It's the Son of the Return of the Revenge of the Spawn of Dante's Oddysee!
This time ...
... It's peronal.
Chapter 23
So I sent Aaron and Altus back through the gate, and turned my attention back to Benedict.
“Alright, dude, I have a plan. We’re going to get your settlement back, and here’s how … ready?”
Benedict nodded. He couldn’t verbalize anymore, after seeing that. It occurred to me that sligs don’t really know anything about mudokon powers …
I cut to the chase and explained my plan to Benedict. While he relayed the plan to the others, I made a call to Altus. Then I began to transform.
My back narrowed, and my torso shortened. My arms became scraggly and weak. Even my fingers narrowed, and a fourth finger sprouted out of the side of my palm. About then my legs gave out, and I fell onto my face.
This was when Benedict and several other sligs walked back in to the chamber. I think they screamed, but I didn’t spend any more attention on them. I was transforming still, and had to focus.
My legs were gone now, and my upper lip was … melting or something. It was almost like the paramite transformation; fingers were growing out of my mouth. My jaw kinda … disappeared, or something. It just stopped being there; apparently sligs made all their sounds with their mouth-fingers.
My eyes stretched out, and my vision blurred for a moment, and then I was seeing not only in front of me, but to the sides and almost behind me, too. It’s weird to explain, and hard to imagine unless you’ve seen that way before.
My skin suddenly burnt and wrinkled, and got brown and charred. I was officially a slig. My mind suddenly filled up with the natural instincts of the common, free slig. I felt nurturing, careful, and very weary. I was filed with the urge to carry rocks around and build a shelter. But, since I had a mission to accomplish, my mudokon mind had to overpower. And it was pretty easy.
I noticed abruptly that Benedict was indeed screaming, and I think he was coming at me with a club or something.
“Hold it!” I shouted in my new, gruff slig voice. I instantly decided it rocked, and I would have to use it as much as possible. “It’s cool, I’m Dante! The mudokon!”
Benedict stopped short. “Uh … Dante? As in the mudokon that I just left two minutes ago?”
“YES!” I shouted. “Now I suggest we get this plan rolling.”
Benedict cleared his throat, and nodded. He went and got me a slig mask, as was planned. He helped me put it on, and I thanked him, and took off.
I crawled out of the room and back up the tunnel to the cave entrance. I tried to listen for any slig pants. And, even though the mask covered up a lot of sounds, and accounting for the slig’s already poor hearing, I heard no whirring pants.
I carefully crawled down from the ledge, grasping onto loose rocks and gravel. That was my first mistake: grabbing loose rocks left me slipping down the slope.
But, it did attract some attention. A slig was on duty about twenty feet away. He heard me with no trouble (his mask looked very cool, and it was a lot better than mine, so I felt a little jealous). He turned and raised his gun. “Freeze!” he shouted, but then he saw it was a pants-free slig lying around. He shook his head in disgust and lowered his weapon.
Time to roll.
“Hi. I was trying to climb up there and spy on the refugees, but I slipped.”
He strolled over to me, and smacked me across the face. “Buddy, I don’t know who you think you are, but if you think that …” Realization crept across his face, and he smacked the side of his head (the equivalent of a mudokon slapping his forehead when he realizes something obvious that he had overlooked earlier). “Why didn’t anyone think of that? If we had some of us climb up that shelf without pants … and then … Come on, buster. We gotta go see Cosmo.”
I had no idea who Cosmo was, but I had to play along if I didn’t want to raise suspicion. “Sounds like a plan, Stan, but—”
“It’s Rubb, buster.”
“Right, sorry, Rubb. But, what I was saying was can you get me some pants? And maybe a gun?”
Rubb nodded and patted me on the shoulder. “No sweat, buster. Come on.”
He led me towards the camp, but we had to be sneaky; no one would like to see me.
“You new around here, buster?” Calling me Buster was getting annoying, but I shouldn’t argue … ugh. “I’ve been here since the camp settled. You come in with last weeks recruits?”
I nodded, then realized he couldn’t see me from this angle, and then spoke. “Yeah. Name’s Branch.”
Rubb chuckled. “Branch, eh? Well, let’s get you prettied up for the Boss, okay?”
I was down with that.
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