Jimothee Jenkins Jukes Jungle Justice

by

Blaine Arcade

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The planet Woodzy was not known for mysterious jungle islands that knocked you out of the sky and trapped you inside some kind of invisible force field, so one Jimothee Jenkins could be forgiven for not having his wits about him when it happened.

He was a cillikeeper, a coach of those profoundly silly creatures called cillimorphs, but some who knew him called him a drifter instead, while those who knew him best called him a bum. As far as he was concerned, a bum was the imago form of a cillikeeper, someone who had embraced the silly lifestyle so passionately that traditional employment looked like willingly taking on a chronic autoimmune disease.

No, life was much better outside of the office, the home, and sometimes even the atmosphere. Humans couldn’t survive in space, not without help, and sometimes instead of a helmet that help was the kindness of a morph. Jimothee had a Jormugonda, the longest known cillimorph in existence, which gave it enough mass for its gravity and vacuum-defying silliness field to extend to anyone who rode upon its back.

That’s how Jimothee and the rest of his morphs got to Woodzy, skipping that whole planetary passport thing, a one-way slither off planet Scorcher to somewhere cooler. He needed no more complex motivation than that: one of the perks of being a bum.

Flat on his back, arms behind his head, lost in the sepia daydreams between his eyes and sunglasses, Jimothee was joined by his four other best morph mates, all enjoying the breeze from his Jormugonda’s speedy flight over Woodzy’s single, small, greenish sea. His Swaluminum was folded up in its own foil, even cozier in the arms of his Wartwaste. Meanwhile his Crownifix, clung to Jormugonda’s curling side with its thousand starfish feet, dangled its crimson lures for the spiritual energies of his nearby Pokeyperch to play with.

It couldn’t be better, which meant it had to get worse. All of a sudden they were struck by a gale out of nowhere, and it must have been powerful to even slightly perturb a creature the size of his Jormugonda. It wailed in confusion, the deep warble of a world serpent gone wormy. Great blue coils began to tangle in its distress, dropping Jenkins and his other morphs into free fall.

An excellent time it was for a flying cillimorph to swoop in and save the day, but his ride was already distracted, and only Swaluminum had wings. Hardly larger than the extinct Thanksgiving turkey, it didn’t have the strength to save its coach. As everyone always says though, nothing knows how to prioritize like a Swaluminum. It managed to snag Crownifix and Pokeyperch, flapping with all its might to slow their descent, dropping nothing but cartoonishly large sweat droplets.

Wartwaste would have to find a way to save Jimothee and itself. Its coach had supreme confidence in its ability, which he demonstrated without even shifting position as he plummeted toward a growing green gash of an island. Hands still behind his head. Sunglasses still firmly in place. They didn’t even rattle enough to smudge the white base of his clownface or dislodge his red nose.

Rather like a pollution-mutated toad crossed with a linebacker, Wartwaste was not particularly meant for air travel. When in doubt, which the people also always say of Wollyclogs and their matured form Wartwaste, use your tongue! A typical frog would keep it in their mouth, which Wartwaste did as well, but that mouth was on its stomach.

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Out of its gut shot a rope of red taffy, saliva sticky enough to keep a wrecking ball on the side of a skyscraper like a blackhead. The only thing to attach to that was falling slower than it was Jormugonda, and once its tongue was affixed it swung at a perfect trajectory to snatch Jimothee and cradle him like an infant.

Then it got rough. Leaves. Fibrous bark. Tiny flitting segmented cillimorphs chittering and screeching as they tried to get out of the canopy that was now a bombing zone. Mr. Jenkins only opened his eyes when things got strangely dark. The trees settled overhead, peculiar palms as large and fecund as redwoods, fronds closing around the sunlight, practically locking them into a tropical jungle brimming with tweets, hisses, squawks, and the percussion of tire-sized coconuts falling on rock outcroppings.

