“We’ll set up a two hour watch for each of us, sans Aiman, agreed?” Acharya asked the group. He received questioning glances from Mary and Malikah. He explained, “We’re strangers in a strange land, no telling who might come along and try to steal our gear and food. We can’t risk letting our guard down, and we can’t risk losing what little supplies we do have.”
People in cities were from all spectrums of life, the rich, the poor, the comfortable, and the desperate. Right now, they fell in with the desperate. They needed to act like their lives depended on what meager supplies they had, which it did.
Asclepius gave a short quick bark. Acharya nodded, “Okay, I’ll take second watch, then Malikah and Mary.” The two women nodded. “Mary, if it’s still dark by the time you’re done, then I’ll take over and finish out the night.” She made to shake her head but he held up a hand to stop her before she began, “no arguments. I mean it. Now, let’s get some sleep.”
The group settled down into their sleeping bags with their mosquito nets flung over themselves propped up by the sticks they used the previous night. Acharya wasn’t expecting to get much sleep tonight. He stared up at the night sky, trying to find the stars. Only the brightest stars were visible to him, which was expected. He stared up into space thinking about what it was they had to do.
The night passed by uneventfully. Acharya woke up slowly with a sore back from sleeping on concrete. Mary hadn’t woken him up and he was pretty sure she had stayed on watch for more than two hours. He silently thanked her for that though, he felt like he hadn’t gotten any sleep at all.
There wasn’t any time for breakfast as they had to pack up their gear and get moving. They weren’t too sure about the local laws but they didn’t want to become targets of the local law enforcement as vagrants. Several minutes later they were cleaned up, packed up, and moving. They dropped Aiman off at the library as the rest of them decided to go to the museum.
They found a bank and was able to exchange their rupees for the national currency, the Communaute Financiere Africaine franc, or the CFA franc. For their 32,000 Indian rupees they got in return 280,000 CFA francs. Not a bad little raise, of course what that actually meant here was anyone’s guess.
They made their way to the museum. Once again, no dogs were allowed. This time it was Acharya who stayed outside, while the three girls went in to look around.
Malikah wasn’t impressed by anything the place had to offer. The front façade of the building was done in something that gave off the impression of California pueblos. She had been introduced to them when she had first arrived on the American west coast. The place was underwhelming, but it did have a nice courtyard. It had a few skeletons and the history of the place was interesting. It seemed that the only things this place did have were mostly concerned with archeology, Stone Age tools and apparently the oldest human skull ever recovered. The place was pretty bare otherwise, and they kind of regretted spending the money to get into the place.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
With nothing else to do they wondered around the city. Malikah knew that, she at least, stood out like a sore thumb. He pale skin was in sharp contrast to the rest of her pack mates. And being that they were in a city almost entirely populated by some form of black person, it made her pale skin stand out even more. Tara’s darkly tanned skin blended in better than hers.
The sun was past its zenith and she was getting hungry. They all seemed to be talking about food, in some form or another. The open markets, eating fresh food again, what they had eaten growing up with their families. It was small talk to take their minds off the problem at hand, they were tracking down Shape shifters and had no real idea of how to go about doing it.
They made their way back to the library and picked up Aiman as the cooler air of the evening was moving through the city. He was smiling as they came up to him on the grounds.
“You found something,” Acharya said with a bit of a sideways glance.
“Yes, it could be nothing, but then again…” his smile broadened.
“What did you find?” Malikah asked.
“A possible location for the village of Werehyenas, Kabultiloa.”
“Where is it?” Mary asked excitedly.
Aiman then outlined the text that he had found. It had all started when lions and hyenas were the lone predators in Africa. The hyena was smaller than the lion so the lion took control of the savannah and all the good hunting lands. This caused the hyena to become subsistence hunters, eating whatever the lions left behind. The night sky witnessed this injustice but was powerless to do anything about it.
Then one day word reached the hyenas that the soft fleshed animals called man had discovered a great new weapon, harder than their claws and sharper than their teeth. The hyenas grew curious of this new weapon and came to the man village to see what it was. There the hyenas learned of iron and steel, and the men who formed it, the blacksmiths.
The hyenas created a plan to make use of this new weapon to give them an advantage over the lions and take back some of the hunting ground that had been stolen from them so long ago.
After years and years of trial and error, the night sky smiled on them and blessed them. Under the light of the stars and moon they were able to put on the skin of the man beasts and walk among them. They learned about this new weapon of iron and steel. They became great masters of working with it.
However, no matter how hard they tried, they couldn’t make the weapon work for themselves when they took off the skins of the man beasts. Disheartened they threw away the new weapons and returned to their own kind.
It wasn’t until much later that word reached the ears of the hyenas of the great metalworkers that had disappeared. The man beasts would pay money to learn from these lost masters if anyone knew where they had gone.
It was then that the hyenas decided that if they couldn’t make the iron weapons work for them, then they would take what the man beasts offered as payment. They could exchange the iron weapons for meat and skins. They would make the man beasts hunt for them. They would then be the rightful kings of the hunting lands. So what if it was the man beasts that actually did the hunting. Better they be put in danger than any of them.
So, they put on the man beast skins and created the village of Kabultiloa. No man beast knew that the skins and game meat that they exchanged for the great works of iron and steel craftsmanship actually came from Werehyenas.