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limitedrevolverworks · 6 years

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Varmints -5- [END]

“They ask me, Doc, what in tarnation was this all ‘bout? And what was I suppos’ta say? Nothing, that’s what. Ain’t no point in explainin’ to a dire bear that y’aint really intrudin’ in his territory, jus’ strollin’ by, no biggie. That’s how you turn your noggin’ into dire bear fodder."

“So what’d you tell ‘em then?”

Doc Norton’s eyes, thrice their size through the magnifying lenses in front of them, looked up from the mistletoe and the hands methodically plucking its leaves. They met the inquisitive gaze of Beth and lingered there for good while, apparently more interested in counting the myriad, occasionally bioluminescent scales dotting the young lass’ face like freckles, rather than giving her any manner of answer.

“Troll shamans.” The words tumbled out of his ‘stache like the laconic payoff to a grand train heist.

“No way!” The girl’s visage alighted like a starlit tapestry, bright blue light pouring forth from the millimeter-sized flakes sprinkled all across a pale gray mask of bewildered dissatisfaction. The sturdy wooden table creaked under the weight of her chin and arms sprawling suddenly dropping on its levigated surface, the noise melding almost seamlessly into Beth’s prolonged whine. Doc Norton felt for the poor kid - irritation, mostly. Her tiny fingers had latched onto the corners of his vision, pointy claw-like nails digging into the table right besides his own busy hands and the precious plant. Not quite close enough to disturb his work, at least; shame he couldn’t have said the same of the small pair of boots digging their tips into his shins in a series of lazy, and yet entirely too precise kicks.

“But you always say it was troll shamans, unca!”

“And it always works. Now stop kickin’ me ‘fore I go ahead and make salves out of that tail of yours, missy.”

She stopped, about three particularly more violent kicks later. The quiet sound of leaves being plucked was the sole one heard within the atelier for a dozen merciful seconds, at the ends of which Beth, her glowy pout held by her hands, decided that she’d had enough. The dull thump of her tail against the legs of her stool said as much; Doc Norton’s attempt to feign deafness fell flatter than the dish where he was collecting the mistletoe’s remains.

“‘Kay. You still ain’t told me what these ‘varmints’ are s’pposed to be.”

“And I reckon there ain’t a reason why I should.”

“There ain’t a reason why you shouldn’t, though!”

With a sharp snap, the mistletoe was left a mere tangle of naked stems, the last of its leaves dropped into the glass dish besides it. Doc Norton stared at the veiny pathways that the plant seemed to paint on the support panel where it had been laid, admiring the intricacy of their design, but mostly the fact that they couldn’t bother him about his reticence.

He set the magnifying glasses down, massaged his forehead and then his moustache. When he reopened his tired eyes, Beth was still where he’d left her, waiting for her childish curiosity to be thoroughly sated.

Narrowing his eyes, no, his entire face right down to the last follicle protruding from his upper lip did absolutely nothing to dim the bright determination of those young eyes, or the far more literal one painting her skin, for that matter.

It was troublesome, especially because Beth was right: none of the reason he had to keep quiet with ignorant, trigger-happy daredevils truly applied to this smart(ass) of a kid.

“A’right, a’right, fine. Guess y’aint completely wrong on that.”

The curve of Beth’s lips flipped upside down before she’d even started bouncing on her seat, triumphantly throwing her arms up and some locks of the humongous golden mass that was her hair along with them.

“Right, chill down a bit, you nag of a lizard.” grumbled Doc Norton as he sat up, and for all the cranky vibes dripping from his every word, a minuscule speck of something resembling anticipation seemed to seep through. It was the reluctant excitement that came with prying open the seal on a self-imposed taboo, the guilty pleasure of indulgence with nothing but regret at the end of the path it paved. The pharmacist resented the lightness with which he moved about his little realm of beaks, ampoules, vials and metal vats. Nostalgia coursed through him with a jolt that left behind bitter disgust and something akin to warmth, when he finally found what he was seeking; he retraced his steps with half a mind to do the same with his words and substitute them with a single nevermind. The sight of Beth’s dangling legs kicking a jolly rhythm into empty air, while her throat silently hummed its non-existent tune through lips sealed into a giddy smile, convinced him to do otherwise. He plopped back into his chair, setting down on the table the miniature model of the world that he’d plucked from one among the many shelves in his atelier.

“The thing about this crazy ol’ world of ours, y’ see, is that we do things differently, depending on which Layer one’s from. We think different. We live different. And, of course, we fight different. That’s how it be, when your planet’s a fractured mess of continents floating about atop and below one other.”