“Yo Jorm,” he called out to his ride to see if it was alright. Conservatively classed as a colossal morph, it should have been far too large for the canopy to even close again. It could shrink down of course, but that was just to make rasslin’ matches with other morphs more fair and feasible. Such reductions in size did not normally happen involuntarily, yet when Jenkins stood and looked around that was what he found: his Jormugonda curled around the trunk of a tree. It whimpered with a sunken expression in the vapor of its hurricane eyes, looking downright adorable at a paltry thirty-five feet long. “What happened to you?”

There was no answer, as morphs couldn’t talk, which was usually a blessing, since they would almost never stop cracking jokes, and probably at a terrible garbage ratio too, like ninety-five percent knock-knock jokes. The coach could guess, after he took a few minutes to put their situation together, after checking that the rest of his team was in one piece.

Swaluminum was looking flat as foil, but it was just tired. The spiritual energies of Pokeyperch, two glowing nodes like songbirds usually roosting on its horizontal abdominal spines, were excitedly circling, or perhaps worriedly. If they were agitated that could mean they’d fallen into a place strong with spirits, the ethereal remnants and relatives of cillimorph shenanigans, built up in certain lands over many generations.

Some spirit must have been disturbed, as Jenkins couldn’t think of a single other thing that could knock his world serpent out of the sky and shrink it down to barely a worm on a hook. He asked it if it could return to its typical size and take off once more, but it just shook its drooping head and cried rainfall from those big blue hurricane eyes.

“Well team, looks like we’re in a pickle,” he said, hands on his hips, striking a warm figure with his Hawaiian shirt, which had been purchased on the planet Scorcher, so it was covered in tilted volcanoes rather than palm trees or flamingos. “Or wait… maybe we can just stay here forever. Seems alright.”

For once a man was less serious than his morphs, for as he examined the expressions of his dear ridiculous friends he saw that they were uneasy. They must have sensed something he could not. So it was time to buckle down, be the leader he only was in rasslin’ matches and when trying to get his morphs to wait politely in line at frozen treat carts, which notoriously got out of hand, especially with a hungry morph the size of a Jormugonda. Cities had fallen. Emperors had abdicated. Over strawberry citrus squeeze.

“Alright guys, huddle up. We’ll make a base camp and then we’ll figure out what to do.” His five morphs made a circle, and then Jormugonda made another circle around them, head wilting into the center so it could hear better. “Wartwaste, you get us some sticks for building shelter and a fire.” The giant toad leapt away, out of sight in a single bound.

“Pokeyperch, feel the place out.” The black and yellow newt-thing nodded, always smiling its bear trap smile. It ambled off to let its spiritual birdies act as highly mobile divining rods for whatever energies had grounded them.

“Crownifix, Swaluminum, find us some food. I’m thinking… lobster Thermidor.” One starfish arm saluted dramatically before its five-pointed slither took it under a sandbar and out of sight entirely. His birdish morph waddled after it.

“Gondola, Ghandhi, Big Gondo.” None of the nicknames cheered up his largest morph. “Easy buddy. We’ll find a way out of here. You just keep trying to grow and fly every few minutes, okay? Just to see if anything changes.” It sniffled. “You can walk with me while we look around.”

He tapped it on the chin to help it buck up, which he had to leap to do, like dunking a basketball. It was cheered up enough at least to follow him, and also still large enough to cut a swath through the hazy undergrowth that they would be able to follow back to their campsite.

Jimothee wasn’t an expert on anything aside from avoiding becoming an expert, so he wasn’t sure exactly how odd this island was. He’d never heard of Jormugondas or Toaderations being knocked out of the sky by a spiritual wallop. There was something he was forced to consider: a big yet lurking cultural force. A thing with no experts, because it had never been confirmed. The people who said they were experts were robed weirdos telling fortunes or hocking blurry photos and videos at roadside stands next to the frozen treats.

