At long last, I have garnered enough time and sufficient plot development to continue the Strange Friends story. Here is the next part, concerning a new/old character being introduced, and the search for Swiftlit, who seems to be rapidly devolving. Very minor reference to vore here, and swearing has been upgraded from comedic/cartoonish %*^& to merely --- as censure. As always, critique and comments are welcome.
Strange Friends: New Friends
Chapter 9: Road to Nowhere
He wiped at his cheeks, trying to remove the evidences of last night. The twin lines of maroon flaked away, dry blood leaving a slight stain in his skin. His corneas still ached, a sharper pain farther back in the retinas, but the flow of crimson had long since stopped. The grief had long since stopped, the fear gone. Everything was drained to nothing after pouring out onto the beach some six hours ago.
So why was it that he could still taste tears? Feel pain? Be terrified?
There seemed to be nothing left. All of it shattered, irrevocably unraveled and smashed to an infinity of pieces that could never all be found. The razor bits left behind hurt too much to examine, warm memories turned chill and sharp enough to slice him open anew with every thought. He had only himself left, everything else taken to leave emptiness in their wake. His house in Miragia had been invaded. He could not reach his true home, forced to endure this misery until it came to him itself.
And now . . . Calimn.
Just the idea removed the bloodstains from his face with new tears. His teeth ground together so hard it was audible, and after a few second the pressure incited red to creep into the double streams that ran down his face, half-closed ruptures breaking open once again. His hands clenched, new blood joining the old as the vicious, raw bite-marks covering his knuckles split. Pain lanced over his fingers, but he only squeezed harder, and let his nails bite into his palm as well.
What was left?
Nothing.
He sped up, going from a walk to a run that kicked up grit behind him, and then his speed increased further, going into twelve-foot strides that left long lines of disturbed sand on the beach. It still wasn’t fast enough. He wanted to run until he didn’t know where he was anymore, until his shoes were nothing but shreds. Given that they had already taken a beating from his usual high-speed activities, they might have done just that, if he hadn’t stopped. Bracing his feet, he slid to a halt and listened hard.
“Swiiiiiiifffftliiiiiittttt!”
It was very faint, but he could still recognize it. Jab. He jumped as high as he could, peaking at close to twelve meters, and looked around. Off in the distance on the landward side was Jab, coasting along a few hundred feet above the treeline and scanning the area. His stomach immediately tightened up with terror. If she found him . . .
Fear flashed a split-second scene in his mind. Jab carrying him to Calimn, the mermaid taking him, and then . . . an explosion of lightning blazing with colors that couldn’t fully be realized by the human eye. Calimn convulsing before turning to sand and ash. Or Jab, destroyed the same way as she tried to fly him back to Calimn. His heart quivered at the prospect, and as soon as he touched back down from his leap he shot into the jungle, scrambling to find a hiding place so that Jab couldn’t see him.
He went flying into the brush, dashing and moving through and over and under and around the foliage that rushed at him like a moving labyrinth of vegetation. He suddenly, inexplicably felt a rush of something. He sped up, sliding under a half-fallen log and rolling before gaining his feet without breaking stride. He had been getting better and better at controlling his movements, getting used to moving in jungle at high velocity. Being hyped on adrenaline from fear helped keep his reaction time in line with his speed.
No, something was wrong . . . No. Better. Something was RIGHT.
Everything turned into an emerald blur as his head cleared.
All he had to do was run. That buzzing feeling was boiling up in him again, vibrations that synched up perfectly. Everything was perfect. Run, run, RUN. Keep running until he left everything behind. Never slow down. Let the world fall behind. See it forever as nothing but stretched, blurry colors. Nothing would ever catch him. Never. Not even fear. He would outrun everything.
Momentum took over, and that vibration meshed with his heartbeat . . . or maybe it was the other way around. It didn’t matter. He just had to run. Was he getting faster, or was everything else slowing down? He moved through a tangle of vines without even slowing down, bouncing off surfaces and vaulting over obstacles like they were hardly there at all.
Run forever.
Run until he got back home.
Run all the way there, no matter how far it was.
Run.
Something happened then, but he wasn’t sure what it was. One second he was moving along like a maniac, dodging branches and vines and blazing through the forest so fast he couldn’t even think. The next second he felt his whole being ripple, front to back, and stretch. Everything became a solid swirl of color that began to go grey, and he felt his stomach spin out of control as his heart screamed and his mind turned to a spiral of clarity and confusion. Fast. SO FAST. TOO FAS-!
