okay releasing another short chapter because I think it’s funny, don’t be mean or I’ll actually cry:
Chapter 25
“And this is – COME ON, MOVE FASTER – this is where the train docks. Don’t EVER go inside the train, it’s nothing but rusted metal. Do you know what tetanus is? Do you know what a train is? A train is like a long car.”
I didn’t know what a car was, but lacked the heart to tell her.
Despite her crooked nose (obviously healed from past violence), her imposing frame, and those muscles, Hydna bounded about with the eager friendliness of an over-large puppy. I’d stopped trying to shape my replies to please her, as anything I said, no matter how foolish or petulant, seemed to bring her delight. Most likely I could thank Merulo for lowering her standards of conversation.
“Moving right along now, this is – CAREFUL!” Hydna lunged at me, and I flinched, closing my eyes in brief cowardice, but she only yanked me back from the sink hole I’d been about to step into. “You’re a delicate little thing, so use your eyes, eh?” was my rebuke, along with a shoulder-shattering clap on the back.
“I’m above the average height for men,” I said, pointlessly, for she’d already moved to the next attraction of Poseidon’s Family Fun Resort. This section of the resort looked a proper horror show, with its crumbling merry facades and sun-bleached pigments, bearing the ghostly afterimages of smiling aquatic creatures. When Merulo and I first arrived via portal, we’d evidentially emerged in the section of the resort used for housing visitors, with all the blocky, tall buildings forming a quasi-neighbourhood that radiated out from the newly designated library plaza.
I found it bewildering that this underwater city had been built solely for transient entertainment, though I didn’t doubt Hydna’s explanation. Mentioning this to the sorcerer proved a mistake, as he simply said “Yes, I can imagine thinking is a great effort for you,” and then banished me to spend time with his sister. Or rather to “provide that creature with whatever form of entertainment you see fit, so that I might be spared its company.”
“Are you and Merulo not close?” I asked, remembering the exchange, then winced. I’d interrupted her explanation of a terrifying plastic wheel that stretched many feet up above us, complete with intermittently spaced chairs into which victims might be locked.
“Close?” She sounded baffled – and thankfully unoffended that I hadn’t been listening. “Of course not!”
I squinted up at the dragon woman. She’d dressed herself in relics for the tour, having wasted God knows how much magic in their restoration: a wide-brimmed hat embroidered with water droplets, crammed onto her massive skull, and a shirt stretched painfully tight over what might be either breasts or prodigious pectorals, its smiling fish illustration distorted into a boggle-eyed monster. Her baggy “pants”, which ended mid-thigh, burned an intense yellow-green that didn’t exist in nature. It felt cruel to ask someone so playfully dressed this question.
“Well, you are family! Shouldn’t there be, you know, some underlying love?”
Rather hypocritical, given that my own father likely fell asleep each night thinking of creative ways to kill me, but she didn’t have to know that.
“He’s a walking knife,” came her growled reply.
“Well, yeah.” I kicked around at loose bits of pavement. Intervening in Glenda’s various moods had gone some way toward thickening my skin, but I still shuddered at the waves of displeasure radiating from Hydna. “He’s a lonely guy, I think.”
“Might be less lonely if he weren’t such a piece of shit.” She met my eyes without blinking, and for a sickening moment I found myself mesmerized by their reptilian scarlet.
“You have to. . .” I clenched my teeth and resumed my kicking, concentrating my attentions on a particularly large and rounded chunk. I reminded myself that I owed the sorcerer my life and then some. “I don’t know. Meet him more than half-way? I think he does want company.”
“But is too much of a bastard for company to want him back.”
“Exactly!” I said, delighted that she’d completed my thought. This faded as I saw her expression. “That’s neat that you can raise one eyebrow like that. Good control of . . . uh, of your facial muscles.”
Hydna pointed to a circle of unicorn-sized crabs, complete with saddles, welded to a roofed platform that looked vaguely capable of motion. No half-shouted explanation followed, though; I’d succeeded in puncturing her enthusiasm.
“Those are cool,” I said lamely. Then, “It’s only because he’s been kind to me, when he didn’t have to be. Merulo, I mean. Not that everything’s been perfect, I didn’t much like the whole ‘torture needle’ thing, but –”
“The what?”
“Hang on, I’m coming to a point. Merulo might make a lot of insulting, degrading remarks, and he is overly obsessed with killing God –”
“This is a defense?”
“Hydna, please! What I mean is that, brushing aside all those little details, he’s always been there when I needed him most. Like when Glenda shot me full of arrows, or slit my throat, or –”
“Who the fuck is Glenda?”
“Hydna, come on, I didn’t ask you what a car was!” I rubbed at my stubble, wishing I could reach into my own head to pull my thoughts into order. “Merulo will be there for you, too, if you ever need him,” – and I hoped that was the truth – “So, it’d be good if you could both . . . try.” At her contorted grimace, I added, “I’ll talk to him too, promise. Same speech!”
The dragon woman exhaled deeply. “You’re an annoying little man, Cameron.”
“Again, above average height.”
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