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Cryptocillimorphology. If it was ever proven enough to be a study, it would be the study of undiscovered cillimorphs, operating in the background of the world, toward goals unknown. New cillimorphs were cataloged regularly, a key way of being silly was not showing yourself at all for centuries at a time, but the ones that earned the tag ‘cryptomorph’ were always more dramatic than an extended game of hide-and-seek.

A cryptomorph was said to be more like a god, or a mischievous trickster. They watched mankind from the shadows and the cracks, trying to puzzle out their friendships and competitions with their less grand kin on the cosmic scale of silliness. And they weren’t to be confused with cillimorphs partly created from the reputations of old Earth’s cryptids like Bigfoot and Nessie. Those were a dime a dozen.

No, a cryptomorph might never show itself, so that its very concept played hide-and-seek with the species that only might have created it with a cillium crystal oh so long and oh so many generation ships ago. If that was what he dealt with, what was its aim? What could a cryptomorph possibly want from Mr. Jenkins, who was so separate from material wealth and prestige that he could barely afford the ‘Mr.’ on the front of his name.

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Their looping walk was forced to turn back when they reached the foot of an inactive and overgrown volcano. Wind whistled through the stalactite fangs of cave maws, dotted all across its slope. This theater of eyeless yawning faces disturbed his serpent morph further, and it whimpered a request to turn back.

“I don’t want to get swallowed by one of those either,” Jimothee agreed, leading Jormugonda’s head around to the middle of its turning form. “The others are probably back anyway.” Despite implying it, he had no clue how much time had passed. Thinking about cryptomorphs was an intellectual labor, like thinking a whole book. Did it take minutes to do that, or hours?

Stormy clouds denied him the passage of the sun. Only the wind, acting up more and more, could reveal anything, like a wild cillimorph from out of the fanning brush! Bulky and green, with flowing black and white stripes down its limbs like layers of burnt marshmallow, the Mallarballast honk-roared at them.

Any attempt for the duck-billed dinosaurish morph to block their path would do no good against a Jormugonda normally, but with his shrunken down and frightened they would have to try something other than sailing over its ornery goggle-crests.

“Go away, we’re not in the mood,” Jimothee scolded it. Confusion was understandable; he was wearing his clownface, which was the universal signifier for ‘ready to rassle’. Still, his words and their charred curling tone should have dispelled any playful atmosphere, yet the Mallarballast held its ground and honked even louder. It didn’t want to play; this was a genuine challenge. “You up for showing this loser a thing or two?” he asked his morph. Shrunk or not, attitudes always improved when their honor was on the line.

Usually a bell was rung to initiate a rasslin’ match, but Jimothee didn’t have his portable one on him, so they had to settle for him saying ‘ding ding’ with the most lacking luster. Jormugonda and Mallarballast squared off.

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Poised to strike, it looked like a dinosaur versus a giant cobra, when in reality it was two against one, as the snake had Jimothee on his side and his seasoned coaching skills. In the game for years, he had developed a style all his own, shockingly aggressive, so that they might end things early and get back to the real business of hanging out.

“Jorm, lightning glare!” The snaky morph’s hurricane eyes whirled, a dynamo spinning up, with intense blue light to match. Out of them shot thick ropy bolts of lightning, right on target, but in his haste the cillikeeper had forgotten something crucial about Mallarballasts. While they were amphibious, which usually meant a vulnerability to electrical and frost based attacks, that wasn’t really so in this case.

Mallarballasts were buoyed in the water by several rubber duck-shaped nodules along the back and tail. A rule of colorful thumb, something to finger paint by, was that if a feature of a cillimorph seemed stupid and impractical, it was probably true. So while Mallarballast’s duckies kept it afloat just fine, they were also unnecessarily rubbery, like the actual toy, and thus frustratingly insulated against his Jormugonda’s lightning glare.

The attack was absorbed, redirected into forward energy, which became a tackle. Both bodies rolled into the brush, Jimothee chasing after with awkward waddling strides to avoid the uneven stones that were now slippery from the rain that had begun somewhere between rasslin’ moves.