He slammed into a tree, no longer able to keep up with his own movements, and the impact sent a harsh wave through him. Something broke. He hoped it wasn’t his neck. Or his skull. He was literally blinded by the pain of it, an explosion of reds and oranges that turned his vision into a field of blazing, excruciating flowers. Then he was on the ground, and he could feel the pain pulsing through him. The sound followed seconds later. There was a hideous crunching noise, and a harsh exhale, and the thump of a body hitting the ground. He suddenly realized that the sound was him hitting the tree and then falling.
Then his stomach caught up and he realized it was still spinning. He rolled over and retched, dry-heaved even after everything was gone, and lay there, trembling with the aftermath. He couldn’t move except to shake with pain and nausea, nerves jangling and that vibration that had spurred him into running so hard in the first place fading. A knife had been slipped into his right side, tight and hot as burning net made to ensnare. He was sure something there was broken. The same sort of pain was chewing fervently on his nose, and one of his forearms.
Then his brain caught up, and he could think, if only for a second. His ears instantly screamed, a ringing sound that penetrated his psyche as he comprehended the input his senses had garnered while running. Now the writhing of pain became true seizures. His senses had found their places, and now he would pay dearly for what he had done. There were no screams, just a peculiar, ultrasonic whine emanating from the back of his throat. A sensation that transcended pain washed through him, an he choked as blood from his nose caught in the back of his throat.
For a full minute he lay there, muscles seized up until he could feel his bones bending, immobile, blinded, deaf, and utterly incapacitated. For every second of it, he sincerely wanted to die.
Finally, unconsciousness buried him in a landslide of darkness.
* * * * *
Jab sailed over the treetops, as low as she dared, scanning for any sign of Swiftlit. Calimn mentioned he usually kept off the ground, favoring the treetops. The harpy skimmed them, only her own height above the tallest boughs, and stared into the branches and leaves that rushed by.
The thing was, she didn’t know that much about him. He was fast, but she’d never gotten a good feel for how fast. Had she passed him already? Was she on her way to a Miragia with no Swiftlit in it? That line of thought lead her to a conclusion.
“I’m a f---ing moron! I’ll never find him like this.”
She stalled in the air with a hard flap of her wings, then used a handful of downbeats to get higher, where she hovered.
“Miragia’s a piddling little chunk of trees, but it’s still too big to search, even with a grid . . .Where the hell is Quen when I need that half-blind page-eater. He’d have some kind of idea. If I had some kind of net to drag behind me or somethi- no, that’s retarded, it’d get caught on things too easy. What do I DO?! Oughtta dive-bomb into Negav and drag that runty bookworm out of the library . . . brrrrnmnmn . . .” she finished the end coming out as a low mumble of consideration.
Suddenly, a ghost of an idea slipped over her features, swiftly followed by the living thing.
“HA! She could do it, yep!”
Performing a curious aerial cartwheel, she changed directions and spun to face the farther edge of Miragia, the side closer to Negav. With two explosive snap-to’s of her wings, she sailed off towards her destination, rehearsing her explanation mid-flight.
It was not quite dusk when she reached the small hollow she was looking for. It was fairly close to the border where the trees became funny, and not in the ‘oh isn’t that funny, hehehe’ sort of way. When you looked far enough, you could see a kind of odd effect, something between heat haze and an optical illusion, unnerving and almost nauseating if you stared too long in that direction. Jab tended to stay high up when going over Miragia. Being a giant wasn’t much defense against random portals, warps, and abrupt changes in physics.
The harpy shuffled her feet nervously. Being on the ground made her feel a bit claustrophobic, especially with the massive trees all around her and the canopy overhead blocking out most of the sky. Her own cave was cramped, but at least it was an easy run right out into the open air, and high up. Jab ducked under a branch and hopped down the slope into the hollow, into a darker, gloomier area with thick vines forming a web overhead.
The red, ruddy glow up ahead told her the sole occupant of the hollow was indeed at home.
“Hey, Professor Aven, I’ve got an emergency I need your help with!”
The glow brightened slightly, and expanded, growing and becoming more defined.
“I still love the idiotic hula-hoop look, Prof. I’ve never actually seen a hul- Ffffff- forget it, nevermind. I need your help, Aven, I mean I REALLY need your help. You see, my friend, this-“
A pair of softly glowing crimson eyes opened up in the dark, the glow outlining fingers pinched on the bridge of a small but quite sharp nose.
“Jab . . . I told you before . . . I am in the middle of intensive research. Intensive, Jab, and very precise. You don’t experiment with dimensional magic at random, and if you calculate anything wrong, there’s no telling what could happen.”
