mustardseed delicately curled her wings so she could fit through the neck, then reached back down to take Snaps from Yahoo. In moments they were all under a suddenly cloudy sky, looking out at gray waters to see what kind of fish Vitruvian was reeling in.
Its eye was like cork, its flesh transparent like glass. Oh, they all realized. It wasn’t a fish at all, but a bottle. When it was close enough the automaton looped his wire around its neck and lashed it to the side, lifting it out of the water just enough for them to see the contents, and for the contents to see them in turn.
The wine bottle contained a much smaller bottle, perhaps originally for a potent hot sauce, with a mostly worn away label that now acted as something of a belt for the creature trapped within. The smaller bottle that made up his shell had four holes sealed with rubber: spots for his black hairy limbs to hang out in the slightly fresher air of the larger bottle.
Though he appeared to breathe he did not fog the glass directly over his face, and there couldn’t have been any oxygen left in either bottle by that point. This coupled with the creature’s sharp teeth, fiery eyes, and ridged goat horns marked it as a demonic entity, some sort of imp.
“It’s about time!” the imp yipped at them. He seemed to remember something that made him sullen. He wandered to the back of the larger bottle, hitting his head on the inner glass hard enough that it pinged on the outer glass. “Not that it matters.”
“What is your story?” the fairy asked, arms wrapped tightly around Snaps, but not so tightly that he couldn’t lean forward and scrutinize the curious little demon. Such beasts weren’t to be trusted. They existed only to make Faustian bargains; surely someone had double-sealed it and thrown it into the ocean to be rid of it.
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“I’ve been here and there,” the imp gloated, mood pivoting again. “I was summoned by a poor fool named Stevenson. We set up a few parameters for my stay topside. You see, I grant wishes.” He clearly expected more of a reaction, even if it was just disbelief, but the handful came from a place where these sorts of things were just accepted. A few of them had seen a tiny genie whistling as he emerged from the spout of a kettle. In Minimil a wish was easier to grant than a loan extension.
“And what’s the price in full?” Snaps asked, making it clear this wasn’t his first rodeo.
“The price is the sticker,” the imp said with a grin. “The wish goes off without a hitch, but if you die while still in possession of this bottle,” he gestured to the smaller one acting like a diving suit, “your soul is forfeit to hell. The only way to get rid of me is to sell me, to someone who knows the risks, for less than you originally paid.”
“So… are you down to the bargain price of nothing yet?” Yahoo asked, digging orange wax out of one of his ears with a brown claw almost as long as one of the imp’s.
“I can’t be given away. Money must change hands.”
“I see,” Mygdenia noted. She explained the concept to Mustardseed, as fairies often had little concern for the ways of money. “Eventually the price is so low that the risk is much higher. Even if the original price was a million it would eventually work its way down to cents. He who buys it for two cents can only sell it for one, and only a fool would buy it for one because he can’t resell it for lower. He’d be doomed.”
“And doomed he was!” the imp cackled. “Normally you can’t get rid of me, but the idiot who bought me for a penny threw me out to sea and died by self-inflicted gunshot before I could return. Last land I saw was… Hawaii… I think.” He sighed. “So unless you’ve got a piece of money on you worth less than a penny, this whole crossing of paths is a big fat nothing.”
“Hah! We’re saved,” Mygdenia said plainly, looking more pleased than the others had ever seen her.
“How!?” the others demanded, the imp most aggressively of all. The treasurer reached into her pocket and pulled out several coins, including one of Blefuscan glass.
“Take your pick,” she said, crouching and holding her palm up to the imp’s outer bottle. “We come from a country that uses several currencies. Each one is based on stockpiles that couldn’t even fill a store on the human scale. When traded for human money ours is only worth fractions of a cent.”
“You’re pulling my leg,” the imp accused, now wary of whatever catch the handful was hiding.
“Even so, if we sell the blighter off we’d be dooming one of our countrymen,” Snaps argued. “I won’t have that on my conscience. I’d rather be dunked in milk and crumble.”
“The risk is minimal,” the golden woman insisted. “The exchange rates are constantly shifting in the barn. Even if we purchase him for our least valuable cent, a different cent will be worth less than it within a few days. Such interactions can happen back and forth endlessly.
Logic dictates that someone will eventually perish randomly while in possession of the creature, but I think we can trust them all to make their own informed choice. We must do this. It is literally a small price to pay for our lives.”
The gingerbread man was the most difficult to win over, but even he recognized that the alternative was forcing some of his best friends to eat him alive, so he eventually relented. For the low price of one Myrmidonian amber drachma they became the imp’s owner, which made him so ecstatic that he annoyed them all with the sound of him bouncing off the bigger bottle back and forth.
“Alright people! What’s your wish? It has to be reasonable by the way. I’m an imp after all, not the big guy himself.”
“I notice you didn’t mention that in the sales pitch,” Snaps grumbled.
“Yeah well...” They waited for him to finish the sentence, but he already had.
“We wish to be transported back to our country, Minimil,” Mygdenia ordered.
“-Alive and well!” Snaps added. “And with everyone there as alive and well as they would be were we not to suddenly appear there!”
“I told you the wishes were on the level,” the imp said, waving off the cookie’s concerns. He cracked the knuckles on all twelve of his fingers, but that was the actual magical act rather than the preparation for it. By the third pop the ocean was gone. By the fifth they were in Scotland. By the ninth they were inside the barn.
At the twelfth pop their canteens were resting safely, right on the windowsill where the Scotsman had first picked them up and placed them inside his traveling bag. The Challenging Handful stepped down, the sun-drenched wood welcoming their weight.
“It’s a pretty nice place you got here,” the imp said with a whistle. The larger bottle was gone, but the smaller one still made him waddle as he scouted out his new neighborhood. Mustardseed handed Snaps’s torso off to Yahoo so she could take off and enjoy some indoor flight without the threat of a fish leaping out of the sea and swallowing her whole. She brayed happily, started shouting to each street she fluttered over that the Challenging Handful had returned.
“I wonder how we’ll be received,” Mygdenia said by the others. “Little Wars may yet live. If it does… it’ll be coming for us. We’re the real commodity.”
“We’ll deal with that in due time,” Snaps sighed. None of them had yet spotted the perpetual yellow flames burning in the loft, or the sand castles surrounding them. “For now I just can’t wait to get home.”
He was sure his walls were waiting for him, smelling softly of nutmeg. He could bake himself some fresh arms and legs and then use them to tuck himself into his marshmallow mattress with a good book. Perhaps Solenos would come calling to welcome him back. He could grab his tin of icing and whip himself up a fresh dignified beard.
What he would do for a handful of it.
The End
The handfuls will return in
Challenging Applause