“Use the roll! Wrap him up!” he advised his morph. It obeyed, each rotation adding another coil around the Mallarballast’s keg of a chest. He didn’t need to tell it to put the squeeze on, really make it honk, but he couldn’t even if he’d wanted to. Something flashed in his mind, swifter and stronger than his Jormugonda’s lightning.

Thrown into a slip, down to the rock, the vegetation blocked the battle, as did the vision he couldn’t blink away. A flashback: that was the only name he could give it. Something had turned a snippet of his life into a program, forced him to watch it when he should have been coaching. It was the episode where he’d met his Jormugonda, and the day he’d befriended it.

Lots of keepers tried to meet morphs in their juvenile stages, to grow up with them, even if the amount of growing up the humans had to do at forty or sixty was a little embarrassing. Like most things Jimothee couldn’t begin to care about morph shapes or stages when they crossed paths. All that mattered was the shape of the crossing.

His Jormugonda was a full blown adult when it stopped alongside Jimothee’s hot air balloon ride that, apparently, fateful day. It begged for a taste of his quadruple cheddar koi crackers, best snack on Woodzy by his estimation, concentrated enough in cheesiness to even zing the taste buds of something the size of that particular spacefaring cillimorph.

Kindness was crackers, and not just literally. Best to share liberally, as one day you could find it crumbling and vanishing between the couch cushions no matter how careful you were. Lots of befriending happened by winning rasslin’ matches, but with his Jormugonda all it took was a couple of dehydrated cheeses and a nice breeze.

From then on they were as thick as he was with any of his other morphs, except for his first, his loyal Swaluminum, which he had met as a shiny adorably Swalun, having mistakenly grabbed it instead of his foil-wrapped leftovers from his favorite childhood restaurant.

After several seconds, and a hundred raindrops pelting the cheek that wasn’t bruising against slippery stone, the vision faded enough for Jimothee to scramble to his knees and check the progress of the rasslin’ match. In what felt like the third shock in as many minutes, it was already over! Jormugonda, head swiveling, seemed the victor, but just as confused as its keeper.

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Nothing had scared the Mallarballast off, as it had found the time to produce and wave the white flag that indicated a forfeit. It was on the rocks, already drenched grayer. Jimothee asked his morph what happened, got in response a couple of loops that could only be a snake’s shrug. Thunder bowled lightning bolts overhead. Man and morph alike recoiled in fear.

“Let’s get back to the others!” Jormugonda didn’t have to be told twice. Its head snaked between his legs and lifted him into a comfortable dip of the neck. Then it slithered back along its own trail, occasionally dodging such large coconuts, tossed in the wind, that both of them feared being flattened.

If there was a cryptomorph watching out for Jimothee Jenkins and his friends, it received his silent thanks when they all reunited at the campsite they would never get to build. Whatever supplies his other morphs had gathered were already dropped and lost, scattered by what could now only be called a typhoon.

“Everyone okay?” They could barely hear him, he was sure, because he could barely hear himself over the gale and the cannon barrage of giant coconuts rolling down the dead volcano, and some back up, the wind was that strong. Swaluminum, Pokeyperch, Crownifix, and even his buff and brave Wartwaste were all cowering, hiding their heads under each other’s wings, arms, and ridiculous protuberant growths.

He was considering their options when the typhoon tried to make the decision for them. Only Jormugonda wrapping around him and Crownifix keeping the others stuck to the ground with its thousand tube feet kept them from blowing away like tumbleweeds. They needed shelter, and they needed it now. Unfortunately, Jimothee had only come across one viable option.

“You’re not gonna like this,” he told Jormugonda; it already didn’t. Less than a minute later the only morph large enough to stay anchored against the winds was carrying its keeper and all the others through a progressively shredded jungle. The caves punctured into the side of the volcano were the only place that seemed resistant to this tantrum of Mother Nature.