The dusk nymph continued to grow until she was close to Jab’s height, a sharp scratching noise as she finished an entry on the notepad she was holding.
“I know it’s important and all that, but I need you to back me up, Aven. Quen is still reading away in Neg-“
“Who’s Quen?”
“Oh, right, I haven’t told you. He’s a sort-of elf that always has his filthy beak in some scrap of paper and hangs out in the Li- Gah, I don’t have TIME for this! Look, you scarlet night-light, my friends are in trouble and one of them could be in even bigger trouble if he doesn’t get help ASAP. He’s going to disappear into another world or something, and we need to find him and find a way to keep him from fading away, so could you get your sooty buns in gear and HELP ME!?”
Aven looked surprised at the announcement, but not at the urgent language of it.
“Going to disappear? As in, intersect a dimensional anomaly?”
“Yeah. He gets super-hot, and not in the kind of ‘ooh, hey flockmates, let’s gang-rape ‘im’ way, I mean in the kind of ‘HOLY F--- I’M ON FIRE’ way. And then he flickers and halfway disappears and stuff.”
Now those red eyes were far more attentive and the tired annoyance was gone.
“Hmmmmm. That sounds quite suspicious. Very well. I will go find this Quen person immediately and bring him to the Jewel side of Miragia. Then we can get to finding this . . . what species is he again?”
“Swiftlit, human kid. Like . . . I don’t know, fifteen? Short, scaredy-cat.”
“Wait . . . human?”
“Just go get Quen before I strangle you with that ridiculous red ring around your blubbery hips.”
“Alright. Going.”
“Aven . . . Thanks.”
“No need,” replied the nymph, already fading into the shadows.
As her dark hair sank into the gloom as if she were submerging in water, she said, half to herself, “A nice experiment opportunity.”
* * * * *
Calimn was powering through the water, feeling the tug on her long hair as the current of her own movement rushed by. She ignored the intense ache in her abdominal and tail muscles, the burn spiking as the fin flexed and thrashed, propelling her along. She took another deep gulp of warm seawater, taking all the breath it afforded her. She wasn’t much of a long-distance swimmer, not at a pace like this, much better at maneuvering and flashes of rapid movement.
She strained, not letting herself slow down. She had to find Swiftlit. She couldn’t let him do this. He was going to just hide away, or wander, and condemn himself to die all alone, or vanish forever, with no one else to be with him as he went to some unknown place. Tears vanished into the water like her friend would soon disappear into another dimension.
Grief was starting to slow her down, and no matter how she forced it away, it kept coming back, but this time with logic in tow.
“Even if I get to Miragia . . . I can’t go on land for long, and I can’t catch him even if . . .”
She stopped swimming, coasting now, the resistance of the water beginning to slow her down towards stopping. There was no way she could actually get Swiftlit back. It was utterly futile. He was one small boy in the vastness of Felarya. Even if he stuck to Miragia, the chances of finding him in all that, with all those insane vortexes and portals, was pretty much zero.
She let herself sink into the sandy shallows, just at the bend where the Jewel River connected to the Topazial Sea. For some time, she just laid there, unmoving, trying to control the tears that she thought she hadn’t had any left of. She didn’t even look up when a massive shadow eclipsed the unsteady, shimmering image of the sun refracted through the water.
Fleshy ropes wrapped around her, pulling her upright so that her head broke the surface. She didn’t resist, letting herself hang limp. The silvery eyes of her oldest friend scanned her face, a pause before the chlaena spoke.
“What are you doing? I thought you were going to save him.”
“Shut up, Welifindi.”
The chlaena shook her head, lower half a peculiar shade of slate grey.
“It’s really disappointing.”
“Why aren’t you happy? You’re the one who wanted this in the first place. You’re the one who wanted him gone.”
“I just wanted you safe. Him being gone was just a stipulation of that. I’m kind of disappointed you’re going to give up.”
“You’re the one who CAUSED this, Wel, by telling him-“
“The truth? It’s a fact that he could kill you if he stays near you. It would be a complete accident, but it would happen anyway.”
“So what do you care if I give up. I’ll never find him anyway. Never . . .” she finished, hanging her head, hair falling before her face like a closing curtain.
“I care because it’s sad to see someone I know so well in this distress, and it’s disappointing to see someone I know is better than this giving up so easily. I don’t know where that fierceness went, that determination. You’re weaker than I thought, if this is the best you have these days.”
All said with an annoyingly polite smile.
“SHUT UP, WEL! It’s YOUR fault he ran away in the first place!” Calimn yelled, yanking herself away from the myriad of tentacles that had been holding her up.
“The fact that I could make him leave like that is a proof . . .”