Beth nodded diligently, her eyes fixated on the pharmacist’s hand which, like a dragon oil salesman, danced about in front of the product he was expounding about, or at least its minute representation: two distinct sets of flat, curved shapes representing the land masses, floating into two distinct spherical orbits, two layers, with one containing the other. Or float the originals did anyway; the ones on the model were stuck like skewered wererat meat on rods that protruded from a compact mass at the very center of it all, metal bits and pieces chaotically assembled together into ball that constituted the core of this broken planet’s pale specter.

“Now, lass, show me you ain’t been loitering around for nothin’. What’re the three basic principles of pharmacy?”

Beth straightened on her seat, from the top of her head right down to the floppy end of her tail, so eager to answer she might have fallen from her seat, not at all helped by the considerable height between the soles of her boots and the floor smeared with numberless splotches of evaporated concoctions.

“Creation, tranf… traaan…” she began, trapped in a struggle with her forked tongue’s inability to deal with such a ridiculous combination of sounds. “Trannnngh! Transformation! And destruction. Them’s the three of ‘em, right?”

“Aye, looks like you got a good head on your shoulders. Pity ‘bout what’s inside it… guess you won’t be winnin’ the spelling bee anytime soon.”

Doc Norton almost regretted it when his knees started aching from the aftereffects of Offended Lizardite Hybrid Kicking Syndrome.

“Anyway. Creation, transformation…” He made sure to take his time pronouncing the word, letting each phoneme filter through his ‘stache with maximum accuracy and ludicrous amounts of mockery for an adult talking to the little girl shining angry hues of dark blue at him with her face.

“...And destruction. When you get down to it, that’s all pharmacy’s about.”

“But unca,” interrupted Beth, only slightly less miffed thanks to a sudden burst of curiosity, “don’t you always say that pharmacy is about knowin’ the world and how it works?”

“Aye, you smart lil’ lizard. That’s ‘cause the three principles are what the world’s built on. Take us folks here, in the Middle Layer.” He wriggled a finger into the large gap between two of the surface continents to poke at another beneath, shaped like the top view of a hat that had been stomped on repeatedly and with purpose. “No matter what the sheriffs and constables will want you thinkin’, it’s the wand that sets the law here. It be through the wands that money exchanges hands - the big money, mind you, not pocket change. Folks steal, pillage, buy and sell… shamans bring the dead up. Rich bastard dies, a poor sap inherits his fortune, only to get killed on the way back to his stable. That night, a merry band of wandmen are havin’ a jolly good time at the local waterin’ hole with their freshly stolen goods. Somebody trips into the wrong table, wands come out, chaos. One of the guys gets thrown off a window and runs away with his part, decides he’s had with this mess of a life, settles down, starts an activity, it’s successful, grows old on a neat little pile of savings… the cycle repeats, or maybe not, it don’t matter, ‘cause there’s a hundred other cycles like that going on around a continent or the other of this Layer of ours. Here, we’re all about transformation. Hell, even the dead ain’t let be here. Something’s always bound to begin right as another’s ended.”

“And that’s what makes it fun?”

“It’s what makes it a big damn mess, lass. Still, we got it good here, all things considered. Them sorry bastards on the Lower Layer, now...”

Doc Norton turned the model until he found a seam to stick his finger through and touch the sphere of collected metal standing in the middle, right atop the pedestal’s rod running through it.

“They got no time to spare for shenanigans like ours, not when they be sittin’ right atop the Core and making a livelihood out of it. The Lower Layer, y’see, is where creation happens. It is an ever growin’ sprawl, a parasite of steel and nickel and titanium. A machine that keeps on breakin’ on itself, one that you can’t just go and open to see what’s wrong, no, ‘cause by that time the technology’s grown obsolete, blueprints have evolved, techniques refined. On the corpses of empty, busted engines the size of a whole town they build a new, bigger, more efficient pumpin’ station that sends magma like blood through the veins of this beast that don’t know anymore what its true shape’s like. They got no time to look backwards in the Lower Layer, only forward. They’re runnin’ away, no more, no less. The moment they’ll stop creatin’, is when their world’ll collapse beneath them and catch up.”

“That sounds sad…”

“They don’t got time to be sad. They’re too busy hammerin’, breathin’ smoke like we do oxygen and orderin’ their golems around to care.”

That sounded even sadder to Beth. Doc Norton let her silently mull over the harsh conditions of Lower Layer dwellers - then, the half-lizardite raised her small hand to poke one of the smoothly-edged continents sitting at the top of the world’s ethereal structure.