As they progressed, which Jimothee measured by the degree of rainwater seepage in his bones, the island’s native cillimorphs emerged from disguised dens that were now tossed salad and joined their tamer brethren in heading for the old volcano. There wore more Mallarballasts, with juvenile Hadroquacks bundled on their backs, the latter being much smaller and too awkwardly-shaped to escape on their own. Alongside and overhead were flocks of birdish Guzzjars and Swauldrons, pitching side to side in the gusts, losing splashes of their precious yet ghastly guzz.

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One of them spilled the nasty stuff all over Jimothee, which would have ruined his bright shirt, if not for the torrential rainfall washing it right then and there. Only the waterproof guarantee of his high-end make-up kept his clownface in place. Not even a bum like him skimped on that. Nothing worse on a silly planet than a clown who cries his own face off.

The last of the bog-green guzz washed out of his eyes and he saw it, lording over everything, drinking the rain and slurping lightning strikes like noodles: the volcano. Jormugonda would just slip down the side if it tried to climb to one of the higher options, and they couldn’t all hang off Crownifix while it suction-walked its way to safety, so Jimothee pointed out the lowest and largest opening that wasn’t yet flooded.

Once they were inside, the storm no quieter thanks to the drumming of the rain echoing everywhere, Jimothee dismounted and ripped off his shirt to feel just a little drier. He wanted to make a fire, and that wasn’t hard with a Pokeyperch on his rasslin’ team, but tinder was still required.

In looking around he realized that the olivine nodules in the walls were just more Guzzjars and Swauldrons already safely nestled. They weren’t flammable, and neither was their guzz. Guzz wasn’t good for anything; that was the whole silly point of them generating and storing it in their cavernous pelican mouths.

“Anybody have a stick by chance?” he asked the whole cave, domesticated and wild morphs alike. Every titter, grumble, and burble was just a shrug by a different name, until one helpful Swauldron remembered that after it had run into a tree, thirty-eight seconds ago, it had lost all its guzz and gained the terrible replacement of twigs and fronds.

Hopping down from its ledge, it barfed up its entire contents into a perfectly arranged campfire. The only missing ingredient was the fire itself. Jenkins requested Pokeyperch amble forth. The cute chickadee-like projections of spiritual energy that it kept perched on its exposed ribs were already dry, as good spirits were always warming.

So warming that one of them was able to swoop down into the guzzy tinder, concentrate itself, and ignite an orange glow for the entire cave to bask in. Once everyone settled in they were silent, but Jimothee couldn’t let the situation rest. This wasn’t his normal unemployed and recreational lounging. This was forced lounging, which was no lounging at all.

“Which one of you guzzheads knows what’s causing all this?” he asked the native morphs. None of them attempted any flailing pantomime answers, but their beaks, including those of the Hadroquacks still waddling in out of the downpour, all turned down the dark throat of the cave, looking at something that just might’ve been looking back. The cryptomorph? “If you’re down there, show yourself!” Jimothee challenged the darkness.

To his surprise, he received a response in the form of lumbering sounds. His team perked up, Pokeyperch gnashing its sharp teeth, Wartwaste pounding one fist into the opposite palm. He wasn’t so sure his guys could handle a cryptomorph; the interplanetary rasslin’ champion, who held the golden Big Boy Belt, probably couldn’t pull it off with five Pitwreckers and a bonus Puppentanz.

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But what emerged was no cryptomorph. It was a Ribrage. If his Pokeyperch ever matured it too would become a Ribrage, extended perch ribs fusing and bowing int a great cage of bone upon the back, housing not happy flitting energies, but a miserable purple glob of anguish and self-pity. Speaking of such a blob, it grew a miasma arm from between its glowing eyes and extended it, like a lazy river cutting a path, toward Jimothee.

“I’m in no mood,” he warned it. “If you want to rassle, a white flag might not even get you out of it.” The Ribrage was undeterred, stomping forward, snapping its crocodile jaws, leering from under its mantle of folded skin, so like the hood of the grim reaper. “Fine by me. Crownifix, sic ’em!”

