Sophie was about to ask what he meant, when she heard - oddly - the sound of springing. Boing, boing, boing, it went, each boing echoing a moment after the others, and the strike and clatter of rock came with them.
The dragon grimaced in distaste, and instead of hurrying to the door - as he had with the knight - finished his meal, just as slow as he pleased, wiping his lips with a napkin. It was only once he was done and the dishes were washed and in the drying rack that he went to the door, staring caustically out at the mountains.
Sophie went to the door after him, and could only stare in confusion at the man rapidly approaching.
He was a man. At least, he must be. Or was he? Sophie couldn’t tell. He sure looked like a man - had all the limbs, the torso, the bits affixed to his head, you know, man stuff - but she wasn’t sure any man should be quite so, err, gelatinous.
He was skipping from one mountain top to another, his arms flopping limply over his head and his body waving from side to side in ways unreplicable by any with a spine. His clothing was antique but fashionable - a lush brown overcoat and a beige vest, with goggles on his head to ward off the winds - with, perhaps, the only odd part of his getup being his shoes.
He’d affixed springs to these, and was using them to improbably propel himself over the range, making excited whee noises all the while.
“Wheeee,” went the man as he bounced over the mountain tops, flopping from one to the other till he landed with a breathless grin on the small patch of dirt outside the mountain entrance. He smiled up at the dragon without moving his body out of its hunched position, his head turning nearly sixty degrees up and to the side.
“Good eventide to you, sir,” the man said, his voice surprisingly strong for such a feeble body. Up close Sophie saw that his pale white flesh was stretched taut over his bony frame, his gelatinous body paradoxically looking as if he had no muscle and nothing but bones.
“Good evening, Jack,” said the dragon, and turning to Sophie motioned to the man (evidently his acquaintance). “Sophie, this is Spring-Heeled Jack; Jack, this is Sophie. She’s a freelance office administrator, and my current damsel in distress.”
“Boy, the standards are really going down in these parts,” Jack jested. “To think, you’ve had to resort to damselnapping office administrators.”
“Why are you here?” The dragon snapped, clearly not in the mood for banter.
“”Aww, don’t be like that. I ain't here of my own volition; They are asking for you.”
The dragon froze. “Oh, are they? And why, pray tell, have they reached out to me?”
Spring-Heeled Jack sniffed. “The boundary between the realms of Faery and the mortal realm has been getting mighty thin; they want you to look into the matter.”
“Would not a knight be a better option?” Sophie asked, and the man laughed.
“Oh, I take it back - I take it all back - I can see why you like her. She’s a keeper. Ask a modern knight of Faery? No, no - Heavens to Earth, no. Oh Lordy Lou, what a disaster that would be.”
“No,” Jack reiterated one more time, just in case Sophie hadn’t heard the refusal, “can’t ask a fairy knight to do jack - if you’ll pardon the pun - not these days. Especially not when it comes to humans. No, there’s been some mighty strange views on humans coming from your realm to ours, and you won’t find many fairies what will look into matters of the human realm. Half of them think humans are an illusion, whose origin can be explained by science; the other half also think humans are an illusion, but see them as a grand story, made up to make ourselves feel better about the world. In any event, there’s but one knight left in all of Fairyland who believes in people.”
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“And that would be me,” the dragon grimaced. “Fair enough; I’ll look into the matter for you, although you’ll have to look after my damsel in distress while I’m gone.”
“Aye, I can do that,” agreed Jack with equanimity, “although there’s no need to, since They want me to send her back after you.”
Now it was Sophie’s turn to freeze. “I - I can go back?”
“Sure. You only died, after all.”
There was a prolonged moment of silence as Sophie took this statement in, a moment in which the dragon stood there awkwardly and the small fellow in the fancy suit smiled inanely.
“I’m… dead?”
“Oh, quite,” said the man cheerfully. “You were hit by thirty long tons of explosives, after all; your body was instantaneously atomised. How else do you think you reached Fairyland, but by ceasing to exist? But I wouldn’t worry, for such little things are easily fixable.”
There was another moment of quiet, which Jack evidently took for assent, for he turned to the dragon and continued his discussion.
“But we now have a very big problem - bigger than piddly things like death - so I’m afraid I’ll have to leave aside questions of that sort in favour of my bigger mission. You understand.”
And he reached inside the pocket of his vest, removing a sheaf of papers in a leather holder. This he handed to the dragon.
“Here, for you - it contains all the pertinent information which They foresaw you would ask, except that information which They think you should discover.”
“Which, as in most cases, will be all of it,” the dragon chirped merrily, his earlier frustration fading away as his knightly persona took over, and he once more took on the adventure with cheerfulness and a full heart.
“Don’t be like that. They at least tell you what you’re looking for, sort of, and give you directions as to where you need to go, a little. Sure, half the steps in between and everything before and after the fact is missing, but hey, what’s life without a little fun?”
“I died?” Sophie repeated, still stunned.
“Yes, we’ve been over that,” the man said, and continued addressing the dragon. “Now, They would like it very much if you would leave as soon as is dragonly possible, a sentiment with which They have commanded me to concur.”
“I was obliterated,” Sophie said, face expressionless.
“Yes, yes, you died, but as I said before, that’s an easy problem - unlike your lost umbrella. So, when do you think you can leave?”
“Imminently. Let me get my armour,” said the dragon, and vanished back into his cave. Jack waited companionably with Sophie while he did, the pair of humans standing in absolute silence; the one content, the other crushed.
There was a crackling and a glow not unlike when Snaggle fought Sophie on the bridge - a scent and sound the dragon had told her marked the presence of ‘aether,’ the magical not-quite-fluid the creatures of Faery used for magic - and Sophie gasped and came out of her stupor, for well she knew the knight who emerged, and knew him for Sir Higgins.
“Wait a moment,” she said, as she stared in shock and awe, “you told me, when we met, that we had never met before.”
“That I did,” the knight concurred, “for how could we have met if we had never met?”
“Yet met we must have,” Sophie insisted, “for I saw you upon the bridges of Fairyland not even an hour before my evident demise.”
“As is altogether possible,” the knight conceded, “yet met we hadn’t. You may, indeed likely did, meet me in the past - your past - but not mine. Fairyland is beyond the fields you know, outside the time of the human realm; and what goes straightforward there may go altogether differently here.”
And before Sophie could say anymore he whistled, and a grey, bedraggled nag clomped out from deep in his caverns, deeper than Sophie had yet gone or would dare to go, for the dragon had many layers and pits deep in the earth and even he was wary of some of their depths.
He mounted the nag, and tipped his lance to her. “I ride now; I anticipate seeing you soon, way back in the past. Perchance we shall meet again, come Tuesday.”
And with that he was gone, his steed vanishing with the wind. Jack watched him go with a grin, bouncing around on rubbery feet and slapping his hands together in a vain imitation of rubbing them.
“Well, that was that; now, for the next arc. Come, shall you at last find your umbrella?”
Sophie wanted to ask why, exactly, her umbrella was so integral to the people of Fairyland, but before she could utter a word the ground gave out from underneath her, and she was gone.