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storyunrelated · 5 years

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Wizards up the spout - Smith

One wonders whether people liked that quote honestly or ironically.

Given that it’ll be coming out of the mouth of this particular chap, will that colour anyone’s perceptions? Hmm.

Unlikely. Equally unlikely anyone will read. And it’s unfinished! Ah, what a tangled web we weave.

The man smelt strongly of lotion. Overpoweringly so. It was meant to be a pleasant smell and in moderation likely would have been, but the man had not been moderate in his application. He had been liberal. Generous, even. This made the smell pervasive and unavoidable, which made it cloying.

He himself seemed entirely unconcerned. He was probably used to it.

He smiled.

“Hello. I’m Smith. Just Smith to you. I work for an organisation you won’t have heard of but which is very important, believe me. I am important, you see? But that’s probably not what’s concerning you, is it? You’re probably wondering why I’m in here, your home, and who my friends are? Yes?”

Nigel swallowed and nodded. He had the distinct impression that he wasn’t required to talk.

“Understandable. Not the sort of thing that happens every day, is it? Not the sort of thing most people have experience with! But that’s fine. You’ll have to indulge me though. I’ve been away from polite company for a little while now and have found myself starved for conversation. It builds up, you know? If you spend too much time on your own, lacking anyone to unburden yourself to.”

Nigel’s eyes flicked to the lanky, quiet people moving about his home. Smith noticed this.

“Oh, my compatriots don’t count. Very useful for doing things I need doing, not so useful for conversation. There’s not a lot going on upstairs, you know?” Smith said, drilling a finger into his temple and grinning. “Nothing at all going on upstairs, actually. At least not unless I put it there.”

Smith beamed, as though this was amusing. Nigel didn’t get it. Smith smiled even wider.

“They’ve elves. Immature elves. Are they what you would have expected from elves, or not? Did you expect anything at all? A lot of people have preconceptions.”

Nigel’s mouth worked uselessly, but he had nothing he could think of saying. Elves? Nonsense. But looking at them, he had to admit they did still look wrong. He’d thought so since he’d first clapped eyes on them, yes, but really! Elves? Did they really look that wrong?

Uncomfortably, yes, yes they did. Nigel swallowed.

Smith waved a hand and leaned backwards.

“You see - and here we diverge into a brief biology lesson, because why not? - elves have the most fascinating life-cycle. Or at least I think so! Older, adult elves are sedentary, you see? They don’t move. They pick a nice, quiet, out of the way spot and they settle on down. Its their kids that do all the running around, see? The kids are wired so they’ll do anything their parents wants. Anything! Slavishly devoted, you might say, if devotion didn’t require a certain level of self-awareness. Just slavish, then.”

Smith smiled again and Nigel made to speak only to be shushed, Smith raising a hand.

“I haven’t finished,” he said. Nigel shut his mouth.

Smith continued.

“The first batch of kids are more like clones, really. Naturally produced, all very strange. As far as I know all elves have a set of these youngsters just waiting around inside them, ready to go once they mature. But yes. those can’t turn into adults. Kind of stunted. Just there to get the ball rolling. The real kids only come later, and they need another adult for that, and so they have to find one first!”

“And once they find another adult elf, which they do by sending out their little slave kids to go off investigating and sniffing around, they go and they attack. What they want is a very particular organ. The genitals, specifically. Elf genitals are very odd. Very difficult to describe. Designed to be torn off, you see? And so the adult being attacked will try to defend itself and the attacking kids will try to rip this thing off and run away with it. If they all die, the original adult who sent them will probably die too. Wither up. No-one to feed them, you see?”

“If they succeed, they’ll come back and leave the mutilated adult to lick their wounds. If the one who got their bits ripped off has any of their own kids left they should do alright. Elves are tough, so they’ll usually bounce back. Assuming ripping the bits off wasn’t particularly enthusiastic and they didn’t remove a few of the more vital pieces in all the excitement, of course.”

“If the losing adult loses all their kids though they die too. Harsh stuff. Nature, eh? Red in tooth and claw and all that, yes? Red in the tearing of the bits off? Anyway. Genitals come back to the adult who sent their kids, adult elf gets knocked up, they get some proper kids, the proper kids eat the first set of kids, proper kids obey parent but there’s a chance one will start to mature - if that happens the adult better be careful because those maturing kids got a big chance of snapping and eating their parent! And then going off themselves and starting all over again.”