His starfishish morph vaulted forward on all five of its arms, standing on their ends like a furious cat. It stabbed at the air, a series of rapid jabs, with its stigmata stingers. The spirit blob inside the Ribrage didn’t know suffering; Crownifixes knew suffering! They were forged in boiling desert waters, forced to eat spiny cactus fruits that only occasionally rolled into the pools, and were only capable of getting hugs from their equally spiny family members most of the time. Crownifix could fix this mopey morph’s wagon.

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Jimothee let the challenger make the first move, so he would have something to counter. It tried to catch his morph in a pincer of purple vapors extended from both sides of the cage.

“Dropped shuriken!” the confident coach called out. Crownifix went flat. Just as quick it was spinning, gliding across the stone like an air hockey puck. It sailed between the Ribrage’s stumpy legs and ricocheted off all of its ankles, dropping its opponent painfully into its own bulk just as it escaped from underneath.

A match like this could be finished in two more blows, before the Ribrage even stood up. Jimothee was ready to tell his morph to pin down the neck between two arms and poke at it with its stigmata stingers, but something struck him dumb. A something that had become too familiar in too few instances. Once again he was hit with a white flash that threw him back in time, and hopefully didn’t keel him over right into the campfire.

This episode he was on Scorcher, kicking back in a beach chair at a fraught angle on the side of a sand dune, with no actual beach in sight. That was the beauty of planet Scorcher, you could get a tan anywhere, and a burn in even more places. His sunbathing technique was so admirable that it had drawn an admirer.

Something tapped its way onto his bare chest and stood still. The rays Jimothee was catching just then were particularly good, and he didn’t want to scare them off by opening his eyes, so he just let whatever small thing was happening continue to do so. An hour passed before a cloud provided brief respite.

Then he pulled off his sunglasses and saw a Brittilist stood in its famous crucifix pose on his sternum, tanning itself exactly as it had learned from watching him. It wasn’t even wailing in fake pain, which the brittle star-like morphs were known to do in the throes of desert boredom. That meant it wasn’t an attention hog: a very rare trait for that species.

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“Hey Brittilist,” he addressed it, with it opening the side of one eye to lazily give him the slightest acknowledgment, “you want to hang with me?” The tiny creature dropped its nonchalant facade, smiled wide, wobbly, and stupid, and threw itself flat against him for a squealing hug. The spines didn’t feel great, but Jimothee just stored the pain for later, when it could exist awash in other things far worse than a sunbathing session, like waiting in line, or trying to tell a joke to a Brass Tack.

The formality of beating it in a rasslin’ match with a cillimorph he had already befriended would be handled later, and, eventually, that Brittilist would mature into the Crownifix that was now valiantly doing battle with the obstinate Ribrage. Doing battle! As in right now! Jimothee bit his own tongue to force himself to surface from the memory. When he broke through he found that he was on his side, but Wartwaste had set him down gently away from the fire.

Through its orange licks he saw that the Ribrage was gone, retreated deep into the volcano, its white flag limp on the uneven rock. Crownifix toyed with it, muttering, apparently dissatisfied with a half-finished match. Exactly like the Mallarballast. This was no fluke. Every time his morphs rassled on this island, he was thrown back to the day he met them. To what end?

When he had the strength to turn his head on his stiff aching neck, he saw the worry in his team’s eyes, for him, for each other. There was no reason to drag out their ordeal. The secret to life was taking the shortest path to the next smellable flower. Whatever was out there, or in there he now realized, deep within the dormant volcano, certainly not dormant itself, was going to keep throwing stray morphs at him until he’d relived the formation of his entire team.

Jimothee wouldn’t let it string along his poor morphs like that; he would beat it to the punch. He used the head rush from standing up as momentum to complete his plan. Swaluminum honked when he marched deeper into the cave, its anxiety seconded and then turned into nervous chorus by the rest of his team.

