[TheRaisin]

For your amusement,
TheRaisin presents to you
The next installment.

Chapter IV

The sound was a chainsaw. All the paramites turned their heads in the direction of the sound and hissed in a perturbed tone. Irked that his sleep had once again been interrupted, Skrit stood and gathered a small scouting party, leaving most of the males behind to guard the pack.
After a few minutes of creeping through the underbrush, the small scouting party came to the edge of a large clearing where slig poppers stood watching over Mudokon scrubs wielding chainsaws, flaunting their weapons menacingly in case the scrubs got any ideas. Skrit's first reaction was to attack the sligs, then the Mudokons, and have a feast after their long desert journey. But he quickly realized that even with his full pack, there was no way they could take down a group of well-armed sligs, and if the Mudokons jumped in with their chainsaws, it would be a massacre.
Skrit decided to leave the small scouting party there to keep an eye on the sligs. Meanwhile, he went back to the small pond where the pack was camped and told the pack members to stay silent, then sent another scouting party to scout the area beyond and around the clearing where the scrubs were cutting down trees, to see if there were any other Industrialists camped nearby. Finally, he went back to the area where the sligs stood commanding the Mudokon slaves, leaving a guard of his best and strongest paramites to protect the rest of the pack. When he got to the clearing, he took a closer look at the group of sligs and scrubs.
There were about one-thousand scrubs using chainsaws to cut down the giant trees, being guarded by about five-hundred slig poppers, with a few slackers walking up and down the line of Mudokons, shouting things like "Work harder!" and "If you don't meet the quota, we'll make good use of you somewhere else... like a slog hut, bein' ground up an' fed to the slogs!"
At the other end of the large meadow was a huge prefab portable barracks for the sligs. A few slogs could be seen chained to the building, chewing on bones. Next to the barracks was a gigantic enclosure area, little more than a high barbed-wire fence. There was also a small truck area. Around the whole compound was a high fence with gates at the truck area and directly in front of the buildings, and rickety guard towers, which were basically ladders with spotlights. It all looked like it had been set up within a day, which, with the Glukkons' knack for cheap, portable prefab buildings, wasn't all that unlikely. Finally, near where the Mudokon slaves silently cut down trees, was a large group of vehicles, some of which were obviously massive Mudokon and slig transports, some of them simple flatbed trucks on which the scrubs heaved the huge trees so that they could be shipped to a factory, processed, and made into toothpicks, back-scratchers,and toilet-seat covers. Despite the crudeness of the whole operation, it was well guarded with it's weight in sheer numbers, and would be impenetrable for Skrit's small group, which consisted of 50 to 60 paramites, many of them females or juveniles.
As Skrit watched intensely for any kind of possible weakness, a small berry stung the top of his head. He shook it off and resumed his vigil, until another small berry hit him. He turned his gaze up into the branches of the tree above him, and saw, to his surprise, a paramite not of his pack.


Now praise my brilliance!