“Then, unca, the Upper Layer’d be...”

“Destruction.” anticipated Doc Norton, and for all the effort he put into concealing it, Beth couldn’t miss the harsh flavor that he’d given this single word, nor the way he was looking at the Upper Layer’s reproduction. Like a wandman would have the corpse of a duel’s fresh victim.

“Is it bad up there?”

“Aye.”

“That why you left?”

“Aye.”

Beth and Doc Norton waited, not for one other but for themselves to find something suitable to say. The girl’s childish imagination nor the doctor’s wealth of knowledge couldn’t quite find anything of the sort, and so they simply let their eyes linger on the vision of this tiny little world’s attempt to represent their own.

As time passed, however, something odd happened: the size of Beth’s cheeks began to increase exponentially, accompanied by the unmistakable phenomenon known as pouting that all lasses were so thoroughly proficient at. An explosion wasn’t probable as much as a given inevitability, and it hit Doc Norton’s reverie with all the force of a major caliber fire spell.

“Nevermind that, unca! How’s about you tell me what this has to do with those varmint thingies already?”

The pharmacist nodded once, than again, more firmly, as he recollected his thoughts, smoothing them out like he was doing with a corner of his ‘stache.

“I was gettin’ to that, impatient lass. Y’see, varmints are these eensy teensy little clumps of concentrated bastardry, the kind of disruptive nonsense that them Upper Layer screwballs spend their time comin’ up with.”

“Okay, but what are they, unca?”

“Larvae. Sorta. They be smaller, not really alive per se, and lotsa more troublesome, since they feed on gold.”

“They… eat gold?”

“Aye, them little shits love themselves a fat shiny luncheon. And there’s gold aplenty up above, though the stuff they make with it… nothin’ on any other Layer compares. Complicated golden spellwork printed under the surfaces of machines the size of a mountain, phlogiston runnin’ through them like blood to power golden cannons which shoot aether able to pulverize a continent’s whole surface… books inked with gold, able to store knowledge in the language of patterns and release it directly into the reader’s mind… if phlogiston is the lifeblood of the Upper Layer, gold’s what lets it flow where it’s needed. You rid a city of that and you’ll have won yourself a war in no time.”

An awed woah was all which Beth could muster while holding onto her tail in an attempt to keep it from destroying her seat from all the excited swaying it felt like indulging into.

“Varmints are some of the foulest stuff made up there, no doubt. Just rain a bunch over a sea of corpses - and there ain’t ever a shortage of those, in the Upper layer - and soon you’ll have gotten yourself an army of livin’ anti-civilization bombs.”

“That sounds ugly… and evil..”

Doc Norton couldn’t have found better words to describe the Upper Layer and its idiosyncrasies.

“How’d they get on the Middle Layer, unca?”

“Good question. Guess someone made a miscalculation with wind trajectories, timin’, whatever and rained their death cargo at the wrong time. Could be that the stuff got shot off the edges of a continent before it could be properly deployed, too. The cause don’t matter to us Middle Layer folks, anyway, and the effect’s been cared and dealt with.”

“That’s true…”

Beth hopped off her stool, skipping a few paces away where a sizeable tub was sitting on the floor, and peeked over its contents. A distorted reflection arched its eyebrow back at her.

“...Though you got them varmints right here.”

“I sure do.”

“Didn’t you tell them folks at the farm that you’d like, get rid of them?”

“And that I did.”

“But you didn’t… uhm, eliminate completely with that concoction of yours?”

“And waste a perfectly good batch of useable varmints? I ain’t spittin’ on a free batch of gifts from our cretinous neighbors, silly lizard. The acid I made only served to dissolve the corpses I had them wandslingers toss into. It got no effect on varmints, resilient sons of squirmy bitches.”

“Aah…”

Beth grimaced slightly at the pungent odor coming off from the clear liquid, at the bottom of which clumps of slimy, translucent filaments of worm-like substance swam into each other, or perhaps simply drifted, moved by the currents spread from the surface. Then, a thought occurred to her which gave her an incentive to look away from the tub and shove her clawed hands on the part of her dress’ long skirt where he hips were. Doc Norton was too busy twirling his moustache and looking at some portion of the world model to notice the tiny slits through which the half-lizard was looking at him.

“Say, unca… was spittin’ into the acid also a key component?”

“Nah. I just told ‘em for what us smart pharmacist call the ‘shit’ and the ‘giggles’.”

The surface of the liquid inside the tub rippled with the vibrations of an exasperated - and, towards the end, admittedly amused uncaaa…!

#wordy seeds

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