“Don’t worry guys, I know at least half of what I’m doing.” They were confident enough in his words to pipe down, but the flat reflective eyes, like an idiotic owl’s, that belonged to all the Guzzjars and Swauldrons stared at his back in fascination, watching him sit down with crossed legs, watching him take a breath deep enough to swim the entire planet Splishy.

Meditation wasn’t really his scene, too much content compared to spacing out. Employing a simulacrum of it here seemed prudent though, to bring his memories into the sharpest detail, like drawing a saber and shoving it down the cave’s throat. Really it was more like three sabers, all neatly arranged and polished to a shine.

The first was the time that earned him his Swaluminum, back then just a timid smooth Swalun with barely a peep in its voice. It made more noise crinkling its aluminum foil feathers, which was how he noticed it sitting next to him in his family’s minivan-mobile.

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Passing streetlamps shuffled the shadows of the seats like playing cards. The radio had jazz so soft you could sleep on it. Jimothee was only ten, and his parents had taken him out to his favorite restaurant, where all the waiters were cillimorphs, and you never got what you ordered as a result.

The loaded steak fries that he didn’t want but really liked anyway were a log cabin of pure starch, so he had to have them wrapped up to take the leftovers home. That’s what he thought he’d done, the foil surrounding them folded into a cute little swan shape. But in the atmosphere of the drive home, like the downy shadow nestling under his bedroom pillow, he heard the crinkle.

That wasn’t his leftovers sat next to him. A swalun! Nuzzling his thigh with its neck. None of the silly waiters had been Swaluns, but if he remembered his favorite cillimorph education show correctly, Swaluns did this kind of thing all the time, swapping themselves out for doggybags in search of loving homes. This one had hit the jackpot.

Jimothee didn’t let the recollection stretch into the eventual maturation of Swalun into Swaluminum. This was about the first encounters, so he unsheathed the next one: Pokeyperch. It was a trade, as sometimes happened after a rasslin’ match, coaches and morphs just feeling like something needed to be changed up. He’d said goodbye to a Widdlewaddle he’d never really gelled with, and gained a morph that would be with him for years to come.

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They were great battle partners because Jimothee knew that you had to coach the two little birdish things that came along with the salamanderish thing in order to properly utilize all of a Pokeyperch’s abilities, not unlike what he did now with his memories, sharpening these parts of his spirit and launching them in a barrage.

The final volley would be his Wartwaste. It was stuck in a public pool drain, having matured and enlarged just as it was trying to dart out of sight. Jimothee was the pool guy, uniform and everything, only for a week as he passed through some of the more suburban parts of the overly-civilized planet Urbaniak.

It wasn’t exactly love at first sight of those scrawny frog legs kicking helplessly and churning the chlorinated water. Wartwastes were fully amphibious, and could survive at the bottom of a barrel of used motor oil and reactor runoff, so he wasn’t worried about it drowning. In the plenty of time provided he could scrutinize his collection of pool cleaning tools for the best one to extract a morph suffering one of its stupider moments.

Scrawny as they were, its legs would probably kick straight through the net, so that was out. The long mop thing? Not aggressive enough. The jet hook, for sucked in bathing suits and beach towels? Too assertive, he wasn’t scraping plaque off molars here. Poker thing? He wasn’t sure of the giant cue tip’s actual purpose, its blue rubber tip seemed more at home on an obstacle course game show, but that ultimately meant it could only be for dislodging cillimorphs.

After putting it to work, a strenuous effort, Jimothee expected no reward at all, just a skittish frog disappearing into the sewers. Instead the Wartwaste squeezed back through; it leapt out of the pool in a sort of reverse cannonball and gave him a rib-cracking hug. Then it immediately challenged him to a rasslin’ match, for which he called up his Brittilist and bravely beat the beast into submission and friendship.

The cave swallowed down everything he sent its way, leaving him only silence, a rare void with so many cillimorphs about, who could sing and giggle and belch even in the vacuum of space or the folder recycling bin of a twenty-year-old airplane mode smartphone completely drained of battery.