“Of WHAT? What, Wel? Stop talking in knots and give me your oh-so-important reasoning!”
“Proof he’s stronger than you are.”
Calimn felt a harsh sting somewhere in her lower chest at the semi-insult. She winced as Welifindi continued.
“You’re rather pathetic in comparison. He’s willing to separate himself from you, go crazy with paranoia, and you give up like this? I think he’s worth chasing, but you don’t seem to think s-“
“I told you there’s no way I’ll ever fin-“
“So? Look anyway. Try. If you don’t reciprocate that kind of friendship, that loyalty, well . . . you’re not worth chasing through futility, huh?”
“I . . .” she wiped at her face, rubbing until a deeper blue came into her cheeks, “I will never understand you, Wel.”
“I’d be at a horrible disadvantage if you could figure out chlaena logic. Now act like the defiant young mermaid I struggled to rein in and find that twitchy friend of yours.”
“I guess I don’t have to understand to know what I should do.”
“If you have to guess, then you’re still not doing it right.”
The only response was a quick hug. Wel patted the mermaid’s head, colors flushing an odd shade of cream and yellow.
“Good to see you backing up all that determined talk from before.”
Calimn hugged her harder, then let go, turned, and, with a splash, vanished into the water, a wake forming an arrow that sped upriver. Wel just gave a short laugh, then began to follow the mermaid.
“Might need another pep-talk.”
After a moment, the chlaena’s smile widened.
“Or not.”
* * * * *
“No, that one just a bit higher up, Ms. Xelan. Right- other way. There you go.”
The dryad leaned over, paper hair rustling, as she handed the heavy book to Quen. The elf took it deftly, spine curving under the several pounds of weight, three-thousand six hundred and eighty five pages worth of botanical information on Felarya’s varying plantlife.
“Excellent. I must say I’m rather surprised at how incredibly well my first two encounters with giant hybrid predators have gone. Mutually beneficial relations with both, the odds of which, I shall remind you, is phenomenally low. Information transaction with an avian hybrid, and a literary transaction with your venerable self,” the strange elf declared, going over to a sort of makeshift cart with a massive platform on it.
He set the book aside for a moment, then pulled at the rope handle of the cart. With much puffing and straining of thin, underused muscles, the scholar managed to wheel the ensemble over to the dryad.
“OH, this is just the thing. I really have to thank you, Quen, for agreeing to bring full-sized books to me,” the hybrid said, leaning over again to lift the platform off the cart.
The platform proved to not be a platform at all, but an absolutely gigantic novel, The Tales of Sineria, Queen of the Web. It was easily as tall as Quen and four feet thick. How he had ever gotten it down from the shelf and onto the cart, Xelan had no idea, but she was exceedingly grateful for his hard work. She had already read through the books nearest to her that were large enough to actually read the words, re-read them several times, but after awhile it got old.
The transaction had begun as a simple request for a book from the shelves within her reach, high up where even the tall ladder he carried with him couldn’t reach, and an offer to give her a giant sized book from his own personal hoard in exchange. She had been delighted, and the two of them had quickly engaged in regular trade. He brought her books tailored for giant beings, and she picked books from the highest reaches of her own shelves to give him.
“Quen the Scholar?”
The voice came out of nowhere, somewhere in the shadows of the next shelf over. Both Quen himself and Xelan started, the dryad more so; she hadn’t felt anything from her root system at all. Quen peered into the dark, squinting past his thick spectacles, but saw nothing, not even with his gloom-attuned eyes. He heard something though. A faint breathing, slow, calm, and nearly noiseless. Whoever it was, they were extraordinarily close for him to hear such even breathing so clearly.
“That would be myself, indeed.”
“Ah, excellent. A pleasure to meet such an avid pursuer of knowledge, like myself.”
A crimson light winked on, a sort of odd halo encircling the waist of a dusk nymph who unhurriedly stepped out of the dark.
Not out of the dark past the shelves.
Out of the dark of Quen’s own shadow.
The elf spun, but it was already too late. The fairy wrapped one thin arm around his shoulders and simply fell backward, sinking into the shadow and dragging the astonished and struggling elf with her. Xelan immediately bent over as far as she could in an attempt to grab his vanishing, flailing arm, but she missed, and felt only light scrape of his heavy digging nails over the tips of her fingers.
* * * * *
Quen was drowning in darkness. It was cold here, and so utterly black that he was blinded completely. A continuous murmuring, wordless and bordering on silent, wormed its way into his sensitive ears, and his breath was being stolen by the night and heavy pressure squeezing him on all sides. He couldn’t fight it, barely able to move, and the only tangible resistance was the arm wrapped around his neck.
