by

Yanick Champoux (38%)

Lee Watts (18%)

Josip Nað (17%)

Michel Lacombe (16%)

Dorian (4%)

goldkngt55 (3%)

Andrew Avila (2%)

Marten (1%)

Oliver (1%)

Part 30

Yanick Champoux (8/2/2002)

The boy called Rodent was in deep shit.

No, really, he was.

A few moments ago, things were nowhere as bad as they were now. He was doing his best to explain what was written on the scroll that he was holding in his hands to the woman that was also a man. The whole situation, while distinctly peculiar, wasn't really disturbing Rodent. Since birth, he had often seen things invisible to other people, heard voices when there was no one around to speak. Rodent liked to think those were signs that he was someone special, someone with a special gift. His father, more pragmatic, was of the opinion that 'that's what you get when your mother had been too stoned to know the difference between contraception pills and hallucinarcotics'.

But the point was that Rodent was used to weirdness. In fact, he welcomed it. Life, through progenitors entertaining the notion that parental duties ended five minutes after the conceptual coitus and a social system that made sure that what's down stays down, had pretty much doomed him to a life of spite, grimness and misery. Yet he was still young and he still dared to hope. To hope that, somehow, he would one day break free. And until this blessed day would come, weirdness, his and that of the the world he was living in, was all Rodent had to keep the dream alive.

And that's why Rodent hadn't freaked out. He was way too excited. At long last something was truly happening to him. For once, he was doing something important. For once, he was proving more capable than anybody else at something. For once, he was essential. This, to the young lad, was magic.

But his bubble had burst and he had been roughly dragged back to a reality that was doing its best to be unpleasant.

While his mind was elsewhere, the pungent water of the sewers has risen, and had trapped him. The water was up to his armpits, which meant that most of the tunnels and rooms in the vicinity were flooded. For the time being, it had stopped rising, but there was no way to tell if it would remain thus for long. While the water level of the sea was orchestrated by the movements of the moon, the water level in the sewer was following the much more erratic movements of the valves operated by some disgruntled city worker. It could suddenly go up, or slowly drain, or stay at the same level for days, if not weeks.

Rodent's options were fairly limited. He could stay where he was, marinating like a pickle in a rather unwholesome sauce, or he could try to find his way toward drier grounds through kilometers of pitch dark unchartered sewer systems and caves that would be for the most part flooded. In all honesty, he would have been hard-pressed to qualify any of those two options as appealing.

He seriously considered staying were he was. If in both cases the chances were he would end up drowned like a rat in a bucket of vomit, why bother at all? But he remembered something one of his friends once told him: 'A sitting dog's more likely to get kicked than a running one'. On the other hand, he also had heard someone say that 'the dog who doesn't cross the road doesn't get shredded to bloody ribbons by the passing street-cleaning machine', but it was a saying that didn't rolling as smoothly on the tongue as the first one, and was therefore less likely to be true.

Strong with this conviction, Rodent made his mind. Carefully, he tucked the case he was still holding inside his shirt. Then, stretching his arms before him like a blind man, he began to wade through the foul water.

Byran was really looking forward to getting this whole Vau business behind him.

The principal reason for such a neck-hazardous desire was the Vau themselves. They were driving him crazy. A crew of Vau, Byran had discovered, was about about as useful as a ballet troop of Gannocks, and nowhere as entertaining. The tall aliens were good at looking mysterious and mystic, but not much else. The events of the morning were a perfect illustration of that. When Byran had picked up the bleep of the escape pod on his post-jump check routine, Shepherd had been proud as a peacock. The Auspices, once more, had been right. The Auspices never lie. We are so hot to be able to read the Auspices. Now, you go and pick up whoever is in there. The Auspices say you should. Yeah, right. Huzzah for the Auspices... Byran wondered if the Auspices had warned Shepherd of the hefty rescue fee that would appear at the bottom of his bill too.

So to pick up the escape pod the Fearless Baboon went. And what did they found in the escape pod? A drooling idiot. Not a surprise, really. Passing through an activated jumpgate without a Sathra device had that unfortunate consequence of turning the best minds to mashed potatoes.

What you do with a man with a broiled brain? If you are a reasonable being, you tuck him in some quarter and forget him until you wander near a planet where you can sell him at meat-price to the local slave cartel. But are Vau reasonable beings? Visibly not, as Shepherd, under the ubiquitous advices of his goddamn Auspices, decided to call a meeting over him. So there Byran was, wasting his time in the briefing room in the pleasant company of a few Vau and the man with the grilled grid, waiting for Demuel to make his appearance.

The airlock of the room hissed open, and right on cue the man appeared. Or rather, the woman, although the sharp twist of her eyebrows and the way the thumb of her left hand was hooked in her belt, right above the holster tied to her leg, left little doubts on who was at the commands. He briefly looked around, and moved his attention to Shepherd.

"I feel this one's gonna be a good one."