“And so on and so forth. Circle of life. Absolutely ridiculous, isn’t it, yes? Nature was involved in this life-cycle only distantly! Most of that is magic. Magic is a fickle creature.”

Nigel was by now just staring, mouth hanging slackly open. He’d listened, but after a while it had just become a wall of noise. It was nonsense. Bits of it made sense and he could follow it, but it was nonsense top to bottom. Worse, Smith looked like he believed every last bit of it. This wasn’t someone just spinning a yarn to make someone else sweat, this was someone unloading something they’d wanted to tell for a while, relishing the release.

It had already been pretty clear that this Smith chap was a lunatic, given he was in the habit of breaking and entering with a posse of silent, waifish goons, but he was apparently far more detached from reality that Nigel had initially suspected.

Nigel wondered what the quickest escape route might be, and what his odds were of making it without being caught. Slim, he realised, glumly. He was surrounded.

Smith lent forward and patted Nigel on the knee, making Nigel flinch.

“Now I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that I’m not an elf - and you’d be right! Keen eye on you! You see, I’d studied elves, and the same thought just kept coming back to me: how do they control those kids? The control is perfect! Totally loyal, know exactly what they’re meant to be doing no matter how far. Extensions of the body! That’s the kind of thing that could be very useful to a man in my line of work. And if someone else can have it, I can have it, yes? Just a question of working out how, yes?”

“So I did a little more research. Found some elves of my own, opened them up, poked around. Found some interesting squishy bits. Eventually, I found the one squishy bit I wanted! Found an adult elf who wasn’t really using theirs and just-so happened to visit them when their kids were out. I borrowed it! They didn’t seem to mind, or at least I don’t remember them trying very hard to stop me. And lo and behold, the children now think I’m daddy. Isn’t that nice?”

Smith continued smiling and trailed a hand across one of his minions as they moved past. They were all smiling too, Nigel saw, in a blank, vacant kind of a way that made Nigel even more uncomfortable than he already was. Smith turned back to Nigel, looking a tiny bit more serious than he had a moment before.

“Anyway. The point of all of this is that sometimes you just need an all-natural ingredient, and they’re sometimes in places or in people you wouldn’t expect. This is where you come in.”

That got Nigel’s immediate and undivided attention. Smith was staring at him now, and didn’t seem to want to blink. Nigel noticed that, for all of Smith’s youthful good looks, his eyes looked tired. Exhausted, even. Not to mention bloodshot.

“Have you ever heard that in some places, albinos are murdered for the body parts? For use in potions and rituals and such. No? Well it happens. Not exactly every day, but it happens. Rot, obviously. Nothing special about them, magically speaking. It’s just superstitious nonsense. But there are people in the world who have bits and pieces in them that are actually special, that are actually useful. Can’t tell from the outside though, oh no, can’t tell by looking. You have to sniff it out, see? Which is hard work. But rewarding.”

Smith sat forward, moving so he was balancing only on the very edge of the chair.

“And let me tell you, you smell good. Very, very good,” he said, the smile back in full force. He then stretched, arms over his head and grunting to himself, rolling his neck.

“Unfortunately, there is no way of me telling - sat here - which bit of yours is the bit I need to cut out. I can just tell there’s one in there, somewhere. Hardly precise, is it? Which means I’m going to have to cut and cut and cut until I find the right bit. Also unfortunately you are going to have to be alive for that. And awake. Sorry about that but, you know, magic. It’s a bitch.”

Whatever calming, smothering influence had wrapped up Nigel until this point finally broke and he could stand it no longer. It did not matter if he was surrounded or that the exits were covered, all that mattered was getting away.

“Kids, if you wouldn’t mind holding my new friend nice and still for me? Daddy has to work.”

The screaming continued for some time once the work in question started. Precautions had been taken against anyone hearing these who might cause trouble, obviously, and so Smith was content to let Nigel scream however much he felt like. If Smith was being honest - and Smith was always honest, at least with himself - he had to admit that he actually rather liked the sounds that Nigel made.

Smith knew that this was probably a bad sign, but he didn’t really care. Everyone had their vices, after all, and if one of his was a certain level of enjoyment and maybe just a smidgen of arousal when it came to the obvious terror and agony of another thinking being, well, what could he do about that?

He was only human, after all. He wasn’t made of stone.

(As I say, unfinished.)

#Wizards up the spout #Writing #Writblr #Writeblr #Amwriting

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