A grey glimmer up ahead encouraged him, and he fought, trying to wrest the arm from around his neck, tugging at it. Suddenly, that arm was gone, and instead of restraining him it switched gears and he felt a hand hit the small of his back, shoving him into the growing light.
The elf broke the surface of a shadow, that of a large leaf on some kind of exotic flower (Ericam Lily, leaves highly toxic, pollen used in tablets made to enhance sense of smell, somewhat common, discoverer Algrem Eri-). He flailed, trying to escape the tar-like consistency of the darkness the dragged and sucked at him. He struggled to the edge of the shadow, grabbed a double handful of grass, dirt, and detritus, and somehow managed to pull himself up out of the puddle of shade.
Quen rolled aside, gasping for air, and let his heart slow down. Of course, his cardiological rest lasted only a few seconds, because it immediately resumed it’s former pace as a long black arm lifted free of the shade and placed a hand an inch from his face. He rolled, rising to his feet in the same motion, and stepped back hurriedly as the dusk nymph levered herself out of the shadow as if it were a pool of water.
A kind of languid fear seized him, now that he was out of her element. It was fairly close to nightfall, but the fairy was still squinting slightly, looking uncomfortable as she paced towards him.
“Alright, I can handle this . . . . where is-“ he thought, quickly reaching into his overcoat and rummaging through it.
The calm but urgent attitude continued as she came closer, flinching as a sliver of weakening sunlight hit her eyes. His hands hit glass . . . No. Another vial. No. Another . . . YES.
The dusk nymph raised a hand, perhaps to shrink him, and he flicked a small, dead-black bottle at her feet. He shut his eyes at the same time, shut them tight, and slapped his hands to his ears.
Crac-POP!
Yellow suffused his vision even through his shut eyes, and a harsh ringing noise hung in his ears. It didn’t quite mask the shrieking of the dusk nymph, nor the heavy scuffing noises as she stumbled backwards.
Quen turned, sprinting as he opened his eyes. It was too bright out here, and his nearsightedness was no help at all. Still, the fairy was thoroughly blinded by that flash-potion he’d just recently perfected. A bit of the luminescent flower that grew in the library, a mineral catalyst, any light above gloomy, and you had a flash comparable to a burst of direct sunlight in a pitch-black room. It certainly lived up to his expectations, and now it had let him esca-
He didn’t even see the low-hanging vine until caught him under the chin, clotheslining him instantly. His feet, not quite comprehending yet, pedaled at empty air as he flipped with a sharp ‘Hrurk!’ of complete surprise. A moment later the breath was explosively expelled from his lungs by the ground impacting his spine hard enough to stun him. For a second time in mere minutes he coughed, trying futilely to suck in enough air to get up and run.
He had finally levered himself up onto one elbow when a shadow fell over him.
“Well, you certainly didn't get very far. As I was trying to say before you blinded me, I’m not here to hurt you. Or eat you, for that matter. I’m here to request your help in finding and studying someone called Swiftlit. Jab asked that I bring you along. According to her, you’re something of an expert in everything, theoretically, anyway. Ah, Aven. Some call me Professor Aven. I’m a scientist.”
Quen, despite himself, let her help him up, taking the proffered onyx hand. A fairy scientist? While he was incredulous about that, she seemed to know Jab, and knew him, at least by name. She didn’t seem to intend any harm, either.
“I . . . see.”
“I’m studying dimensional magic in particular. This Swiftlit person seems like an interesting subject. Possibly unstable in the dimensional sense. Now, he’s expected to be somewhere along the Jewel River side of Miragia. We’re at the edge closest to Jadong Lake right now. Right. We’re going to do a tandem search along the river side, a scan, initially. Then, during the night, I’ll do some shade-hoppping and move along faster. I’m aerial, you’re terrestrial search. Okay?”
“I . . . uh . . . yes?”
Quen wasn’t sure what to do, suddenly having this fairy suggesting and ordering.
“Good. Boy, human, fairly short, paranoid, ragged clothes, mousy hair and green eyes. We’ll head out when it’s a bit more towards dusk, give just enough light for you, not too much for myself.”
“I . . . okay?”
Quen scratched his head as the fairy nodded sharply and shook his hand.
“Very good to work with you, Quen.”
“Yes . . .”
Credits to Karbo for Felarya itself, and to Moonlight-Pendent13 for allowing me to use her dusk nymphs
All named characters are mine unless otherwise stated
There we go.
Subject: Re: Strange Friends 
Fri Sep 16, 2011 5:34 am