“Come on, there they are,” he hissed at the dark. “freely given. No strings attached. What do you want them for?” Answers were not forthcoming. “Guys, back me up here. Tell it what you think.”

He couldn’t speak cillimorph, no one could, if they even had a language it would be one without rules, but he knew his team understood him. They gave the cave a piece of their minds too. Jormugonda bayed, Wartwaste croaked, Pokeyperch snapped its teeth, Crownifix slapped its suction feet, and Swaluminum honked and rustled all its foil until it was practically balled up and squeezing out sauce drizzles of leftovers long past.

Only then did they get their response. Jimothee heard and felt it, the sensations like the twin strands of DNA: interlocking, ancient, ambitious, and stubborn. This entity, be it a cryptomorph, be it amalgamated ghosts, or be it some other alien lifeform created by an element much stranger than cillium, did make one thing clearly known, its purpose.

With powers unfathomable it had dragged down his Jormugonda, chained its abilities, sent in mercenary morphs, conjured a storm to lure them there, and made itself at home in Jimothee’s mind, pulling up good memories like a popcorn bucket. And all because it was lonely.

From half a sky away it sensed the bonds between man and morph and grew jealous. Not jealous enough to actually attack, the wild morphs it sent were just to trigger the rasslin’-associated memories of friendship forming, but enough to bring them close for an invasive investigation.

Its demand was one of his friends, and not just any of them, the best one, the deepest bond. If he handed over his most precious morph, then he could leave with his four others and go about their delightfully empty lives once more. Whoever remained behind would be the companion of the thing, the center of the volcano, the soul of the island.

Otherwise they would have to stay, until they changed their minds or until the minds decomposed out of their skulls. Only that choice was theirs, no other in the face of such raw and foreign power.

But it wasn’t really Jimothee’s choice. He went to his greatest friend, knelt by it, embraced it, tears already in his eyes. Producing that rope of sorrowful snot was more work than he’d done in the last decade.

“Well old buddy, what do you think?” he asked his Swaluminum. It nibbled his ear, honked quiet and mournful. Morph tears were catoonish bombs; he heard them splash against the cave floor. They’d been together since they were babes. It felt like he’d eaten half his meals a day old and right out of the steamy storage compartment on Swaluminum’s back.

“Think of it this way,” he blubbered to his best morph, “I’m saving you for later. Like all that food you’ve got. When the time is right, we can reunite. I know this thing’ll like you, which means it’ll eventually feel bad about all this and let you go. Then you’ll know your way home. I’ll reach for the mushroom panini I had wrapped up for a midnight snack, and instead I’ll pet you.”

“Wonk,” his Swaluminum said. Jimothee understood it better than he understood the cave thing’s ultimatum that had bored directly into his brain stem like a corkscrew. Swaluminum was brave and patient; it could do it. For Jimothee. For the others. For a meal that was better the longer they waited.

“Goodbye buddy.” He hugged it one last time, the rest of the team joining in the embrace, warmer than the fire. Then his resolute Swaluminum narrowed its eyes, straightened its neck, and proudly waddled into the consuming shadow.

And just like that, they were free to go. The oppressive weather outside lifted, the wild cillimorphs the first to leave. Jimothee the drifter was suddenly having trouble doing what he was good at, but there was a parting gift. Out of the darkness came more slaps of webbed feet, not from his Swaluminum, from a Hadroquack with a friendly expression.

“I guess this is just another trade?” he asked the little green morph.

“Quack,” it explained. “Quack quack,” it elaborated.

“Come on then little guy. We’ve got places to be and nothing to do.” The Hadroquack joined them, and after they all feasted on one giant coconut broken up, chewed to the husk, and drunken down, Jormugonda grew to its full size and carried them into the fresh sky.

Jimothee Jenkins sighed, breathed in a cloud, stroked the Hadroquack nestled into his lap. Maybe the cryptomorph meant to help him too. It wasn’t difficult to believe this new feeling was a gift. He was looking forward to something, like smelling leftovers through the foil.

The End